Finding edward, p.3
Finding Edward, page 3
“Let us sit up straight at our desks.”
“Yes, Grandpa Nelson,” and he’d square his books and line up his pens. Stiffen his back.
“Are you ready to apply yourself to some good work today, Cyril?”
“Yes, Grandpa.”
“What have you studied in preparation?”
“I have my running writing in these two pages.” Proud as punch because the writing looked good and the page was still crisp and clean, not smudged at all. But especially because the words he’d written were good, strong words. Nelson had him copy lines from a poetry anthology. These were the words, he told Cyril, that his university students learned.
* * *
Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?
* * *
Cyril was eight when he first copied the words. When he was nine, they visited the poem again. And every year after that until Cyril knew that poem, and others, as well as he knew his way home from Grandpa Nelson’s. Each year, he understood the poems better and cherished them more. Since his first encounter with “The Moon,” he’d seen her always as the best duppy ever. A lonely ghost up in the sky.
They’d begun with the poets and their poetry, people and their callings. Moved on to books, how words looked on paper and the shape of type. Capital letters. White space on a page. Margins and titles. What an anthology represented, and why they chose to use the Oxford Book of English Verse. The children teased him: “Sissy Cyril. Teacher’s pet. Books in his bag. Brain too big for his head.”
For them, Cyril’s lighter skin, the everlasting evidence of his absent father, underscored his difference.
“Never mind them,” said Nelson. “They are not on your path. What you learn makes you strong and happy. Tell them that their teasing doesn’t hurt you.”
And it didn’t hurt, didn’t matter. Cyril loved the time he spent with Grandpa Nelson and the lessons he learned in the big living room with fresh flowers in a bowl, books and magazines on all the tables. Cyril sat in his primary school classroom and listened to the teacher recite her lessons and, despite his boredom, applied Nelson’s advice: “Where does your mind take you when she talks? Write it down. If she inspires a thought, make a note. There is always something to learn, Cyril.”
When the children teased, Cyril learned to say, “I do what I choose, and I choose to learn.” The children mimicked him, their tongues making the shapes of plums in their mouths. Playing with the words and the unfamiliar English accent that shaped the expressions he learned from Nelson — “I Dooo Wot I Choooz” — and dancing around him on the red dirt road to his house on top of the hill. They’d stopped teasing by the time he reached ten because Cyril could always be counted on to solve things. He knew how to help work backward out of a problem and pass the test. Could charm a parent. Knew the names of all the birds. He’d been different for so long that they came around to accepting him; his rarely ruffled calm, his apparent independence. The funny way he talked. He spoke English as easily as patois and was unembarrassed. By the time he was eleven, they called him “Teacher Cyril” and relied on his help with their homework.
Nelson told his friends that he encouraged and tutored a bright and determined boy who was older than his years. Not a brilliant boy, but one whose curiosity, whose spirit of inquiry, would lead him to a good life. Who loved words even though his mother read only the Bible and had never been further than Kingston, just sixty miles away on the other side of the island. A simple, good woman who was in awe of her son. Nelson told his friends that he’d look after Cyril and make sure that he got in to university and out of poverty. When Cyril was twelve, Nelson got him a place at York Castle, the best high school in their parish, high on a hill above Brown’s Town. Cyril was rarely bored after that.
Every few weeks, Nelson threw his famous Sunday Afternoon Party. While he mixed up the rum punch, ladies from the Little Queen restaurant cooked curry goat and jerk chicken along with rice ’n’ peas, festival breads, callaloo, and plantains. Nelson pulled the furniture from the centre of the living room and pushed the tables to the walls. Cyril’s job was to pile and tidy the papers, stack the books so they could be found the next day, pick hibiscus from the garden, and place a single blossom on each of the many small glass saucers that were scattered about the room.
Lunch put everyone in a fine mood. “Fit for conversation,” said Nelson. They settled in the living room, where the doors were open to the garden. Cyril pulled a footstool up to the side of the couch and listened as the adults talked politics, crime, and more politics. Then theatre, and a Kingston actor who had embarked on a successful Broadway career. They talked about education because two or three of them were professors at the university.
When Nelson flirted with the women, he was a younger version of himself. His friends said he had a sexy smile, and he definitely used it a lot at his parties. He wore an expensive cologne and would let Cyril have just a drop or two for himself. Cyril served the drinks, another of his jobs. Not on a tray; he wasn’t old enough. But he could carry a glass in each hand and learned how to make a little bow as he handed it over, just a quick dip of his shoulders, as Grandpa did. “This young man will be prime minister one day,” Nelson said, “then he’ll teach the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund some overdue and very necessary lessons.” Despite how silly that sounded, and regardless of his own embarrassment, Cyril was always proud to be there.
At fourteen, Cyril was allowed to stay past the conversation and into the reggae. Nelson was smooth on the floor, smiled his straight white teeth at the women who’d begged him up to dance. Cyril liked the way that looked and learned it for himself, to slide the floor like Nelson. He never could quite bring himself to join the dancers, though. He never found the courage.
