Pictures of a Dying Man
Excerpt

Opinions are like genitals, everyone has them. So, though no one knew why Gladstone Augustus Belle slung a rope around a ceiling joist in his bedroom and hanged himself, everyone had an opinion on the matter.

No one knows the reasons or the circumstances, but there is one point on which everyone agrees: it was a beautiful day, certainly not a day one would ordinarily choose for death.

Midmorning. School childrens’ singsong voices drifting through the windows of the schoolhouse on cool breezes that rustled the tree leaves, caressed women’s thighs, rippled their frocks and brought sighs to everyone’s lips, everyone except Gladstone Augustus Belle. Midmorning, when Isamina Belle, wearing a thin-strapped, black-and-white polka-dot dress and high-heel shoes, left home, headed toward the main road where the hawkers had already set up their trays along the roadside ever since disembarking from the country lorries at sunup; Isamina on her way to purchase provisions to prepare her last meal for her and her husband, she said later.

Yes, it was midmorning with the fragrant steam of hot cocoa bathing my face as I sipped from my enamel cup as through my front window I enjoyed the rhythm of Isamina Belle’s buttocks undulating as she passed by.

Midmorning when after returning from a short stroll taken to inhale the freshness of the air I noticed my mother standing still and holding her dust rag motionless on the back of the mahogany rocking chair listening to some distant sound audible only to her ears and instantly I knew that as sure as steam rises from a hot, tar road after a sudden tropical shower I was about to hear one of her dramatic, prescient pronouncements: somebody sick, somebody dead, an accident just happened or is about to occur, a tragedy has struck, a cataclysm about to erupt. A regular psychic, my mother is.

And no sooner do these thoughts enter my head than, "Gladstone just dead," she says, all the while fixing me with one of her accusing stares.

Inwardly I’m saying, Oh Lord, but aloud my only response is, "Yeah?"

Because how else can one respond to a woman standing in the middle of her house staring into space then announcing that somebody somewhere else just died?

I’m a schoolteacher, perhaps not the best educated of persons. But one thing education has given me is a fair dose of skepticism. Which often tends to put me at odds with friends, neighbors, and of course Mumah who is giving me this look as though I’ve just bashed in the head of a crippled infant, because of the skepticism she has read in my face, I surmise.

But surmising can lead you down the wrong track sometimes, because instead of commenting on my disbelief she’s asking me, "What that boy ever do you, eh? What Gladstone ever do you?"

I’m puzzled.

And she continues, "Why you so bad-minded?" A rhetorical question, I assume; because she’s going on about how grudgeful-minded I am. "Since you was small," she’s saying, talking about how she carried me nine months inside her belly but she got to say it: "You hate to see people do better than you." (Which, I must tell you, isn’t true.) And she’s pausing and then asking as if it’s one of the great puzzles in the universe, "Why you so, eh? Why you like that?" and shaking her head in deep befuddlement. "You en get it from me," she’s saying. "And your father, God rest him in his grave, wasn’t like that. Here it is I tell you a man dead and all you can say is ‘yeah’?"

Gradually I’m beginning to get my bearings. Mumah, always able to Find something good to say about even the most evil of persons, her motto being, "If you can’t say something good about somebody, don’t say nothing at all," a philosophy that I’d come to realize excluded both me and my father. I always believed that it was her constant nagging that killed him. Natural causes? She was the natural cause, or so I used to think.

So there she is saying in one breath that Gabby just died and in the same breath accusing me of . . . what? Indifference perhaps? Indifference to an event that, as far as I knew, had occurred only in her mind? I shrugged figuring, What’s the use?

"I think we should go and see what happening," she says.

And instantly dread is a leaden weight settling in my stomach; because superstition, no matter how firmly dispatched, no matter how deeply buried, is like a restless spirit that often will arise and cause even confirmed atheists to appeal to nonexistent deities ("Oh Jesus Christ!" they will yell, or "Lord have mercy!" they will bawl) when staring eyeball-to-eyeball with death.

Such was my predicament that morning.

Because, you see, it is one thing to entice a woman’s fidelity away from her man, especially if that man is someone you disliked since childhood. But to hear your mother say that this same man is dead? Well, that’s another matter entirely. Because what if by the most extraordinary coincidence she was right? What if he had committed suicide and his wife’s infidelity with me was the cause? That’s a heavy burden for anyone to bear.

