O N E

Rosemarie

. . . F R O M N O W H E R E . Ten o’clock in truth the back door open, but not a sound in the yard. Now, when we think back, we say it was too quiet. Not a bird, not a cricket, not a frog. And as for the dog – the less said about Venables the better, especially since car lick him down only weeks later anyway, poor fellow. So, as Miss Ellie like to say, the rest is silence. We certainly hear nothing from no dawg that night. Only the pulley squealed when Dan hauled the line from the landing beyond the door, and I walked out to pull the clothes off as he held the line within reach. All the time Ellie was folding and stacking the clothes as fast as I tossed them in to her, for we done become sisters long-time – she could all read my mind.

I tell you our eyes well fasten on that door and even from inside we could see right through it and past the laundry room door. The zinc roof sloped towards that dark corner under the mango tree where the Bombays weighed down the branch. One or two must have dropped since I came in from watering because the smell reached way into the house, so Ellie started to mutter about churning ice cream – but we were never going out after them into the black shadow of the tree even if we could have found them. Apart from those corners and the top of the laundry roof, the light under the eave flooded the rest of the yard.

Then, missis, that blow stun me. Like a vice close on my head same time the two heavy boot crunch down behind me. And the grip wrench back my head and yank my face up so I see the steel flash before I feel that cold metal flat under my chin. I suck in my breath to just hold my throat from the blade and the fingers clench on my skull was iron, tug my neck back so although my eye darting darting all I see bend over me was this hood with slits. Dark, frayed slits.

Only then from my eye corner I glimpse the other one, like a shadow. Now he break away from the dark under the palm and spring up on the parapet. Light, weightless. Is almost like he float in between Dan and the door. He hooded too but his hands odd – transparent white like duppy fingers on the black gun. Then Lord, Master – he level the muzzle in Dan face and circle him jabbing, jabbing with the gun.

Nothing we could do but inch backwards inside the house.

When the muzzle nudge at his head Dan freeze, but since I come back and I get to know him again I come to realize his mind racing even when his voice soft.

Only this cool . . . murmur, over and over. Polite.

“Nothing valuable but our books. See for yourselves.” Calm.

But is like I went crazy. I said this is not happening and they will be gone or Dan will behave normal – scream, curse, shake.

But he turned up his palms and spread his hands and said, “Look around if you like.”

When I tell you – was one madness. Or must be was me crazy. I flatten against the wall watching this gun at my brother’s head and it was like I catch fire inside.

I begin to blaze. Years apart and now this . . . this loss again hanging over me – a rage roar in my head, whatever happen I feel I must kill at least one of them.

The dundus man with the gun fixed his eye on me (eye colourless, like ice). I glared back at him but I could feel Dan’s eyes boring into my brain: Don’t antag-onize them. And he was right bout me for I was never one to consider anything for long, and then the gun slide around from the back of his head and settle at his temple.

The dundus push his head in Dan face and . . . and growl, “Don’ make no trouble!”

I see it now – books, notepads scattered on the table, the mahogany like a mir-ror how it reflect teacup, bookmark from the Holy Land, one New Orleans paper-weight, the photo album open on coconut tree criss-cross at Manzanilla. Ellie began to scream and the gunman swung towards her. Dan tried to call them off, to distract them from her.

“Take anything you want.”

“Shut her up,” one of them said. The grip on my hair relaxed, and the blade swept out and flashed at Ellie. “Nobody have fe dead here tonight. Just learn fe cooperate.”

“Quiet! Hard-ears old bitch you!” The gunman grabbed at Ellie as she slid over to the window screaming, screaming. He bawled at her, “Don’t make we kill you.”

When he bring down the gun butt at the back of her head was like a warning, not vicious, and she pay him no mind. She slide from his hand and scream one scream after the other without pause and is so they leave the two of us to try stop her.

Dan wail out, “Nooo!” For he saw her drawing them away and the gun butt raise, miss, connect, miss while she duck out of their way, screaming all the time.

