Everyone remembered the good days and they wished for them to come back. John was one of those people. He wished them back mostly because he missed the card playing.
He had been twenty-five when the factory closed seven years ago. It hadn’t bothered him in the slightest when he heard the news. He was unable to foresee that it would have any effect on his life. He had already decided to remain in the village. Whether this decision was because of the giving up of dreams to settle for a tangible reality or just laziness was still unclear. Even to John himself.
He had just gotten a job as a janitor in the factory before it went out of operation. The people from DuPont Village he had worked with there were those he had known since childhood. The ones from outside DuPont Village he had worked with ignored him.
He hadn’t worried about getting a new job when he lost that one.
“Place getting dirty every day. And nobody want to clean because they don’t have time. I have work till the day somebody invent building that don’t need to clean,” he told his mother.
He didn’t foresee the end of cards. And he wasn’t aware of how important cards were to him. His addiction was still hidden to him then.
No matter how much you have of what you’re addicted to, it’s never enough. That probably is the most accurate definition of an addiction. When there’s a gap between the last fulfillment and the present, it can seem as though the next one will be enough. It isn’t so and it never is. But an addict’s mind doesn’t always make sense. Even when the addiction is something as relatively harmless as playing cards.
John was unemployed in the sense that he had no regular job. But he always had work. He was right that there was always somewhere dirty without anyone having the time to clean it. Sweeping yards and cleaning up dead grass after it had been cut were his major sources of income.
They weren’t his only sources because he was happy to do any task. Whenever people needed one more person to get a job done, he was there. If a roof needed to be erected, a gate welded, or anything else of that nature, John would be present. Usually without anyone asking or even telling him. It was as if he had a radar for small jobs.
He always tried to refuse payment for these jobs before eventually accepting. It had become just decorum and tradition that he tried to refuse the money. Everyone knew he had to be paid for helping, but no one would send him away if he came to help. Because how can a volunteer be sent away? And that was what he appeared to be. He always came in the guise of a volunteer.
There wasn’t work every day, and John spent a lot of time at his neighbor’s place doing nothing. In the shed with a galvanized iron roof, under two mango trees, John could be found in the hammock whenever he wasn’t doing work.
This shed wasn’t very much different from the shed in John’s own yard. In fact, the hammock made of rice sacks that Hamiz had installed was far less comfortable than John’s cloth one at home. But John never stayed home when he was idle. When he was younger his mother had always found work for him if she saw him with nothing to do. He had become far too old for his mother to still try or even want to find things to keep him occupied. But John still hadn’t realized that and consequently he could never relax at home. He always expected that if he started to relax, his relaxation would be broken at any moment.
Hamiz worked as a night watchman and was one of the few people who hadn’t lost their jobs at the sugar factory. Someone was needed to ensure no one stole the equipment or destroyed any out of spite. John hadn’t worked out if the equipment hadn’t been sold for lack of buyers or because no one had tried to sell it. Hamiz never woke up before 2:00, and John often had the entire morning to himself.
John’s best friend was Vishaal. They had never acknowledged it to be so and certainly never used the phrase “best friend,” which was a foreign term although not a foreign idea. Any foreigner would be able to see that they were best friends and call their friendship as such. But foreigners never came to DuPont Village.
Vishaal was younger than John. When the factory had closed down Vishaal was still in his final year of secondary school. The closing of the factory meant only that there was one less place to apply for a job. His exam grades had been unexceptional, so he entered a profession that was the refuge of those who are too smart to be menial laborers but unqualified for anything else. He became a primary school teacher.
Vishaal was regarded as a good primary school teacher. This wasn’t a reflection of his ability. Primary school teachers, when assessed, were judged by the pass rate of their students. But this applied to only the teachers who taught the final year. All the others were just assumed to be good unless it was obvious that they weren’t.
The primary school closed at 2:00 p.m. It had never been common for teachers to keep students for an hour after school to finish the curriculum or to get practice with the final exam format when Vishaal was still in school. Though it had become a common practice it was not something Vishaal would do as a teacher. He thought it to be a waste of his free time. However, he always said that it was because his students were so exceptional that extra time was unnecessary. Statements such as these made Vishaal a much-loved member of the community.
