By Love Possessed by Lorna Goodison

Author:Lorna Goodison [Goodison, Lorna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7710-3572-2
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2011-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

The Dolly Funeral

I CAN’T REMEMBER how Bev and I became friends, but I remember at first feeling displaced by her as leader of our neighbourhood group of children at large, in the summer holidays. She came from a family that was even bigger than mine and up until that time I had been the child to hold that particular distinction. I had six brothers, which meant people thought twice about interfering with me. Bev had eight brothers. My parents had nine children. There were twelve children in the Lyons’ household, and when her family moved into the neighbourhood, she just naturally assumed the leadership role that I had held till then. I loved visiting the Lyons’ house. They lived in “their own place,” which made them rich in the eyes of everyone in the neighbourhood. Their place was a many-roomed yard peopled by the many Lyons’ married sons and daughters and a few aunts, uncles, and cousins.

The first time I visited their house, I remember wishing that I lived there. Unlike my house, where somebody was always correcting you for “sitting down bad” or “common behaviour,” the Lyons were a marvellously free and uninhibited people.

They yelled at each other, screamed with laughter, and used language that would send my mother for the brown soap to scour out somebody’s mouth.

The first time I witnessed Mrs. Lyons trying to discipline Vavan, “the baby” of the family, I was truly astonished. Vavan did some really dreadful thing, Mrs. Lyons screamed at him to “beyave,” he replied, “Gweyframme.” She swung a punch at him, he stuck out his tongue at her, dropped to his belly, wriggled under the bed, and from his dark hideout proceeded to tell her some things no child should tell a mother and remain alive. She yelled that she was going to tear his backside and, seizing a broom, commenced to stab wildly at his hidden form. She must have seen me staring at her because she paused and advised me to go outside and play in the yard, then they resumed the duel, he with the foul mouth and she with the broomstick.

All sorts of wonderful things happened at the Lyons’ house. Periodic fights would break out between the brothers: big, strong Spanish-looking men who would fight each other fiercely until their mother appeared and sometimes doused them with a goblet of cold water.

My friend Bev had all sorts of lovely toys and games to play with, but mostly she had a wonderful talent for organizing great events. These could range from the really low-level act of getting a group of children together to go and tease Rose – the retarded child who lived several streets away (I can truly say I could never bring myself to join in this activity), to informing on Mr. Frenchie to her aunt Miss Dottie about which bar he had spent all his money in (she always told her to mind her own business and stay out of big people’s business), to organizing dolls’ tea parties, weddings, and pregnancies, to the Dolly Funeral.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.