Oren Cousins, Contributor
VICTORIA Jubilee Hospital, December 25, 1964.
A dark, thin and tall young man with a black bag in his hand strolled back and forward in the courtyard, looking up every now and then at the grey block of buildings.
It was not yet visiting time. Dark clouds still hovered over Wareika Hill and the John Crow Mountain in the far distance, indicating rain in the hills. But Kingston was already clear and sunny.
The young man kept glancing up at the third floor of the maternity block, at a dozen or so windows illuminated by the ward lights, inscrutably staring back at him like rectangular yellow eyes.
But he was oblivious to their stares, since his nerves and ears were intensely listening as if he could differentiate a special cry among the half dozen or so baby cries that seeped from the windows at interval.
It was Christmas morn and North Street and East Street, like the other streets, were deserted except for a squad of scrawny dogs scrabbling and snarling over an overturned garbage drum under the light across the street.
There was little vestige of the revelry and promenade of Christmas Eve and Grand Market Night that had inflamed the city with thousands of multi-coloured pepper lights, neon signs, Christmas tree and Santa Claus in every store, sound systems belting Peace on Earth and Silver Bells, hordes of men, women and children gaudily wandering or dancing up the streets.
The young man was oblivious to the shouts and the swish of the brooms of the street cleaners starting their early morning task of collecting the litter of the night, the towering municipal Christmas tree glimmering in the distance in downtown Victoria Park, the bells of Kingston Parish Church ringing their tongues out, a black and tattered suited demented man passing by praying loudly to a stick he raised up to the sky, and a lone drunk straddling the middle of the street and loudly and obscenely denouncing the Government, interspersed with melancholy wails of "Merry Christmas."
He wasn't even listening to the tiny groups of carollers who had entered the courtyard lustily singing, Away in a Manger.
The young man looked at his watch and exhausted with waiting, clutching the bag more tightly, he hurriedly entered the foyer of the maternity block and took the lift to the third floor. As he walked to the door of the ward, a nurse smiled at him.
"Mr Johnson?" she asked.
"Yes," he replied.
"Your wife ask me to look out for you. Congratulation...It's a boy!"
His knees almost failed him and he dropped the bag. "A bwoy?" he said in awe, pulling a green rag from his back pocket and nervously wiping the sweat from his brow.
"You can go in now," said the nurse, placing the bag into his hand and pointing to the door of the ward.
Call him 'Christmas'
Trembling all over, he made his way to her bedside. The baby was sucking at her breast, and she smiled as he approached.
"Percy. A glad yuh come," she said, and she pulled the protesting child from her breast and placed him in his father's hands. She laughed gaily, as he awkwardly nestled the child in his huge arms and gingerly held him near to his heart.
"Him look like yuh," she remarked. "Same fore-ed, same nose, same way yuh tu'n up yuh mout. Dead stamp a yuh."
"Bwoy, 'im look nice!" he exclaimed, proudly looking at his son. "Him look nice!"
"Mek wi call 'im Christmas, because 'im bawn 'pon Christmas Day. Christmas Johnson," she said. "Eh, Percy? Dat awright?" she anxiously asked.
He looked proudly at his wife and son. His wife! Princess was only 18 years old. He married her two months ago, after she told him that she was pregnant by him. Now the child was here.
"Three of us," he said to himself.
He bent over and kissed his wife and placed the baby in her arms.
"Dat awright. We gwine call 'im Christmas, because 'im bawn 'pon Christmas day. A fimi Christmas gif' dat. A bring a Christmas present fi yuh," he said.
He took a parcel from the bag and handed it to her.
"Don't open it till a gawn," he said, his eyes twinkling with mischief and pride. He stared at the child, then looked at his watch. A haffi go work now. A wi come back as soon as a done work."
She watched his back as he went towards the door. Christmas pulled his lips from her breast and started an infernal squall chorused by another half dozen babes, as if he didn't want his father to leave. A nurse took him from his mother's arms.
"Sh. Sh.Sh!" she said to Christmas. "What a big mout' this little boy have! Look like you goin' to be either a singer a parson or a politician."
Christmas's father never came back. His body was found in a hand-cart in an alley off Beeston Street, on Boxing Day.
The nurses in the ward deliberately and, in great sympathy, directed to Princess and her son most of the gifts that Christmas philanthropists and the Salvation Army brought for babies born on Christmas Day.
When Princess's sister and brother came to take her and her child from the hospital, the day after Boxing Day, they had to get an extra taxi to carry away the gifts.
Kingstonians seemed to have vied with one another in bringing or sending cash or kind for the young widow and fatherless child. Christmas's uncle hitched the huge Santa Claus - one-of the gifts - by the back of Santa's broad black belt to the bonnet of his car.