Then they pitched her down on the tiles and turned back to Dan, and he whispered, “Do what you like with me. ”

Outside over the whistling frog and cricket, an owl shrieked and I cursed it. I could see the swelling, three lumps on her head back but no blood really, nothing you would expect of a head wound. It was a dream, how they shouted at me when I opened the fridge door and tumbled out ice cubes in my skirt and wrapped them in the kitchen towel and pressed against her head.

They flash the knife at me and I just tell them say, “Beg you get ’way from in front me.”

Ellie whisper, “O Jesu, careful, ” but I never give thrupence for them.

“Likkle most I box him down,” I told her, and I swear I was ready. Only then a siren wailed in the road – maybe is the screaming draw attention fe true – and they chase back out into nowhere.

So we survived – except for this feeling they could walk in again. Anytime. It was over. Except in our heads.

“Everything’s riddled with uncertainty now,” Ellie explained over the phone to Ivy when I passed on the receiver. “They’ve left a sort of void lingering on in

. . . little pockets of bewilderment.”

The house looked like nothing happened, but how to live after a thing like that?

Ellie said if General Patton were still alive, he would have barked and raised hell. The General was the dog I met when I came to them first and that was over thirty years ago. Their daughter, Rachel, was just a little thing then – younger than her own Andy was when this thing happened.

“The General would’ve ripped out a few pieces too, good fellow, not like this little docile mutt we have now. But, Rummy,” Ellie said to me when we went over it again, “they must have fed Venables something, for you remember how he stag-gered when he woke up. All the same, I don’t doubt that the dope was all that prevented him from taking to his heels. Heels? Dawg have heels?”

Oh Saviour. I mean I loved Ellie for being able to smile even in pain, but sometimes she drove me mad, always finding something to laugh about even at the weirdest times. True.

All Dan could find to say was, Just suppose Andy had been here. “First time I’ve felt relieved the little fellow is far away.”

He closed his eyes and the strain in my brother’s face tugged at my heart. They were writing the children of course, Rachel and her husband, Rabin, and Ellie muttered aloud as she finished it off.

Going now. Carbon paper nearly in rags. Just slipping this in with your father’s epistle.

Rummy sends love. DV, Mom – P.S. Hug my little Andy.

Of course they had phoned Trinidad that same night to talk to Rachel, but there were details to add so they wrote too. Dan and Ellie were like that. They would write letters.

The whole awful thing replayed in our minds, as Ellie put it, and some parts we had forgotten came back later. And then, for that matter, how much was blot-ted out? The attack was reason enough for any of us to wake the next morning shattered, but the relief of having us all safe buoyed us up over the shock, and Ellie insisted the gunmen were not so beastly as they might have been when we think what we see sometimes in the Gleaner. Headlines screeched at us from the newspaper spread open on the table between Dan and Ellie, and he slapped the paper closed and rolled it tight.

“But at least they never tormented us,” Ellie protested, “and perhaps at heart they were not so . . .”

I swung away refusing to hear it and slammed my fist on the wrought iron bars between me and the white anthurium beside the porch step. The colours outside glowed rich, deep, and this was the hour ferns were supposed to get the little water. But instead I dropped down into the wicker chair, sucked my knuck-les, and did my best to take in what I could. That was September 1985, I remember, that first evening I was locked away from the garden, and its perfume was all around me.

“Why they didn’t shoot us then, if they were so evil?” Ellie insisted. “How we know they weren’t just hungry and desperate?”

“Don’t ever make the mistake of underrating the situation we were in,” Dan snapped. He was quiet but so furious I stared at him, for he never had a bitter word or rough tone for Ellie, but she just laid her cheek against his and they let the matter go, though he refused to speak of it ever again.

“So here we are on the porch with a tale to tell, like in the old days.” Ellie stretched for my hand. “But those times were nothing like these. We called Ivy about it, didn’t we?”

