Beg-Water

by Brenda Flanagan

"Ma,"I screamed from the gallery. "The postman has a letter for you!"

My mother, bending over to dry her soapy hands on the hem of her skirt, came slowly to the front of our house. Carefully, as if she was accepting a rose from a stranger, she took the white envelope with its red and blue stripes from the postman.

"It's from overseas," the postman announced unnecessarily. "But it doesn't say who send it." Sitting halfway upon his bicycle seat, the cuffs of his khaki pants clipped about his ankles, one foot on the ground, the other on the pedal, he waited for my mother to reveal the letter writer's identity, as I, excitement dribbling down to my toes, hopped around her.

"Who write, Ma? Velma? It's from Velma?" On my way to the latrine I had heard the postman's bell, and had dashed to the front yard. But he had refused to give me the letter.

"Is for your mother," he said. "I have to put it in her hand. You see there? You could read that?" And with him holding the letter a tantalizing distance away from my face the way I held bread away from the dog, I had read, "To Mrs. Carmen Cumberbatch only." The only was underlined three times.

"Call your mother," he had commanded me.

I could feel the urine that I had not had a chance to get rid off. I could feel the avoirdupois weight of it, hot, pressing down, but I tightened my thighs to squeeze it back up into my belly. My discomfort grew as my mother stood transfixed in her aura of wonder. She was holding unto the gate with one hand, like a brace, while between her right thumb and forefinger she held the envelope, half drooping, as if she wasn't sure if she should keep it or allow the breeze to blow it away.

"Ma," I pulled on her arm. "Open it. Let me open it for you," but she ignored me. Instead, she turned the letter over, silently read her name and our address, Pole Number 69, Belmont Valley Road, Trinidad, West Indies, scrawled in blue ink, then turned it over again to find nothing on the other side but three empty straight black lines on which the sender's name should have been inscribed. As if to reassure herself that the letter was hers, she turned it over again to stare at her name.

"It leave New York since last month," the postman told her. "But with the go-slow, nuh, it just reach the post office. I say to mehself, since it's Friday, let me bring it up for you."

I wished he would ride away. The postmen were always on a go-slow, their only weapon against the government's unwillingness to raise their pay. I wanted to say to him, "Leave my mother and me in peace, nuh," but he was just as anxious to confirm who had written as I was. Raising myself up on my toes, I tried to get another look at the writing. It looked like Velma's. It had that scrawly slant like the writing in her copybooks.

The postman said expectantly, "Well, I hope is good news?" My mother did not even glance at him. He looked up the road to where Miss Kelton waited at her gate, her arms akimbo, signifying her impatience. With a slight wave of annoyance, he stupsed and said, "Well I gone, oui. Is the government work I have to do." Then cutting his eyes from my mother to me, he warned, "Beg-water never boil cow-skin, chile." He rose up on his pedals to power himself up the road.

I was getting vexed. "Ma," I pleaded. "You just going to stand there till cock get teeth?"

But she wasn't listening. If she had been she would never have allowed me to get away with that rudeness. There we were, standing in the same space, in the same time, yet she had gone away. Drifting like my kite, the one that had flown away from me the day before, leaving me with empty hands, wondering if it would land or get tangled up in a tree.

I wanted to grab the envelope from my mother. I wanted, desperately, to slit the flap open with my big thumb, to read what my sister had written.

My mother ran her fingertips over the writing, over the four stamps with a black circle of notes and numbers impressed upon them; then along the red and blue stripes that resembled a flag, and as she did so, she smiled as if she was enjoying a secret.

I wanted to go to the latrine so bad I thought I was going to burst.

"Open it, nuh Ma, come on," but she's hefting it in her palm as if she's trying to measure the weight of the words inside.

"Is from Velma, Ma? Eh? Eh? Ma..a.a!"

It's then she hears me, only then, because I bawl out like a baby goat, "Ma..a..aa!" and that, that make her look down at me and say, "What you still doing here, chile? "

"Go next door and play," she shoos me away as if I'm some stray fowl, and I know she must be gone mad because she never tells me to go and play, and especially not next door.

"But I want to see the letter, Ma. Can I touch it? It's from Velma. I know. I could feel it."

