For Myrna, the Washerwoman
WHEN MYRNA LAUGHED, the sound rumbled from somewhere deep inside her belly. People would pause at the otherworldly thing erupting from her. Myrna’s laughter sucked the air dry-dry like eating an East Indian mango seed, working it between her teeth, the juice running down her chin as she devoured the flesh. I am much older now, and she is long dead, but I still remember Myrna’s laugh. The way she used to laugh before it happened. As a child, I believed that after it came from her mouth, fully formed, her laughter became a separate thing—still there—long after the wind had carried away the sound. I tried to laugh like her, but mine sounded like freshly shelled red peas spilling into a tin bowl. It paled against hers, like whitish-grey foam framing the red gills of river snapper.
Yuh laugh and yuh word dem mus’ have weight, she’d say.
I begged her to show me how to laugh ’til the earth shifted under the force of it. She’d shake her head and say: Girlie, mi cyaan teach yuh dat. It haffi jus’ come.
*
In our village, they’d sometimes call her Smiley and the old folks would say har head touched, meaning she was a little slow, maybe on account of being dropped on her head at birth by the district midwife, who was known for having fingers as slippery as melting butter. But Mama said Myrna wasn’t slow at all. Her wide-set eyes, the colour of burnt molasses, took you in and, despite the blank expression on her face, she was sizing you up. This soft, round woman carried loads of washing on her head to the river, with Baby Buck balanced on her back, his bigger sister Irene grasping one leg and her twin brother, Derek, the other…calves like good, strong mahogany…this must have been what Parson Brown, like all the men in the district, first saw when she marched her entire clan of children up the hill every Sunday to Sunday school, each child holding the hand of another smaller child, all struggling to keep pace with Myrna as she bounced up the hill...the shape of those calves as she turned to check that her brood was still safely following her…those calves connected to sturdy legs, fleshy hips and a round bottom, which little Teresa loved to use as a pillow.
I remember her gaze, too. She gazed a lot after it happened. Myrna could stare at you for a long time, slack-jawed, relaxing her whole face, just looking at you. But that was her way of taking in the world, trying to pick sense from nonsense, playing fool to catch wise, as Mama used to say. Prodding out the truth by her silent, patient listening.
You’re no fool, Myrna, I’d hear my mother say to her. Mama would be wiping the beads of sweat from her brow while she ironed Dadda’s uniform or his church shirt on a cloth-covered ironing board that seemed to reach the roof of our small house. Or she would be stitching up the hem of a dress, sitting at her ancient Singer sewing machine, whirring away with the foot pedal as she and Myrna talked.
I relished catching bits of “adult conversation,” as tantalizing to me as forbidden fruit or raindrops running off ginger lilies. I’d slide into the space below our wooden house, braving forty legs and the possibility of scorpions or an ants’ nest. I’d slip behind the fern bush or scrape up my skin and rip my skirt on the prickles of the sinkle-bible plant just to hear something juicy.
So how yuh mek so much man fool-fool yuh up and give yuh so much pickney? Mama asked one time, plunging straight into patois as the conversation deepened, standard English (that she always urged me to use) set aside on these occasions.
Myrna took a sharp breath. To me, this inhalation was like a splinter of cloud across a brazen sun.
But Elvie, she said, and I imagined her parting lips the colour of pink bougainvilleas, is not de man dem fault mi love de woody!
The laugh came then, and our entire house, down to every plank, shook—quaking, before settling down again, wearily, on its haunches.
Please watch your mouth, Myrna! Mama exclaimed, suddenly proper again, her “School Teacher Smith” persona fully restored in this single rebuff. Although she said the words sternly, I knew she wasn’t really angry. I could hear her own laughter underneath her voice—brimming at the surface but never quite bubbling over—like those times when she caught me hiding under the kitchen table greedily licking the pan of Christmas cake batter or staining my new dress with curry, or stealing a gizzada she had just baked for Parson Brown. She’d tell me I was being bad, but I could see she wanted to laugh, too.
I remember, Mama continued, when we were in Ms Olsie’s class. Myrna, you were the brightest! Brighter than me. You could have gone to Teachers’ College, too! You have a good head. Remember how you always knew your times tables up to thirteen?
At this point in Mama’s reminiscing, I lost interest and went play by the river with Myrna’s eldest son, a shy, bookish boy named Kirk, my constant playmate. We’d attack the Julie-mango tree or turn over rocks along the riverbank looking for land crabs that seemed like miniature, lopsided warriors, their oversized claw resembling a shield.
*
Sometimes on the way to Mr Chin’s shop to buy blue-soap or starch or flour for Mama, Kirk and I passed the bar on the corner. The men there riotously laughed and cussed about politics, cricket and the economy. One time, I heard Myrna’s name.
Dat Myrna sweet like honey, a man slurred.
Another chimed in: Mi want ah taste.
