Sibble-Sweet by Carol B. Duncan
3300 words, 16 minutes reading time
Issue 2 (Spring/Summer 2023)
Janine nudged open the slightly ajar door with her left toe, awkwardly balancing the tray with the milky tea, toast, and medication in one hand, as she sidled into the room. Her uncle lay with the overhead lights off, white cotton sheets drawn tight around his thin shoulders. The room was dimly illuminated by the nightlight near his bed and the pale-yellow line escaping from the bathroom. She stepped closer and put the tray down on the little table next to Uncle Vic’s bedside. Her hands shook as she was sure that this wasn’t her uncle lying there in the bed. This other person was someone, or something, pretending to be her uncle. It did a good job most of the time but there were weird skin pulls over bone instead of smiles. It grew new skin, wetted the backs of its eyelids, and licked its teeth in its sleep.
Only in a few framed photographs on the end tables, next to the chesterfield in the living room, did she see the uncle she knew. His handsome well-shaped head covered with thick, tight-wavy hair cut low by his favourite barber in the neighbourhood shared by Caribbean and Italian immigrants, in the central west borough in Toronto. He had his mother Nan-Nan’s mouth with the top lip thinner than the bottom and the same small even teeth with the space in the middle. His hair was parted on the left side from four years of age through all the decades of his life, even the ones in which cool, young black people wore their afros high. His dark eyebrows arched over large expressive black eyes and the same hawkish nose of some long-ago rumoured sailor great-grandfather.
That Uncle Vic she knew and remembered from his twenty-five years of annual visits home to Île Marie-Joséphine, beginning in 1963, for carnival with another Josephan, his man friend Hesket.
She was in infant school then and always looked forward to the toys and gifts that they brought, especially the Yankee dollar bill he would press into her hand with a conspiratorial whisper, “Doan tell nobody. Yuh mus’ always have a little something for yuhself, girl. Put this in yuh pocketbook.” And he would wink at her and straighten his lanky frame.
Uncle Vic was daddy-sent-by-God and Hesket uncle-sent-by-God, as her grandmother Nan-Nan told her. Vic’s older brother by two years, Monty, was her daddy and he had left for England with her mother, then his girlfriend, a few months after she was born. Neither parent ever returned, although they sent money whenever they could, leaving Janine to be raised by Nan-Nan and Poppy.
Everybody knew about, and didn’t know about, Vic and Hesket.
That’s how it was then, he explained to younger people, or anyone who asked, often with questions in their eyes. People didn’t really talk about those things in those days. Nan-Nan always knew who I was, and I was okay with her. That’s all that mattered. Poppy was another story. I kept quiet and kept out of his way as much as I could until I could leave. We had a truce. “You could do what you want in your own house when you come big man,” he would say, “but right now I am the only grown man in dis house.” I always knew who I was and who I wanted to become and that I would leave, not for England, but for America or any piece of it that would have me. Freedom.
Vic’s piece of freedom was not America but near to it. You could reach bits of America like Buffalo, Niagara Falls, Chicago or New York City by bus or train and then eventually by car and that was good enough for him. He and Hesket landed in Montreal for that first icy winter and then they ended up in Toronto where they stayed for the rest of their lives with few visits to any other Canadian locales besides neighbouring cities like Hamilton. They both agreed that if they could scrape together the money for travel through extra shifts or susu extra savings with other islanders, that they would go home-home.
Like other Caribbean people, carnival drew Vic and Hesket to the island and now he was pulling a piece of that home to him, right here, in his last days, like hard toffee painfully tugging at old dental fillings, in this old house in a central west neighbourhood that he and Hesket bought 25 years ago back in 1968. They did not explain anything to anyone.
If all-yuh want to think that we are thrifty bachelor roommates living together to save money and that we rented out rooms to other Josephan and newly arrived Caribbean migrants out of the goodness of our hearts, then go ahead. Everybody knew everybody in those days, he said to Janine offhandedly before drifting off.
He never specified which days were those days, but she had heard snatches of his stories in the house and whispers of gossip in her grandmother’s house and in the Josephan community in Toronto to know it was those days. Yes, the heady ones after the war when Josephans and other Caribbean migrants were in their late teens and early twenties, far away from home and far away from the watchful eyes of family, the community, and the church, and before times changed in the 1980s.
