The Last Warner Woman by Kei Miller Read Free Book Online Page A

happen that one night she must have taken a long way, cause she come back pregnant. No shame in that. She was her own big woman after all. But who it was that did the breeding I cannot tell you, because I did not ever ask it of Pearline Portious, because she was not around to tell me.

A Night So Long in Coming
    I F YOU HAD BEEN AROUND BACK THEN IN 1941, YOU would not have spotted in Mother Lazarus the usual signs of fatigue. There were no droopy eyes, no sluggish movements, no yawns the size and decibel of a roar. She displayed no symptoms, and yet more than anything else Mother Lazarus wanted to sleep. She had not slept for eighty years.
    Her insomnia started at the age of ten when a traumatic event—to put it plainly, a rape—kept her wide awake for seven days straight. When Agatha did not return home one evening, her mother began to wail and wail, and the sound was like a siren over the cane. Every woman responded by pushing her man out of bed, if he hadn’t already risen by himself, and sent him toward the wailing to see what had happened. The men formed themselves into a search party and told Agatha’s mother to stay put, understanding even then that it would not be good for her to find her own child, see the possibly mangled and lifeless body and receive a shock great enough to send her to the grave as well.
    It was dawn when the men found Agatha. One man immediately vomited up the tea and bread he had eaten before setting out, for Agatha was lying in a pool of congealed blood and mud. Two men picked her up as gently as their calloused hands could manage. She didn’t make a sound, didn’t resist, and if it were not for her eyes that even then were wide open, and her chest, which continued to rise and fall, they would have believed her dead.
    They marched back to the wattle-and-daub house in which her mother waited. She saw the search party coming from afar and could make out the body of her daughter dangling from their arms. At first she pressed herself as deep into the house as she could, trying to slip into its shadows. “Lord Jesus!” She shouted, “Not mi daughter. Lord Jesus, take the case!”
    “Take heart, Mumma,” the men called back, “take heart. She is alive.”
    They had to say it a few more times before the words finally made sense. At last the mother lifted herself from the wall and ran toward the group. One man stepped out to block her. He held her in his arms.
    “Let me go. I need to see her. I need to know that she alive for true.”
    “Take heart, Mumma. We tell you that she is alive. But we find her in a bad bad way.”
    “Let me see her,” the mother cried, but she was shaking, her strength leaving her.
    “We find her in a bad way, Mumma. Her panty did tear off and fling to one side, and …”
    “Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me.”
    “Mumma, we have to tell you before you see her … I sorry. The whole of her pum-pum was out-a-door. We never did want to see the young girl like that at all, but that is how we find her. Mumma, don’t faint on we now. Keep strength and take heart. I tell you she is alive. But she in a bad way for true.”
    So it was, the little girl was delivered into her mother’s arms and for one whole week she did not blink. Her unfocused eyes made people think she was staring into another world; they worried that the child was looking at her own death and walking toward it. They tried to tempt her back to the land of the living through a number of ways: by the strategic placement of small mirrors all around her (what the obeah man had told them to do, advising them that the child needed to be surprised by her own reflection); by throwing red string in front of her, then drawing it away slowly (what the myal woman had told them to do, advising them that an evil spirit in the form of a cat had possessed the girl and needed to be lured out); by walking round the house seven times and banging a pot with a wooden spoon (what the old brother-man who lived in the