Benji and the Night Before Independence Day

Independence Day in Cliffside began the week before.

That was when the flags went up — small ones on the lamp posts, larger ones on the community centre fence, and the biggest ones at the corner houses of Barbican Road where the families who had been there the longest flew them as a matter of tradition. The colours were black, gold, and green, and by the fourth of August the whole road wore them, and on the night of the fifth the neighbourhood stayed up late enough that you could hear music from three different yards at once.

This was the year the big flag at number twelve disappeared.

Number twelve Barbican Road had flown the same flag for eleven years. Not the same flag literally — flags wore out, were replaced. But continuously, since the year the Morgans moved in, there had been a large Jamaican flag on the pole in their front yard, changed fresh every year in late July, bright as a greeting.

Benji saw it go.

Not who took it — the night was dark and he was at the far end of the road. But he saw the movement, and he knew what was at the pole, and he knew what wasn’t there afterward.

He sat at the corner of Barbican Road for the rest of the night.

At six in the morning on August fifth — Independence Day — he found the children.

Clevie was awake because Clevie was always awake early when something good was happening, and Independence Day was something good. He was on his step eating cereal when Benji appeared at the lane entrance and looked at him.

“Morning,” Clevie said.

Benji looked at him. Then looked toward Barbican Road. Then looked at him again.

Clevie put down the cereal.

“Early for trouble,” he said. He went to get Omar.

The pole at number twelve was bare.

Mrs. Morgan, who was seventy-four and had planted that pole herself the year she and her husband moved in, was standing in front of it in her house dress looking at it with the expression of someone who has not yet allowed themselves to believe what they are seeing.

“Gone,” she said. “They took my flag.”

“When?” Nadine asked. She had arrived from her grandmother’s end of the lane. Miss Gloria had looked out the window and seen the children going toward Barbican Road and had sent Nadine after them, which was how Miss Gloria managed most situations: by sending Nadine.

“I put it up yesterday evening, five o’clock. It was there at ten when I locked up. This morning —” She spread her hands.

Benji was at the edge of the yard, nose to the ground, moving in a slow sweep from the gate along the fence line.

“He’s tracking it,” Omar said.

“Tracking what?” Mrs. Morgan said.

“Where it went,” Nadine said. “Which direction.”

Benji stopped at the far corner of the fence. He sat. He looked down the road to the left, away from the main street, toward the older part of the neighbourhood where the roads narrowed and the houses were packed closer.

“That way,” Clevie said.

They did not go that way alone. That was the decision, and it was Nadine’s decision, and everyone accepted it because Nadine’s decisions were usually structurally sound: they were eleven and ten and it was early morning and they were following a dog into the narrower part of the neighbourhood.

They got Mrs. Morgan’s son, Winston, who was thirty-five and large and had been planning to sleep in until nine but whose mother’s Independence Day flag being stolen was sufficient to end that plan.

They went in a group: Winston, the three children, Benji slightly ahead.

Benji led them two streets down and one street across, to a house with a yard that had two dogs in it — large dogs, chained, that had not barked at Benji because Benji did not smell like a threat and had learned long ago how to move past chained dogs without incident. He stopped at the gate.

Winston looked over the gate into the yard.

“That’s Calvin’s yard,” he said.

“Calvin who?” Clevie said.

“Calvin Marsh. He’s — he’s fifteen. Lives with his grandmother.” Winston’s expression was doing something complicated. “Why would Calvin—”

Benji was looking at the side of the house, where something was visible at the edge of the wall: a corner of black and gold fabric.

“There,” Nadine said.

Calvin Marsh was fifteen and he had taken the flag on an impulse that he could not have explained well to anyone, which was how most fifteen-year-old impulses worked. He had been walking home from a friend’s house late in the evening and he had seen the flag on the pole and it was bright and new and something in him had made a decision that the rest of him hadn’t caught up to yet.

He had hidden it behind the house and gone to sleep and in the morning he had understood clearly that he had made a significant error in judgment.

He was in the process of figuring out what to do about this when Winston knocked on his grandmother’s door.

His grandmother, Miss Irene, was sixty-eight and had raised Calvin since he was four and was not the type of woman to be anything other than direct.

“You have something that belongs to somebody else,” she said to Calvin, after Winston had explained. It was not a question.

Calvin brought the flag.

He gave it to Winston.

He said sorry to Winston, to Mrs. Morgan through Winston, and — because Miss Irene was standing right there — to August sixth generally.

Miss Irene said something to him in a low voice that the children didn’t hear, and whatever it was, Calvin’s expression at the end of it was the expression of a person who understood something they hadn’t understood before.

The flag was back on the pole by eight o’clock.

Mrs. Morgan stood in her yard and looked at it, and Benji stood beside her, and the morning was already warm and gold the way August mornings were in Jamaica, and somewhere down the road someone was testing their speakers for the day’s music.

“Thank you,” she said, to the dog.

Benji’s tail moved.

“He understands,” Clevie said.

“He understands everything,” Nadine said. She had said this before. She suspected she would say it many more times.

The Independence Day celebrations proceeded. The flags stayed up all day. The music from three yards reached the kind of volume that made conversation within one yard difficult and cross-yard conversation completely unnecessary, which was fine because everyone was dancing.

Miss Icie’s radio played all morning.

At four in the afternoon, Clevie counted six different plates of food he had been given by six different neighbours and felt that this was the correct way to spend Independence Day.

Omar wrote in his notebook: Benji stayed at the corner all night. He waited until morning to come for us — he knew we couldn’t do anything in the dark, and he knew the flag wasn’t going anywhere. He waited. He’s patient in a way that most people aren’t patient.

He thought about Calvin Marsh carrying a flag home on an impulse and not knowing what to do with it in the morning, and about Miss Irene’s low voice, and about whatever she had said that changed Calvin’s expression.

He wrote: Some things get resolved by Sergeant Peart. Some things get resolved by grandmothers. Benji seems to know the difference.