Mr. Loverman by Evaristo Bernardine

Author:Evaristo, Bernardine [Evaristo, Bernardine]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2014-03-10T04:00:00+00:00

9

The Art of Being a Man

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Next morning I wade through the fog of sleep to the landing and pick up the telephone.

I already guess the news it will bring.

Carmel’s weeping as she tells me her daddy dead. I feel for her. Don’t need to love someone to be compassionate. Don’t matter what your parents are like, nothing compares to losing them, whatever age it happen. Only thing worse must be losing one of your children.

“He wasn’t a bad man, Barry. He just had a bad temper, that’s all. I’m sure he felt guilty about what he did to Mommy.”

Easy to feel guilty after the fact.

“My papi’s with the angels now.”

“Yes, my dear, he with the angels now.”

The fallen ones burnin’ alongside him. You see, Carmel? Your grief don’t change what he was, a narsy man, but I ain’t goin over that ground with her right now.

“Mi feel like an orphan, Barry.”

“I sorry, Carmel.” And I am. For her.

“When you coming for the funeral, Barry?” Carmel’s voice is heavy with hope.

“You know I don’t business with funerals.”

“Yes, but this mi papi.”

“I sorry, Carmel. I sorry . . . but I just can’t.”

Sigh.

Click.

I stand there awhile before I put the phone back in its cradle, and then I sit down in the chair next to the phone and catch myself. I recognize what I feeling. The cycle of grief, the way hearing about a person’s death, let alone my own father-in-law’s, resurrects old pain.

My father dead before I reach my sixteenth. Mr. Patmore Walker, Esq.—son of Mr. Gideon Walker, Esq., son of Mr. Jesse Walker, Esq., son of Solomon, son of Caesar, son of Congo Bob—worked as a junior clerk in the courthouse. He was the first in his family to go to school but not quite first in class so he didn’t get the single island scholarship to a British university available to my people in 1929.

He wanted to be a teacher, so he should-a started his own school with kids sitting on mats. I would-a advised him so, if he’d lived long enough. Making my way in England, I learned that when the fortress draws up its ramparts, you gotta start building your own empire. Don’t wait for nobody give it you.

But he was a passive, placid man, except where he and his wife was concerned. My mother might-a been a humble maid for the Pattersons, but she had high ambitions that her husband never met, with his highly intelligent mind but lowly job at the courthouse. Theirs was not one of those marriages of everyone else’s inconvenience, which was rare in the Ovals, but they nonetheless quietly, consistently bickered.

My father was home after work, every evening on the dot; he didn’t disappear without no explanation, didn’t spend hours over at the rum bar, didn’t lie, didn’t cheat, didn’t beat.

His favorite pastime was reading the Agatha Christie novels his pen friend sent him from England, transporting himself to the land of the British who’d brought us there,

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