The Starapple Canadian

Cyril Dabydeen

Go and visit Auntie, my mother says, and it is more than just my coming home to experience trade winds blustering against mangrove, courida, with the sea being all on our coastal belt. She mutters on in her almost mute manner; and will Auntie on the Corentyne sixty miles away from our district embrace me with almost half-blind eyes? "How's Canada?" she will ask with a quiver. And see, my mother and Auntie are one of a kind, though Auntie is often morose or melancholy; but she will really want to tell me about Danny and Rob, her sons, as if time has stood still.

Oh, Rob is now preaching the gospel somewhere in America, Auntie will say, still seeing him gesticulating from the pulpit and haranguing about John 3:16: For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life! Auntie mimics in a way, waving her hand, a diehard Hindu as she is, bemoaning Rob’s evangelism. Rob no doubt wants his own congregation here in the tropics, his own faithful ones, homegrown believers all.

Changes in our family, in the country, I think about, as the trade winds keep hurling. Now who or what is really Pentecostal? And there are others who will call themselves Israelites, if only Africans who think they are the Lost Tribe of Israel on this faraway South American coast; and Muslims, too, becoming converts among them. Maybe. Why did Rob leave the Corentyne district in the first place? I wonder.

Then Auntie doesn’t want to talk about Rob anymore; as my mother keeps whirring, saying she’s glad I am finally home. But Auntie keeps fretting, pulling her headkerchief, uncomfortable as she seems, for no reason at all. And my mother will ask, Do they really want to know? She means people outside, in Canada, where I’ve been living for a long time, if not in America. Know what?

Auntie looks at me, squinting, though her eyes are shutters.

What will I tell her and my mother next, if only about the letters between us, and their words, with a gust of wind yet blowing across the Atlantic? I inhale hard. Tell them...what? And Auntie will now talk about her one son remaining at home, Danny, the lost one; the same Danny who’s known for his sometimes odd ways, always saturnine, come to think of it. Others come around us, children mostly, all to see me, they say.

My mother balks. Auntie also balks.

One girl seven or eight—with knotty hair, more curious than the others, comes closer. You really come home? She says with a snort. Instinctively I inhale more of the coastal ground, the sea mixed with sargasso, Bahama grass. Sheep, goats, horses, pigs run helter-skelter, as I am thinking about Rob, not Danny, see.

Auntie squints once more. My mother sucks in her breath. And what’s between them, my mother and Auntie, for they hardly speak to each other, sometimes for months going by? But it’s Rob who comes again in Auntie’s mind, not Danny: Rob, who as a teenager, would take me out with him in a canoe, far into the sea: it was all he wanted to do, it seemed. Then somewhere in the middle, he would lift one leg high against the gunwale and burst out laughing. Sprays whipped into our faces as he imitated a dog peeing, and he kept on laughing. A kingfisher somersaulted above us, so sudden in my view; and I feared drowning! Mullets, crabs, in Rob’s eyes, as he kept up his antics, with the canoe nearly capsizing. My heart in my mouth, as I cried, Stop it, Rob. Please, you must!

Dourly Auntie says one never knows much about Rob...but only about Danny. Really? The sea’s miasma, rank air, and Rob yet being in that canoe, gleeful. I kept holding on tightly. Stop it, please, I cried. No-no! His eyes glinting in the sun; and Rob was bent on taking me with him to new places, he declared; even take me also to Lake Superior, the world’s largest lake: Would he really?

Please, Rob...stop it! I yelled, as sprays kicked up at us from the sea and ocean.

Auntie looks closely at me because of what I am thinking; and how time has flown. The one eight-year-old girl with knotty hair calls me a Starapple... What? She pouts; and the starapple fruit is dark and fleshy, everyone’s favourite, isn’t it? The sun brightening, the sea coruscating in my line of vision, and the waves and surf rise higher.

Others yet keep coming around, more nieces and nephews, just to see me because I’ve come home, they say. The one eight-year-old girl eyeing me suspiciously. But once more it is the image of Rob before his congregation brandishing a Bible, I see; and perhaps he never left at all, as I think too of climates changing; and winter storms, hurricanes and cyclones being everywhere, even near the world’s largest lake. The nieces and nephews titter as they watch me.

Auntie twists her body, like a rope. A scrawny peelnecked chicken squawks nearby, and the one young girl near me kicks at it as the bird looks up her dirty cotton dress at her knees. "Hi, you wicked!" She means the chicken, and again swats at it. A flutter of wings in the air, as a mongrel barks and runs after the bird. The girl lifts a petal of a hand to brush away another chicken coming at her; the mongrel jumps up and down, more high-spirited. Oh, a caterwauling is now everywhere!

Rob, are you still there before your special congregation brandishing a Bible and crying out about John 3:16?

Everything being imaginary but real. Auntie again looks at me and still squints. My mother turns sideways, as if not sure about anything. Ah, Danny, where are you? Auntie turns to my mother; and what will they say to each other in the silence, eyelids whirring? And I’ve indeed come home, where perhaps I don’t want to be, as I’m yet travelling to new places, going farther away.