Right away, and Ivy spoke with each of us. It was always Ivy we turned to and, in fact, it could have been her house – the guest house – that cemented us together. Of course the guest house itself had been Ellie’s idea, as Ivy told me herself.

“But downstairs has so much space, Ivy,” Ellie had said. “Listen. Your papa’s big bedroom and den could cut up make guest rooms. You have this porch down here, not only on the southern side, but on the east – when there is all that glo-rious space upstairs. You could enclose just one side down here make into rooms.

Then, Ivy, you don’t see you can get at least six guest rooms downstairs? Cho!

What you waiting on?”

Over the years we would drive north through the hills for a weekend, just as Dan and Ellie had always done before I came to them, and we would arrive at Miss Ivy’s, shouting for her above the uproar, for Dan held down the car horn to drown out the dogs.

“Hysterical as always,” he would grumble.

Basil would saunter out with that mournful smile (“lugubrious as usual,” Ellie would say, and grin) and he would calm the dogs. Basil’s title was Butler but really he functioned as general handyman and gardener, so right away someone would hound him to produce a breadfruit and get it on the coals.

“Just pick it fram one of dem tree right here so, Basil. Nuh go hill and gully a look fe it.”

While she ordered Basil around, Petrona would tumble ackees out of the bankra and rummage for Scotch bonnet peppers. Eventually, it was Ivy’s place that inspired it all.

“I sometimes dream of escaping the gathering confusion in Kingston for good,” Dan had been saying of late.

So, now that the madness had actually touched us, it was Ivy’s we longed for, for sanity.

And what if I had lost one of them – the brother Ma deprived me of all the time I was growing up, leaving me parked there in New York with her crotchety old Aunt Miriam, from the earliest I can remember, so she could ensure the edu-cation of her precious son? And what if now I was actually back with him, what if I had lost him or his wife, who brought us back together? Dan and Ellie. Long-time, Ivy would say they grew together like two pimento trees. It was the sort of thing she would say. Yet since that fall and the broken hip we saw less of Ivy.

“On the phone we debated it,” Ellie lamented, “and I could only agree with her. What she could do but let the guest house go? At least she made enough to keep the place, before her hip gave out, not to mention the tourists going more and more for the hotels springing up on the beach. Only now, in between our visits the house just gapes around her, empty and silent.”

She never married, poor Ivy, so she had no children – save Evan, the boy she seemed to see as some sort of protégé, and of course her nephew, Scotty. Because I thought of him as mine – my stepson, after all – I forgot sometimes that Scotty was her sister Maisie’s boy. Otherwise, Ivy was left with only the facety puss that was too full of itself to be company for anyone – though of course Miss Ivy insisted Marie Antoinette was devoted to her. It got to be just at the end and in the middle of the year that the guest house was full, and sometimes Ivy was alone. It was then we would go, mostly, but there was always always room for us.

The times we had there. I lived in the garden and worked on it each visit. Now where I had nestled tiny plants, lush shrubs marked the edges of the lawn and their perfume drifted up to the porch. I remember Dan complaining one dusk as I sprayed Ivy’s geraniums for her, “All this green bush we can’t even eat, Basil.

Why they don’t clear it plant likkle corn?”

“Me fada ’ave a bull cow,” Basil said, coming to a halt in a tangle of boney limbs. “Me fada milk him naat’, sout’, heas’ an’ wes’. Where im don’ milk im?”

“Eh?”

“Bull cow cyan’t milk, sah! Is nat dat im for.”

“Haw!” Ellie turned on Dan triumphantly. “So not everything God plant make for you to eat. You better start grow gerberas now.”

But Dan just grinned after her and muttered his stock phrase, “I’ll take the matter under advisement.”

And Basil raised his hat a last time before clapping it on his head to make his way downhill.

Later that evening, though, Dan stopped and reflected. “This morning,” he recalled, “no, earlier, first thing this morning, Basil was decidedly sullen. It bewildered Ellie for she always insists he is good-natured in his own wooden sort of way. Ellie asked Basil if he was sick, for he really isn’t sour usually, and after some disgruntled writhing, he grumbled it out.”