* * *
Two years before his diagnosis, Grandpa Nelson had said that he wanted to see the whole of the country one last time before his beloved nineteen-year-old car died. For two summers, he and Cyril criss-crossed the island. Threaded the corkscrew turns into the Blue Mountains and down through the coffee plantations. Across the flatlands on arrow-straight roads through acres of sugar cane and bananas. They saw the manatees at Black River and watched the man-o’-war birds soar the sky above the still lagoons at Alligator Pond. Nelson looked on while Cyril paddled the rocky pools and waterfalls at YS Falls and Dunn’s River. They ate tourist food in Montego Bay and roasted yams from roadside BBQs in Hectors River. Walked the white sand beaches in Negril and climbed the rugged coastline at Port Antonio. They drove the narrow, winding road that ran though the dense bush of Cockpit Country and explored the caves along the north coast. The last summer, they drove all the way up to Accompong, the hidden mountain village founded by runaway slaves, the Maroons.
Cyril sat beside his grandpa, thrilled to travel, delighting in Nelson’s refusal to meet the traffic around him on its terms. Cars slid by them with only inches to spare, wailing horns punctuated by shouts from the drivers: “Get off the road, daddy! Park your car! You driving to your funeral?”
“He’ll be there before me! Drive like a fool,” said Nelson. Cyril drummed his feet on the floor in delighted celebration. Grandpa Nelson was his hero.
* * *
Two spirits watched over Cyril who had lost so much. His mother’s veiled his eyes with flowers so that he would always see the natural beauty around him. Nelson’s showed him what lay beyond the beauty and pressed him to stay curious, stay fair, and never, ever generalize.
The captain announced that they had started their descent and said the temperature in Toronto would be minus five. Cyril could not imagine how air that cold would feel.
THREE
In Toronto, Cyril found a crowded household near the top of a brick and concrete stack of apartments. Mount Dennis was a name that he’d heard in Jamaica. A destination for lots of people from home. But it was nothing like the television Canada that had informed his imaginings. It was a grey, flat place, holding close to streets as smooth and busy as highways that ran for miles: Jane and Weston, Black Creek and Eglinton. It was November. An early snow had left dark muck in the roadside gutters, and the wind stung tears into his eyes. The snow was a disappointment. He’d expected the Christmas-card kind. The cousin who picked him up at the airport ushered him into the dark lobby of the apartment building and showed him which floor button to push. He’d once been on an elevator, but only to the fifth floor. He didn’t tell his cousin that he’d never before been as high as eight.
His Canada-Uncle Junior was a noisy man. “Voice too big for him body,” his family teased. A short, loud, bombastic man. There was no real family here for Cyril. Just people who filled the living room with shrieks of laughter or shouts of complaint. Who hugged him because he’d lost his mommy but couldn’t always remember his name. They called themselves the Juniors — related or not. The young ones stopped long enough to check his clothes, his hair, his gear — he had so little — and found him odd, dull, and impoverished. They rushed out to enjoy their lives and left him stranded inside the four walls, his bedding and belongings hidden behind the blue-checked couch where he slept.
Canada-Uncle Junior took longer to deliver his dismissal. “I knew your benefactor,” he said, “Nelson Johnson. It’s a good thing he did, leaving you the money for school. I did a stint at the University of the West Indies myself. Johnson taught history, I think?”
“Yes, sir. English literature, but European history was always an interest, and he taught that, too, when he was younger.”
“You have a similar character, similar speech. His refinements,” said Junior, whose amused expression implied that he shared the view of many others who had found Nelson’s manner odd, affected.
“Nevertheless,” said Junior, “Johnson was a good man, and your mother was an angel. You’re welcome to stay until you find your feet.” With that he turned, entered his study, and closed the door behind him.
Cyril was on his own. For the very first time. Because even after Nelson died — who had been so much more a father to Cyril than the red-faced man in the wedding photograph his mother had kept hidden in a drawer — despite Cyril’s grief and the constant need for money, he had always had his mother. His new life was strange and cold: the first time he left his building to walk on the Canadian sidewalk was an adventure; the second time made him as lonely as he’d ever been.
On his third day in Mount Dennis, Cyril left the apartment ready to explore. He found himself on an endless sidewalk alongside an endless road where the few shops were shuttered and shabby. He got as far as Jane Park Plaza, where the stuff in the stores wasn’t so different from home, though there was a lot more of it: five styles of pyjamas, not just one or two. But it was nothing like the shiny glass-and-chrome promise of the airport where he’d landed. He’d thought all of Canada would be like that.
The Juniors laughed and called him “Freshy.” That plaza’s a shithole, they said. Go to Yorkdale Mall. He didn’t dare. The tattered bus map they gave him was an alarming tangle of roads and numbers. He was very afraid of getting lost. Besides, he didn’t have money to spare, so he stayed inside. It was quiet during the day when people had gone to work or to school. “Commerce and education,” announced Uncle Junior. “That’s what we’re here for.” He ran a busy courier company and spent evenings in front of his computer strategizing his stock market trades.