Really…where?

More Bahama grass and sargasso I take in and inhale the aroma of seaweed mixed with sheep pellet. I also recall one time when Rob darted among the sheep, chasing after them over a rickety fence at the edge of the sea where the houses are; he was just about ten or eleven then; and the pigs had kept squealing because they sensed the high-tide coming in the boisterous Corentyne air, everything windswept in an instant.

More rancorous smells I sniff at, everything intermingling. And Rob again is quoting John 3:16, converting the entire town and village, ready to convert us all! With collar-and-tie on he perspires in the heat, his voice still strident; and how he gesticulates, hands chopping the air.For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, for whosoever believes in him...it is Everlasting life!

Auntie’s voice is an urgent plea: "Maybe he's still shy,” she says. She means Danny. He’s been worried about that horse, you know. He thinks about it all the time, still sees it running up along the road when that car came full speed at it. The driver, oh Gawd... and the horse right there in the middle! Her lips awry, forehead wrinkled, more mahogany-brown in the sun.

Yellowish clayey ground I stare at, willfully, but I keep seeing Rob lifting one leg in the air against the canoe’s gunwale in his awkward stance. It’s his mixed congregation also in my mind, if only creole people who are different from us on the seaside Corentyne; and everyone is now longing for salvation, I know. Who’s really asking? Rob being in the line of patriarchs, from Moses on down, I contemplate; and maybe he’s now with a long straggly beard, imposing-looking. Really? Stone tablets tumbling down from the mountain, and being in Rob’s hands, the same commandments being holy inscription or message for us all to live by.

My mother looks at me, wondering who or what I have become.

Oh? All the while Auntie struggles with her emotions, her spirit and memory; and, then, it’s about that horse again in the middle of the road, she says, and the car coming full speed and veering towards it.

The one knotty-haired girl scurries away another peelnecked chicken looking up her dress. She does, doesn’t she?

Auntie adds, It is the driver’s expression from the window that I saw, when the same horse came railing up like that. Oh, Gawd, it suddenly lurched forward as the car came full speed! More words imprinted. The horse’s eyes, large, swirling, and its shoulders rising up, then coming down massively from the clouds almost. Auntie clasps her hands before her face, remembering more. The hooves coming down against the car’s windshield, and the car hurtled forward.

Oh God! Blood spurted. The horse was killed in an instant. That car, a Buick, it tried pulling sideways to avoid hitting the horse, see. Auntie’s words a tangled knot. The sea throbbing, with its own heartbeat no less. All Danny said was that it was bound to happen, as if he’d seen it all before; and everyone kept hollerin’; the pigs squealed loudest too. Auntie's face is no longer sallow, but flushed-looking. “Did you tell them 'bout it in Canada?" She looks at me with a strange glare.

Tell them what?

Whirring sounds, eyes looking back at me. Lake Superior in my vision, also. My mother’s now anxious to hear what I will actually say, doesn’t she? What really? “Maybe they don’t want to know ‘bout us, Auntie hums.

Don’t they?

***

"It is cold there," I mutter, as if talking about the Arctic, the cold being everywhere in the winter sun. A great large prairie in the horizon, and suddenly it’s as if I have not left at all, as the wind keeps fanning my cheeks; and the Atlantic extends beyond Newfoundland and the Grand Banks, I want to say. Cod leaping like regular flying fish, and the rain starts coming down next. The one knotty-haired young girl laughs, as she looks at the expression on my face, florid-looking. Another chicken looks up her dress, and she quickly scoffs at it as before. Ah, that horse is dead, I think; and the sky’s blood-red, the look in Danny’s eyes I try to conceive. "Hallelujah!" Rob hails from afar, with a sense or vision of the apocalypse. Really? Ah, Danny is still saturnine, I know.

One particular letter I read over and over again in Canada about that horse being killed; and then, a hand-clapping congregation's response, "Amen!" The world’s salvation in the USA, Canada, as the congregation keeps coming closer to us on this far coast. Maybe that horse was indeed a favourite chestnut animal that belonged to Auntie and the close family; I yet see it prancing up, hind legs kicking out high in the air.

Hey, Starapple Canadian, what yuh thinking now? I hear.

A rooster is riotous among the chickens; and the mongrel is at the ready, snarling. What d’ you think, eh? Auntie brings me back to her, with the sea receding, the surf disappearing it seems like. Rob’s canoe invisibly moving, miraculous on the horizon. Where’s Danny now? Auntie’s face is etched against the rim of the sun. My mother keeps being silent standing next to me, like a guardian.

"Soon you will be going back to live in the winter cold, eh?" Auntie grates. What is she really thinking, if not about Danny, the solitary one, who never sees things eye to eye with Rob, maybe not unlike Biblical Cain and Abel. A hot gospeller’s voice again I hear that instant. Ah, Auntie growls about her two sons who haven’t seen each other in years. Oh?