A third man added: Unno watch it. Silent river run deep.
I went in to hear more, only to be shooed out. I found Kirk still standing outside, his eyes held down. He told me later he felt ah way to hear them talk about his mother like that. After that, I saw Myrna on her way to the river with a load of washing, so I asked her:
How come people chat behind other people back?
She took a guinep from her skirt pocket.
Chile, people is like dis guinep, she said, holding up its green hard skin between two fingers for my closer inspection.
Dem is one thing on the outside and something else inside. Bite it.
I did, my tongue enveloping the fleshy orange seed.
*
Myrna had eight children—five girls and three boys—with seven different men. A couple of the children were parcelled out to aunties, cousins and grandparents for safekeeping and rearing whenever there were too many mouths to feed. Thinking back now, she couldn’t have been older than thirty-five. I was then eight and the only child of my parents. I never saw any of her children’s fathers at Myrna’s house when I went there to play or out with any of the children. It was only Myrna who showed up at school on Parents’ Day or Sports Day or to speak with the teachers about the good or bad performance of any of her clan.
Kirk didn’t know his daddy. My daddy was the district constable and an elder at the local church, Ebenezer Sanctuary of the Innocent and Sacred Heart Deliverance Ministries, a more grand-sounding name than the reality of the squat wooden structure, with its gigantic white doors. A church need a imposing name, Parson Brown used to say, de temple o’ de Lord have to inspire awe and reverence!
Myrna earned a living from taking in washing. She scrubbed Nurse Johnson’s uniform until it was white like Myrna’s teeth, gleaming in the sun on the clothesline, or restore Principal Anderson’s faded yellow shirt to brilliance. She even got work from the Chinese, who took in washing from their rich clients in town and hired Myrna to do the job. Although she had been forced to drop out of school at thirteen because her mother needed help on the family farm, Myrna could read well. I’d see her reading pages from old editions of The Gleaner on the backstep when Mama was scaling parrot fish onto other pages of the newspaper.
You are a smart woman, Mama would say to Myrna when she took a break from marking papers and she and Myrna drank coconut water on the verandah, or when Myrna would cane-row or flat-iron Mama’s hair, dividing its forest of thickness with a fat black comb and smoothing it with liberal doses of castor oil.
Sometimes I went to the river and watched Myrna wash. Kirk found this too boring and wandered off on his own, so it was always just Myrna and me. She pounded each trouser and shirt on massive rocks by the riverside, with vigour, as if exorcising evil, as if the clothes had to pay penitence for every bad thought or deed of its wearer.
She didn’t go to church on Sunday, like the rest of us did, though she brought her kids to Sunday school religiously. Myrna living in sin, according to Parson Brown, most recently with a man who had moved to our village from the neighbouring town. Although she never set foot in church, the flow of the river, sure and steady like heartbeats and heartache, egrets flying overhead, mangrove roots rising out of the water, this place was her cathedral. A cathedral where she sang her own hymns. With reverence, she belted out Johnny Cash’s If I were a carpenter and you were a lady (would you marry me anyway?) Or in a slow and steady prayer, croon Bob Marley’s I went downtown (said I went downtown)—all over her booga-wooga (over her booga-wooga).
Myrna intrigued my imagination in ways I didn’t understand. Adults then had long faces, perpetually frowning or hissing their teeth Cho!, speaking in worried and upset tones about everything—things like Government, elections, the price of food, their low pay or finding ah wuk in town. Myrna seemed content and, to my childish mind, happy, because she never spoke about those things. She was fascinated by the peeny-wallies blinking their bodies at night, would squeal (but never tell Mama) when Kirk and I chased her with a dead frog, would hitch up her skirt tail and run after Kirk and me, braying like a mule in one of our make-believe games, let me plait her hair with huge polka dot ribbons, and talk to my doll, Miss Amy, like she was a real person, too, even though Mama said that was foolishness.
Yuh mummy nice, I’d tell Kirk, and he’d shrug without saying anything, in the way boys his age did.
When I was around her, I didn’t have to be quiet or sit still or pull up my socks, keep on my shoes or stop my skirt from crushing up.
Sometimes, I felt I could tell her my secret.
When I nearly told her, we were by the field on the riverbank. On our backs on the grass by the guava tree, we were waiting for the clothes to dry on a makeshift clothesline she’d strung between two trees. I was proud that Myrna, after some cajoling, had allowed me to rinse a dress or two. I felt grown-up. Kirk was off in search of some marbles or a box we could stuff with newspaper to make a cricket ball to use with a dead tree branch as our bat. When I close my eyes, I can see it still: the blue-blue sky...the river grey like janga shrimp.
Miss Myrna, I began cautiously, what it mean when a man…my voice trailed off. I looked away at some goats gobbling bushes in the distance.
I took so long to continue she propped up her massive body on one elbow to face me and waited. Finally, when I said nothing, she urged me:
When a man do what?
