Brown Girl in the Ring Read online

  • • • •

  Give the Devil a child for dinner!

  One, two little children!

  —Derek Walcott, Ti-Jean and His Brothers

  Baby screamed, then started sobbing as though his heart were broken. Ti-Jeanne rushed to pick him up, but all her rocking and shushing didn’t help. His clenched fists punched at the air. The sorrow on his pudgy face made him look older than his years.

  The noise had no effect on Crazy Betty. With Baby cradled in one arm, Ti-Jeanne sat on the edge of her bed and stroked Crazy Betty’s forehead. The woman moaned a little. Was this really her mother? Ti-Jeanne stared at the ruined face, trying to see some resemblance to the beautiful, vibrant woman who had left her twelve years before. Funny how eyes defined a face. With them gone, the rest of her features seemed to have lost their definition, too. The nose looked a little like she remembered her mother’s. Maybe. The mouth, too, but it was hard to tell. Some of Crazy Betty’s . . . Mi-Jeanne’s teeth were missing, and her lips caved in around the spaces, shrinking her face.

  Mi-Jeanne’s hands jerked, then her feet. Alarmed, Ti-Jeanne stood up, ready to go to the top of the stairs and yell for her grandmother. An ambulance howled by, very close. Then the noise stopped. Seconds later there was a pounding at the door. Had someone called an ambulance for Mi-Jeanne? But who would pay for it? Couldn’t Mami help her? Ti-Jeanne put a still-weeping Baby back in the crib and ran downstairs, but Tony had already answered the door. He was pointing the visitors toward Mami’s examination room. He looked ill. Six men brushed by him and went into the room. They were Vultures. All were wearing hooded, floor-length bulletproofs in Angel of Mercy black. Two of the men had Glocks. One more was carrying a telescoping stretcher.

  “Why you going in there?” Ti-Jeanne asked them. “She upstairs.”

  The Vultures hesitated, looked to Tony for confirmation.

  Mutely he shook his head. The glance he gave Ti-Jeanne held all the sadness of the world. She could almost weep just looking at his face. He went outside.

  “Leave the door open, sir,” one of the Vultures called. The small speaker grid in the beak of his bulletproof magnified and distorted his voice.

  Ti-Jeanne didn’t understand. She followed the men into the room. For a second, her mind rejected what her eyes saw. The body on the floor was recognizable only by its small frame in its patched black housedress. Mami’s necklace of beads had broken. The brown and red beads were scattered over the floor and her body. Tony’s funny square knapsack lay beside her, open. A machine of some sort hummed inside it, fat red tubes extended like claws into Mami’s neck, arms, chest, thigh.

  Her head was the wrong shape. Someone had smashed the back of her head in. In the room above her head, Baby’s screaming reached a crescendo.

  Two of the Vultures knelt at Mami’s side, began checking the machine’s connections.

  “Looks good,” one of them said, checking the readout in his hand from the wand he was running over Mami’s chest. “BP falling a bit. Kurt, step up the dopamine some, will you? And Jamie buzz the hospital. Tell ’em to meet us at the airlift out front. We’ll fly the heart straight to Ottawa General.”

  Dimly Ti-Jeanne’s mind registered two shocks of pain as her knees hit the floor. She choked on the word “Mami,” then she screamed it. “Mami! Oh God, Mami!” She crawled over to her grandmother’s body, reaching to touch. Hands pulled her away, dragged her to her feet. She resisted. “Let me go! Mami!”

  “Please stay out of our way, miss. That woman is a biomaterial donor.” Ti-Jeanne kicked back with her heel, connected with someone’s kneecap. She ignored their howl of pain. She was free. She fell at Mami Gros-Jeanne’s side again. Sobbing, she touched her grandmother’s face, still warm.

  The pulse at Mami’s neck was still beating. Incredulous with joy, Ti-Jeanne looked at the Vultures down on the ground with her. “She ain’t dead! She heart still beating! Quick, make we take she to the hospital; maybe we could save she!”

  One of the Vultures raised the beak off its face. It was a woman. “I’m sorry, miss. She’s dead all right. That’s not a pulse. It’s just the CP bypass machine keeping the blood circulating. I’m very sorry.”

  “Dead? Mami really dead?” Ti-Jeanne felt as though her own heart were being turned inside out. The words came out without thought: “How she get like this?”

  Another of the Vultures with the weapons raised her to her feet again, gently this time. “We don’t know, miss. Maybe she fell or something.”