But I knew the story already. Scotty had refused to let Basil chop down a scrawny cassia tree that some type of ficus was overpowering. More important, Scotty refused to let Basil “chap” the ficus itself. The idea was to give more pri-vacy to the upstairs bathroom windows.

“But the roots, Basil,” Ellie had protested, “is right against the wall.”

“I tell Mas’ Scotty, m’am.” He waved the machete murderously.

“Is a beautiful tree,” I lamented.

But Ellie planted her hands on her hips furiously. “Frost the panes, or put up curtains. Ficus root? He will mash up the house! And after all Ivy has gone through?”

“A so me tell him, Miss El. Me tell Mas’ Scotty say strangler fig wicked, but him say fe mind me business and fertilize it.”

That was when Ellie held her head in frustration and called in Dan.

“Then Scotty not listening to Basil about plants? Ignorance top o’ ignorance.”

And was no point going to Ivy to complain on Scotty, especially as I very well did as I pleased.

Under the lignum vitae tree my own plants thrived and jostled one another.

Even the grass was thicker, silkier, and the orchids I had set showered almost to the ground. Basil and I had spread coconut husks behind the tree and now the anthuriums flourished up to the wall bordering the yard. You could see the garden from every room of the house, and beyond it westward at the front, but also on the northern side there was the sea.

So as often as possible we drove over to Ivy’s, and in the long run I suppose it had to come up: Why leave at all?

“Why we don’t just remake the guest house into our own old-people home?”

I had demanded.

“Rousseau’s Rest Cure?” Ellie intoned, turning it over on her tongue.

“Rest? What we want is to ensure some intelligent conversation,” objected Dan’s friend Cecil, who generally drove over when we were to spend more than one night. Cecil was lonely, Dan confided. Not much interest from his children since the wife died. “I’m ready to join up.” Cecil raised his right hand.

“Call it Ivy’s League!” Dan ripped away the tough red-streaked green outer layer from a column of sugar cane and split each section into four.

“Get Scotty to put up the money to start with,” I added, leaning back to clasp my hands behind my head so I could think better. Scotty was not only my stepson but Ivy’s nephew. He could very well do that for her, and here I was – prepared to run it.

After all, Ivy and I were sisters-in-law-in-law – and it happen this way.

Before I came back to Jamaica, Ivy’s sister, Maisie, married Jesse Cunningham, and after that first miscarriage eight years pass before the child born. Same way Ellie wait years to have Rachel, but in Maisie case is when the time come that the baby just wouldn’ born. Well then all Jesse did dream about turn to nightmare.

Ivy told me everything – the screaming, and Maisie like some pale shadow not like Maisie at all, she toss, bawl till she tired. When the baby came at last she just let go in a final unforgettable sigh, Ivy said, and the frail scrap of a infant hardly able to cry. Poor Jesse.

After Maisie’s death, Ivy devoted herself to this baby – Scott, they christened him – and somehow she kept her brother-in-law alive too. But then, when Ellie told her I was home and living with them, Ivy begged me to help her. To help her again (for there had been that other time I mustn’t talk about). What Ivy needed now was for me to help her with Jesse’s baby while he was at work, for it was the season and the guest house was busy. So I took leave and spent a month with Ivy – and is that started it, for Jesse was ready to idolize anybody who cared about his child.

But it was years, while I hemmed and hawed about Jesse. A second wife, I couldn’t help thinking, and a child involved. I talked it over with Ellie as I never talked with anyone before.

I had been hurt, you see. In New York. I was lonely over there, unaccustomed to compliments, dazzled by the uniform. My mother gave no advice, gave nothing as usual, as usual wrapped up in herself and her son – though I don’t hold that gainst Dan no more. Ma had come to spend time with her Aunt Miriam and to help get me ready for the wedding. But two weeks before my wedding Ma picked up and returned to Jamaica. No notice, no explanation. She just cut short the visit to get back to her precious son and left me to marry or not marry a wo’tless man.

