Easily Fooled, page 1
EASILY FOOLED
ESSENTIAL PROSE SERIES 185
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Copyright © 2021, H. Nigel Thomas and Guernica Editions Inc.
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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2020947076
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Easily fooled : No safeguards 3, Millington’s story / H. Nigel Thomas
Names: Thomas, H. Nigel, 1947- author.
Series: Essential prose series ; 185.
Description: Series statement: Essential prose series ; 185
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200354124 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200354140 |
ISBN 9781771835817 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771835824 (EPUB)
| ISBN 9781771835831 (Kindle)
Classification: LCC PS8589.H4578 E28 2021 | DDC C813/.54—dc23
For Caswell “Fatman” Grant
We are big and blunt and easily fooled and know few of the fine points of translation
—Don McKay “Meditation on a Small Bird’s Skull”
1
HE HAS BEEN pacing the corridor backward and forward— from the main door, through the living room, to the dining area. His skin’s tingling. It began as soon as he got into the elevator on the ground floor. Now sweat’s coursing down his sides from his armpits. An hour and a half ago he received his permanent resident visa. Starting over at thirty-six. Tough.
He takes off the navy-blue blazer he wore to the Citizenship and Immigration office earlier and hangs it in the coat closet. He should change his damp shirt too. It reeks of the Paco Rabane he sprayed himself with. He moves to the couch, begins to sit, but hears the crows clamouring outside. They come around 11 a.m. on a Tuesday, garbage collection day. He walks to the dining area, unlocks the patio door, goes onto the balcony, and watches them. Twenty-one are feeding rowdily from atop the three overflowing dumpsters. On the ground below, five gulls, their white plumage contrasting with the crows’ black, move around and eye the crows nervously. The simple, instinctual life. He sighs. Do crows worry? If they’re as intelligent as the biologists say, they probably do.
He hums:
All things which live below the sky
Or move within the sea
Are creatures of the Lord most High
And brothers unto me.
One of the few hymns from his Methodist past that he’s still comfortable singing (minus the third line).
On the metro on his way home from the immigration office, he vowed to start focusing on what’s beautiful in his life. Took over three years, 2012 to 2015, to process his immigration application. Yesterday was Thanksgiving. Today he has something to be thankful for and one thing less to worry about.
He returns inside, walks back to the living room, and sits on the couch. His mind turns to Gladys, a parishioner back in Barbados now studying at McGill. This afternoon he’s meeting her for the fourth time since she arrived in Montreal at the end of August. She insisted that she must see him urgently but wouldn’t say why. He thinks she has found out something. Is she about to confront him? No surprises, please. Not today.
He wonders: Will his nightmares end now? Will he stop dreaming that he’s back in St Vincent looking for a job and a purpose for his life? The feeling that his marriage to Jay is a mistake, will that too end? Suppose Jay says to him when he returns from Atlanta today: Millington, you are a permanent resident now, so let’s annul this marriage.
That Friday evening: February 17, 2012. What came over him? Why did he uncork so easily? Why did he spill like that? He’d sealed it for a long time. Longer and he might have exploded, gone insane for real. If Jay’s brother Paul hadn’t stayed behind in the hotel lobby, he would have been more measured. But the stopper blew and he gushed like a geyser. The bar was deserted, just a man and a woman at a corner table at the far end from them and the bartender behind the counter.
He told Jay that he’d resigned from the Methodist ministry. Jay complimented him for doing so, “if that’s what you wanted.” And now I’m destitute, he resisted saying. He asked Jay about the possibility of immigrating to Canada. Jay said he’d heard that the easiest way was to marry a Canadian citizen ... That the government had launched a campaign to discourage Canadians from marrying people they meet while holidaying abroad. A long pause. “I’ll check out the Citizenship and Immigration website and let you know,” Jay said, his head turned away.
Millington took a deep breath, held fiercely onto the sides of the table—his hands slippery with sweat—closed his eyes, and said: “Did you ever suspect that I’m gay?”
“No.”
He wanted to take back the question.
“That’s why you left the ministry?”
Millington nodded.
Jay put his hand under the table, tapped him on the knee, nodded slowly, and said without even glancing at him that he understood.
What did he understand? He was silent, his head down as if contemplating the table, pensive, for a long time afterwards. Was he recalling the rumour he’d heard from someone he’d met at the Vincy Thousand-Islands Picnic in 2011? “That fellow from Havre, Millington, AMC Methodist minister, heard he went through the looking glass.” Took four months after they’d been married for Jay to tell him.
Back home. Sitting up in bed. Unable to sleep. Angry over his poor self-control. His cell beeping. A text message from Paul: “Millington, Jay is gay. Was in love with u while u2 were in h-school. Can u meet us at the airport no later than 7 a.m. tomorrow?” A tearful meeting next morning. And Jay and he were married four months later. If a parishioner had presented him with such a scenario, he would have discouraged it.
