Brown Girl in the Ring Read online

  “You will?” His smile was like the springtime sun. If she didn’t watch herself, Ti-Jeanne knew she would do any kind of foolishness just to see more of that smile. Trying to change the subject, she asked him, “How you going to get out of the city?” It had been years since she had seen a working car, except for the Angel of Mercy ambulances—the Vulture Vans, people called them—and Rudy’s elegant, predatory Bentley. Who could afford gas, batteries, tires? Most people only travelled as far as a bicycle could take them. Sometimes it was hard to believe that there was even still a world outside.

  “I don’t really know, love.” (Ti-Jeanne’s heart leapt at the sound of that last word.) “And it’s better if I don’t tell you too much, all right? Can’t take the risk. So you really going to make me go away all alone, Ti-Jeanne?” Tony’s eyes looked so lonely. But she said:

  “Yes, Tony. You go be on the run. Suppose I come with you, and the posse catch the two of we? I can’t put this child in danger like that. Send and tell me when you have a job and a place to live, and I go think about it.”

  She touched his arm, then quickly stepped back before the touch could turn into a hug. “I going home now. Go good, Tony.” She blinked hard two or three times and marched away. She imagined Tony staring after her through the dark.

  Tony could give sweet, sweet talk. Words so nice, they would charm the money from your pocket, the caution from your heart, the clothes from your body. Words so sweet and soothing, they sounded like love, like let me hold you the way your mama never held you, like come and be my only special one, my doux-doux darling. Words that promised heaven.

  Ti-Jeanne had not told Tony that Baby was his child. She had left him and his room in the rooming house when her belly began to get big. She’d gone back to her grandmother and refused to see or speak with him. Let him think she’d been cheating on him and was ashamed. Something had made her want to keep the little person she was growing all to herself. It would be the one human being who was totally dependent on her and would never leave her.

  To her surprise, Tony had barely seemed to consider the possibility that she might have been horning him with another man. He was more concerned about getting her back. He had braved her grandmother’s cutting eyes and hard-set mouth to visit Ti-Jeanne at the balm-yard. He sent little notes via her grandmother, written with a dull pencil on torn, crumpled paper. Mami would thrust them sullenly at her. In the notes, Tony apologized for anything he might have done to hurt her. He told her that he was going to leave the posse, going to get a straight job. He told her all the old things that used to set her to dreaming about the cozy life they’d have together. But he’d never done any of them. She told herself she couldn’t believe him any more, that she had done the right thing to go back to her grandmother to bear her child. Whenever Tony appeared at their door, Ti-Jeanne would send her grandmother to answer it, and finally he would no longer face Mami Gros-Jeanne’s implacable glare.

  The last time he had tried to visit had been early in the summer. Ti-Jeanne had been watching from the cottage window. Mami had been in the herb garden in front of the old Simpson farmhouse that they’d made into their home. She was safe within the magic circle of stakes that she had shoved into the ground, surrounding the farmhouse. Each stake had a deep blue Milk of Magnesia bottle jammed upside-down onto it, protection against duppies, dead people’s spirits. Tied on below the Magnesia bottles, triangles of coloured cloth fluttered from the stakes.

  Hunched over the basil plants in her worn black dress, Mami had been picking snails off the leaves and popping them with a crunch between thumb and forefinger. Sun on the duppy bottles made blue lights dance over her face and hands, so that she looked like a duppy herself. Mami knew which plants could kill as well as cure. She had moved on to inspect the spiky aloe plants in their clay pots and plastic margarine tubs. The sticky sap from the leaves soothed burns and healed blemishes. It was Ti-Jeanne’s job to move the plants inside for the warmth every fall. Mami said that her baby would come before then, by midsummer.

  Ti-Jeanne’s breath had caught in her throat as she saw Tony come striding along the path to the cottage. At the same time, the baby in Ti-Jeanne’s belly writhed, as if in anger. Ti-Jeanne moved one hand in soothing circles around her distended navel. She yearned for Tony so badly, but he was no good for her.

