The Origin of Waves Read Free Page A

should haul your arse outta this damn country. What has this goddamn country given you? With all the richness and racism building up, year by year?”
    And I argue back with myself, “I have a house. Don’t have to rent from no blasted landlord. I have no children. Never had a wife: but a good woman, one short time, filled with flowers and summer; and she died too soon, and she ain’t here, no more! Made a living. Making a living …”
    And myself would argue back, “On that Rock where you born, boy! On that Rock, you can walk down theroad, any road, without anybody looking at you the wrong way, and smile and say hello, and hear the greeting coming back, ’cause home is home.”
    And I would have the final word in this interminable two-timing monologue, forty-fifty years long. “Who do I know still, back home? They’re all dead. Or gone-away. Living in Britain; one in Germany as I read in a foreign newspaper; a few in Italy; thousands in Amurca; and tens of thousands unknown to the Immigration authorities, also living in Brooklyn. I do not see them; I see their cousins every year here, in the last week in July and the first week in August; here in Toronto, with their strange, loud, over-sized clothes and thin shins; and gold round their necks, their wrists, their ankles, forgetting the first enchainment in ships; and now they come with gold on all ten fingers sometimes, beating the authorities and the rate of exchange, and in enough quantity and shininess to fill many tombs in Egypt that used to be inhabited by Pharaohs, but not all of the same quality.
    Each December, the snow becomes thicker and my resolution thinner, and more difficult to walk on; and it seems to stick to my body like old white paint, except that it has more weight than paint; and I move just like
Galilee
, that overladen fishing boat we used to watch far out in the waves which made it behave as if it was sliding between hills and valleys. John and I spent hours and hours on the warm sand of that beach the colour of the old conch-shell, looking out at thosewaves, wondering where they went to after they were born at our feet, after they left us, and left our eyesight; wondering how many ships, steamers, Canadian lady-boats, inter-island schooners, and brave fishing boats had passed over those same waves; wondering which wave would bear a woman in its hold that we would truly love, and which ship would carry us from our governors and pageantry and fun and parades and colonialism.
    “We’s colonials,” John said. “And as colonials, we have to leave this place.”
    “And go where? Where to?” I asked.
    “Anywhere.”
    “We are not really colonials, are we? This is our home. We born here. And after Cawmere School, and Harsun College, we’d be
fixed
. For life.”
    “The meaning of a’ island,” John said, “is that you have to swim-out from it, seeing as how it is surrounded by water. And anything surrounded by water is a place you really don’t know the size of, like you have to swim-way far from it, and then you would know the measurements of the place. That is the meaning of borning in a’ island. There is a book in the Public Library that I was reading; and what I just tell you I was reading is in that book.”
    “What it name?” I asked John, who was always reading in “reading-races” with me, with books we borrowed every Saturday morning from the Library in Town. “What is the name of that book?”
    “Man, I read it in a book, man,” he said, “and if I read it in a book, it is true. So I don’t have to tell you
nothing
more! The only important thing for you to know is that it is printed in a book. Books don’t lie.”
    “But you really thinking of not living in this place?”
    “The minute I finish school, out-goes-me! I gone!”
    “To where?”
    “Brooklyn, New York, with my uncle. Europe. Any place. But I know I will not be living in this place.”
    “Me, too,” I said. And it scared me because I did not know