Winston's Two Dollars, Missing the Bus and Getting Some Rhatid Licks!

My brother Winston and I were close for a lot of different reasons. He was short, I was short, he had a bad temper and I am known to lose mine at the drop of a hat.

He always insisted on giving me unsolicited, long winded advise on how to live my life that seemed to go on forever especially since he had a slight stammer, a speech defect which delays the utterance of words (slows speech).

We had a number of heated quarrels while I was growing up and even when I was fully grown he was always trying to meddle in my life.

But two defining incidents, well three, no, make that four, have helped to create a lasting bond between us which thrived despite how perpetually vexed I was that him used to teck it upon himself to give me some rhatid licks whenever he felt I was being too unruly.

My mother had plenty of us children to look after so sometimes she neither had the time nor energy to beat us, so if it wasn't for meddlesome Winston, who love lick, I would have gotten away with a lot!

She never worked a day in her life outside of the home, but toiled in her grung to plant and reap food to feed us, in her attempts to make up for the huge gap in support from my father whose rum drinking consumed most of his meagre earnings.

Her subsistence farming would be supplemented by the money sent from the United States and Canada, by my Uncle Gilbert; the father of my two cousins, Dionne and Grayson who my mother was keeping until Uncle Gilbert could send for them. Later, my Aunt Effie would send money to take care of her last son Dwayne who also stayed with us for a short while and then, my neice and nephew's father Cyril.

She was a resourceful woman who made sure that one one coco full basket. We all managed to be fed, even though we really only got two square meals a day; breakfast and dinner. Lunch was our own responsibility and you better believed we learnt from our mother and made sure that one one coco or crayfish or mango or star apple or guava, fulled bellies!!

Somebody Can Just Dead So? - If Only Fish Could Talk!

There is a Jamaican saying, or maybe it's Caribbean, "If fish come from riva battam and tell you say dung deh deep, believe him!"


Well, when I stood in the autopsy room at Cornwall Regional Hospital to identify my father before the nice lady doctor could cut him open to try to find out what had killed him, I tried my best not to look at the place where his mouth used to be, where all that I could see were my father's teeth.

What an awful way to die! A man, who no one had ever bothered to take a photo of while he was alive, so horribly disfigured in death that it would not make any sense to try to take a photo of him even after they fixed him up for burial.

I could not wrap my mind around the fact that my father's missing upper lip was in the bellies of the likkle crayfish dem that me used to help turn over rockstone to catch!

Catching Crayfish in the River
While I turned the stones, my bigger cousins would hold the baskets below and the crayfish, disturbed from their hiding places, would swim frantically down stream to be trapped by the baskets.

It was a brilliant plan! Never mind that by the time we were finished we would be wet from head to toe and would either catch a fine beating or a cold if our clothes weren't dry fast enough, we were catching fish so our lunches were secure.

I can still remember the triumphant faces of my cousins as they hoisted the baskets out the water quick, quick and inspected their catch before stuffing them into their pants pockets, where devoid of oxygen, they would stifle to death.

I also remember as if it was yesterday, the tangy taste of the crayfish soup on my tongue which would sometimes be painfully scorched when I hurriedly drank the soup before it cooled properly, anxious to be off to our next adventure and not wanting to be left behind by my very nimble cousins.

By the way, almost everybody in Belfont were cousins, known and unknown. It was a small district and it wasn't hard when we put our heads to it to trace the family connections.

So I had a large pool of cousins and friends to run around with. I was the third youngest of my mother's 13 children, (one died during child birth so most times I just say she had 12). By the time I came along, at least three of my older brothers had moved to Kingston and my one sister Precious and my older brothers considered me an annoyance and would make sure I didn't see when they were leaving the yard so I wouldn't follow them.

They felt I talked too much and anything they did, when I got home, I felt the need to share. That would earn them plenty licks from my mother, as if she asked, I told. I, in turn, would get plenty licks from them when she wasn't looking, so me hanging out with my cousins instead worked out fine for all parties involved; well all except my mother, she had to figure out other ways to find out what my older siblings were up to.

So back to the crayfish soup.

A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT

I grew up in a little district in St. James, Jamaica called Belfont. 

A place where to this day, people still catch water to drink and wash clothes in the same river, sometimes at the same time. 

A river that we bathed in bare chested. A river that holds many secrets. 

There were many mornings when, with buckets in hand, rags rolled up in clenched fists and a soap to share among us, we would trudge through the pass to bathe before school. But many mornings, especially when the time was really cold, all we did was glance at the river, shivered and teetering carefully on its edge; expertly performed a provisional cleansing routine we called 'tidying ourselves'.

After performing the 'necessaries', still balancing gingerly on a broad enough rock stone, we would dip our buckets in a 'clean' part of the river above where we had just 'bathe' as our mother had repeatedly instructed us to do and head back up the hill via the same pass that snaked pass Ms. Clemmy's and Cow Son's house. 

We made sure to drag our feet against the tall grass that hugged the dirt pass, confident the dewy moisture from the grass would help erase any overlooked telltale signs of our deceit.

The river used to chatter and clamber merrily over stones on its way to be emptied into the Great River and when I was little it seemed like a pretty big river at the time. 

But later, as I became older and especially when I hadn't been home in a while and I went back to Belfont to visit,  it seemed to have shrunk. 

A Borrowed Dream

When I was about 15 years old I overheard one of my cousins saying she wanted to become a journalist. I borrowed her idea and never gave it back.

She is still studying to become a doctor. I write for a living.

Mind you, I had imagined myself as a writer from I was knee high, and would write dubious poems in a burgundy courderoy book someone had given me to use as a diary and which I kept among my treasures in an old dulcimena grip under the house. I had my doubts about the poems and would keep the book buried under the tons of this and that that I used to play dolly house with.

I only truly believed I could become a writer when my mother, God rest her soul, found the book one day, read the poems and acted so proud, I had no other choice but to take the whole thing seriously.

I can still recall her beaming face the day I put three dirty Jamaican one dollar bills in an envelope with a form I had torn from an old magazine and marched all the way to the post office in Catadupa to post the letter ordering a book on how to become a writer.

The book never came.