My fiancé made a joke of it like he made joke of anything that cut me, my . . .

gallant soldier. Crude, cutting little jibes, was what Ellie called them when I told her. When I cried, he laughed.

“You cain’t take a little hazing?” he would jeer.

So I learned not to cry. I don’t believe I even remember how, and I suppose I have him to thank for that.

He didn’t mind the old witch flying out, he said; what worried him was that she might come back.

“Jealous you got a man, that’s what!” he would taunt me. Then he break out in a song about some Dirty Gertie and that bust up the whole thing. And is that my mother abandon me to.

“Is God make the man show up himself so,” I told Miss Ellie. “Because I feel say, if I didn’t end it, he would try beat me one day, and then I woulda kill him stone dead.”

“God of course,” Ellie agreed. “But not all men stay so. Look at Dan. And then think, darling – a child.” Her glance turned to the baby picture of Rachel, on the piano, and I almost thought their eyes met.

So eventually I married Jesse – ’56, that was – and Scott he came to be my own child, the son I could never have otherwise. Jesse did well working with the Tourist Board and what with bauxite taking off the place was flourishing. At any rate, we did live good, and after a while this child that was so puny began to shoot up like bamboo. Always Scotty hand was in my own while Rachel danced circles round us till I was dizzy. Rachel resembled both her parents, first more like Dan then more and more favour Ellie as the years pass. “Rummy,” she insisted on calling me, for she couldn’t say Rosemarie. “Rummy to put Scott down.” All the years the two of them were like my own. And is so I grew as close to Ivy as the rest of them.

Eventually, of course, I was back with Ellie and Dan and it was just the three of us in their house, which was my home as much as theirs by then. Rachel was married and moved to Trinidad, and Scotty was out of touch, but we filled the emptiness with each other. As often as we could we drove to Ivy’s, grumbling about the hotels that were taking over the beaches so it was harder to get a swim.

“. . . which bodes ill for Ivy’s business,” Ellie fretted.

With Rachel gone, the three of us drew closer and closer – I must have been even closer to Dan’s wife than to my brother self – and, as for me, as one desertion after the next swallow up in the past I suppose I heal up somehow and the bitter-ness disappear. I just never have it in my craw no more. I did cry when my mother died – not over no loss, for is not to say she was ever mine, but because she was never mine. So is not glad I was glad she gone. I just feel lighter (in a sort of guilty-ish way) that nobody couldn’t part the three of us again. Dis aliter visum, Ellie muttered when I said that, but I never retain a word of Latin – and God knows how she could keep it in her head or why the way she say it echo on in my own.

But that was Miss Ellie for you. I see how Dan woulda just look pon her and blind to whatever else move. Is dazzle he dazzle. He have an amazing mind too. From small. People would say, “That boy brain don’t stop here.” But his was the quiet sort of bright. Ellie . . . sparkled.

Dan, Ellie and me. Funny – he never called me anything but Rosemarie, but she picked up Rachel’s name for me. Rummy.

Great-hearted. So I sum up Ellie. Dan and I came back together through Ellie, after not a word to each other for eighteen years. Our mother self at the root of it of course but, anyway, Dan and I had no use for each other till Ellie set to work on him. When he wrote me, it was a stranger inviting me to spend holiday with them. Stranger meet me at airport take me to his house, then Ellie hurtled down the front step and flung her arms round me. Dan and I, awkward as we started out, we never stood a chance against Ellie’s warmth.

A year later, with not a soul of my own in Manhattan, I came back for a rest after my hysterectomy and I never went back.

“We have hospitals right here for you to work in,” Dan pointed out.