Although she said the words softly, her voice had a stiffness and strained pitch I had never heard from her before.
I put my hands over my face. My mouth felt hot like when I ate freshly baked cornmeal pudding before it cooled. Gravel was on my tongue. I turned onto my belly and stroked a nearby shame-old-lady plant and watched its tiny leaves close one after the other to my touch.
I was sorry I had started but was unable to pull the words back in:
Touch yuh…yuh know there (I didn’t dare motion where) and mek yuh touch him?
Lawd Jesus! Her screech split the sky.
Tell mi ah who!
She was on her feet now, her huge body blocking out the sun. I wouldn’t say another word.
*
That was the year we got the new pastor, Parson Brown, an import from Kingston. He had long but knobby fingers, a sloping forehead and barracuda mouth, and he was always sweating. Parson Brown was constantly mopping his brow with an enormous red handkerchief and then sweating some more in an endless cycle of dampness. Plus, he permanently smelled like Vicks VapoRub. His teeth were a jackfruit-flesh yellow.
Parson Brown used to keep some children back after Sunday school for extra lessons. Not everyone, just the bright ones, and mainly boys. Kirk, who had his mother’s brains, was one of them.
When Kirk started to run behind the orange tree to hide rather than take off his shirt in one of our pretend games, even refusing to take it off when we went swimming in the river, I thought it strange. In a childish way, I instinctively knew something was amiss.
One time, I saw him rubbing his crotch and walking like he had something painful in his shorts. Another time we were playing hide-and-seek and I had grown tired of waiting for him to find me behind the chicken coop, so I sprang a sneak attack. When I touched him, he nearly jumped out of his skin. My friend was changing.
Wah wrong wid yuh?
When he told me, I promised not to tell. Parson Brown had warned Kirk that if he told anyone, Kirk would face certain hellfire, which we both knew, from Parson Brown’s sermons, was hotterthanhot, hotter than a little bit of oil splashing on your skin when sprats were frying.
His secret became my secret. His damnation was also mine.
*
So when Mount Myrna erupted, this time not in laughter but sheer anger, I still wasn’t talking. I would have rather drink bitter cerasee tea or bissy or rub Scotch bonnet peppers in my eyes.
I was dragged before my mother, who instantly went grey with panic when she saw the look on Myrna’s face.
TELL HAR WHO TROUBLE YUH! Myrna thundered at me.
I was afraid, because this was not the gentle Myrna I knew and loved. This was a strange fire roaring. I shrank under its blaze.
Myrna was huffing and puffing like a bull, and Mama’s eyes were wide as saucers.
My words were heavy boiled dumplings in my mouth. In a tumble of tears, I finally broke. The weight was too much. Thinking back on that moment now, I can see how I sagged under the bone-weariness of it all, and have sagged every time I’ve thought of it since.
My voice sounded like the ghost of something dead in my throat when I said:
Is Parson Brown. But is not wid me. Is Kirk.
*
What came next happened very fast. And it’s like a puzzle I don’t have all the pieces for.
I never saw it but I heard, we all did, and the story become more embellished in each
retelling.
What I do know is that on the verandah that day Myrna gave out a little moan, like a bird hit by a slingshot that falls to the grass with a thud. It was followed by a low mi poor pickney and then she disappeared in the direction of her house. Mama shouted to her retreating back that she would go to the police station right away and get my father to lock up Parson Brown so he wouldn’t be able to hurt one more child.
The only people there when it happened were Myrna and Parson Brown. But that didn’t stop everyone from giving detailed accounts of what Myrna did that day, including specific descriptions of:
—how she kicked down the manse door (she bring it right down with de force of one good
kick from har left foot and lose har slipper same time);
—how she, unblinkingly, hauled a napping Parson Brown up off the bed by his genitals (grab
him up rough, rough wid har right hand, and hang on pon him wid de cold machete blade
press pon him neck); and
—how no blood was spilled in the manse or on the church grounds (and this part was always
said solemnly—not one drop pon hallowed ground).
There were also explanations and commentary on Myrna’s mental state (is not true she crazy or mi know she did mad from long time).
There was speculation about the outcome and why Myrna never faced a single criminal charge: Constable Smith close the case ’cause dem nuh find Parson Brown body all now. Is drown him drown—she neva murder him; or Him get wey and swim downstream and go straight back to town.
The last thing seen of Parson Brown, according to one witness who swore she did see it wid har own two yeye, was him being dragged behind Myrna, naked as de day him born, in the direction of the river, like a heavy load of washing being brought there to be cleansed. Parson Brown was begging for mercy. Myrna responded with a snarl. Har face like ah mad dog.
Although I was not there, I could hear it from the verandah. Thundering across the valley. I ran into my room and put my head under the pillow. As long as I’m alive, I can still hear that sound.
