The Last Warner Woman (4 page)

And it wasn’t that the leper colony had been nothing but silence. There were occasional sounds from inside the bungalows—coughs, low voices, the scraping of chairs, and other little things that should have confirmed to Pearline that the place was being lived in and used. But she was not curious about such things, and did not realize it was the priest himself who stopped her questions. His face and his manner had become a kind of wall, and so while Pearline did hear evidence of other lives being lived behind the priest, she never thought to ask about them. Also, during those six months, her departure from the colony was always attended by the smell of oranges, lemongrass, and talcum powder. But she got used to this too and it simply became, for her, the scent of leaving.

Then one day Monsignor Dennis said a strange thing.

“My dear young lady, I am going away for a while. You must not come back here for a few weeks. Do you understand?” His voice often did this—said soft things like “dear lady” yet remained hard. “You are to stay away from here. For a month at least. When I come back I will buy everything you have made in the meantime. Do you understand?”

In fact, she understood him more than he wanted to be understood. The priest’s words had become the wall his face and his demeanor had been before. And because the wall was no longer amorphous, because it was now fully formed and articulated, Pearline could see it, and because she could see it, she at last tried to look over it.

“Sir?”

“Yes, my dear?”

“Sir, I fraid I don’t understand you too well. Explain again.”

Albert Dennis raised his brows, and then said slowly but sharply, “There is nothing difficult in my instructions, young lady. If you don’t understand, it is because you are choosing not to. Now listen, I am going away for a month …”

“But there is other people here, sir,” Pearline cut in. “I can’t tell you who them be or what them look like. I never before lay eyes on them. But I don’t understand why you can’t get one of them to take these things next Saturday?”

“You impertinent girl! It cannot be done!”

Pearline observed the veins on the priest’s neck bunched together like an angry chicken; she observed his trembling lips and she realized how angry she had made him. She was about to ask pardon for her rudeness but then something flickered. She looked up to see, for the first time in that valley, standing right behind the priest, another human.

“But yes indeedy, Missa Dennis,” the newcomer said, “it can be done.”

Monsignor Dennis’s face creased into another kind of annoyance, an older one that his face seemed to settle into without much effort.

“Miss Lazarus, what the devil is it now?” he said as he turned around.

The woman looked on Monsignor Dennis as a mother might look on a child who has thrown a tantrum. She wore a broad red calico skirt and two shirts—the first buttoned all the way up and the second unbuttoned, but tied under her bosoms so that each half of the shirt cupped one of her magnificent breasts. She was a small woman with steel-gray hair that grew tall and wide like the top of a tree. You could tell she was old because of her feet, and because of the wrinkles as fine as scripture that spread out like sunbeams from around her eyes. The eyes themselves could fool you though, brown and bright as a baby’s.

She stepped past the priest, ignoring his question, and reached for Pearline’s hands.

“Call me Mother Lazarus, child. You must come back here next Saturday, same as always. Because who to tell, Missa Dennis might be gone much longer than even he think he supposed to gone for.”

“I forbid it.” Monsignor Dennis protested, but he said it without conviction.

Mother Lazarus, still holding onto Pearline’s hands, said simply, “It is time.”

Agatha Lazarus’s problem was that her every step and smile and laugh and wink was filled with so much energy, so much warmth, that no one ever considered the simple fact that became more true with each passing year: she was old. So it wasn’t bad-mindedness, nor spitefulness, nor lack of regard that made people not notice her stooped back, her steel-gray hair, or her wrinkled face. It was simply that around Agatha, sadness had a way of dissipating and lethargy a way of vanishing. And around her, newly energized, people thought that this energy was her own. And in a way it was. It was her gift to them, but it was a gift that did not take up residence in her own bones. Agatha alone felt her arthritis going deeper and deeper. She alone saw her days dwindling. She alone knew it would soon be time to retire, not just from her day-to-day job, but from life. When she said as much to Monsignor Dennis he would listen without sympathy. He was sixty-five years old and still could not imagine that Agatha Lazarus was over twenty years his senior.

