Truths yet to be known, that:
If the dead can indeed wake up, there’s only one safe way to rouse them. Before their grave, light one (1) soft, drippy red candle. The dead will stir, sluggish, cantankerous, the scent like hands running through their sleepy scalps. Bow three times in greeting. Lay down your gifts: crispy fried pork, cups of pale tea, sliced oranges to cleanse the palate. White rum is welcomed. And of course, money—not the monies of everyday commerce, but neon-bright cash certified by the Bank of Paradise. Do not question how currency for the afterlife is produced and sold by your cousin’s pharmacy down the road. Instead, be grateful that a suitcase of money from the Bank of Paradise costs less than your box-lunch. Burn said banknotes and scatter the ashes. Kneel down. Say your prayers. Beg for mercy. The ancestors may not answer you. There is always the risk that no one is listening. But the uncertainty itself holds a portion of divinity — that the dead may still find life within the crevices of your doubt.
Waltham Park, St. Andrew, Jamaica
Gah San Day, 10 April 2004
Joseph Tibbs, second generation caretaker of the Waltham Park Historical Chinese Cemetery, picks his way through the graves and family mausoleums. A bag of oranges swings by his side. His feet move on their own, following some primal memory of early morning light, of his young feet following his father, Albert — the first generation caretaker of the Waltham Park Historical Chinese Cemetery.
Overnight, the thick brush he cleared yesterday has returned, scattering dead leaves across the gravestones. Joseph will tend to them. But first things first. He squats beside the flat cement headstone of Georgie Leung. The black wrought iron fence that surrounded George’s headstone is long gone, stolen for scrap metal. Joseph wipes away the fallen leaves and picks at the dirt, until inky black characters appear beneath.
“Morning,” says Joseph. He takes out an orange and his father’s knife, slicing through the fruit’s soft navel. Exposed pulp looks up at him in perfect quarters, ready for teeth. He cuts open two more and lays them out on the concrete slab, pulpy insides facing the sky.
Joseph sighs. His father Albert told him tales of when the cemetery was awake, how nightly its occupants came scratching at the door of the caretaker’s house, rattling mahjong tiles. And he beat every last one of them, Albert would boast. Albert Tibbs, best mahjong man of Waltham Park Historical Chinese Cemetery. His father said many things.
But Joseph is an old man now. He needs to call those boys from down the road to help clear the bush before family members come for Gah San, this day of the dead, the annual bargaining with the ancestors. The few descendants that still come will pick through the mud, counting headstones, wondering if their great-grandpa was buried one or two graves behind the fat stone cherub squatting over Mr. Wong from Spanish Town. And Joseph will say yes indeed, he believes so, though unfortunately there are no stone angels anymore. On cue, these descendants will stop and gaze with shock across the yard and its muddy paths and its absent grills and the absent headstones, ripped away like buds from their stems by thieves.
This is the final death, when a graveyard dies.
But not yet. For now Joseph enjoys this quiet, the chill of this mostly intact concrete slab radiating up his arm. So he does not see the muddy hump rise just two graves beyond. At first just a lump of wet earth, inching its way towards him. Then the mound of mud arches its back, raising a muddy face and a dark chasm where a mouth should be, growing wider and wider until soft breath echoes through, rustling the leaves across Georgie Leung’s headstone.
“Dad,” the body says, collapsing, limps outstretched and beckoning. Joseph rushes to the body and wipes away the mud. The young bruised face of his first and only son, Donovan Tibbs, looks back at him, eyes closed, breathing shallow. One broken arm lops to one side. Mud trails behind him, and something else. Blood, thinks Joseph. Joseph scrapes away at the mud coating his one and only son’s big head, which he has not seen for so long. Blood clots in a hard gash above Donovan’s ear. But this is not enough to bleed out the blood congealing along a trail that runs down the end of the graveyard, where the oldest graves lie, their fine marble headstones long stolen—except the lone and miraculous, fine-veined marble of graveyard patriarch, Pa-Kung Leung.
Truths yet to be known, that:
2. The price for black market marble is now up 10 percent, as in these wet months the illicit rich find pleasure in the chill of ill-gotten marble beneath their fingertips.