So I’m trying to hold on to skepticism that is as fragile as the bravado of a terrified man in a cemetery at midnight, because I cannot deny that there were times my mother talked about things before they happened, like the day she turned to Pa and said, "Sheila dying," whereupon she put on her shoes and walked over to her best friend’s house only to see Sheila lying dead on her bed when she opened the front door and went in.

According to her, Sheila appeared before her while she was sitting at the table picking rice and said, "I gone, Esther." Clear as day.

Now I know what you’re saying and what I probably would say were I in your place. Shit or get off the pot; believe or don’t believe. But you think it’s easy, eh? You think it’s easy?

I don’t know what expression my face wore that morning, what caused my mother to stare at me, suck her teeth, shake her head, and say under her breath, "You young generation" before ordering me to "Come along. Let we go over there and see what happening."

"Come! Hurry up!" she said. "God forbid you might learn something with your unbelieving self."

And with that she slipped on a pair of my father’s old shoes that she’d turned into slipslots by mashing down the heels, and strode to the door.

As soon as we got outside and I looked down the road toward Gladstone’s bungalow and saw Gladstone stepping from his front door I relaxed.

"Well, look like you were wrong . . . ," I begin to say but am interrupted by a sharp "Shhh!" from Mumah at the same moment that a gray-haired lady whom I could have sworn was Gabby’s grandmother comes out of the house behind him, old Miss Mimi who’d died and left her property for Gabby. Except that number one, Miss Mimi is long dead and buried and two, this old lady is walking upright and not bent over walking with a cane like Miss Mimi used to do.

As warm as the sun was that morning a shiver shook my body as it suddenly occurred to me that I’d just seen both Gladstone and Miss Mimi walk through the front door. Not the doorway, the door. A closed door. And Miss Mimi is descending the front steps holding Gabby’s hand and walking down the gap toward us with Gabby staring straight ahead with his eyes focused on some spot in the distance while Miss Mimi is contemplating my mother eyeball-to-eyeball with a slightly smiling expression as though it’s the most natural thing in the world for a jumbie to be walking in broad daylight and greeting living human beings. And I’m so wrapped in the surrealism of the moment that as they’re getting close I raise my arm and open my mouth but can only manage to say, "Ga . . ." before my mother snatches down my arm and snaps, "Don’t touch him," wrenching me back to reality and making a u-turn still holding my arm and pivoting me with her so that we’re headed back in the direction of our house. I can sense Gabby and Miss Mimi right behind us.

"Don’t look back!" Mumah’s voice is a hiss.

One day a few weeks later as we are recollecting the event I chuckle and say, "What would’ve happened if I’d turned around and looked back, eh? Think I would’ve turned into a pillar of salt? Heh heh heh." My mother just stares at me and says, "Now you bad, eh? Now you got a lot of mouth, eh? Why you didn’t say that then?"

Touch. Because on the morning of the event I couldn’t have uttered a word even if the thought had occurred to me.

My mother’s firm grip on my arm kept me moving.

After a while I felt her release my arm. "Go on," she said. "You can look back now if you want."

I turned and looked over my shoulder.The road was as empty as a virgin’s womb.

I stopped, my belly a yawning void, my mouth as dry as chalk. And the day suddenly had a different feel to it as if everything had stopped moving and every sound was coming to me as through a funnel: a barking dog, a crying infant, the fwap fwap fwap of clothes on a clothesline whipped by the breeze, the hooot hooot of a train whistle far away.

"He dead," my mother said, and her voice came to my ears as from a distance like the hooting of the train whistle.

When we reached our house and my mother turned to go inside I kept walking. To calm the turmoil in my head.

"Where you going?" she asked me.

"To the beach," I said.

Right away she says, "Wait. Let me go with you."

"I’ll be all right, Mumah," I told her. She could be so protective sometimes. I kept walking.

The surface of the sea was as smooth as glistening glass. Breezes rustled the coconut tree limbs overhead and I watched sea bathers submerged shoulder-high and chatting, some swimming in solitary early-morning exercise as I wondered whether Gabby had discovered that his wife had been two-timing him and the person she’d been doing it with was me.

Just then in the freshness of morning came Gladstone strolling up the beach, hands in his pants pockets, head down. And if I was at all hesitant to acknowledge it before I knew for certain then that Gabby was dead as I watched him vanish as if entering an invisible door there in broad daylight, looking over his shoulder at me with a gaze that continues to be the last image before my eyes at night, a gaze that haunts my nightmares, a gaze of accusation.

But that morning, sitting at the foot of a coconut tree, I found myself thinking of the last day Gladstone and I spent at that same beach as childhood friends umpteen years ago.