In the nightmares in which he’s back in St Vincent and penniless, Melvin, his ex-superintendent, and the other ministers laugh at him. One time he dreamt that he met his dad Edward coming up Pasture Road toward their house, and Edward glared at him and spat as he walked past. Another time, near the bottom of the hill, Neil Charles, in the soiled white gloves and white soutane that he took to wearing after he returned crazed from a Catholic seminary in Trinidad, accosted him. Neil, now skeletal, no longer sensual and desirable: crimped beige skin, eyes dark and feverish in their hollow sockets, mouth agape as if wanting to swallow him, arms extended in a semi-circle to embrace him—rushed out from his father’s house onto the road and blocked his path. “Still have eyes for Jay only, huh”—exactly as he’d done on two occasions back in 2011. When Mem’s present in the nightmares, she screams “Disgrace,” and wags a finger at Millington.
These dreams? Perhaps no more than the fluff that fills our heads when we’re unfocused. Not the one in which he’s on his belly pushing himself through a narrow tunnel and gets to the tunnel’s end and can’t go back. That one’s definitely not fluff. In the last month before he left his ministry in Barbados, it occurred almost every night.
The nightmare in which his godfather Elijah first points a handgun at him, then shoots himself on Millington’s parents’ porch, and a finger-wagging Reverend Hennessy shouts over and over at Millington: “You caused it”—that’s definitely not fluff. That one goes back to when he was fifteen. Elijah had sent him to Ma Kirton’s shop to buy a tin of sardines and a packet of crackers. Upon his return he called to Elijah to come onto the porch for the items. Elijah told him to bring them into the house. Millington met him seated at his dining table. On it a bottle of rum, a half-filled tumbler, and a handgun.
“That’s a real gun?”
Elijah nodded. “Don’t look so frighten. I not going shoot you. Might shoot meself though ... Only joking.” He picked up the handgun, turned it over in his hands three or four times, then put it back down. “Buy this from a sailor in Kingstown ... Sit down.” He pointed to the dining chair opposite him.
Millington hesitated. He had never sat in Elijah’s house before, had never gone beyond the porch.
“Sit. What’s your hurry? Your mother know you running a errand for me.” His eyes glazed, his speech slurred, his breath rummy.
He sat. It would have been impolite not to. A long silence. In one gulp Elijah downed the rum in his glass and refilled it. Millington didn’t know his godfather drank. He started getting up to go, but Elijah waved him back down. “What’s your hurry? ... Heard about my wife? Yes?”
Millington nodded. Haverites knew that his wife had left him, had fled with their two daughters to the U.S.
“I want to see my two girls. What they look like. I don’t have even a photo of them.” He stared at the handgun for several seconds. “I buy this when I find out Thelma been butting me. Been butting me coming and going ... With Smallboy.” He snorted. “No-count Rasta scum! Live in bush like wild beast. Thelma use to leave here, not a care what anybody think. I been the last one to know. When I find out, I buy this gun, and the next day I head for Smallboy shack. I did plan to kill the two o’ them and meself. But half-way there, I start wondering what going become o’ my two daughters, and I change my mind. Two days later I go out to the kitchen where Thelma been cooking, and I cock the gun, and I push the nozzle ‘gainst her chest, and I say: ‘Thelma, I know you is horning me. You is horning me with Smallboy. I will blow your brains out if you don’t stop.’ Then I go back inside and lock away the gun. She run away a week later. First to Trinidad, then New York. Three years later she send me divorce papers, then she send for Smallboy and the girls ... I ain’t see my daughters since. Irene and Ophelia. They was eight and six when they leave. Now they is twenty-three and twenty-one. Ain’t see them since.” He wiped his eyes with his shirt sleeve.
Millington felt sorry for him and was about to say so when he heard Mem’s voice calling: “Brother Elijah, Millington by you?”
Millington answered her, got up, and left the house.
Two months later, it was Millington’s life that he threatened, and his speech wasn’t slurred, and alcohol wasn’t on his breath.
He’s not to dwell on such things today. He should cancel the meeting with Gladys too. Put it off until next week. No. She said it was urgent.
What’s her situation with Horton now? Some nights, while Jay’s snoring away, Millington stays propped up with pillows for hours, wondering how his relationship with Horton would have evolved, if he hadn’t fled Barbados and Methodism.
He wants to be candid with Gladys ... So much he cannot tell her. So much. If he does and she leaves Horton, they’d blame him for the breakup.
He likes Gladys. Most people pretend to be good. She’s genuine. The little masquerading she does is beneficent; done for smoother relationships. Too trusting though. But distrust causes worry. Physician, heal yourself. His suspicions about how much she knows are probably unfounded. That or she dissembles well. Maybe she has decided that today she’ll tell him all. Maybe that’s what urgent means.
Horton. Con-man Horton. Can’t blame him for his double life. People do what they must to blend in. Attention seekers of every ilk are on the prowl for outliers, to make scapegoats of them.