3. On the 2nd of April, 1912, when Pa-Kung Leung was buried in the very first plot of this newly christened Waltham Park Chinese Cemetery, his wife May Leung and his mistress Hyacinth Tibbs stood watching on opposite sides of the grave pit. They did not look at each other. Instead they clenched their babies tight to their chests (George Leung and Alfred Tibbs, respectively). They ignored the whispers. They ignore the elders muttering why the hell did Pa-Kung wished to be buried here once and for all, with this dumb priest mourning the uttering soft words into the earth, when we should have buried him the old Hakka way? Clean and keep his bones in a clay urn, until we were ready to leave again, carrying our brood and our dead on our backs as in olden days? Because even in these modern times, no Hakka should have a home but in the wind in our ears as we seek new lands.
Instead the elders sighed, as their brethren Pa-Kung disappeared under the fine slab of Italian marble he secured before his death—white with the palest veins of pink. Meanwhile:
4. On this same dark night, Georgie Leung’s widow, “Pao Pao” Joyce Leung sits downstairs, anxious, her whole body trembling like cow foot jelly not quite set. She cracks the window. The rain slips in as she blows out her cigarette smoke through the security grill, so her son Paulie will not smell its scent. He constantly ignores her perfect logic that if said smoking has not killed her in these 87 years, then some other fate awaits her.
And besides, she tells him, it was his father Georgie who taught her to smoke so long ago, crisp in his starched Royal Air Force uniform, leaning in the doorway of the Leung family shop on Princess Street. Young Pao Pao had obliged his offer for a drag, sucking in the first wisps down her throat, ignoring the passersby eying her. It was 1945. The war was over and the whole world waited for her. And her journey could begin here, smoking in the doorway with an airman, wind still humming in his ears. This Georgie was going places. That’s why she smokes, she tells Paulie—to remember the husband gone off to paradise, leaving her behind.
Pao Pao does not tell her son the truth. And good old Georgie Leung died not knowing that Pao Pao had in fact smoked her first cigarette years before, crouched on a cool headstone smoking with the best mahjong man of Waltham Park Historical Chinese Cemetery. Albert Tibbs, the boy-man who played mahjong with ghosts — a man who knew exactly where he wanted to be buried.
But never mind that. Secrets are for burying. And she’s not dead yet. But still the feeling of weak-kneed jelly persists. Because somewhere in the rain waits her only grandson Michael, looking for sleep.
Unnamed bar down the road from Historical Chinese Cemetery, St. Andrew, Jamaica
Night before Gah San Day, 9 April 2004
Now let us meet Pa-Kung’s great-grand baby boy Michael Leung, son of Paulie Leung, grandson of Georgie Leung, etc. This scrawny man sits in the White House Bar and Lounge off Waltham Park Road, waiting for someone to come in and kill him. He must look for someone watching him. This will be the man who will emerge from the dark to put a bullet in his head. And the bartender won’t even blink, thinks Michael. He will only kiss his teeth and cuss about that Pepsi-drinking wretch who got himself shot and bled all over his nice bar.
Because nobody gives a shit about him, thinks Michael. He cannot run to anyone for help, not even to his family living in their quiet, gated townhouse complex. Although sometimes when he scores a hit uptown, he climbs over the gates and taps as quietly as he can on the glass window panes of his home, for it is the only sound in the world that makes his head not ache so.
But forget that, thinks Michael. He must keep surveillance for watchful eyes. But everybody watches him. Some staring in stark bafflement, others in sly, sideway glances at the ragged Chinese man with mad hair, sitting at the bar drinking a Pepsi Cola, because Michael has never drank alcohol a day in his life and, despite the crack coke addiction, he was not going to start now. Even though his hands shake, rattling the ice in his glass. But for now he must hide in this old bar for old men or be hunted down by his dealer for the pittance he owes him. A miniscule debt, thinks Michael. Not nearly enough to treat him so. To threaten to blow his brains out and, just for fun, to break through the lovely windowpanes of the Leung family home and crack skulls.