Christmas, bonnetted, booted and blanketed, left Jubilee in royal style, his eyes and fists tightly closed and no sound but an occasionally tiny hiccough coming from him, comfortably nestled against his mother's breasts.
Christmas Day, December 25, 1999.
Christmas wasn't the least excited about the Millennium Bug nor any of the superficialities that pertained to Christmas nor about earthly things. He lay in his massive king-size bed in his unfinished mansion.
Somehow, he knew he would not live to see the end of the day. Except when his wife, Puncie, his friend Dr. Paul Foster, and his nurse Miss Fearon, came into the room, he drifted in and out of consciousness, light flicking on and off in his head, as if someone was mischievously playing with the light switches. Whenever consciousness came back to him, his life was passing before him like a kaleidoscope.
The tenement house in Trench Town, tall and imposingly grey in the city lights. Scraggy dogs and aimless boys and girls wandering up and down the streets. Men rattling dominoes on the sidewalk like the rattle in his chest and throat. Miss Dodd coming at him with her cane, her stentorian voice admonishing and threatening.
Men rattling dominoes on sidewalk like the rattle in his chest and throat. Miss Dodd coming at him, again, with her stentorian voice accusing and her threatening cane. SHADOWS! Shadooos! Sha...oh-oh-oh...!
Under Miss Dodd, he had done well at school. She got him his first job as a store clerk at Times Store.
SHAD-OO-OWS! He wasn't feeling any pain. No pain at all. Just an ethereal feeling.
Ethereal! He had learnt that word from Fr. John, his priest, on Christmas Eve. He was holding onto that word like a drowning man grasping a thick stick. Ethereal, a state of airiness. State of passing into eternity. Transcendentalism. He learnt about it from Dr. Paul who didn't think that death was a big thing.
Final journey
"Death is transcendental, the final transition," Dr. Paul explained. "Death is as normal as birth, in fact, more normal, since you have completed the full circle of life, when you die, and you return to whence you came."
Transcendental! He had spent a part of the day listening to, Angels We Have Heard On High, spreading softly from the console below. He had asked Puncie to put the CD on repeat so that he could hear that carol continuously.
"Christ is your saviour. Christmas, my poor friend, do you believe?" Fr. John said the day before, leaving him with doubtful hope.
He had told Fr. John yes, just to get him to stop talking. He had been trying to discover for himself a link between the ethereal state and the transcendental state as it relates to God and man.
He could not find a difference. Dr. Paul had spent more hours explaining transcendentalism to him, than Fr. John had spent explaining God and the ethereal.
Dr. Paul said: "God is an awesome absolute enigma".
Fr. John said: "God is love."
Both had left him in utter confusion and consternation about life and death. There was a thing he had not discussed with either of them could it be an aberration or hallucination that he was seeing a shadow hovering over his afflicted body? Was it his own spirit? His life? His ghost? Leaving slowly, lingering, but leaving? Or was it an Angel?
Those last days, he had been seeing, in fits and starts, episodes from his life. He saw himself walking up and down Peechon Street where he lived with Sylvia.
He saw the day when he won the Lotto - $41 million! Two months later, he left Sylvia to live with Puncie. He told Sylvia that he was leaving her, because she couldn't breed. He shuddered slightly as he recollected the hate and desperation in her eyes and voice.
He had given her a house full of furniture and jewellery and he suspected that she had stashed away a lot of his money in her own secret bank account. Plus he had given her a good time. What more did she want?
His brother came before his eyes. Boysie! No sooner than he had walked out on Sylvia, Boysie walked in and she became pregnant. Boysie! A week after he had won the Lotto, he bought Boysie a new Toyota Camry. He walked proudly up and down Peechon Street to watch Boysie dusting and re-dusting the new car, while a group of admiring and excited schoolboys looked on. He was even jealous that he overheard them calling Boysie, "don".
As he strutted up and down the street wondering what to do with so much money, he kept passing some men - he knew them by name - playing dominoes near the silver pans of Jerkie, the jerked chicken man, under the twisted guinep tree leaning against the graffiti-covered wall of Jackie's beer shop.
"Ah sah! Rich Man, buy we piece a jerk deh noh!" they jovially called as he passed them the third time walking up and down the street.
These men envied him nothing. He stopped and bought them jerk chicken and beer. He was dozing off again, watching himself and the men eating jerk and drinking beer. Shaw...dohs!
The luxuriously furnished room in which Christmas lay was part of a suite of rooms in a monstrous three floor white edifice, built on a low-lying lot of land that was too small for such a building.
Incongruous structure
It could not be called a magnificent house, despite its patios and porticos, its many and stately Doric columns and capitals, its Roman arches and swollen ornamental protuberances uniformly spaced on the walls beneath the lower eaves, giving the lower story the impression of a fortress.