"The onliest thing you going to feel this morning, young lady, is my hand on your behind. Do what I say. Now!" I back away, but I see her unlocking the hook-and-eye in her bodice.I see her pushing the letter into her brassiere, then locking back the hook, before returning to the washtub.

Just as if nothing has happened. Just as if a lightening bolt didn't just fall from the sky, my mother bends over the tub, picks up my father's pants, and begins to rub it against the jucking board, all the time staring down at the dirty water.

I stay in the front yard to kick the roots of the guava tree, to bussup the sole of the last pair of school shoes I own. I pick up a stone, I pelt down a green guava, I bite it, spit the hard pieces at the chickens; I chase a dog in heat from our gate; I break a stick from the mango vert tree and I start digging a hole in the ground like dogs do when they have something they want to hide. I just start digging this hole, digging this hole, and flinging the dirt away with my bare hands and digging out more and something start squeezing my insides and I start crying because I know that letter is from Velma and I'm getting frightened, just like I feel my mother is frightened, and I don't even realize I'm peeing until the water start coursing down my thighs into my white washecongs.

II

Night before last my mother wake up screaming. my room is right next door to hers so I hear everything. I hear when my father roll over and ask her what she bawling out so for; I hear her say something in a dream frighten her; I hear my father tell her that he'll have to start sleeping in the living room because every night lately she's been waking him up with her bad dreams and it takes him a long time to fall back asleep. I hear my mother go to the kitchen and I hear when she come back and sit on the edge of the bed where the springs squeak and I know she was holding a wet cloth against her forehead because that is what she does in times of trouble: she bans her head with a wet cloth. I hear my father grinding his teeth. I hear my mother sigh as she lay back down and try to pull, gently, a part of the cover my father wrapped up himself in. I know my mother didn't go back to sleep because I stayed awake until the cocks start to crow and she went into the kitchen to kneed the flour for my father's breakfast bake, and to heat a pot of water to take the chill off the cold water in the bucket near the back steps where my father bathes.

III

My father did not want Velma to go away. He and my mother argued about it night and day. He said America was a rottendown place where Black people were worse off than the people who lived in Shantytown near the Labasse. My mother said if that was so, then how come Christabella, Mr. Joseph's daughter, had made so much money in America that she could build her father a big house and send for him to come on holiday. My father said the Josephs would sell their souls to the devil for a shilling, and who knows what Christabella was doing in America. She was always too hot for her own good anyway. And besides, how come my mother prefer to listen to other people instead of to her own husband? He should know. Hadn't he been to America in '66 to pick fruits in Dundee, Florida? Given up his good-good job with Road Works to run behind the Yankee dollar? He wished Florida would break off and fall under the sea. If you see where we sleep ten men in a two-by-four. Every morning up early-early to go to the fields and pick oranges. Oranges? The juice make me throwup. If I ever see a Yankee orange again in my life I will turn beast. All day in the hot sun filling up baskets; filling up trucks. Night time? Night time we glad to crawl in a corner to get a few hours sleep before the bossman come breaking down the door for us to go in the field again. Moon and sun kicking the hell out of one another, and we in the groves, picking fruit. Three months we stay up there and is only when it was time to come back home they let we go into the city, but the bossman keep back we passports, fraid some of we would run and hide, so we could stay in America. Stay in America? Who wants to stay in that place? But it's not that way in New York, my mother says quietly. I hear New York is a good place. New York? New York? My father's voice begins the furious bubble of boiling water. Who want to go New York? Can't even see the damn sea. Only a bunch of tallarse buildings blocking the breeze. Imagine. Imagine having to learn to spell all over again because America think it so great, it gone and change c to s, and drop out the u from some words entirely. Them people boldface too bad.

By now, my father's voice is thunder rolling along the rim of the hymn my mother is singing, just under her breath: Oh God, my strength in ages past/my hope for years to come.

What I want to send my daughter up there for? No! Let Velma stay here. Let her go and learn to sew by Miss Ivy. Seamstress is a good trade. Let her learn to sew.