During the week, Cyril woke before them, unmade his bed, and restored the couch to its public role. He sat reading, steadfast, hugged tight into the shelter of its corner cushions while the Juniors came from their beds or their showers and hurried through the noisy kitchen where the television blared news and weather, traffic and jokes into the morning’s beginning. By 8:30 a.m. everyone was gone and silence filled the rooms, settling heavily around him, weighted further by the drab, off-white walls and cold winter light filtered through cloud cover and sheer curtains. A regular run of airplanes skimmed the tops of the apartment towers in front of his on their descent to the airport that had seemed so far away, but which he now thought might be close enough to walk to.
He walked. After the Juniors left in the mornings and again in the evenings, unless all of them were out. One day, from a late start on an unusually mild morning, he headed south, following a downhill drift that was flanked by houses and small apartment buildings. He crossed a busy highway and came to a small patch of beach where Lake Ontario spread out in front of him. To the east was the CN Tower, closer than he’d seen it before but still a good distance off.
Cyril shivered inside the big black wrap of a coat that he’d bought second-hand. He pulled at the toggles, tightening the waist and pulling the lip of the hood down over his forehead. He’d tried the coat on for one of Junior’s visitors, who dealt in used clothes and had searched it out for Cyril.
“Looks good, man,” Junior’s friend had said as Cyril stood in front of him.
“Not too big?” said Cyril, glimpsing his forehead’s creased concern as he twisted to see himself in the mirror above the dresser.
“No, no. That’s how they are, man. They gotta be large, gotta big job to do.” He laughed and poked a finger at the puffy, quilted sleeves. “Also good for if you fall on the ice, got a lot of padding,” and he laughed again.
“How do you fall on ice?” Cyril didn’t understand.
“Think like climbing from the sea on rock covered in the slippery stuff? You know, when you can’t keep your foot from sliding?”
“Yes.”
“That’s it, Cyril my man, that’s slipping on ice. But it’s on the sidewalk, where you do your everyday travelling. You won’t see it, comes sneaking up to surprise you.”
“Okay.” Cyril pulled at the zipper, shrugged out of the coat, and put it beside him on a chair.
“I’ll look out some boots for you too. With big treads to give you a grip on that ice.”
Cyril was grateful for the coat now. And the boots. As he walked back to Windermere, the cold slapped at his face. At the streetcar stop, he put himself in behind the glass to cut the wind.
As he rode home, the lake stayed in his head. He couldn’t imagine how big this country Canada must be. On maps, his little Jamaica sat like a peanut in the sea beside Cuba and Haiti and the Dominican. Puny alongside those two islands. And how far was it across Canada to the other side? He hadn’t thought of that before, and now it seemed an urgent question. When the bus passed the library at the corner of Weston and Eglinton — where he had passed many times before — it was easy to get off at the next stop and double back. Cyril understood libraries. How the books were shelved. What the librarian was paid to do. It would be the same as home. He had a right to be in this public place and saw straightaway that it was a welcoming one because the people who sat around the big table, reading newspapers and magazines, one of them sleeping, were the close-to-the-bone types he’d seen about in the neighbourhood.
Cyril walked to the shelves as though he belonged and knew what he was looking for. But the Mount Dennis library was enormous, with a massive collection. As he passed Canadian History on his way to the atlases, something urged his attention, and when he looked about it was through a fine, bright film that suggested an importance he could not at first identify. Then he understood that this was what school would be like, that his future would come with books, and surely that was why he was here. It was a premonition, a half-formed glimpse of what could be, where light shone from the white spines of books in a place he hadn’t yet seen but was as close as tomorrow or the next day.
Cyril found a world atlas, the biggest he’d ever seen, and sat with it at the nearest table. Canada was awesome. Huge oceans on three sides with the fame-and-fortune promise of the U.S. down below. He ran his finger over the pages and stopped at Lake Ontario, where he had stood just an hour before. He traced the scale of the page with his thumb and forefinger, measured the lake from its Canadian side to its American shore. His peanut country, only 234 kilometres long and 80 kilometres wide, would float inside it — that’s how crazy big the lake was. How could a person ever know a place as large as Canada, which he now saw was vast? An impossible challenge. As he registered the size of the country that could hold multitudes of Jamaicas and all of the place names he had never heard before, never seen on television or in movies, all those unknown and unknowable places, he wanted to go home and sleep — which he did, once the Juniors had gone to bed and the living room was dark and empty.
The routine came fast; in the evenings, after dinner, when the Juniors collected in front of the television or absented themselves with computers to the other rooms, Cyril left the building. His regular destinations were, variously, the library, Weston, or a convenience store at an intersection about a mile and a half away. He walked to pump his blood, to move his arms and legs fast. Boots stamped the concrete, breath steamed in clouds from his mouth — a phenomenon he continued to find highly novel. He covered his head with a toque like the few other people he passed. Black faces framed by wool scarves or fur and hats and hoods. It was not just Jamaicans who lived here but English- or French-speaking West Africans and Spanish-speaking Blacks from South America. Cyril had thought that Canada would be mostly white.
