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  • Breakout
  • H. Nigel Thomas (bio)

Millington is standing at the kitchen sink. He returned from the Canada Citizen and Immigration office in Montreal three hours ago. He's now a bona fide Canadian resident. He'd waited three and a half years. He'd submitted the application shortly after marrying Jay. He wishes Jay were here. They could celebrate, but Jay's attending a history convention in Atlanta. Millington is thirty-six and works three evenings per week as a sorter at a recycling plant. It pays as much as the stipend he received as a Methodist minister in Barbados.

He begins to remove a glass from the drain board but stops. Instead his mind wanders back thirty years, to the first time he began wondering about God—an evening when he was around six and in the first year of elementary school, a year behind his peers because he couldn't go when he was five. Then he was in and out of hospital. The doctors told his parents that he'd contracted typhus, and it had stayed untreated for too long. His parents had put too much faith in the folk remedies his godfather Elijah made and sold. During the last of those hospital stays, his father asked the doctor if he thought Millington would die, and the doctor said maybe. That same afternoon, Mem, Edward, and Reverend Spellman came to the hospital, kneeled around Millington's bed, and prayed asking God to spare Millington's life.

Manny, the boy in the bed beside him, was South Asian. The day after the prayer, Manny did an imitation of what Millington said in his sleep. "Me naw want fuh dead. Aah! Aah! Me naw want fuh dead! Ahhh, Ooh! Ahh, Ooh!" and laughed. Then they both became quiet until Manny said, "You think me going dead too?"

"Naw, you no going dead. You and me going live and we going be good friends."

Manny was from Calder. He said he was eight years old. Manny cried out often for pain. Sometimes the nurse came and gave him an [End Page 107] injection, after which he'd go to sleep. Manny found it strange that Millington didn't cry out for pain when he was awake. Millington said it was because he was tough.

"Crap," Manny said. "Me does hear you bawling for pain in your sleep. 'Aah! Ooh! Oo Ah!'"

Manny died three nights later. The nurses behind the curtain preparing the body must have thought Millington was asleep. They spoke in whispers. One nurse gave instructions to the other: to close his eyelids, bandage his jaw, straighten his arms and legs, put cotton wool … Millington wondered if Manny was hearing them. When they left wheeling out the body, Millington became afraid that he'd see Manny's jumbie, and had trouble falling asleep for a couple of nights until a new patient occupied the bed.

________

That evening when Millington was six, Pastor Bowles—his son Brinsley was in class with Millington—who lived at the very bottom of the hill in a big wall house behind the church with the big lit-up green letters SAVED AND SANCTIFIED BAPTIST CHURCH, had come to hold services at the junction where Millington's street, Pasture Road, met Hill Road, some twenty metres up from their house. Pastor Bowles used a megaphone. Lying in bed, Millington listened to everything Pastor Bowles said.

Millington already knew that when Mem and he went to church on Sundays, it was to worship God; and that worshipping God meant singing and praying and listening to the minister and staying quiet because they were "in the presence" of the person who had made everything, and who was powerful and invisible, and who knew and heard and saw everything, even people's thoughts; and he wrote it all down in a big book, and sent you to heaven or hell depending on what was in his book. And people asked this powerful man to do all sorts of things and to grant them all sorts of wishes, and sometimes he did and sometimes he didn't. When he didn't, it was because he knew...

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