2 February, 2025: He Said It

Featured & Cover 2 February 2025 He Said It

set in West End Village, Anguila, The United Kingdom

Father is standing with his younger brother, Smith, in the graveyard of their village, in front of the two gravestones of their parents. An emotion bubbling up inside of Father tells him that he wants to smile. His father and his mother are finally side by side, the tombstone for his father old and chipped, the one for his mother a fresh pewter, each word clearly legible, with a smiling stencil of her face over it.

Here lies Beverley Williams.

1934–2024

He loves seeing his mother and father enjoying a space together, despite it being in death. His father, he wasn’t the easiest man to be around. He liked to work a lot, and he liked to drink a lot, too. He said bad things about his kids, he hit his wife. He died when Father was just getting settled into his work in the city. His mother had to live a long time without a man, but life at home was peaceful because of it. Despite this history, Father’s mother felt like she was supposed to be buried next to him. It was just the way things were. Men married women. Women gave them kids. And women prayed as they withstood the drinking and bad habits of their husbands, sticking by their sides until the end. The only people who didn’t think this was normal were the ones around Son’s age, and those kids were thinking all sorts of thoughts unnatural to the islands. And his mother would never understand them, in this life or the other. She wanted to be next to her husband in the afterlife, and she got it, even if it took thirty years for it to happen.

So, there she is, there he is, and here are two of their sons, Father and Smith, standing side by side. It’s been a month since he returned to the West End for the funeral. He tries to visit his mother and father once every few days. Sometimes he comes with Smith, sometimes comes with Jeff, sometimes he comes with Uncle Vince, and sometimes he comes with a cousin or a niece or a random neighbour. It’s good to be back in the place where he was born and brought up. Although he does feel like his welcome is drying up. The relatives were polite to him during the first week, but these days they’re making their comments, wondering when he’s going back home to his three-story cottage in Mount Fortune.

Smith and Father’s eyes meet. Father wants to smile, and he wishes his muscles would move, but he’s emotionally drained. It’s been months since he has had a smile on his face. It just isn’t coming to him no matter how hard he tries. Both of their gazes drift downwards to the tombstones. Father doesn’t say much to Smith, but this is the familiar way of their relationship, and Father enjoys their walks together. Smith is an open guy compared to Jeff, who’s never been a real big brother, doesn’t even look Father in the eye unless there’s some alcohol in him and he wants to get a rise out of Father.

Mr Fancy Man is coming to get a look at how us village men live. Aya look wuk he walks like he coming from Spain. Look at the Mr Fancy Man. Is he remembering us and how we live?

What’s worse about the way Jeff talks is that the other uncles and cousins and nephews tend to agree with him. They take a good look at Father, get a little laugh, and agree with whatever Jeff says. They invite him to join in their little groups sitting on the benches or stoops enjoying their beers, but Father doesn’t like getting drunk, and he knows that they’ll take advantage of the alcohol to dig into him. He feels more comfortable going back to his room in his house to chat with his wife or one of the other relatives who live elsewhere and who have likewise returned to the village for the funeral.

Despite feeling somewhat isolated, Father isn’t ready to pack up and go back home yet. It’s because every time he walks past the one-storey homes around the street and the swaying palm trees beside them, he remembers being a boy in flip-flops doing the same. He looks at the gravestones and the tombs, and while it isn’t like he’s seeing their spirits, he is convinced that a part of him still resides here somewhere.

It’s his home, this village. It doesn’t matter how his relatives feel or the fact that he left many years ago. He was a loner as a boy, and he is a loner now. But he still belongs here.

Father doesn’t get the chance to see the graves of his loved ones or pay his respects over in Mount Fortune. And here they are, and will be forever—his mother and father. Two bodies buried in the dirt. His father is probably already a skeleton at this point. There would be more dust in his coffin than anything else. And his mother has been freshly laid to rest. Father remembers how hard the thick curls of the hair on her head became, how purple her feet were, and he breaks eye contact with the tombstone. He thought his emotions were dead, but there is that one gnawing anxiety, that all-consuming sadness, that very dark hole that would be so easy to drop into.

All he has to do is remember the face his mother made as the air gasped out of her and her life force heaved away.

‘Ayuh lawd,’ Smith suddenly exclaims. ‘Is that Mrs Willis ova der?’

Father doesn’t even remember who Mrs Willis is. He sees a bent-over black woman with large graying curls on her head scooting slowly over the pavement with her walker. She is moving incredibly slowly. It wouldn’t surprise him if she would soon be going to her deathbed.

‘She looks to be suffering from some acute back pain and some form of muscular atrophy,’ Father responds. ‘I wonder what medicines she is taking.’ He makes a mental list of the things they used at their hospital to treat palsy, and then he remembers he is talking to Smith, who barely pursued higher education, let alone medical school.