  “No!” Ti-Jeanne looked at one, then the other, searching for the faces behind the Shattertite beaks. “Allyou ain’t understand. She did fine when I leave she. Somebody must be . . . Oh God, where Tony?” Ti-Jeanne rushed out, flung herself through the open front door. There was no sign of Tony. “Is he do it.” The words fell from her lips. “Jesus Jesus Lord, is Tony kill she?” She ran back into the examination room. The Vultures had activated the stretcher. It was telescoping to its full size, Mami’s body on it.

  “Miss, we’re going now.” The words came faster, like a litany: “Angel of Mercy Hospital offers its condolences for your loss and thanks you and your family for making this life-giving donation of your loved one’s biomaterial. Your address has been entered into the hospital’s data banks and you will be compensated for your donation. Good day.”

  Ti-Jeanne grabbed for the side of the stretcher, took her grandmother’s hand. She willed the fingers to close around hers, but there was no response.

  “Miss, I’ll have to ask you to step aside.” They were pushing the stretcher quickly, almost running. Ti-Jeanne ignored the words. She kept pace with them, holding Mami’s hand all the way to the ambulance. They had to pull her away, prevent her forcibly from entering the ambulance with Mami’s body. They all climbed in the rear. The doors slammed shut, hollowly. The ambulance started off down the gravel pathway that led to the road.

  “Mami!” Ti-Jeanne wailed. “Oh God, Mami; I sorry!” She ran after the ambulance, screaming, begging, crying. The ambulance sped away, kicking pebbles into Ti-Jeanne’s face. She barely felt them. She stood in the road, howling, wailing, until her breath was gone and her desolate eyes were swollen nearly shut.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  duppies of dust and ululations in light

  vortexed around her.

  Ritualist, she tried to reduce the world,

  sketching her violent diagrams

  against a wall of mountains which her stare made totter.

  Her rhythmic ideas detonated into gestures.

  She would jab her knee into the groin of the air,

  fling her sharp instep at the fluttering sky,

  revise perspectives with the hooks of her fingers,

  and butt blood from the teeth of God.

  She cooked and ate anything. But, being so often busy,

  she hardly ever cooked or ate.

  —Slade Hopkinson, “The Madwoman of Papine”

  In the calabash duppy, regret, hunger, remorse, and anger had merged into one howling need. When it killed, or each time it was fed blood, the essences of terror, pain, blood, and death appeased the hunger for a little while. But whenever it brought sweet death to another, it knew that it did murder, that it would once have abhorred its own actions. And it knew that it was denied the rest it had given its victim. Then, fuelled by guilt, the hunger and fury would rage again, stronger. Always stronger. It hated the man who kept it bound, neither alive nor dead. Rudolph Sheldon. One day its chance would come, and then, Rudolph Sheldon, then. But for now, it was compelled to do Rudy’s bidding. This time its captor had set it to a task more complex than the rending of flesh from bone. Watch Tony. Make sure he killed. And the thing Tony didn’t know: once that was done, kill him, too. There was something else about the task, something that gave it joy. Yes. For the first time since it had been bound, Rudolph Sheldon was letting it go home. The spell it was under compelled it to follow Rudy’s orders, but he had made a mistake now. He had given it a chance
for freedom.

  How to warn them? How to tell them what they must do to free it? It had hovered in the air above the city like a fine mist of blood, considering. A gull had flown heedlessly into the mist. A squawk, a gulping sound, then a clump of skin and feathers had dropped to the ground below, followed by a clatter of small bones, picked clean.

  The duppy had realised that it needed to find the woman, the bodily part of itself that wandered the city while its mind was trapped in the calabash. Crazy Betty would give it the voice with which to speak. Where . . . ?

  Ah, there she was, toasting filth on a brick to eat. But it hadn’t been able to take the time to go into her yet, had had to obey Rudolph Sheldon’s orders, had to follow Tony.

  Screaming silently with frustration, the duppy had seized the crazy woman’s awareness, turned her toward the little facade house on the farm, had driven her on gibbering ahead of it like that monkey that sees the tiger. No need for Crazy Betty to have sight. It could see.

  Soon. Almost there. Soon. Tony had walked so slowly! The duppy had been tempted to reveal itself to him, herd him, too, but men had died with fright before at the sight of it on the hunt. So, patience. Hunger. Sorrow. Anger. Rudolph Sheldon.

