From Harvey River by Lorna Goodison Page B

verandah “behaved themselves,” so Margaret and David would sit on the verandah, which was lit with a smoky kerosene lamp, and they would talk about their friends, about what was happening in the village. She would tell him what her father had told her about Ireland, and he would tell her what his father had told him about England, all the while aching to fall into each other’s arms. When it began to grow late, Leanna would rock her mahogany chair vigorously on the floorboards to signal to David that he should go home. David was a sensitive young man. He always took the hint, and he used this rocking-chair signal as his cue to perform a farewell suite of songs on his harmonica. Out of sheer mischief he would blow, “Nobody’s Business but My Own,” the anthem of the “don’t-care.”
    If me married to a nayga man
    turn round change him
    fi one coolie man
    nobody’s business
    but me own
    Then he would play what became his and Margaret’s signature song, “Beautiful Dreamer.” He would raise the silver harmonica to his lips, and it would flash in the half-darkness of the verandah, where the small kerosene lamp rested on a wicker table. He would play “Beautiful Dreamer,” accompanied by the high alto chirping chorus of crickets, the bass calls of bullfrogs, and the croaking lizard’s response. His inspired performance was illuminated by stage lights of peenie wallies, or fireflies, and the thick country darkness formed an opaque black fire cloth behind him. He would depart playing that song, which Margaret would hear growing fainter as he rode away on his horse, back to Harvey River, where he took her to live after he married her when she was eighteen and he was nineteen years old.
    David’s father, William Harvey, had given them twenty acres of land and helped the new marrieds build their first house. Margaret’s father, George O’Brian Wilson, handcrafted fine leather shoes for the bride and groom and insisted on giving away his daughter despite the protests from his legal wife and children in Lucea, to whom he was forced to say: “There is not yet born the focking man or woman who is the boss of me.” He and Leanna Bogle did not exchange one word at the wedding of their daughter, and John Bogle stood silently by Leanna’s side as the young bride, Margaret, who was dressed in a long satin gown trimmed with wide bands of Irish lace that George Wilson had specially ordered from England, walkedgrim-faced–as was the custom of the time–under her sheer veil up the aisle of the Lucea Parish Church.
    At the wedding reception, held at William and Frances Harvey’s home in Harvey River, George Wilson played the fiddle and sang “Peg O My Heart,” changing the words to “Meg O My Heart,” for Meg was what he sometimes called his beloved Margaret. She and David danced while her father fiddled, and she blushed and tried to pull away when David danced up close to her. But he had smiled and insisted, saying, “We are now husband and wife, we can do whatever we please.”

 

    B efore the children came into their lives, days in Margaret and David Harvey’s household always began well before daybreak in the cool Hanover mornings. “Before night take off him black trousers, before cock crow, before the sun show it clean face behind the Dolphin Head Mountain.” Margaret, like her mother, Leanna, was always the first person up in her household. She would put on one of David’s old jackets over her long nightgown and walk barefoot through the sleeping house. When she reached the back door, she would slip her feet into a pair of his old boots and step out into the backyard and rap loudly on the window of the small outroom where the domestic helper slept. “Wake from thy slumber, Miss Lazy, arise and shine and catch up the fire.” The fire that the sleepy-eyed girl would wake and start at 5 a.m. in