Vishaal liked cards, but he was not addicted to them in the way that John was. He liked playing cards and preferred playing cards to most other activities. But a lack of playing cards did not influence him. Vishaal was never physically sick from a lack of cards as John occasionally was. Sometimes John would not be able to move from the hammock because of fear of vomiting and numbness in his limbs. There was no other explanation to John other than the lack of card playing. But still, no one would play.
John could have played cards in other villages. DuPont Village was not an outlier in having changed drastically without the sugar industry, but the lack of card playing was not a direct consequence mirrored in other places. Wanting to play in his home village was what had stopped John from venturing to others, until he found himself saying he would not play in other villages until cards had come back to DuPont.
***
John and Vishaal could not play cards by themselves, even though they both wanted to play cards. On the island there was only one game to be played when people played cards, and it needed four people to play in teams of two. Whether the name of the game, all-fours, was related to the amount of people needed to play it was unclear. Most people assumed it to be, but no one could confirm it.
“No one plays cards anymore. We don’t have time for that.”
This was the reply given to Vishaal and John on the few occasions they felt confident enough to attempt to start a game. Even if they managed to find one person, they were never able to find the necessary fourth. Hafiz did not play, saying cards were against his religion, even though no gambling was involved.
No one plays cards anymore wasn’t an entirely true sentence, though. Cards were played. No one plays cards of their own volition anymore would be the correct sentence. There is an occasion where cards must be played and where there are no excuses that can be made: at a wake when someone has died.
This was why John had waited so long without thinking about doing anything drastic. DuPont Village had an old population. John was waiting for someone to die to play cards. He never said it out loud, never even let the thought become a fully formed idea in his mind. But it was why he waited. After six years of waiting, addiction had strained his mind. He had started thinking of the DuPont villagers as immortal.
“When last it had funeral around here?” John said.
“Long time now. Last one I remember was when I was in school still,” Vishaal replied.
They were in the shed in Hamiz’s yard. It was 12:30 p.m. on Friday. Primary schools did not have classes after lunchtime on a Friday. The children were allowed to play cricket, football, or anything else they wanted (it was usually cricket in DuPont Village). This only required a few teachers to supervise, and Vishaal wasn’t on the schedule to supervise for another month.
“I real need to go a wake. I don’t want nobody to dead. But wake is the only way I getting to play cards, I feel,” John said.
“You feel we should go in a next village for a game?” Vishaal asked.
“Nah man. It doesn’t be the same like here.”
The cards were weighing heavily on John’s mind. Even more than usual. There was nothing else to distract him. A few months earlier everyone had stopped building or fixing things. There was only so much need for new things, and John’s repairs were normally quite good. After a gate was mended or window fitted, it never needed fixing again.
With too much time for thinking, wakes were ever-present in John’s mind. Not the death aspect, the dead body that precedes a wake, or the funeral that follows it. He had not thought of the grief and expense of a funeral. All he fixated on was playing cards.
“Cards is cards. Anywhere is the same thing,” Vishaal said.
“If it was so I was going in a different wake every night. And join all the bar tournament in the country,” John said.
Vishaal was thinking only of cards, but John was thinking of the past. To him the playing of cards was a link to the past and to play cards again would be to bring back the past. As much as could be brought back, that is. John didn’t care about cards for their sake but for the entire culture that came with the card playing. He was sure that if everyone started playing again then things would revert to like before.
It was a common want to connect with the past and to stay connected to it. It was why Hafiz still worked as a watchman in the factory, even though he could have gotten a job as a watchman at the hardware that was closer to home and paid the same. It was why the sugar factory workers still did welding and machining voluntarily when and where they could. It was not to keep themselves sharp, as they said, but for familiarity. Because after thirty years of working at a skill, there is nothing that can cause you to forget it.
“You remember Jit? He son living in the white house behind the bar,” John said
“Yeah, I know where. He son older than me. I can’t really remember Jit. He dead when I was young,” Vishaal said.