Later, I hear my mother telling Velma not to mind what my father is saying. He's just worried for her. She will talk to him again. But once she realized he wasn't going to change his mind, she stopped arguing. She took in more ironing; she cooked food and sold it to the men paving the Dry River; she baked and sold wedding cakes, pasting on thick white frosting with a flat knife on which she rubbed lime in the long nights she stayed up to squeeze pink rosettes around the sides of the bride's cake, and red around the groom's. She scrimped and saved, and threw two susu hands that my father did not know about. She cheated herself, buying only three small slices of carette or red fish from the van, one piece for my father, one for Velma, one for me. None for herself. She would eat a little curry sauce on her rice. At night she washed our socks and our school uniforms and hung them behind the fridge to dry because we owned only one set. She stayed in the latrine too long sometimes, counting what she had saved, then rewrapping the dollars, the shillings, the cents; wrapping them back up in newspaper before pushing it down into an old biscuit tin that fitted in a hole underneath her washtub.

I had to bide my time, to wait and watch until I could thief a chance, but I always knew how much was in the tin, and I knew the day it was empty, that Velma would soon be gone.

If my father guessed what she was doing, he said nothing, but his silences were loud. Out of the blue he would make us turn over our mattresses and shake out our pillowcases; he slammed cupboard doors after he had searched for God knows what under each pot, pan, and bottle; he emptied my mother's purse and searched her bureau drawers when she wasn't home; he stopped giving her money for food. Instead, he set up an account in the shop against which my mother could trust food, nothing else. Then he stopped coming home every night. He came on Fridays though, to bring his dirty clothes, and pick up the clean ones. And on those nights I watched him and my mother circle each other like gamecocks in a ring, pecking, parrying, just waiting for an opening to dive in for the kill.

IV

Many days I wished I had a brother. A brother who just wanted to work on the road gang with my father; who wouldn't want to be a painter; who wouldn't want to go to art school in America; who would have believed Daddy when he said that being an artist was rich people's business. Instead, I had Velma, a seventeen-year old sister who was always drawing in her notebooks, coloring with coals or pencil; staining her fingers with rhoko, shoe polish, or dye she made from plants because she didn't have watercolors or brushes to paint dark faces, blue hills, white skies, or silver rain falling on galvanize.

When my mother took us to the zoo, she let Velma sit off by herself on a bench to sketch the giraffes while we went around to see all the other animals in their cages. Velma liked the animals but she hated the zoo. She said one day she was going to Africa, to see real animals running free.

One Saturday, the dam in my father broke loose. He burned Velma's sketch books after he came home unexpectedly to find her sitting in front the fowl run, drawing chickens, the yard he had told her to sweep, still dirty. He told my mother he didn't know how else to make the girl understand that she had to do something constructive with her life. When you're poor in this world, he said, you have life hard as it is; when you're poor and deaf too, why try to make it harder by getting involved with things that only belong to rich people?

My mother bit in her lips but I could see her jaws trembling. Velma signaled furiously and stamped on the ground before running inside. Later, I heard my mother telling my father that maybe, just maybe, God gave Velma the talent to see to draw and paint to make up for not giving her any hearing.

V

I had to wait all day to know what was in the letter. That evening, my mother and I sat , as usual, on the back steps watching corns roast over the coalpot. On other nights I would have been catchiung candleflies in a jam bottle, but tonight, I sat between my mothers knees, waiting for her to open Velma's letter.

"She's doing alright," my mother assured me. "She's doing fine. God didn't send her up there to fail."

Velma told us about trains running under the earth, and how frightened she was until they stopped and she could climb out in the fresh air. She asked us to imagine Carnival was every day because that was how New York looked with thousands of people on the streets morning, noon, and night. She said she had gotten a job with a singer named Nina Simone, and that Nina had taken her to a doctor to see about her hearing. She said the doctor had given her something to wear in her ears, and now she could hear. Of all the sounds she was hearing, she liked running water the best.

She was going to get a chance to travel to California when Nina went on the Johnny Carson show. She wished we had a television to see Nina perform, but since we didn't, she drew Nina in front of a microphone in a long, skin tight dress, and a box around her to represent a television. My mother blew her nose and water fell from her face but from the tinkling sound she made, I knew she was happy.

Just before she sent me to brush the corn from my teeth, she rumpled my hair, pulling me close to her. "All I ever wanted was for you all to know your dream don't have to stay in the bush. I feel sorry for your father because he could never understand that.'