  It had felt the mad woman-body arrive at the farm, had felt her try to communicate the message of danger. Tony was danger. But Crazy Betty had no intellect to drive her tongue. She had only babbled half sentences that they hadn’t understood.

  It could have wept with relief when Tony had finally reached the door of the Simpson House. It had swept into the parlour with him; had filled up Crazy Betty’s eye sockets; let itself be sucked up through her nostrils; slid into her ears; crawled past gappy teeth and then her tongue to glide down her throat; had sunk like mercury in through her pores; had layered itself directly into her bloodstream. Body and mind, they had fallen to the ground, stunned by being reunited. It had always been like that, the few times they had managed to be together.

  Now, lying where her family had put her on her old bed, Mi-Jeanne fought her way up from coma synapse by synapse, regaining control of her body that was Crazy Betty.

  And awoke. Oh God, to feel again! She lifted! an arm! to her face, feeling the remembered, intricate play of muscles, will, and joints that made such a miracle possible. She touched a bruise on her forehead. New, that one. The brief pain it gave her was pleasure as strong as anything she knew. Her own touch sent a thrill of sensation through her fingertips. She giggled. Breathing. She was breathing again after so long, pulling the sweet substance of air through her nostrils into lungs that obligingly swelled to hold the gift.

  She remembered why she’d come. “Jesus! I ain’t have the time for this. Anybody there?” No answer. Just a soft sobbing and a sucking noise. She remembered that sound: a hungry baby suckling its own fist. Her daughter’s child.

  Mi-Jeanne swung her legs over the side of the bed (tension in the lifting thighs, trembling stomach muscles clenched to counterbalance; her body was in bad shape). She stood shakily, groped until she found the baby in its crib. “Well, child,” she said, patting his tummy, “it look like everybody gone and leave we.” And that wasn’t good. Where were they? Had Tony got to them already? The baby just whimpered.

  • • • •

  Tony sat in the cold mud on the bank of the duck pond and washed and washed his hands. The cold water made them throb and burn. He didn’t really care. He’d dropped the hammer with its load of blood and hair into the pond. He couldn’t see for weeping. One more. He had to kill one more, or the horror from the calabash would come after him.

  • • • •

  Give the Devil a child for dinner,

  One, two, three little children!

  —Derek Walcott, Ti-Jean and His Brothers

  More than the cold, it was her aching, milk-swollen breasts that finally brought Ti-Jeanne to herself as she knelt in the middle of the road. Baby was still back at the house. He would be hungry. He would need to be changed. Mi-Jeanne was sick. Mundane things, they seemed now. How could she think about those things when Mami was dead? Killed. By Tony. Betrayal and grief almost overwhelmed her again, but despite that, her feet took the path back to the house and up the stairs.

  To her shock, Mi-Jeanne met her at the bedroom door, holding Baby in her arms. “Who’s there?” the blind woman called out.

  “Mi . . . Mummy?”

  “Ti-Jeanne, is you? Where Tony?”

  Mi-Jeanne was aware! Stunned, all Ti-Jeanne could think to ask was, “You feeling better now?”

  “Never mind that. Where Tony?”

  Ti-Jeanne registered her own keening as that of someone far away. “I don’t know where he gone! But I think he kill, he kill Mami!”

  “Jesus, I come too late. Look, girl, he go be looking to kill you, too. Is that Daddy . . . Rudy send he to do. You have to stop he.”

  “Tony? Tony want me dead? How you know?” she challenged the madwoman.

  “I know everything Daddy doing.” Grief and pain twisted Mi-Jeanne’s too old face. “I is the duppy that Daddy does keep in he calabash. I could only inhabit my own body when Daddy let me out to do he dirty work for he. Is my soul he bind to get he power. Is my sight he twist into obeah, into shadow-catching for he.”

  It was too much. Ti-Jeanne felt herself move beyond hysteria into an odd, shaky calm that she knew wouldn’t last. Nothing in her world was what she’d thought. “Motherscunt bastard,” she muttered, unsure if she meant Tony or her grandfather. She pushed past Mi-Jeanne, strode into Mami’s room, and started opening drawers and cupboards. “I know it have a gun in here somewhere.” She heard Mi-Jeanne groping her way to the bedroom behind her. Mi-Jeanne barked her shins against the bed, felt to see what it was she had bumped into, then sat down on the thin, narrow mattress.