Is what I go do, thought Janine as she pressed pills into Uncle Vic’s hand. I have to stay here and see to him. But she was afraid of what was happening to her uncle and his changes, especially at night.
Her uncle’s face and voice grew strong at night-time when he went about his real work of moving between the walls of the house, feeding on its memories, and whispering bits of conversation from the past. She could hear him laughing softly and muttering old-time stories and singing old mas’ road marches as he passed her room door. Drunk and Disorderly and Fire, Fire in Meh Wire, Wire.
Good thing she put down the salt grains like her grandmother Nan-Nan taught her to do. No jumbie go pass over her doorway tonight. Any jumbie or wandering spirit would have to stop and count all those grains.They were compelled to do so, said Nan-Nan. It was their nature.
But was it a jumbie, a restless spirit, or Uncle Vic for true? How could he have no energy in the day and be up all night? Nan-Nan would say that people who stayed up all night bleachin’, who didn’t sleep when night come were haunted.
Like Nan-Nan and some of her cousins, Janine sometimes dreamt with her eyes open, and she could feel and walk and talk in her dreams as if she was awake. Nan-Nan would say, It felt so natural to me, and then she would tell Janine about running off the steep cliffs on the north side of the island, the ones where the British and French built defensive forts in centuries past. She ran with the full speed of her girl-self, but instead of plunging down bloody on the rocks into the Atlantic, she flew over the sea to see her sister in England. Sometimes Nan-Nan would greet her great-great grandmother born in 1807 when she entered a room or sat right there so-so in the chair next to where Janine happened to perch as she listened to Nan-Nan’s adventurous and often prophetic dreams.
The old ones didn’t die. Death was a door to another life: a life as an ancestor, watching out for their family. For instance, when Janine was still in infant school and long before scholarships, visas, and plenty government papers ushered in Janine’s dream of studying nursing, Nan-Nan received a message that the child—Janine—was to help heal the sick. And now look—Janine would soon start university to study nursing and look after her daddy-sent-by-God in exchange for room and board. That is prophecy right there, Nan-Nan said to those who doubted.
But Janine barely got to talk to Uncle Vic and practice her bedside manner since she arrived in Toronto a few weeks ago. He slept all day, every day.
“Uncle? Uncle Vic, you sleepin’? Look, I come to give you something to eat and drink to take this second dose.”
Uncle Vic barely stirred with a shrug of his shoulders. His voice surprisingly strong with an unmistakable rasp as he answered. “Eh-eh is already evening, Janine? I was dreaming, chile. I was home again and playing cricket at di recreation ground wid di fellas. We were a good side. Some of dem like your father end up trying out for di West Indies team an’ all and moving to England. Those were good days.”
“Yes, Uncle. Good days,” she responded, trying to stifle a sniffle that still escaped.
She hated the smell of what Nan-Nan called “sick.” Nan-Nan does use she nose for experiences and places that most people doan recognize by scent. For example, she does cuss her grandchildren and tell dem that dem smell of “outside” and that dem need to go and bathe. Outta order people that didn’t have good broughtupcy were “rank.” Well, somehow this uncle-thing managed to smell of “sick” and “outside” all at the same time and he was often ram goat “rank.”
“Come child,” his voice breaky-breaky as he turned slowly, the sheets twisting like thick doughy bread plaits once hard and now soft from soaking in water to make bread pudding, “Come and let me look at you so I can see my brother’s face again.”
Vic squinted, taking in Janine’s ironing comb-pressed black hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, her greenish light-brown eyes, and cocoa-tea with milk complexioned face. Save for the ponytail, he was looking at a young Monty. In the colour-conscious island society of the 1940s when he was growing up, his brother Monty’s hazel eyes were often talked about by some family members as if they were somehow special gifts doled out by arbitrary genetic gods selecting from their multitude of African and few European ancestors. Monty got “the eyes” and Vic got “the nose,” they would say even though he was “the dark one.” They both had “goodish” hair, meaning it grew abundantly in a wavy pattern rather than tight coils and this was good enough, as they were boys, and it was expected that their hair would be worn cut by the local barber. In Canada and England in the 1950s, both Monty and Vic quickly learned that shades of brown skin were “black” in the eyes of the wider metropolitan society. “Good hair” and “nice eyes” didn’t matter in the mother country and one of her dominions in the same way that they did on the island that they had left.