“If you don’t know he, then you wouldn’t know he have a brother.”
“Nah. I didn’t know. I doesn’t even talk to he son and we went the same primary school and secondary school,” Vishaal said. “I can’t even remember he name. Even up till he was in secondary school people was still calling him ‘Jit son.’ He was in a higher form, so I never see he plenty.”
“He name Ishant but that don’t really matter. Jit brother living in Canada. Since before Jit son born. Them don’t really talk again though. Family have some quarrel over something,” John said.
“Alright. But why we talking about them for?”
“Jit brother, he name Suresh, didn’t fall out with everybody. He does still talk to my mother. And he always does say when he dead he want he funeral down here. Because in Canada people can’t get cremate out in the open by the river.”
“He dead?” Vishaal asked.
“No. But is we, me and my mother, who he tell to bring him down when he dead. Not he family. So if I say he dead, then it come like he dead. Even if he living,” John said.
“So bad you want to play cards?”
“It go do good for everybody to come in one place again. Instead of sit down alone in they own house every day. Is like the village have no life again.”
John truly believed the resulting necessary preparations for a funeral when killing someone off, at least only in the mind of the village, would be beneficial. He was convinced that a wake, and nothing else, was the answer to the fragmentation of the village. He was old enough to remember the days of the sugar factory but too young to realize that they were not as idyllic as he remembered.
“But when people realize he not dead we go have real trouble to deal with,” Vishaal said.
Vishal could still see the potential for things to go wrong. He could not see very many ways for anything to go right. But he had belief in John, and it was a belief that almost bordered on blind faith. Whatever John proposed he would always agree to, after John had done the requisite pleading.
“By that time things go be nice. All we have to do is wait for them to realize that. They go come and shake we hand after that,” John said “They wouldn’t take on the man still living. Who go be vex that a man not dead? That is thing to be happy about.”
“So how we doing this?” Vishaal asked.
He had resigned himself to the fact that it was going to happen. It was better to be in on it, so that he wouldn’t be caught off guard like everyone else would be, to what was real and what was fabrication.
“I really can’t tell you yet. I go check you in the evening. I go have some kind of plan by then,” John said.
He was already formulating a plan. The first thing that was necessary for the plan to be successful was that his mother be involved. But she had to think that it was all real.
***
John’s mother was called Debbie. It wasn’t her real name. Her birth name was Maureen Garcia. But no one in DuPont Village knew that, not even John. Even to her that name was little more than a memory and a link to the past. Everyone who knew her by that name were no more than memories, like the name itself.
Debbie was already forty when she had John. Other people in their sixties had multiple great-grandchildren and perhaps even a great-great-grandchild would not be far away for some. But she still waited to see her first grandchild or to see her son get married. But it was not a pressing worry anymore, as it had been.
Age had calmed her over the last few years. It had taken some of the intensity from her. John would get married in his own time to his own choice. Although she had not resigned herself to the fact there was nothing she could do about it, she knew she saw only the same places with people who never changed. She would never meet a young woman if she stuck to her daily routine. So she left it up to John. She wasn’t aware that John also would never meet an unmarried woman if he stuck to his daily routine.
Debbie had become absentminded with the passing of years. It was only a slight change. Her opportunity to display her brain activity was already limited so any drop would not be noticed quickly, if at all. It was still mainly little things what she forgot, such as whether she had put salt in the food or turning off the lights before she went upstairs. She never used the term senility. She called it old age, and by using that same name, the explanation of why forgetting never bothered her was clear.
John knew he could tell his mother that she already knew Suresh had died, and she would believe him because she was adamant about keeping up the pretense that she was unaffected by old age. Though she claimed forgetting was normal with age she also liked to pretend she was less afflicted. She was also inclined to believe everything John said because she saw so little of him. She felt as though he didn’t need her and was glad to hear anything from him.