  Tony had opened the garden gate. Mami looked up at the creak it made. Tony had looked at her, then hesitated, waiting for permission to enter. Mami had straightened from her weeding. Somehow, her tiny, fierce body had seemed to tower over Tony’s six-foot frame. She had stared at him for long seconds and then muttered, “If you don’t stop coming here, I goin’ to put mal ’jo upon you, you know.” Evil eye. Tony was terrified of the small-boned seer woman. Ti-Jeanne knew that for all his medical training and his Canadian upbringing, he’d learned the fear of Caribbean obeah at his mother’s knee. His face went grey. He swallowed, stepped back, then turned and hastened away. After that, he hadn’t tried again.

  Baby had been born a few weeks later, and then Ti-Jeanne had had no time for thoughts of Tony. Learning to look after her sickly newborn had kept her busy.

  • • • •

  Tony took a deep breath for calm as Crack Monkey beckoned him into Rudy’s office. The elevator ride up one hundred and thirteen floors had increased his nervousness. The door shut with a hollow thud, like a coffin lid slamming down.

  Rudy was sitting in a leather executive’s chair behind his huge, highly polished oak desk. With a manicured hand, he indicated that Tony should sit in the chair on the other side. Tony sat, tried out a smile on Rudy. The posse boss’s thick, blocky body nearly obscured the plush padded leather of the chair. The man’s neck was almost as big around as his head. Tony suspected that Rudy augmented his strength with steroids. He’d once seen him wrap one hand around a man’s neck and lift him right off the ground. Crack Monkey, a whippet-thin man with cords for muscles, stationed himself in front of the door, feet apart, hands held loosely behind his back, exposing the gun at his belt.

  Poor Melba was there, standing beside Rudy’s desk, a dustcloth tucked into the waistband of her thin cotton skirt. She was holding a glass jug filled with water and ice cubes, ready to refill the goblet of water that Rudy kept on his desk. She was deathly still. Condensation ran off the jug. It glistened on her hands and tracked runnels down her forearms to drip onto the grey plush carpet. Tony had the impression she’d been standing in just that position for a long time. Her fingernails were edged blue from the jug’s cold. It must have been heavy. Her thin, wasted arms were trembling with the weight of it, but she didn’t move, said nothing, just gazed absently ahead, looking at nothing. Rudy noticed Tony staring at her and smiled. Tony shuddered. Whatever hold Rudy had on the woman had to be more than just buff addiction. Her will, her volition, seemed to be gone. Tony knew that she would do whatever Rudy told her, and only that, until he gave her a new order or her body collapsed from exhaustion. She even had to be told when to relieve herself. She was only in her mid-twenties, but in the past few months her face had become lined and worn, and her hair was whitening rapidly. She wasn’t the first that Rudy had used like this, either. It was one of the reasons Tony had come to feel he needed to get away from the posse’s influence.

  Trying to look calm, Tony turned to Rudy. “Afternoon, Mr. Sheldon,” he said quietly.

  “Afternoon, brother. How you keeping? Crack treating you all right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. Now Tony, you been with we for a few months now, right? Crack tell me you doing a good job.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Sheldon.”

  “Don’t thank me yet, me brother.” Rudy settled back farther into the chair, linking his hands behind his head. Every movement he made sent a thrill of fear up Tony’s spine. Why had the posse boss sent for him? Rudy continued:

  “Crack say you have one little problem, though. You does dip into the deliveries every so often.”

  Behind him, Tony heard Cr
ack Monkey’s insane little giggle. They knew! He’d thought they wouldn’t miss a few pinches of buff here and there. The fine hairs on Tony’s arms raised in terror. “I, I,” he jabbered.

  “Nah, nah, is all right, brother. Me understand.” Rudy held up one hand in a calming gesture. “Life hard. Sometimes a man does get, ah, dependent on he pleasures, you understand me?”

  “Mr. Sheldon, I can pay it back, I can—”

  “Yes, that is exactly what you go do. Pay me back.” Rudy’s face was serious for a moment. Then he skinned his lips back from his teeth in an oily grin. A snake probably looked like it was smiling, too, when it opened its jaws to strike. “You go pay me back by doing this one little job for me, just the way I tell you. But don’t feel no way. If you pass this test, I go know I could trust you. I go know say you is a true member of the posse. Is that you want, right?” Rudy’s meaningful stare made the only correct answer obvious. Tony nodded quickly. Rudy smiled again.

  “Seen. I did take you for a man with brains.”

  Tony could feel his heart thumping in his chest. “What do you need me to do, Mr. Sheldon?”