Smith interrupts Father’s thoughts and shouts, ‘Mrs Willis! Ya hearin? Mrs Willis!’

‘Stop,’ Father interjects. ‘I don’t remember her, and she probably won’t remember me.’

Smith keeps shouting, ‘Mrs Willis! Mrs Willis!’ The woman clearly cannot hear well. She continues ambling to her destination, a neighbouring house.

Though the yelling gets Smith nowhere, he continues to say, ‘Ya made the best Johnny cakes last week. They were good with the shrimp. They were good plain, too. We loved ya cooking. We have to invite ya over soon.’

Now he remembers those soggy fried snacks when he visited this random older woman’s house. They ate seafood fresh from the ocean. The smell of coconut was everywhere. So, that was Mrs Willis…and that was her home….

It is nice of Smith to engage with Mrs Willis like that, Father reflects. Smith was always that brother who went out of his way to do things for others. Back when they were kids, Father would sit at his desk at school, lost in his studies and homework. By the time he got back home, Jeff would have eaten almost all of the snacks that were prepared for them. They were hard to resist given how tasty they were—the jam balls were sour with tamarind but overly sweet from the sugary caking, an addictive contrast. But only Smith would keep some extras just for Father. Smith was always considerate, and that is probably why he is the one who has spent the most time with Father visiting the gravestones.

‘Thanks for taking the time to bring me here again,’ Father says to Smith. ‘You really take a lot of time out of your day for me. I appreciate it.’

Father’s words are genuine. They aren’t formalities. He means it. I energy around them changes. The breeze that is hitting them feels a bit cooler. The smell of dried grass lingers.

Smith’s eyes meet Father’s, but he keeps staring into him. Then he tells Father, ‘What happened to Mum…we know ya tried ya best when you took her to the city. We appreciate it. But we did our best for decades, too. We done did a good job when Mum still lived with us, and ya know it. I think ya should have let us keep trying. Ya gave up on us, and then Mum died, and that made us feel a certain way.’

Father’s face curls up. He turns to face Smith. Smith’s the polite one in the family, doesn’t express what he truly thinks that often, if ever at all. Father’s getting a real glimpse into his brother’s heart.

He has to handle it tenderly.

He tries at first to defuse the situation. He asks, ‘Are you angry at me?’

‘No,’ Smith responds. ‘Jeff says what he says cuz he’s angry. Uncle Vince and Dave are angry, too. The kids are angry because everyone else is. They don’t know better. And they love to mash. Everyone loves to mash. But I am not angry.’

Father observes Smith’s body language. He is composed. He speaks matter-of-factly, with no desire to hurt Father.

Despite knowing this, why is it that Father feels like he is being poked at?

‘I was doing what I thought was best. Just like when I used to send money back – ’

‘No, no no.’ Smith’s face, which appeared so peaceful, suddenly clenches. ‘I’m not saying sending money was bad. Ya sent ya money, that was good. We used the money, and we took care of her. You done much good. But it is more than money. We knew what else our mother needed.’

‘She is my mother, too.’

‘We lived with her. We knew her.’

‘I…’ The truth was that Father didn’t know her. The suburb where Father lived wasn’t that far off. It would only take him half an hour maximum to travel home, and yet he acted like he lived in Birmingham or Kent, thousands of kilometres away. He liked having his own family, his own job, his own network, and his own success away from his childhood home. His mother benefited from that—all of the relatives did—but they lived completely separate lives. So, yes, Father didn’t know what they were like. Father didn’t know what they were like at all.

Father takes a deep breath. It isn’t enough. He feels like someone has just punched the air out of him. He needs to breathe again. He knows he has to. He’s really lacking the air. He feels like he’s going to cry. But he doesn’t want to cry. He’s almost seventy. No one who’s a man on the islands cries, and in front of his younger brother of all people.

‘I did my best,’ Father says.

‘Ya did,’ Smith says.

‘It just wasn’t good enough.’

‘That’s not what I said.’

‘I want to go,’ Father says.

Smith stares at the tombstone. He mouths something, addressing the space beyond Father. His eyes are stuck in place, as are his feet.

Smith gets like this when he is tense. As a little boy, Smith didn’t talk much. Neither did Father. Even as adults, neither are particular social, and they like being that way. But as Father looks at Smith now, he wonders if they should have been there for each other more.

Ironically, this is the first time in their entire life that they are addressing each other so candidly, Father realises.

Here they are, standing, not saying a single thing to each other. Father tries to control his breathing. He has to make his heart rate go down, he has to let go of the tension in his nerves and muscles.

He feels like he ought to have so much more to say to his brother in response, and yet nothing is coming out.

All he wants to do is kick at the tombstone, angry at his father and mother. Angry at them for giving him so much responsibility, yet none of the ability to express its weight towards his loved ones.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

More Related Stories

-+=