I imagine one in the city, and the other, Danny, being in his own self-created Garden of Eden here in the Corentyne district. Hallelujahs, in my ears, a refrain…somewhere. And Auntie wants them to stop killing each other, she says. My mother grimaces. The ducks, fowls, pigs, sheep, goats run around. And dissension in the family really started around the time of the horse’s death, no? Who is really to blame? All that time I’d been abroad, unconsciously becoming the Starapple Canadian, I figure. The knotty-haired girl eyes me suspiciously once more.

Auntie murmurs to herself, but still asking about all I’d experienced while living close to Lake Superior. Doesn’t she? The one letter I’d read about the horse’s death still with me, that I replay in my mind. Oh, how the tropical sun keeps burning. Tell us more, someone else hurls.

What about?

Canada...what is it really like being there in de cold?

Tell us, rasps another. What? Auntie’s eyes are shadows. My mother’s a myriad rainbow.

Everyone’s now asking in a chorus about people in Canada, America, if only just wanting to hear me talk about a truly exotic place. Jets criss-crossing in the far sky. Movie-star types mostly, being at it. Christ! Rob, what d’you think? The knotty-haired girl looks at me with a surly glare. Starapple..?

Rob and Danny in their own private or personal worlds look back with jaundiced eyes. As I think only about northern lakes and rivers, cold and ice; and maybe I no longer see myself as an outsider. What for? My mother instinctively moves closer to me. Come on, hisses another. Tell us! Nieces and nephews with determined looks on their faces. Do they all imagine one day going to Canada? Clouds undulate, in a far sky. Where’s the ocean now with the waves subsiding?

Everyone thinks I am only eager to find out about Danny. Rob is yet grimacing, see; and is it all about Christ’s Second Coming? Who is the strange horseman...that horse indeed with a name sounding like Death. What?

Auntie wags a finger at me. My mother does, too. A magenta cockerel raises its head. Pigs squeal louder. Waves lap against the makeshift sheep-pen a few yards from us, breakers being all. A ship is now coming somewhere on the horizon, Columbus’s, not Magellan’s? Seagulls clamour. A kingfisher makes a strange raucous noise as it cartwheels above the canoe, I evoke again.

Auntie breathes harder. It’s about Rob, isn’t it?

A choir, a dirge of death because of the horse in a time of a real Apocalypse, see. Rob! Rob! voices call out, from a holy congregation of sorts. All the while I inhale mud-crab and mollusc in the air; and maybe Auntie truly remembers me now because of her own strange rhythm, her understanding…with her slow breathing. It is Rob he really comes to see, someone else hisses. Yes, but what about Danny?

My mother is thinking what too?

Then I see Danny coming out of the ground, haggard-looking, a bent figure. Has Danny been seeing ships coming to the shore, if ghost-ships only from the past, which he and Rob argued about? Did one ship really leave them leave the family—marooned here? Bitch! I hear the one girl cry out, berating another chicken looking up her skirt.

The horse? I say.

“It is Rob’s…only,” comes an answer.

And Danny has been planting a special orchard, always with the sea in his ears, I know. Danny grunts as he comes closer. Auntie simply murmurs, like an echo: I can never understand him. She means Danny, of course. Since Rob gone to become a preacher, Danny’s never been the same again; even though they always quarreled a lot, the two of them!

I wave to Danny. The relatives also wave, mimicking me.

Danny smiles.

Auntie appears suddenly relieved. \

My mother smiles, too. But it is Rob who’s still with me, who might have once wanted to go to Cuba...or Aruba, if to experience being in a real ship like the Pinta, Nina, or Santa Maria. Danny mumbles, It is that horse they been telling you about, no? Still saturnine-looking he is.

I nod.

Rob...he knows, he adds, and squints.

Everyone wants to hear what I will say next, what I will ask as the trade winds become a veritable squall. Now I don’t want to think about Rob with his Bible in hand, as I will see the horse again in the middle of the road, maybe...and the car lurching forward. Auntie hums, It is good Danny is still here with us. But not Rob? Now what else can I tell you? She looks at me, then turns to Danny again. But it is as if she is seeing Rob only, and expects him to appear before us like a miracle.

***

Danny starts walking back to his garden, to feel the soil between his fingers, he says. Rob, well, he is still in the city sniffing at the church pews’ heavy mahogany smell; and incense burns as everyone keeps singing hallelujahs—all to become truly saved! Salvation is at hand: a new kingdom, a new earth! And maybe climates the world over will no longer change! Oh, in Canada I know I will think about this and about them all as never before, even as I long for my own Garden of Eden, sort of.

Another letter in my hand, and again I will see the horse’s wide-opened eyes, and its forelegs high above the car’s windshield kicking out ... then coming down mightily. Rob ’s been in that same car, he is done dead, I hear next. Oh, Gawd! Auntie wails.

It is my return visit I will think about, telling my mother this, only. And maybe Rob will indeed come to meet me at the airport. Danny too, bedraggled-looking and all. Ships also will be coming to our shore from everywhere; and my mother’s letter I will keep reading, as I hope to see the north star, wanting it to guide me along as I inevitably come closer to the world’s largest lake; same as I want to tell her, and tell them all.