On the morning that the Original Pearline Portious had made her first descent to the leper colony, Mother Lazarus had also made her own very painful and lumbering descent onto her knees where she prayed. She did not believe in God, but she believed in Desperation. She believed Desperation could make a woman go down on her knees, and that that same Desperation would go out into the world in search of whatever was needed. Mother Lazarus was desperate for a replacement, a young woman brave enough to enter a leper colony, to touch the inhabitants without flinching, to wash floors, cook food, and bandage wounds.

When she had looked outside later that morning and seen Pearline talking, excitedly it seemed, to Monsignor Dennis she did not at first believe her prayer had gone out and returned already. She stared for a long time before finally deciding to go outside and confirm things for her own self. She walked stealthily, placing herself behind a tree near the gate, and as Pearline left Mother Lazarus took a closer look. The old woman knew it then; it was her prayer come back to her.
Yes indeedy,
she thought with relief,
this girl is the one.

As if to make up for her lack of curiosity during those first six months, Pearline was now filled with a terrible impatience, and each time she repeated those three words that Mother Lazarus had said, that impatience grew.
It is time.
Pearline thought she knew time and its shapes: there were weekdays, and market day, and church day, and then weekdays again; and each day began with a rooster and ended with a chorus of frogs. The sun traveled across the sky, and men and women followed it on their own small journeys, leading cows to grass, hauling crocus bags of food from the ground, or just pressing on, pressing on like pilgrims. Most evenings found Pearline knitting, and so it seemed that night was a thing she made, with steady fingers.

But now time had unraveled and Pearline realized it was time that had been knitting her all along. It was time that had delivered her into all her moments, and time that would deliver her into all of her futures. She had no control over it—neither what it did nor what it would make of her. It could shift patterns like that. She understood suddenly that, in the six months of her dull knitting, she had been heading toward something that would soon reveal itself, but she did not have a clue what this thing might be. And although half a year had passed quickly, the next Saturday could not come fast enough.

If she had suspected, however, that this particular Saturday, when it finally came, would be her last morning waking up in her rainbow room, her last morning spent in the village, and her last morning sitting at a table with her mother and father eating callaloo and yam farmed from their ground, she might not have been in such a hurry.

And if she had had any inkling that this new life would include, in quick succession, a child and the terrible thing that happened after … well, she would definitely have slowed down. She would have savored the yam, gloried in its smooth texture, its sweet taste. She would have gone over to the dutch pot for another portion. She would have sipped her tea instead of swallowing it so quickly it burnt her tongue. She would have hugged her mother good-bye. But she suspected no such thing, and when she finished her breakfast she gathered her knitting into a plastic bag and ran toward the leper colony.

When she arrived, the morning mist had not yet risen out of the valley and the three bungalows seemed to float as if in a dream. There was no Monsignor Dennis to greet Pearline. She walked around to the front of the bungalows and was surprised to see the gardens spread out like aprons before each one, full of aralia and bougainvillea.

She called out in a half-hearted way. She was enjoying this solitary moment on the grounds, observing the place for herself. The gardens were laid out in careful matrices; besides the aralia and the bougainvillea, there were also squares dedicated to tomatoes and ginger and onions. Near to the fence, there was a network of pumpkin vines.

“Hello ma’am?” She called out again, a little louder this time.

A broad patio extended from the middle bungalow, and on that deck was something that looked like a small city of rocking chairs. Rickety thrones. She began to feel comfortable.

“Hello!” She called a third time, and then there was a shout from inside.

“
NO
Missis! Please, don’t juuk me wid dat ting again, aaaaiiy-eeeeee!!”

Pearline found herself on the ground, flat as a sheet. There was another scream. Something toppled over. Then there came the old woman’s voice, firm.

“Hold steady Maas Johnny, you know we have to do this, hold steady!”

“Aaaaiyeeee!”

A silence stretched over the valley as if even the trees needed to take a breath after this assault. Seconds passed, and then, in the distance, a chicken squawked. It seemed a crude, indecorous sound, but it seemed to give permission to the landscape to carry on. The wind began to blow again and the valley regained its composure. Mother Lazarus stepped out from the middle bungalow, a long injection needle in her hand. She nodded to Pearline as if it were quite a natural thing to find her out there, her body still pressed to the earth.