John walked through the front door. Debbie was in the living room sitting at the sewing machine. She was not sewing. Almost no one wore clothes that were not factory made anymore. All the work she was able to get came from altering the hemlines of pants for school uniforms or making blouses to wear with saris. But she still sat at the sewing machine. After so many years her body had become contoured to the chair. The view out of the frosted glass windows had become familiar to her. She could still see through the overgrown grass to the side of the next house. The view was not really comforting. It was the familiarity that was soothing.
“What we doing about Suresh? We have to start making arrangements,” John said.
“Arrangements for what? He coming back?” Debbie said.
“He coming back when we arrange it. I thought you was organizing things all this time,” John said.
“What you really talking about?” Debbie asked.
“We have to arrange the funeral. And organize wake. And bring the body,” John said. “I can’t do everything. I don’t know how these things does work.”
“Funeral? Suresh dead. When he dead?” Debbie said.
“But you tell me that. Right after you come off the phone,” John said.
Debbie became confused. She had no recollection of the subject. But she forgot things more often now and John seemed completely certain. If she said she could not remember, he might be able to guess her mind was failing. Older people were being put in homes all the time, with their own pensions paying for the relocation. She had no intention of leaving DuPont Village.
She genuinely feared that he would put her in an old age home, as two women she knew from the village had been placed by their sons.
“I was busy. That is how I come to forget. But now is time to deal with that. You have to deal with he family in Canada and get him here to cremate,” Debbie said.
“I go get on it right now. But we have to tell the family who here. They go have to have a wake tonight,” John said.
John was focused on the wake. Lying and deceit could take care of everything but the wake. The wake had to be real. It needed to happen. Everything important to him was dependent on it.
“Don’t worry about that. I go organize that now. All I need you to do is call and make sure the arrangements for he to come down in order,” Debbie said. “Then tell me how long it go be for he to reach. I going by Jit son now.”
“I go deal with that call now,” John said.
Debbie slowly got up from the chair. She needed to change before she went to talk to Ishant. She needed to wear her somber dress of dark grey and black. It was the only dress she had that was appropriate for delivering bad news.
A funeral was a process. It was a process that was the same as for a celebration, but it was a celebration of which the centerpiece was sorrow and not joy. The negation of mourning was found in the ritual. The mourning was drowned in the work necessary for the funeral. These rituals required so much work that no lengthy periods of time for grieving remained. The only reason the rituals had survived for hundreds of years was because of the success at keeping people separate from the encompassing grief that comes with death.
John left the room and walked into the back yard. All he needed to do was to wait. This was perfect because this was also as far as he had thought out. There was nothing on his mind except the wake.
***
John sat on a brick in the shade of a breadfruit tree. He was wondering if there was any way that his mother could find out what was really going on. She was the only one who would even have a chance to. But she couldn’t call because she couldn’t use the phone to dial long distance numbers. It was something he always did for her. She didn’t even have the number for Suresh. If she wasn’t home, she couldn’t answer the phone in case a call came. And there was a lot to keep her busy out of the house. Everything seemed to be in order.
It was after 6:00. John went back to the shed in Hafiz’s yard to tell Vishaal what was happening. Vishaal was still in the hammock.
“Wake tonight. By Jit son place,” John said.
“So fast? Just this afternoon we sit down here planning.”
“I tell you it wouldn’t be difficult,” John said, “All we have to do is go and change and go back for 7:00. And then we could play cards.”
Vishaal leaned back in the hammock. He had been there all the time since John had left. John hadn’t said what time he would be back, and Vishaal had been waiting. Not with anxiety but with boredom. He hadn’t really expected John to do anything, and at most he thought John would have a plan and nothing else. The actuality of a wake and the realization that John had gone ahead with a sudden and only semi-thought-out idea was a great surprise. Vishaal didn’t appreciate the ideas of idle talk becoming reality. It interfered with his sense of what was possible.
“Best I go home and bathe and change,” Vishaal said.
“Meet me there around 7:00,” John said.
Shastri Sookdeo was raised in Trinidad and Tobago and currently lives in Rotterdam. His fiction has appeared in the literary magazines Saltfront, Moko, and the Caribbean Writer.