I felt a cold sweat that hot Saturday morning at the Castries Market, when Jacinta called to say her brother-in-law and my friend, ‘Ah-Boy’, had left Planet Earth.
Her cracked voice suggested I should not keep her on the line too long, so I offered brief words of solace while listening to her sobs.
I’d last seen him just days before when he’d walked his usual slow-walk up-the-hill to my home to tell me I wouldn’t see him next week because he had to see his doctor.
He’d also undertake his monthly task of payments of family utility bills, all pay-points conveniently-located within close walking distance to his umbrella-sheltered working table in the backyard at Miss Virgin’s Creole Cooking outlet next to the Vigie Field.
‘Billy’, as he was also-known-as, loomed large at Sans Soucis, admired by the likes of the late Wilkinson Larcher and Richard Jn Marie for his unwavering support for the legendary Lancers football team; and his artistic talent remains imprinted in many shops and local restaurants in ‘The Yard’.
Billy would even paint his own shoes in spare time – and in his trademark shapes and flashing colors…
His work spoke loudly for the quiet Billy, a veritable master at “Giving life to old things” — one of the main sources of our renewed friendship since my return home from Guyana in 1999.
He gave new life to several cultural items of sentimental value that I’d bought or acquired in faraway places, including a Japanese sword, a Somali mask, a Yemeni dagger-and-belt and a 14-foot Guyana snake-skin.
His latest engagement was to restore a replica of the steam-engine trains used to transport cane during sugar days, plus some age-old African, Amerindian, South American, Australian, Caribbean and European silver, brass and copper trinkets from the global circumnavigation of my sailing days (1969-1972).
But his most visible piece of artistic renovation for me is an old feathered carnival mask I’d rescued two decades earlier from a rubbish bin one Ash Wednesday.
Carnival was still observed in February and I’d always frowned on the church-inspired practice of burning or dumping all the artistic talent created over weeks and months for the annual competitive Parades of the Bands on Carnival Monday and Tuesday.
The plumage of my rescued bigger-than-life mask was ruffled and the face spotted by natural elements, but within a week the artist in Billy had slowly and purposefully cleaned and polished it and given it new life to the dumped masterpiece of art.
Billy was also an artistic innovator: he planted different types of cacti into a dried tree trunk, one cactus actually flowering brightly overnight that he interpreted the next day as “Mother Nature saying thanks…”
Another time in May, he showed May, he brought me two dry coconuts: one had fallen on the stool he usually sat to work on below the shady mango tree, so he’d wisely picked the other with my ‘Coq Kako’, to save and protect himself from possible harm from high.
I jokingly told him “We’ll make a ‘Confetti Tablet’ with them…” – grating the two dry nuts and boiling them in a pan of brown sugar, ‘Canelle’ (spice) and nutmeg, like we did on our juvenile runaways to the beach with coconuts picked-up under Mr Gibson’s or Hackshaw’s trees, or on d’Auvergne Land or in Bousquet (my father’s) Yard.
Ah-Boy was always on his own business, never one to mingle with ‘the Fou-a-Chaux Boys’ daily hanging-out at the bottom of the O’Shaugnessay Hill next to ‘Sarge Amos’ (formerly Teacher Amos) home, observing and discussing latest community happenings.
We also often commented on the inexplicable, inextricable connection between then National Youth Council (NYC) firebrand Ernest Hilaire and his buddy ‘Bird’ Bailey, who also lived near Ah-Boy’s hilly family homestead overlooking the Castries Harbor and the Vigie Peninsula, also with a panoramic view of Faux-a-Chaux.
Billy and I always reminisced about the historical growth of that section between Hospital Road and the La Toc Highway that’s moved during our lifetime from being a quiet fishing and shipbuilding area, first to a playing field, then a rubbish dump, before construction of the Banana Wharf that now also used-to-be…
The last times I went with my friend Carlton to drop some goodies for Billy, the once-unimpeded postcard views from his section of the Blue Danube Road were greatly barred by overgrown trees and abandoned homes, but each time we’d briefly walk down Memory Lane back-tracking to what he memorably described on one occasion as “The Good Old Days when none of us ever thought we’d grow old…”
Billy was also artistic in his prophecies, telling me (more than once): “I don’t know when my time will come, but if I die in Foolasho, it won’t be by bullets…”
True to his word, Billy slept his way into the other world long before anyone else realized, collecting his final boarding pass, entering Humanity’s departure lounge and taking that inevitable last flight that awaits us all to that place none has ever returned from.
Choking on tears (like when Jacinta called me that Saturday morning while buying Black Pudding), I delivered an unusual very-brief eulogy at Ah-Boy’s farewell party at Rambally’s Chapel on July 5.
I never knew his real name (until I saw Gabriel Mc Lawrence James on the program below his photo), or that he was born on the last day of the shortest month (February 28), or that he was all of 70-years-young when his breath expired.
He’d scored the ‘three-score-and-ten’ we’ve been brought-up thinking is the end of our allotted Life on Earth, every day after which is ‘borrowed time’.
Clearly, neither Billy, nor Ah-Boy, or Gabriel, wished to live on borrowed-time, shortening the line for all-of-us waiting in Life’s transit lounge, our one-way tickets already long-booked, only left to collect our boarding passes, gate-numbers and boarding-times for that final long-awaited non-stop flight to the Land of No Return.