Gardens in the Minibus

Sure. You can even start with Blazes. Blazes was me, the content one who never quarreled even when I should have laid some language to waste in somebody’s ear for their foolishness toward me or somebody else. You could say that Blazes was the part of me, which was like lightning, but always only nearly struck. Never used. Not even when that fucker hacked my shin with a cutlass and left me in a crutch and, years later, had the mind to ask me to walk lively, as I was getting on with my business, crossing the road to the butcher’s. Did Blazes interrupt? Somebody else would have cussed that fucker out right, would have rammed my own crutch into his ear, even. But not me. Because of Blazes. Blazes was always there to stop me leaning into my base instincts. Now, let’s not forget that even if we don’t start with Blazes in this story, we will end with Blazes.

I was burning a cold rage that morning. We had been living in Uncle Mark’s old, blue minibus for two months. My mother had said it would be just temporary since hurricane season was approaching. My mother had been tamed by the worn-down a-woman-should-be whips that had been brought through to her generation by a vague historical power, so she was also not one to show that pain was increasing in her body. Her calm was religious. It was also doctrinaire. And by the time she needed to explain why her chest had felt constricted and her heart too engorged, and before anyone could ask for how long, it no longer mattered that she had been done with labouring on her banana farm. My father had told her it was a good idea to secure that government loan and she could rely on him, for they would work the land together. My mother had the means to find someone in a high office, because although she was gentle and unassuming in looks, she had a high-pitched laugh that dislodged trees from any dark night; she could erupt clouds and sound like a high wind. Which is to say she could make you feel whatever you needed to feel so that the days could carry on among themselves. So, I imagined that at the government office, she found someone to laugh with. And that person changed her birth year on the important government document or another thing. Soon after that she was no longer too old to qualify for the farmer’s loan.

She got the loan. My father did not help as he said he would. Eventually, my mother had to give up the farm. She sold it to someone who was unable to pay her just yet. Someone promised to pay her the minute the farm turned over its first profit and she agreed. The gossip the town needed was that the good-for-nothing father of mine had made a three-part wager with the devil and he could not pay up so the farm became collateral for the devil’s concubine, who now owned the farm, and soon my mother would be part of the price and I, eventually, the third part of it. By any standard, Blazes became my name at this third toll. I was still very young when this all happened. I remember being home sick from school on the day Blazes appeared. My fever had been higher than I could know, since my mother told me I had crawled up the wall like a spider and I had chewed the curtain in the living room down to threads. Blazes arrived then and never left. My mother never got the money for the farm that she was promised, and since she was a lot like Blazes, she never made a fuss. “Let them have it,” she said, “the lord giveth and the lord taketh away.” I wondered later in my mid-life whether she believed she deserved to lose because she had laughed her way into the back-breaking work of the farm.

By the time my mother had anything to say about the knot in her that year she fell ill, her belly had bulged, the citrus-like pain she described, it was, of course, a sign of things too late. The stroke wound her arm up into a bow, and she could not undo anything anyone had said about my father’s wages, his deal with the devil, and me, in the shadow of Blazes. Not even my mother who could charm any lifeform from here to nowhere could undo any of that.

My father had come by the minibus one morning and a flock of pigeons landed just beyond the door. He put his one foot up on the stool out front and left his other leg deep outside, the way of Captain Morgan. I was near the door.

“Morning,” I said.

“Where that mother of yours,” he asked.

I could never understand why he, of all people, never really saw my mother. I understood them to be too far apart to matter much to each other any longer. Even though, apparently, they’d once been close enough to each other to make me, Blazes.

“That devil,” he added.

But Blazes did not quarrel. Blazes knew that our father’s days for making trouble were numbered. Blazes was like the facsimile of me that showed up as a profound and singular force when I needed to step away from real things that happened out of proportion. Blazes was also confusing, the way maids, movie stars, and delivery women are confusing to people who live in a cabin in the woods. Call Blazes my coping mechanism. I was Blazes and Blazes was me. We were the same except we were not together.

“She’s sitting out back,” I said.

“Out back,” my father said.

Blazes wobbled. The coconut tree near the green shed where the chickens were pecking resigned its two dried fronds to the dirt path below it. My father looked back and stepped out of the way of something neither Blazes nor I could see.

“Out back,” I said again.

My father had an irregular way of caring. He could, for example, fondle the dog when he entered the yard, but he would not ask how I had been. Still, Blazes could tell that our father had to have been slightly less happy than he put on. He could not, for example, stop himself from laughing at his own bad luck.

My father went around to the back of the minibus and I heard some mumbling. I heard some raised pitches and then sudden quiet. He left and I watched him leave through the minibus window, where I could also see my mother and by then, Blazes blew away with a small wind.

My mother was nearing the end of some tears, I could tell, and some rage, and I found for myself a cold, embarrassing rage straightway. The cold rage walked me to the back of the minibus. I helped my mother back into the minibus. I stretched out her legs as she liked to have them placed side by side on two padded stools. I rubbed her coiled arm with the ointment her sister had made. I wanted to enemy father’s life. End prematurely, all of the things he had still in him to do to us.

“I’ll make dinner now,” I said.

“It’s possible to lose things out in the open, you know, Blazes,” my mother said to me.

“I would rather he was gone. I would rather you never having met even if that means no Blazes. Even if that means another Blazes would never think it beneath him to satisfy a grudge and teach an old man a lesson.”

“You cannot let the world or anybody in it turn you inside out like this, Blazes.”

Since my rage was cold, I could tuck it away. I could unfurl it. I could make it into other things. Throw it at the wrong things. Make it an absence.

At those last words of my mother’s, I went to Miss Gloria’s yard and picked some blooms for a bouquet. She was our neighbour and she knew Blazes so she did not mind sharing her flowers with him. I came back and slipped the bouquet into my mother’s coiled hand. She let me because she knew Blazes. I put one flower on top of her ear and another in her hair. Just like the day before and the one before that. Then I put a flower on top of my ear. I went back to the small basin of water on the wooden tray near the front door of the minibus. I leaned on my crutch and chopped some onions and herbs for stewing some roasted sardines. I would plot soon, I decided, how everyone should pay that devil, even if that devil is me. But for the moment, both of us for a time were gardens in the minibus.

¹ Article 20. To this end, we want two people to be appointed by our officers in each market to examine the food and goods which will be brought there by the slaves, together with the notes and marks of their masters which they will carry. (Code Noir, King Henry XIV, 1685)

 

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