Michael is imagining the prospect of his dealer bashing into his Pao Pao’s head, when he hears someone plop down on the barstool beside him. It is a man tall and slim like himself, but strong with the muscles of work. The grit of cement dust lingers in the crevices of his nail beds as he calls to the bartender for a Heineken. The man takes one long, deep gulp from the green bottle, oblivious to anything else. Or so he would want him to think, thinks Michael. This Heineken drinking fool thinks he can just play innocent, guzzle his beer and wait until Michael is not looking.
Michael has just about decided to slam his empty Pepsi Cola bottle on this man’s head when the man comes up for air and, in the flicker of light from the TV playing the afternoon’s horse races, Michael sees the soft lines of a ghost trip across the strange man’s face.
He remembers in fragments. The hot white light of noon, racing each other through the old cemetery. Him igniting his father’s lighter for the first time as the other boy runs the edges of the paper money (verified by the Bank of Paradise) through a razor flame. Them both watching as the fire eats away the paper, daring each other to hold on to the burning money for longer and longer and longer until they can’t, until nothing is left but ashes and air.
“Donovan,” says Michael to the man beside him.
Donovan Tibbs looks at the skinny man calling his name. He is about to tell this cokehead to bugger off when he sees the same flash of light: white noon, razor flame, a torch of fire and paper money burning in his hands.
“Michael?” he asks. “Shit.”
They take a table in the corner of the bar, away from the old men (although the bartender watches, coyly peering through the crowd). They hunch over each other, guarding the air around them. Under the table Michael’s feet quivers, tap, tap. All Michael knows, right down to his bones, to his palpitating phalanges, that Donovan will save him. Donovan Tibbs, the childhood playmate whose father and grandfather watched over the Leung family graves—the plain cement gravestone of Grandpa Georgie, and the genuine Italian marble of Pa-Kung Leung. When they were young, little Michael and little Donovan would gaze at the miraculous marble’s pristine surface, dense and unscathed by nature or headstone graverobbers.
“What would they do with the marble if they got to steal it?” Little Michael had asked little Donovan.
“Anything they want,” little Donovan had said. Because anything is for sale when your poor constituency has become a gang battleground. When guns were needed and real marble was precious. Especially marble like this one, with its pink veins that seemed to pulse in the flickering light of fake cash burning away, the gift withering into ash and smoke that crawled skywards to their intended recipients
“Why a dead man need money in heaven, anyways?” little Donovan had asked.
“So they don’t have to beg in paradise.”
“So how Black people manage?” But Donovan hadn’t asked that one aloud. Instead he thought of his ancestors, those no names lurking beyond his Grandpa Alfred. Where were they buried? Who tended to their graves? Were they alone, abandoned, standing at the crossroads of eternity, washing already pristine, transcendental windshields for some patty money?
But no, that time of childhood is gone. Donovan says he is a father now. Of a little baby girl. He shows Michael a picture of the baby smiling, gummy mouth wide, eyes crinkled in laugher. And there again is the ghost, though Michael can’t place it.
But the baby is so colicky, says Donovan. And though he’s a mason, construction work has dried up bad.
“I wonder though,” mutters Michael. “How much marble is now?” He takes another sip of his third Pepsi, hands shaking. “Italian marble.”
And there again a flash of light before them both. White noon, razor flame. A bed of marble, hard white, with delicate pink vessels miraculously unbruised by time.
Truths yet to be known, that:
5. In Kingston 1911, both Mrs. Pa-Kung Leung and Hyacinth Tibbs gave birth to baby boys, Georgie Leung and Albert Tibbs respectively, precisely three months apart. They were both a respectable and identical six pounds. Before his death, Pa-Kung Leung was present at the birth of both his sons (held in separate houses, in separate constituencies of Kingston). Pa-Kung had held each son in his arms, beaming with a love unbearable at their faces, and thought, shit. They both look like me. One Black, one Chinese. But there in their sleeping faces was the ghost of him, swooping down their foreheads and eyes, curling along their cheeks and down their tiny wet mouths.
