JACQUELINE BISHOP
THE RIVER’S SONG
A NOVEL
Sparkling, flashing, gleaming, glowing,
Where no eye can see its rays,
Rests the mystic golden table
Dreaming dreams of olden days.
’Neath the Cobre’s silver water
It has lain for ages long;
And an undertone of warning
Mingle’s with the river’s song.
~ The Legend of the Golden Table
On the dresser sits a frame
With a photograph
Two little girls in ponytails
Some twenty one years back
~ Cindy Lauper, “Sally’s Pigeon”
For
Kamara & Demaya
I went to see Annie on my last day on the island. She was sitting on a plain wooden chair in her room, looking out of the wide-open windows at the dark-blue mountains. She turned slowly and looked at me when I walked into the room, a long searching, searing look, before she looked back out the window without saying anything. Her mother, pale and ashen, kept looking from Annie to me, trying, for the umpteenth time, to figure out what had happened between us – just what had gone so terribly wrong. Getting no answer, she withdrew.
Annie looked down at her slender fingers. She turned to look at me again, another searing, searching look, tears rapidly filling her eyes, before she looked back out of the window. It seemed in this one moment that I was saying goodbye to so many people: to a woman named Rachel whom I had loved and who had so loved me; and to the girls, now women, who had all left their mark on me – to Junie, Sophie, Nilda, and that girl Yvette, wherever in the world she might be. I was saying goodbye to my mother, my grandmother, Zekie, the island. But most of all, I was saying goodbye to Annie. Dear sweet Annie.
She tried to say something, but it was too great an effort to get even a few words out. She seemed to be searching for something else to say, before she gave up, and pulled an even tighter veil over her face. She looked down, frail, emaciated, hands trembling in her lap. There was that look again on her face, of deep confusion; something just did not make any sense to her.
I made to go over to her, but found I could not; my feet had grown roots it seemed, down into the ground. She seemed so tiny, so frail. Annie. After that, all I could do was hurriedly leave the room, hurry down the stairs and out of the house, an anguished sob trailing behind me. This is how I remember it, years and years later. This is how I remember it, and why I had to write it down.
CHAPTER I
“I knew you could do it! I believed you would do it!” my mother said, smiling down into my face that she’d just covered with kisses.
The entire tenement yard must have heard her cry of delight as my mother danced around the tiny two rooms we lived in, thumping heavily on the dark brown wooden floor, waking up not only me, but also the insects burrowed deep into the wood. When she was done dancing she pulled me out from under the quilt my grandmother had made for me, when-you-were-a-baby-no-bigger-than-the-palm-of-my-hand, gathered me into her arms and started kissing me all over my face. That morning, the examination results were finally printed in the newspaper and I was one of the girls who received a scholarship to All Saints High School, the most prestigious girl’s school on the island.
Outside it was cool and dark, the sounds of early morning coming into the house through the jalousie windows. Ground lizards shuffled up and down the hibiscus tree outside our door, and the crimson sun was just beginning over the horizon, rising above the dark-blue mountains, which dominated Kingston. As the sun rose, the large white mansions perched on the mountainsides came into view. These were the houses my mother often looked at with desire. One day, some way, some how, we would live in one of the houses in the hills. Then-we-would-become-somebody.
I did not know when my mother left the house to go and buy the newspaper with the examination results. I knew I had passed when I heard her screaming. All night long I twisted and turned in bed, making all sorts of deals with God if he allowed me to pass my common entrance exam. I would stop telling lies and stealing money from my mother’s purse to buy all manner of foolishness. I would go willingly to church every Sunday and there would be no quarrelling with my mother about how I was dragging my foot in the house instead of hurrying off to hear the word of the Lord.
“Come, come and look. Look, right here, under All Saints High School, is your name.”
I rubbed my eyes, blinked, and looked where my mother was pointing her finger excitedly. Underlined twice in red-ink was my name. It was there along with the primary school I attended. A slow smile started across my face. At thirteen years old, and on my first attempt, I had gotten into All Saints. The many months of extra lesson classes, reluctantly leaving my friends on the playing field and heading off to Mrs. Porter’s, had finally borne fruit.
“Come, I have something for you!” My mother took her handbag out of the closet and started rummaging inside. When she didn’t find what she was looking for, she emptied the bag’s contents on the table and started rifling through them. She pushed aside bills, receipts, the green lime she carried as-protection-against-things-evil, a shiny fluorescent metallic-purple make-up kit, before she finally found a small plastic bag.
“This,” she said, “is for you.” She tipped out the contents and there in the soft pink of her palm was a pair of gold earrings: birds in flight – red rubies for eyes, the tips of their tiny beaks a brilliant moss-green. They were the earrings I’d seen a couple weeks before in a jewellery store in downtown Kingston. I had stood for a long time just looking and looking at them. My mother had come up to the window and together we looked at the earrings, before my mother took my hand and slowly led me away. We both knew she could never afford them.
I shrieked and threw myself into my mother’s arms. Laughter bubbled up from a warm soft place inside. Hugging, we danced around the room. I was happy my mother was happy. I was happy to make my mother happy. My mother wasn’t always very happy with me.
“I knew you would do it!” She gave me a long satisfied look. “I just knew you would! Girl, I’m too proud of you! Now we’ll have to send a letter to your grandmother to let her know the good news, though I suspect by the time the letter gets to her, she’ll have heard it already – your Grandy has a way of finding out these things!”
This used to surprise me, how my grandmother would turn up just when my mother was at her wits end and needed her the most. When I was feverish and sick and my mother was distraught and crying, not knowing what to do, I would look up to see Grandy’s cocoa-brown face bent low over mine. When I was younger, Grandy would visit at least once a month, but she didn’t come as often any more; her arthritic feet gave her more and more problems Still, every now and again she made her way to the city to see us and I still spent all my summer holidays with her in the country.
When Grandy found out I’d passed my exam, she’d be as pleased as my mother, maybe even more so; she was forever telling me that if I wanted to become somebody-in-this-here-Jamaica-place I had to go to high school; if I did not go to high school, dog already eat my supper.
“Your grandmother will tell all of her church sisters! Everyone within a one-mile radius of her front yard will hear about you – her bright-bright granddaughter