Why did Horton plant suspicions in Gladys’s mind about him? ... Horton set him on the path toward honesty, but he doesn’t relish how he did it.
Would his situation be different today if they’d been in contact less often? Less dramatic for sure. But he might have dragged out his ministry and found rationalisations not to leave. The womb of faith is a comfortable place, says Matthew Arnold. Too comfortable. Or he might have done something stupid—something truly disgraceful. Or turn cynical and become a hypocrite. Takes unusually powerful storms to topple deep-rooted trees. He got out of Methodist soil dirtier but wiser than when he entered.
Not overly soiled.
Untainted?
I’ ll need a therapist to confirm or dispute that. Left with my sanity too—contrary opinions notwithstanding.
And left many tongues wagging. Even Neil Charles’.
Yes, Neil, theology has been bad for both of us. Let the tongues wag.
Might have lost my sanity for real if Jay hadn’t intervened.
And when the full facts of his intervention become known there’ ll be venomous tongues.
We’re staying away from that today. Remember?
2
HE REMEMBERS A sandbar in Havre’s bay that bathers used to stand on safely year after year, then one day he walked out to it and dropped into deep, dangerous water. Gladys invited him, her pathetic bachelor minister—he was sure it was how she saw him—for supper almost every week. Most times he declined. Their two boys—Len, six at the time and Alex, four—called him Uncle Millington. He was Alex’s godfather.
As the junior minister in the Authentic Methodist Church (AMC) Christchurch Circuit, it fell on him to chair the planning committee of the South Caribbean District for the synod that was to take place in Barbados in 2009. As steward of the circuit, Horton was automatically part of the committee. One Wednesday morning Horton came to the manse for them to go over the programme before sending it to be printed.
At various points in their discussion, Horton paused and fixed his cow-like, usually sleepy eyes intensely on Millington. He felt uneasy and probed his memory to see whether he’d left something undone. When he dined at Horton’s house, Horton rarely looked at him, even when speaking to him.
They finished synod business an hour early. Doris, Millington’s domestic helper, brought them a pot of tea. Horton poured himself a cup and held it suspended half-way between his lap and lips for several seconds while he stared into Millington’s eyes. He was certain then that some item he’d overlooked was bothering Horton. Horton took a sip of tea and looked guiltily at Millington. Millington felt his palms moistening. Less than a metre and a half, the width of the desk, separated them.
The silence lengthened. Millington wanted to break it but knew there’d be a quaver in his voice. He might have said that he had another appointment, but they’d planned to meet from nine till noon, and it was 11:10.
“Reverend,” Horton said, quite loud, startling him. Church officials used his title only when several people were present. Otherwise they used first names. Millington waited, tense, for the rebuke he thought was coming. “You look puzzled. Aren’t you my reverend pastor, my shepherd who vowed at your ordination to lead me to watering holes and suc-suc-cu-lent green pastures and protect me from wolves?” Said with a wink and a slurp.
Didn’t know you were a sheep. Millington chuckled nervously. His parishioners certainly expected him to beg God to grant them special favours. One had asked him to plead—her word—with God to send her a decent husband, “cause Reverend, these-here children too much to care for by muhself.” John Wesley, Methodism’s founder and Millington’s de facto boss (though more than two centuries dead), had ordered Millington, in number twelve of his rules for ministers, to engage in prayers; at Millington’s ordination ceremony, he had vowed to obey Wesley’s rules and teachings. He’d been told too—ordered rather—by Melvin, his superintendent, to heed St Paul and feed milk to the ninety percent of his congregation who couldn’t digest meat. Paying the ministers’ stipends and keeping the churches in repair required lots of money—lots; every lost member was lost revenue, facts Melvin hammered on incessantly, facts he used to push his ministers to imitate the fundamentalists.
“Okay, Millington. This is hard to say.” Horton’s eyes, now two honey-coloured glowing marbles, were fixed on Millington. “Don’t look so rattled. Millington, I believe you’re gay.”
A wave of spasms crisscrossed Millington’s gut. How dare you! The demeanour drilled into him to deal with prickly parishioners kicked in. He inhaled deeply, deliberately, and said, in carefully paced words: “Horton, my sexual orientation is none of your business.” He expected Horton to stumble out some sort of stuttering apology and drop the subject.
“Millington, get serious.”
“Get serious. I am serious. In Jamaica—”
“We’re not in Jamaica. You’re my minister. You’re to get to the bottom of my troubles and commiserate with me and comfort me ... Maybe more.” He moistened his lips.
Millington had complimented him on his cologne when he arrived. A mistake perhaps. Caribbean men who wear cologne are sometimes asked why they smell like women. Horton was wearing a close-fitting peach tank-top that outlined his paunch and love handles (he’s about six centimetres shorter than Millington and has a smallish frame with about five kilos of extra weight), and tight dark brown three-quarter shorts that accentuated his very round buttocks. Until the “maybe more,” his clothes and cologne had meant nothing to Millington.