Waltham Park, St. Andrew, Jamaica
In the early hours of Gah San Day, 10 April 2004
Donavon Tibbs is not terribly sure he can smoothly extract the entire marble slab from the grave. Likely the marble is sealed tightly to its cement enclosure, protecting the body below. And since neurotic marble cracks at the slightest suggestion of electronic vibration, he will need to go old school. Perhaps scoring the edges first with a utility knife, then running a chipping hammer along the grout. A heavy wire would follow, sawing through the ancient seal. The process may take several nights working quietly in the dark, in an effort to not wake his father, Joseph Tibbs, still sleeping in the caretaker house at the end of the graveyard.
He tells Michael these facts when they arrive at the gates of the cemetery. But he is not sure Michael is listening to him. Michael nods yes, yes, of course. His whole body vibrates with affirmations. Oh shit. He’s high, thinks Donovan as they both climb over the fence surrounding the cemetery. Not for the first time tonight, he thinks of turning back, going straight home to his wife and bawling baby.
They both land softly on the ground, narrowly missing a headless angel. Much of the bramble has been cleared away to the sides. He can see the tiny family mausoleums and gray markers clearly through the dark. He whispers to Michael to wait, but Michael bursts ahead, hopping over gravestones.
“Michael,” calls Donovan a bit too loudly.
“What!”
“You know where you going?”
Michael stops shaking for a moment to let out a huge belly laugh that buckles his knees. He sinks to the ground.
“Don’t have a clue,” he whispers finally. He has lost so much weight, thinks Donovan.
“Come,” he says, pulling him up. “This way.” And sure enough Donovan’s feet find its path, remembering the early morning march following his father Joseph and grandfather Albert to the miraculous marble headstone of Pa-Kung Leung, untouched by thieves. At night little Donovan would lie awake, waiting for the thieves to come with their hushed feet and quick hands hauling away pounds of stone and metal. Growing up in a cemetery, he knew not to believe in ghosts (tall tales at best told by Grandpa Albert). But the night thieves had frightened him – these goblins with hammers and chisels. In his childhood dreams he would see them hover over him, faceless bodies with thick hands clenching hammers, waiting for him to wake up.
So every dawn he would run to check Pa-Kung Leung’s headstone, impermeable to these night goblins. And every Sunday he did his duty, scrubbing the blush marble. And little Donovan would ask Grandpa Albert, why this one? Why did this stone remain so unweathered and untouched, while others so easily got taken? And Grandpa Albert would press little Donovan’s chubby fingers against the marble’s tender pink veins, pink as mice’s tails, and tell him that the gravestone of Pa-Kung Leung kept strong because he was waiting for us, his grandbabies and his great grandbabies to come sit with him – to scrub him clean, to feed him rum and play mahjong. And little Donovan would smile and swallow this story whole — that his mother was wrong, that they were not a long line of stupid men obsessed with a graveyard.
When they buried Albert Tibbs, only Donovan and Joseph had attended. They buried him by the caretaker’s house, his body turned west to watch the cemetery’s entrance. And as Donovan watched his grandfather sink into the dirt, he asked his father if Albert’s stories were true. Were they related to these Leungs scattered across the graveyard? His father had shrugged. Grandpa, Joseph told him, said a lot of things. And Donovan looked out at the dying graveyard with its broken stones and bodies neglected by their own blood and thought, what the fuck? Why the hell have we stayed here so long? Where are our ancestors, the black ones, the self-evident, bare-skinned ones that need no witnesses? Don’t they need a little grave scrubbing? A little pocket money for paradise? And his dad had stared at his one and only boy. And after a long silence between them he smiled and said, “a good man has many fathers.”
But Donovan was sixteen then, and that wasn’t nearly good enough. But somehow here he is now, his feet carrying him and Michael to the end of the graveyard, to the final resting place of Pa-Kung Leung.
“This is it then,” says Michael. They both stop and watch the marble’s seamless surface. Marble, says Donovan, is actually not meant to last this well outside. Granite is a better material. But somehow this stone remains impenetrable to grief.
Michael crouches down, running a finger along the lettering.
“You sure this is the one?” asks Michael.
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“You know,” says Michael, chucking softly. “I never learned how to read this stuff. Always skipped the class.”
“It says he’s from the Guangdong province. Born 1875. Has one son.”
“Just the one?”
“Yeah.”
“You can read this stuff?”
