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

father, you see, was a master carpenter who couldn’t think. What should o’ stay up in his head sink down to his balls. Spend his whole life screwing and drinking. 110 acres — 110 acres o’ good grazing and farm land that my father inherited — the Vincentian government sold for unpaid taxes, while my mother and me was living hand to mouth. I is his only child. He married my mother only because she made me. I is the only child that come from all his screwing. All my mother got from him was me, a ring, and two-three weekly beatings. He spent only enough time at home to screw my mother or beat her when she refused to let him screw her. I was already some twenty years in Aruba when he got old and shaky. People used to write and beg me to send money to look after him. My mother was long dead from all the beatings and abuse and VD that he gave her. I never answered the letters. A fellow from home who worked with me at Largo use to keep me up to date with news ‘bout him. His mother used to send him news about everybody. We called him the San Nicholas Gazette. My father went to the poor home and die there and get a pauper’s burial. The way I feel about it is: how a body live so it must die. What you sows, Cynthia, is what you reaps .
    â€œEarly in my life, I watch everything my father did wrong. And was the same mistakes a lot of poor people make. They get married young while they still poor and have lots of children that make them poorer. I decide I ain’t getting married before I get rich, and I wasn’t going to full up women all over the place with children that I would have to turn my back on, and no rum shop will ever see my face. I stick close to the church. I stayed a altar boy until I go to Aruba and would o’ been one there too, but they didn’t have no Anglican Church. That didn’t stop me from going to church. I used to go to the Methodist.”
    I wanted to ask him how he satisfied his sexual needs, and did my utmost not to say: Kirton, you’re sure the only thing you did for Showalter was to cook for him? Kirton, you’re sure some of those shares in that portfolio didn’t come from Showalter for unmentionable services rendered?
    Zachary Kirton, (it should be spelt Curtain), Zachary Kirton, may you rest in peace. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes.
    APRIL 14, 1966
    I send Anna to the Anglican Sunday school because her father was Anglican. Yesterday, two days after her tenth birthday, she asked me why I don’t go to church. I think she sees all the well-to-do women in Havre doing the fashion parade every Sunday and is wondering why I’m not among them. “God is in my heart, child,” I told her. “All I have to do is look in there and I will find it.”
    â€œ It , Mama? How can you call God it ?”
    â€œ It, child. It. God is a force, an energy — like electricity — that makes some things work. It makes us kind, forgiving, generous; it makes us treat other people the way we want them to treat us.”
    Anna frowned. I saw she was puzzled, but she asked no further questions.
    DECEMBER 14, 1968
    For as long as I can remember I used to jot things down. Little poems. Feelings. I mpressions. How a grasshopper looked crouched on the ground. An orange-and-black butterfly spread out on a flower. The weaving and unweaving of the lace-frills of the waves breaking on the seashore. At puberty, it was the changes in my body and my feelings for boys. A lot later, just before Kirton asked for my hand, they were about Benjamin — the girls he was seeing, my torn feelings at 18 when I was sure that even though my body tingled and ached for his, I couldn’t marry him: nought plus nought is nought. Children and poverty don’t mix — one thing Kirton got right. The lives around me were open books. Tch! Tch! Cynthia. You read them and later forgot the lessons. My years with Kirton, I sneaked out of bed when his snoring started