“You come at a good time. I can show you around. But first follow me and let us get the porridge for them.”

Pearline’s eyes were fixated on the needle, a bead of white liquid perched at its head.

Mother Lazarus looked on it and answered Pearline’s unasked question.

“Chaulmoogra oil. They don’t like it one bit, but is the ongly thing that help. Now come.”

Pearline stood up, slowly. She brushed the specks of dirt from her dress and followed the old woman into the farthest bungalow. She had expected the inside to be dark and musty but instead it was full of light. On the far wall where one might have expected windows or doors, there were big open slats. You could jump out staight right into the garden. Two doors to the right seemed to lead to other rooms—bedrooms, she guessed—but the rest of the space was open. It seemed to be used as a kitchen and pantry of sorts. There were no shelves or cupboards, but everything was quite obviously in its place. Big sacks of cornmeal, rice, and flour were in one corner; there was a sandalwood box for cured meat; small baskets of onions and garlic and scotch bonnet peppers were laid out carefully and unobtrusively on the floor, and there were also larger hampers for potatoes and yams; in another corner there were crocus bags of oranges and grapefruit, and towers of plates and pots rose from the mats of newspaper they were set upon. The only appliance was an enormous woodstove that seemed to sit in judgment over the whole kitchen. On top of the stove a black cauldron was already bubbling. Mother Lazarus went over and stirred, and then she began to speak.

“I feel as if I know you. But maybe this is not true at all. But see, I watch you come here every Saturday and I stand by the gate and I watch you leave. And I like what I been seeing.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“Yes indeedy, you have a sweetness to your spirit, child. I think you will like it here. Mmhm. I think you will.”

“Ma’am, I don’t even know what this place is.”

“Mother Lazarus. You can call me Mother Lazarus. Yes. I taking too long to tell you the things you want to know. Forgive me.”

And, as if to take even longer, Mother Lazarus left the pot and ambled over to the tower of dishes. Her stumpy hands dislodged a stack of four bowls.

“Pearline,” she resumed, “in a minute you will help me take this porridge over. You will meet them, but listen, you must understand that these people you is about to meet is just like anybody you have ever known. Yes indeedy. They probably won’t look like anybody you have ever seen, but that is how it always is in this life, yes?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“It is a horrible disease they have to bear. Sometimes it happen that their hands get so large it swallow up their fingers, one by one. The same thing happen with their toes—they just get loss inside their foot. You will see that their skin is very dry, like it bake in Gobi Desert, and no mount of coconut oil you rub them down with will change a thing. Mind you, you must rub them down all the same. And you must touch them, even though sometimes they can’t feel it. That is how it is with this disease, they get so they have no feeling.”

Pearline understood sickness as having bad feelings. She couldn’t quite wrap her mind around having no feelings whatsoever.

“Excuse me please, ma’am, but what kind of sickness make you don’t feel at all?’

The old woman shivered involuntarily, but did not answer Pearline directly.

“When you earn his confidence, which I guarantee you won’t be long, you will draw long bench with Maas Paul and with his own mouth he will tell you all bout the woman, his own auntie, who grow him up. That woman would sometimes make him reach into a pot of boiling water or even hot oil to take out the food she was cooking for him. Think bout that for a little. If you see his hands now, they burn up bad bad. Black as tar. He never know what he was doing to himself, cause he never did feel it. Is a terrible, terrible disease.”

Pearline was now decidedly afraid.

“Ma’am, please, am I going to fall sick here?”

“And when it get bad bad,” Mother Lazarus continued, “is when all the family decide they don’t want to take care of them no more. That is when they have to come here. Their family might just throw them into the gully like they was a dead dog, or they might leave them at some church or take them to the doctor office and then run gone. Move house to make sure they don’t ever see them again. That is how they end up here. You have some like Miss Lily who don’t even have the use of her legs, but she come here on her own backside. It take her one week. She drag herself up the mountain and then drag herself down the valley. When she reach here, her batty tear up like backra done whip her. And she do all that so she could end up at a place where people don’t look on her with scorn. I hope you hearing what I is saying. When you help me take this porridge over, don’t open up your two eyes at them like you shock.”