“I don’t need to.” Donovan takes out his scoring knife and paces around Michael and the grave, searching for seams. He tries not to think about those Sundays spent scrubbing and polishing the marble, how the surface shone underneath his fingers. He scrapes the knife against the cement frame.
“I can’t get it out whole,” he says. Michael looks up at him. His vibrations, Donovan notices, have quieted.
“What?”
“We’ve got to break it up and take out the pieces.” He takes out his hammer and chisel.
“What? Shit. Won’t it ruin it?”
“There’s no way around it,” says Donovan. “We can sell it off in bits.”
This is what he must do. He must chip away at a low angle, let the chisel’s edge scrape right through the marble, white with faint pink veins, pulsing. Are they pulsing now, these fine pink vessels, right under the surface? Warm and throbbing underneath his splayed fingers? Was that dew, or was that sweat, salty and leaking through the stone’s miniscule pores?
They stand there for too long, Donovan poised over the stone, Michael standing behind him.
A fine breeze whispers over their heads, like fingers across their scalps.
“Don’t do it,” Michael says softly, suddenly. Surprising himself.
“No, I won’t.” He drops the chisel to the ground.
They do not look at each other. Instead they stand quiet, watch the marble, the elusive marks declaring the final resting place of Pa-Kung Leung, in a land so far away from his birth. Rain begins to fall, settling into the black letters.
“Hey, Chiney,” says a voice behind them. They both turn around. They both promptly receive concussions as two cricket bats swing for their heads.
Just before Michael passes out, he sees the face of his attacker—that damn bartender from the White House Bar and Lounge. “I hate bartenders,” thinks Michael. Further articulations of scorn fade, however, as the drug-withdrawal hum within Michael’s ear drums give way to some other rhythm, like rain on window panes, pulsing beneath the grave dirt beneath his cheek. Sleep waits for him, the kind of long, sweet sleep where food waits for you on the other side.
Just before Donovan passes out, from the corner of his eye he sees a Chinese man emerge from the dark rain, walking up behind the fugly bartender standing over him. The Chinese man wears a bush jacket of the palest blue and a straw panama hat. He feels familiar. The man seems to smile at him, pressing his index finger over his month in the universal sign of “keep quiet while I fuck this guy over.” And before Donovan loses consciousness he thinks — boy, that man looks just like me.
Truths yet to be known, that:
6. Traditionally, when news comes from a faraway land about the birth of a new boy, the Hakka elders gather, beating drums and cymbals in a riot of song seeking not melody but sheer volume, abrasive enough to penetrate Paradise, waking the ancestors and pissing them off. But who can complain for long? Not when a new child has come into the fold, new blood to keep roaming the earth.
7. Still sleepless on Gah San Day, 10th of April 2004, Pao Pao decides to cook juk porridge. And as she stands stirring the rice and water into a white blur of nothingness, she feels the roots of a laugh quivering in her cow foot jelly bones — a laugher of such depth she has not encountered since she buried her Georgie in 1979.
Georgie Leung had looked every inch his death, with hair that broke off in her hands as she pulled tight. And so few had gathered for his funeral at the Waltham Park Historical Chinese Cemetery. So many of their friends had long left on those five daily flights to Miami, and off to the glossy destinations she had dreamed of as a girl. And her son Paulie was whispering I’m sorry Mum, we should have gone too. Start over again in another land. And maybe if we did, maybe, maybe.
Pao Pao had scanned those that remain: her one and only son Paulie, his young wife Rebecca and the first grandchild Michael snuggled inside her. And this old strange brown man, still tall and slim, staring so hard at her. And there again was a flash of light. Crouched on wet cement, blood-warm leg against blood-warm leg. The gossamer cloud of her first cigarette. And graveyard mahjong king Albert Tibbs who had murmured in his quiet way ImsorrymyloveImsorrysosorry. Don’t make me leave here. And Pao Pao who had clenched her teeth against the smoke and the tears, thinking why the hell does this brown boy care so much about these strangers buried beneath them? Because how can piles of bones and old clothes compare to the fever of her stockingless legs against his?
