Drumblair by Rachel Manley

Author:Rachel Manley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Drumblair: Memories of a Jamaican Childhood
ISBN: 9781938604621
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 1996-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Later that evening, after he had walked the aunts to their cars, Pardi joined us on the steps to meditate at the edge of a world where the moon wandered over the night-dead faces of flowers. The peenie-wallies flashed their Morse code, but the sky ignored them. The stars were very far away, small and mean-looking.

Listen, Moon,

Last night you died too soon …

Mardi was reciting a George Campbell poem.

Pardi surveyed the quiet hedge of Chinese hat shrubs that stood on guard before him, keeping the neighbours at bay. He addressed it as though the dense mass, and not Mardi lost in her poetry, were his company.

“It was the use of the word ‘going.’”

He said this with satisfaction, as though he had retrieved some small piece of vital evidence.

“Does he say ‘going’?” she asked.

Mardi turned back from the verse to her husband’s contemplation of a word which he had apparently retrieved not from George’s poem, but from the bottom of the garden.

“No dear. It’s nothing. Just something Vera said.”

I looked for you

and you had fled …

For a moment he thought she meant him, but then he realized she was reliving some ghosted moment through the familiar lines of the poem. George, the nephew of Miss Boyd who had spent summers with their sons; the most erratic of their young friends, with the mind of a mattoid, part genius, part fool. The greatest Jamaican poet, according to Mardi.

The word “going” was not about the place of departure, but about the destination. In any mention of a journey somewhere is honoured, and that honour falls to the country of the heart. If Jamaica were that country, he thought to himself, then Vera would have said she was “leaving.”

The world was dead

And residue of nothingness

In my head.

Mardi had moved onto the lawn and was waltzing in her deliberate way, nodding her head as though to recapture the beat with her motions. Reduced to glimpses and phrases by the moonlight, one might not realize what a bad dancer she was.

I held my lover in my arms, Pardi continued with a line later in the poem, his voice full of mischief.

And you were dead. She lifted her voice to meet him. And you were dead.

Her long legs had reached him, and she searched for the next line in his face. He laced his hands in hers as though to join their voices.

I will never see her face again

I will never see her face again.

The hedge hid them staunchly from view, its eyes averted from a silliness inappropriate to its tenure.

“Do you think one day Muriel will go too?” Mardi asked.

“No,” he said with certainty. “I think she’s decided she’s a Jamaican.”

Going or leaving. Perhaps the moon in her coquetry couldn’t care less. But he knew there was a difference. He knew that life would not be quite the same again.

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.