  “Mercy Hospital need a fresh human heart for a transplant.”

  “What!?”

  “You hear me. You going to find a donor for we. You going to send for the ambulance to come and get it, and while you waiting, you going chill the body down and keep the heart beating. I go give you the equipment to do it. It go be easy.”

  “But Mr. Sheldon, how’m I going to find a donor? Why can’t they use the porcine program? The odds—”

  “Brother, you nah business with none of that. You just going to have to improve the odds, seen? Find somebody the right size, the same blood type, healthy, and arrange for them to be in a condition to donate their heart. You get me?”

  Appalled, Tony could only stare. Rudy was asking him to commit murder.

  The jug fell from Melba’s hands and crashed onto the floor, spraying her with water and broken glass.

  “Fuck!” Rudy shoved himself out of his chair, brushed his pants leg where some of the water had splashed him. He motioned to Crack. “Clean this up. Melba, too.”

  Crack hurried to his side and started picking up shards of glass. Melba just stood, staring at nothing, hands still curled to hold a jug that was no longer there. Goose bumps lifted on Tony’s arms. He had no choice but to do what Rudy told him.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Rocking my baby, I know you are sad,

  Baby, you were naughty; Baby, you were bad.

  I’m sorry to whip you my darling, but true,

  My Mama whipped me, so I’m bound to whip you.

  —Lullabye

  Lost in thoughts of Tony, Ti-Jeanne hurried home. Despite her distractedness, she automatically kept a watchful eye about her. You always had to be on the lookout for trouble in the Burn. She crossed the street a number of times to avoid drunken fights or men offering presents in return for “a little time” with her: “You look so healthy, darling, so nice.” Most men only asked, though. She was Mami Gros-Jeanne’s granddaughter, and nobody wanted Mami mad at them. They needed Mami when the winter coughs were racking their lungs or their women were giving birth.

  A knot of street kids whirled around her, a grimy rainbow of all colours, screeching with laughter and nearly knocking her off balance. They chanted as they ran: “Nigger, nigger, come for roti, all the roti done!” As they jostled her, Ti-Jeanne could smell the dirty little bodies, feel small hands quickly patting her body, looking for anything to steal. Someone tugged at the package of books. Ti-Jeanne yanked it out of the child’s grasp.

  “Allyou get away!” she shouted. “I ain’t have nothing for you!”

  Baby, fascinated by all the activity, didn’t know enough to be frightened. He just stared, wide-eyed. Ti-Jeanne held on tightly to Baby and her books until the children were gone to wherever they went for the night.

  Ti-Jeanne kept walking. She couldn’t keep her mind off Tony. She’d lived with him for a year and a half. A year and a half of him making a few dollars from odd jobs, then using it to score a few slashes of buff, spending the night flat on his back on the mouldy futon in his one-room apartment, eyes wandering from the muscle-relaxing effect of the drug. Next day he’d be queasy and weak, unable to work for days. Ti-Jeanne had kept them fed by working in Roopsingh’s restaurant, but it hadn’t been enough for two people to survive on. Tony was good with his hands, talked about opening his own little bicycle repair shop like Bruk-Foot Sam, but never did anything about it. He could even have used his medical training to do what Mami had done: opened a small private practice to treat simple ailments. But it had been easier for him to start running errands for the posse. It took no thought. He just followed orders and saved all his initiative for figuring out where he was going to score the next slash.

  Baby nuzzled hungrily at Ti-Jeanne’s chest, rooting where he knew her breast was. Ti-Jeanne put her finger in his mouth to soothe him until they reached home.

  Tony had sounded serious today. Maybe this time he’d finally break away from the posse, and she and Baby could make a home with him at last. Maybe a little apartment in one of the suburban cities outside the Metro core. Maybe North York or Scarborough, where she’d heard there were jobs and people could afford to drive cars and wear store-bought clothes. They would both find work, and Mami could come to live with them and leave Toronto people to their own hell.

  “You would like that, my bolom baby? Eh, no-name baby?” Baby’s eyes followed hers. He sucked fretfully at her knuckle. “Well,” she continued, “you almost old enough for your nine-week naming now. Next week, me and Mami go do that, and maybe in a little while, me and you and Tony going to live together, and I go buy a baby pram to push you in, and toys for you to play with. You would like that, Bolom?”