By the time I was matron, I had married Jesse and mothered Scott. Then Jesse died and Scotty set out to college in the States, calling home so little that in a way I lost them both, but still I had Dan and Ellie on one side of the island and Ivy on the other. Whensoever Scotty come home he would fly into Mo Bay instead of Kingston and just find his way along to Ivy’s, for he liked the heap of loud music which Dan wouldn’t have put up with, while his aunt just let him do anything, even to fix up her storeroom with some cork or foam business so he could make himself happy without annoying the guests. So what with one thing and another, I would be back and forth to Ivy’s.

Me same one was the first to set it in a plan.

“We just retire together right here with Ivy. Watch me. I retiring next year and then is a free matron you have.”

“Needs management, though.” Just like Ivy to throw herself into it one time.

“It would be one thing for Ellie to do the accounts but we can’t make her carry the whole thing, and you know my hip rules me out. We have to bring in someone younger.”

“Well, don’t Scotty self qualify in Management?” I demanded.

“But if your stepson is indeed an executive in New York, green card and all,”

Cecil teased slyly, “why would he leave all that and return to run our old-people home?”

“He says he doesn’t feel challenged again.” I held onto my patience. If we were all going live together it was time to practise. “He might move back if his Aunt Ivy ask him. What you think?” I tried to sound careless, watching Dan and Ellie, but was on tenterhooks, for I wanted this but I certainly wouldn’t be walking out on them. From the time I sold Jesse’s house and moved back to theirs I know we three were staying together for good.

“Why uproot ourselves if we’re comfortable as we are?” Dan sounded reluc-tant to bother, rather than against the notion itself. “And what about Rachel, Miss 13

Ellie?” With a flourish, he added, “Our children Mr and Mrs Seenath and Master Andy Seenath! Well? What about them?”

“We’re on the move now.” You could see her leaning towards it. “But what about when we slow down? We can’t just land on the children, and when they visit they can come to us here. Otherwise, we’ll get isolated. Then, Dan, what you expect? We just dodder in our separate corners?”

“I was rather hoping,” he said in his ponderous way, “to be permitted to dodder in the same corner as yourself. I’m to be cast forth?”

“Dope!”

“Communal doddering!” Cecil ruled, and slammed his palm on the card table.

“So let it be written,” Ellie crowed, and as Dan relented and pronounced the response we all chorused with him, “So let it be done.”

Is that why our first thought after the gunmen come down on us was to drive go visit Ivy. Only now our house was harder to leave.

“Suppose the gunmen come back?” Ellie said.

Apart from organizing for plants to water, Venables to feed, we had to call in carpenter to check locks and put in bolts. Then, as he done land up there already, Ellie say he might as well work on a facing or two that hollow with termites. He re-shingle piece of the roof. Welder come bout broken twist in wrought iron gate. Painter to touch up. Christmas pass.

“Just as well,” Ellie argued. “We have fruitcake to take with us, and the rest of the ham.”

In the chill of the morning, the mist curling through the Bog Walk Gorge made me glad of the delay, and when at last we turned in at Ivy’s gate the poin-settias were still heavy in bloom. We sliced up the fruitcake on the porch and she called Petrona to bring out sorrel.

“I can’t carry a tray with glasses again,” Ivy grumbled. “I have to hold on to walk. When next you come I mightn’t be able to get down the steps.”

“And who knows when next it’s going to be,” Ellie said, “with this move coming up.”

“Then is soon?” Ivy wailed. “And I here licking my chops that the whole of you coming to settle here. When you told me on the phone I thought you meant years and years away.”

“Rachel will be here to help us pack up in a couple months,” Dan said, as I watched him reach for another slice of cake. “She’s organizing our room over there.”

“We’ll be back to visit.” Ellie picked up my lifeless hand and squeezed it against her cheek. “And Rummy will come to see us as often as she can.”

“Then what about your house?” Ivy wanted to know.

“Sale complete. Repairs done.”

Ivy’s voice lowered and began to tremble. “But how I will manage without you? All the way in Trinidad?”

Ellie sounded cheerful and comforting as usual, but like her voice float to me over a far distance. “You still have Rummy.”

Is the first time I hear one thing about it.