Janine broke the gaze, looking away to the full-length mirror standing in the corner of the room where her real uncle, once a dandy in his tailored pants and jackets with matching ties and pocket squares, posed before going to parties, church, the lodge, weddings, funerals, curry-cues, dinner and dance and all the social occasions that the small but vibrant community of Caribbean people had formed in foreign. He posed there, too, before heading out to the clubs with Hesket and di fellas and their football and cricket games in the park kitted out in his cricket whites and football team colours.
Eh-eh! Imagine that this uncle-thing kept all di man’s clothes including his coat for his job testing specimens. Each morning a pair of mothball and aftershave scented herringbone trousers were carefully draped over the antique clothes horse. It stood beside the huge mahogany dresser opposite the large bed where Uncle Vic folded himself up like a moth under his bedclothes and his mother’s quilt.
Hesket, who was a bookkeeper and a tailor’s son, made the trousers back in 1958 when they first came to Canada. Although Hesket was capable of making a whole garment from design to pattern making, cutting and construction, he used to make ends meet after his late-night shipping and receiving job stitching zippers and buttonholes in garment factories first in Montreal, and then after they had moved to Toronto, down on Spadina, in the city’s garment district. The wool herringbone fabric of the trousers kept Vic warm that first freezing winter. He wore them now as if Hesket was still here, alive, with his ready smile in his smooth, creamy, tan complexion. Hesket kept his tape measure draped across his broad shoulders that eventually withered to tiny wings.
“Well, chile,” said Uncle Vic, clearing his throat before confirming what she already knew, “it was only in the last year that I took sick. I lost Hesket two years ago. Quite a few in our circle of fellas had become sick. All I have left are memories and the clothes Hesket made for me beginning with that first pair of pants, the herringbone trousers.”
Although the trousers were now baggy woolen blankets on his sugarcane trash legs, they were spiritual vestments. Vic wore them on his nighttime trod when the stairs became the rocky path to the small beach near Nan-Nan’s back property where the small farm ended marked by the sibble-sweet orange trees. He could hear Hesket’s laugh just around the corner. If only he could catch up. His legs swaddled in fabric paced the hallways of the house chasing the sound.
Vic felt fortified somehow. After all, Hesket had put heart and soul into their making and when Vic wore them he felt the caress of the fabric on his legs like Hesket’s hands, and for a moment, the two of them were running through the sibble-sweet orange trees on Nan-Nan’s back property tasting the bitter-sweet citrus fruit in stolen kisses. They were in sixth form then and studying for exams, the success of which gained them entry to universities in Canada, pharmacy for Vic and history for Hesket.
Janine wondered, frail as he was, how Uncle Vic managed to get himself into the herringbone trousers at night for his nocturnal perambulations. On her first night in the house, from the first-floor landing, she saw the edge of the cuffs turn the corner on the second floor. Then, she heard Uncle Vic’s tremulous tenor voice singing Evenin’ time. Work is over now is evenin’ time. We deh walk pon mountain, deh walk pon mountain, deh walk pon mountain side. By the final chorus, she could hear the soft hum of a deeper baritone voice harmonizing. She threw the first grains of salt watching them hit the floor shortly after the duet.
Now she willed herself to lean in past the sick, the smell of outside and the rank.
Uncle Vic whispered, his voice now a rasp, “I goin’ for good soon, chile. Hesket waitin’ for me. We got work to do on the other side. Make sure they dress me in di herringbone trousers, eh. Everything goin’ be all right for you.”
In that special dreaming while she was awake, Janine saw Uncle Vic for a flicker just before he closed his eyes. She saw him as his true-true self, running free, his long, lean, dark brown legs kicking up after him as he navigated the mangrove near the edge of the little bay, at the bottom of the hill, where Hesket waited for him after school.