As if it was an afterthought, and undersigned, this mansion was topped with an haphazard roof with a cuboid turret perched on its highest point. This incongruous structure sited in a settlement of small and medium size houses look like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. People in the neighbourhood nicknamed it Noah's Ark because of the length of time that was passing in its construction. Others call it Castle.
It was unfurnished when Christmas bought it. He completed and extensively furnished the suite of rooms occupied by Puncie and himself.
He also completed the over-size living room and the over-large kitchen as well as the foyer and the grandiose Georgian stairway. Then he took sick before he was able to finish the building. He had bought it, because it was remarkable different from all the other houses he had seen for sale.
He liked the locality, since it was not far from Kingston, and was walking distance from a neighbouring township. He also like the middle-class tranquility and the closeness of the houses which he humorously likened to an up-graded Allman Town.
He did not marry her until three weeks ago. Fr. John had insisted that he marry her and had performed the ceremony. Dr. Paul and Miss Fearon were the witnesses. She had wanted the ring a long time. Whenever she fussed about it, he declared he would not marry her unless she gave him a child. Whenever she accused him of having other women, he told her that no one woman could satisfy him.
Strangely, none of the other women became pregnant. Puncie insisted on condoms as soon as she began to accuse him. He hated condoms. He hated condoms, now he had the dreaded disease. She had warned him that it would happen one day.
Despite the hurt and the disease, she had not walked out on him never leaving his side. She had taken him to the best hospital and doctors in Miami. She had refused to admit him in a hospital, but had fitted up one of the rooms in the suite with a visiting doctor and a regular nurse. Dr. Paul and Miss Fearon had become his close friends and confidantes.
They all knew that he was dying, but they didn't know what day he would pass away. He believed that only he knew that, and he was privately revelling in the secret which he hoped to keep to himself, as long as he was able to. He was about to fall into a doze when Puncie approached his bedside. A simple gold band shone on the fourth finger of her left hand. He smiled weakly at her, as she gently took his right hand. With his slowly gazing eyes, he noticed her swollen belly. He was angry, when she told him a week ago that she was pregnant. He got angrier, when she refused to tell him with whom she went to bed.
"Soh is a Immaculate Conception?" he had bawled at her. She was horrified, when he suggested it was Dr. Paul.
"Dr. Pawl! Him is yuh only true fren!" she had exclaimed.
Saying sorry
He had silently apologized to Dr. Paul. Paul was crazy about his charming young wife and his two mischievous little boys. Paul would not do such a heinous thing. He was so angry, that he wouldn't speak to her for the rest of the week, yet she was hardly absent from his bedside. He believed that she was hurting badly, but he had refrained from saying a kind word to her.
"How many months?" he murmured.
"W'at, Christmas? W'at yuh say?" she almost shouted.
"The baby. "Ow many months gone?"
"A five months gawn!" she replied.
"Look in that draw' and take the will," he whispered. "Dr. Paul wrote it for me, when you went to supermarket yesterday. He and Miss Fearon witness' it. I lef mi Omega for Paul and the piano for Fr. John. He is always playing jazz an' rock an' roll an' reggae on it. Nurse is to get mi Volvo, since is she drive it all the time. I leave everything else for you an' the child. God bless! Give all mi clothes to Fr. John. He will know what to do wit' it. Bury me in only di gol' chain an' cross. I want nutt'n else," he said in an effort to humour her. "Don't cry fimi. You wastin' yer eye-water."
"Christmas! Christmas! I will always love you," she wept. Falling on her knees, she attempted to hug and kiss him. He gently pushed her from him. "Careful now," he said, laughing weakly, "You shouldn't hug an' kiss me without a condom."
"Christmas, bwoy or girl, I gwine call di baby Christmas," she cried.
"Then Christmas will not die," he murmured. "When Christmas dead. Long live Christmas!"
When Nurse Fearon entered the room to feed him and attend to his other needs, she noticed that Puncie was kneeling on the plushy red carpet with her head on Christmas' breast. She was breathing evenly, and her tears had dampened where she lay her head. Apparently, she had cried herself to sleep. She also noticed that the right arm of Christmas was hanging lifelessly over the side of the massive bed.
As she went to the phone to inform Dr. Paul and Fr. John she sighed and exclaimed, "Christmas! I love you!" Then she returned to the room and, as she closed his eye-lids and crossed his hands, she murmured, "Christmas, I will always remember you as a very humorous man, a peaceful man, a patient man, a lovely and loveable man, warm, generous and kind, quick to anger and to regain your composure as quickly, I fell in love with you, although you were too opinionated to know."
A group of happy boys and girls dressed in their Christmas best, was passing by the four ornate gates, unaware of what had happened in Castle. They were lighting illegal fire-crackers and shouting, "Merry Christmas!"