And staring back at the aged face of her old lover Albert Tibbs, Pao Pao had thought shoot – am I seeing things? Is there a shadow of Georgie hanging off old Albert’s face? She had kept them apart so long in her head—the man who wouldn’t leave and the man who promised to go, but didn’t—that she did not see their shared curvatures. Would Albert ever tell her now, after all these years, that his old lover had indeed married his half brother? And as the small crowd bowed in prayer, all Pao Pao wanted to do was laugh loud enough for the ancestors who plotted to bring her into the fold, one way or another. They were patient, waiting for the final punch line.
Yes, this same laugh from so long ago now scratches through her throat, as she stands over the stove stirring juk porridge. Despite her sleeping brood upstairs, Pao Pao knows she must let it go, let it shudder through her teeth and bounce off the pots and pans into the atmosphere, because Pao Pao suspects that the ancestors will be kind to her today. She must make her son Paulie buy more paper money, although the price will be hiked up, today of all days.
On route to Waltham Park Historical Chinese Cemetery, St. Andrew, Jamaica
Gah San Day, 10 April 2004
It is too early in the morning, and Paulie Leung is surrounded by women packed in the family van—his wife, Rebecca and his mother Pao Pao, both chatting and sipping juk along the drive to Waltham Park Historical Chinese Cemetery. Pao Pao says he must wait until they get to the cemetery before he can eat. So they are the first to arrive, even before the reps from the Chinese Benevolent Association with the main Gah San feast of rice and whole sucking pig, skin crispy red. Paulie parks the car and gestures for his cup of juk.
“We don’t have time for that Paulie,” says Pao Pao. “Come.” And Pao Pao is off marching through the gate, bags of paper money and paper gold bricks and paper debit cards in hand.
“Is she alright?” asks Rebecca as they follow her through the gravestones, her feet finding her way deftly through.
“Who knows?” They pass the bushes shielding their patriarch’s grave. And there stands second generation caretaker Joseph Tibbs, surrounded by four bodies, one gripping onto his arms and swaying.
“Dear God! What happened here?” asks Paulie.
“Oh Paulie. You won’t believe it.” He points at the two men in the dirt, cloaked with mud. One has a jack hammer in his hand. The other still grips a cricket bat, standard issue.
“Those two men there were trying to take the marble from Mr. Leung’s grave, I think. And you won’t believe it, but I think your Michael and my boy Donovan stopped them.”
“Michael?” whispers Paulie. He stares at the men coated in mud, one sprawled across the marble slab like he was sleeping in bed, the other still swaying, trying to hold his head high, mouth gaping.
“There you are,” whispers Pao Pao. “Long time no see.” And Pao Pao grabs the swaying man to her bosom. The man yields to her touch, hands falling flat to his sides. She runs her tender hands across the man’s muddy head and whispers in his ear. And Paulie sees the young, muddy man nod, yes, yes, so fervently that mud runs off his face. Or are those tears? And even through the mud Paulie distinctly hears the boy murmur weakly in Pao Pao’s ear yesyesohyesIsawhimIsawhim.
That there, mutters Paulie to himself, is another mystery perhaps solvable by a more patient, less hungry man.
“That there’s my Donovan, Pao Pao,” says Joseph. “Can’t tell with all the mud.”
“Glad to see you come,” says Pao Pao, hugging Donovan tight. And now to business, thinks Pao Pao. She will clean these two boys up, her dear kin. They will pray properly, lighting their incense, bowing three times before offering their musky scent to the earth. And she will give them the whole bag of money to burn for the ancestors who listen when so inclined.
Things that were never known, that:
8. When patriarch Pa-Kung Leung first boarded his ship in Hong Kong, his mind was set for New York. Jamaica then was nothing to him, even as the dark mountain peaks rose coyly through the early morning mists as they sailed into Kingston Harbor. It was just another coastal, Caribbean town, with its markets and its slums and its endless noise. The ship had stopped at many such ports of call on its long serpentine journey. But the sea breeze was shifting, changing the course of his whole life as it blew right off his head the Panama hat he bought for too much money from some Punti in Hong Kong. As he rushed off-board to chase his brand new hat down Harbor Street, the wind of upheaval still hissed in his ears, he knew instantly he was never going to make it to New York. Not when the road felt so sound and certain under his feet — stronger than any promise of paradise.
