No Safeguards by H. Nigel Thomas Read Free Book Online Page A

don’t cackle.’
    Next Anna described Grama’s break-up with Bradley. Anna was 11. She’d gone to Kingstown to sit the entrance exam to high school and returned around 4 pm. There was a crowd in front of Grama’s house. A wall of women had their backs barricading the front door. Aunt Mercy broke away from them.
    â€œAunt Mercy told me not to come home,” Anna said. “She said: ‘Your stepfather almost kill your mother because she put his clothes in the road. He vex worse than a rattlesnake. Go and stay by me till I come. We getting ready to take your mother to the hospital. Somebody gone to get her friend Pembroke.’ At the time Pembroke, Father Henderson, and the Methodist minister owned the only cars in Havre.
    â€œAunt Mercy came home a little past midnight. ‘Your mother in the hospital. She been groaning and groaning. So when we feel your stepfather won’t attack her again, we take her to the clinic over in Esperance. The nurse look at her left arm that swell up fatter than me leg, and red! Red and swell-up can’t done. And the pain making her bawl. We carry she to Kingstown Hospital, and they keep her there.’”
    Next day Anna visited Grama in the hospital.
    â€œGrama couldn’t speak,” Anna said. “Couldn’t chew. Her lips were swollen and blue, like ‘jaw plums.’ For four days she sucked liquid food through a straw. When Grama was discharged, her lower arm in a cast, her face white like chalk, she went to the police station to file a case, but the sergeant told her: ‘The courts not concern with domestic comess. So you throw Bradley out. He can’t satisfy you or what? And he only break your arm!’
    â€œGrama consulted a lawyer. He said that short of killing her, Bradley could have done what he wanted to her. For $200 — Jay, that was a lot of money in 1967 — he wrote to Bradley, telling him that his wife had terminated the conjugal state as of May 11, 1967 and will soon be filing for a divorce, and he was prohibited from re-entering her premises. Something like that. Three days later Bradley broke every window in our house. Mr. Morris witnessed it and gave evidence, and Bradley spent a month in prison.”
    Anna grew silent for several seconds and stared thoughtfully out to sea. The wind had risen and the sea was rough and noisy. The gulls flying over it squawked loud.
    â€œMama was always particular about keeping documents. She kept a folder for everything and a daily journal. Peruse her papers. You will learn a lot about your grandmother. Unknown to her I used to read them over and over — until I got saved and realized it was a sin.”
    Two days later, I came upon the entry that I never wanted her to read and won’t let Paul read.

5
    A NNA’S STERTEROUS BREATHING brings me back to the present. For a moment my eyes rest on the beads of perspiration glistening on her forehead. I get up, take a tissue from the box on the night table, and dab her brow.
    Paul, where the hell are you? Why have you been doing this to us? Okay, so you’re punishing Ma. But me? I sit. My hands are cold but sweating, and sweat is trickling from my armpits.
    Anna’s breathing is now part gurgle, part whistling rattle. Each time she exhales I smell the acetone in her breath. She’s stewing internally. I lean forward and enclose her right hand in both of mine. It’s glacial and limp. In the dim blue light from the tiny bulb over the head of her bed, I watch her struggling body and want to comfort her, to sing her favourite hymn: “Jesus, Saviour, pilot me / O’er life’s dark tempestuous sea,” but know I’ll sob if I start. Those hymns, singing them at home — about the only thing Paul’s bullying didn’t stop her from doing. Paul, where are you? Why are you doing this to us?
    I let go of her hand and lean back into the chair, and my mind travels back to that trip that