  Ti-Jeanne smiled at the child in her arms, hugged him closer to her, but he frowned and whimpered, clenching his hands into fists. She scowled at him. “Hush now.”

  He kept on whimpering. Ti-Jeanne sucked her teeth. She loved him, but when he got like this, it irritated her. Her mother and grandmother had raised her with the strap; it was what she knew of discipline. “Hush, I tell you. You best had learn fast to mind me when I speak, you know.”

  But by the time she’d tromped through the fallen leaves in the park to reach their farm, Baby was screeching with hunger. Ti-Jeanne hated the noise. She shook him a little, hoping to startle him into silence. Instead his screaming took on a desperate edge. Guilt burned at her.

  “Shut up, Baby,” she said. “You must learn to listen when I talk to you.” She rocked Baby in her arms and made soothing noises, trying to make up for shaking him. He got a bit quieter.

  Mami Gros-Jeanne was waiting at the door of their cottage, a hardened knot of a woman in her limp black dress.

  “Is where the ass you been all day? You don’t see the child hungry? Get inside and feed he! You just as bad as your blasted mother!”

  “Yes, Mami. I goin’, Mami.” Ti-Jeanne scuttled inside, unbuttoning her blouse as she went so that the child could suck.

  “Stupidness,” Mami muttered behind Ti-Jeanne’s fleeing back.

  Baby was soon full; he would sleep for a few hours. Ti-Jeanne spent the rest of the evening as she so often did, braiding Mami’s wiry salt-and-pepper hair while the old woman sat and chopped herbs at the “kitchen” table.

  Riverdale Farm had been a city-owned recreation space, a working farm constructed to resemble one that had been on those lands in the nineteenth century. Torontonians used to be able to come and watch the “farmers” milk the cows and collect eggs from the chickens. The Simpson House wasn’t a real house at all, just a facade that the Parks Department had built to resemble the original farmhouse. There was a front porch that led into a short hallway. To the left and right of the hallway were two small rooms in which the Riverdale staff had led workshops in spinning and weaving. Mami used the right-hand room with its fireplace as her parlour/dining room, the left-
hand one as her examining room. Upstairs had been two offices. Those she had converted into bedrooms: one for herself and the other for Ti-Jeanne and Mi-Jeanne. Now that Mi-Jeanne was gone, Ti-Jeanne shared her bedroom with her baby son. The back of the house had consisted of male and female public washrooms, but they were no use now in a city without a sewage system. Mami’s followers had built her an outhouse just outside with a cesspit and had converted the two washrooms into a cold-storage room and a ventilated kitchen where she cooked on a wood stove that someone had found for her.

  “You minding me, Ti-Jeanne? For foot itch, you must pound garlic, and mix it with pot salt to put between the toes. That does kill it.” Mami Gros-Jeanne was always training Ti-Jeanne in the work she did as a healer.

  “Yes, Mami.”

  “This batch for Papa Butler. He coming Sunday for it. I done tell that man that he must wash he foot every day. He does wear one pair of stinking socks from September to June. Stupidness.”

  “Yes, Mami.”

  “What you does put on a cut to heal it?”

  Damn. One of Mami’s spot tests. “Ah, aloe?”

  “And if we can’t get aloe no more? Tell me a Canadian plant.”

  Shit. It was the one with the name like a tropical plant, but it was something different. What, what? Oh, yes: “Plantain leaf.”

  Her grandmother grunted. Ti-Jeanne had given the correct answer, but that grunt was the only acknowledgment she would get. She swallowed her resentment.

  “And for headache?” Mami continued.

  That one was easy. “Willow bark.”

  Tony had once teased Ti-Jeanne almost to tears about her grandmother: “What’s that crazy old woman doing over there in Riverdale Farm, eh, Ti-Jeanne? Obeah? Nobody believes in that duppy business any more!”

  “Is not obeah, Tony! Mami is a healer, a seer woman! She does do good, not wickedness!” But Ti-Jeanne herself wasn’t so sure. There was the drumming that went on in the crematorium chapel, late into the night. The wails and screams that came from the worshippers. The clotted blood on the crematorium floor in the mornings, mixed with cornmeal. Obviously, other people than Mami still believed in “that duppy business.”