  “Mami tell me is a dead that Rudy have in he duppy bowl,” Ti-Jeanne said.

  “Used to be a dead. Then he come to find out the obeah does work stronger if he ain’t kill the body, just steal the spirit. What Tony do to Mami?”

  Ti-Jeanne described what she’d seen. “How come you taking the news cool cool so? Is your mother.”

  “Child, if you only know how much suffering and death I see these past few years, eh? And how much of it I cause. Mami gone . . .” Her voice trailed off to a whisper. “Maybe it better so.”

  “So, if killing come in like cool breeze to you, why you ain’t help we?” Anger. That’s what she should be feeling now, not this vague, distanced resentment. “Why you ain’t do for Rudy?”

  “I could only do what Daddy order me to do,” her mother replied. “If he hadn’t tell me to come here to watch and make sure Tony carry out he orders, I couldn’t even self pass the door. And to talk to allyou, I had was to come back inside my body. When I do that, is like having a fit. It does take time for body and mind to come back together again. That’s why I couldn’t warn Mami in time. I do what I could, doux-doux. I not going to be able to fight Tony for you,” Mi-Jeanne said. Her voice lowered in shame. “Truth is, I supposed to kill Tony, but only after he kill you.”

  “Oh, is so it go?” Ti-Jeanne replied. Her world had frayed into tattered threads. She felt almost detached as she listened to herself calmly discuss her own murder with her long-lost mother. “Let Tony come then, nuh?” Ti-Jeanne said to her. “Bastard. Say we going to move from here. Say we going to settle down. I go shoot he lying mouth right off he worthless face.”

  “If you did have to see what Tony watch Rudy do, you woulda be same way. After you see what Rudy capable of, you would do anything he tell you, so you don’t end up on that table, feeling Rudy knife strip the skin from off your body.”

  Ti-Jeanne’s body went cold. Was this what she was up against? Her knees wouldn’t hold her. She sat down hard on the bed. Mi-Jeanne must have felt the mattress give. She groped along the bed until she found Ti-Jeanne’s leg. She held it hard and continued: “Feeling he slit your throat, Ti-Jeanne. Feeling your lifeblood running into he duppy bowl for the monster insi
de to drink. For me to drink, Ti-Jeanne. Is that Tony see last night. You have to free me. You have to find Daddy duppy bowl and break it.”

  Ti-Jeanne pulled away from her mother’s grasp. She got up and continued searching through Mami’s belongings. “Allyou ain’t want plenty, oui?” Her tone was bitter. Good. It would hide her fright. “Mami want me to turn bush doctor; Tony want me to dead; you want me to save your wicked soul. What I go help you for? After you abandon me from small?”

  She heard Baby’s thin, hungry cry from the other bedroom. Her milk let down at the sound, dampening the front of her shirt. “God, not now, child. You ain’t see I busy?”

  Busy. Ti-Jeanne almost laughed at the inadequacy of the word.

  “Turn around, Ti-Jeanne,” said Tony from the doorway, in the voice of someone who had looked into hell and seen his own face. “Turn around so I can see your hands.”

  Holding up her empty palms, she turned to face Tony. His face was swollen with weeping, but he looked determined. He had a gun of his own pointed at her. He kept glancing back and forth between her and her mother. “I have to do this, Ti-Jeanne. After what you did to Crack and Jay and Crapaud, Rudy wants you out of the way.”

  “It wasn’t me. Is Legbara do it. You saw.”

  “Don’t give me that! You and Gros-Jeanne been playing me from the start!”

  “For what, Tony?” Mi-Jeanne asked sadly. “You ain’t see how the two of them been trying to stay out of posse business? You is Ti-Jeanne baby father, but she leave you when she realise that posse more important to you than she. Man, even your own baby does cry when it see you coming.”

  That startled Ti-Jeanne. She hadn’t thought of it that way. Mi-Jeanne was right. Every time she had started to get close to Tony again, Baby had demanded her attention.

  “Too late for everything now,” Mi-Jeanne said sadly. “Ti-Jeanne, I sorry. The only way to prevent me from doing what Rudy tell me is to break the duppy calabash and free my spirit. And you not go get to do that now.” She stood up, looking in the direction of Tony’s voice. “Tony, none of we ain’t want nothing to do with you. So do your business, or don’t do it. Is all the same to me. Daddy say I must kill you either way. Stop me if you could stop me, nuh?”