Crazy Old Cassie had been a nun. This much we all knew. This much could be verified. Almost every story about her began by referencing this fact. And there were far too many stories about this woman, too many for me to recount. I wouldn’t even know where to start. The old men said the Archbishop placed her in the convent because she said she had seen the face of God. Men are always so romantic about these kinds of things. But women? No, they are the realists. The old women all said she had seen the face of the Devil. Some joked she had simply seen the other “face” of the Archbishop Castillo. Just as there were many variations on why Cassie was sent to the convent, no one could say with any certainty why she was eventually asked to leave it. But everyone knew Old Cassie was to be avoided. And she made it easy on us, very easy on us. She was rarely ever seen away from the Great House near the bottom of what we called Mutton Hill.
Old Cassie’s real father, William Reynolds, had been a plantation owner. Some say he was the descendant of the bastard son of an English nobleman who had been exiled to the island to spare the family in England any embarrassment. When William Reynolds died, he left the estate and all the lands, the rum distillery, the orchards, the cattle ranch, all of it to his son and his son’s family. But none of the Reynoldses who lived on the estate after William Reynolds died lived much longer than a few years. The old man died and then one by one his entire family followed his example. Accidents, sickness, and malady: that is what lived on that grand estate before Cassie did. And then the only person who lived there was Old Cassie. The only Reynolds still alive, alive even to this day, is James Reynolds, the old Governor General, William Reynolds’s brother.
The Great House kept watch over the town. If you looked north from the flea market or the town square, looked north and up the hillside, you would spy its large frame. There wasn’t even another house near the bottom of that hill. The closest house was the Archbishop’s Mansion that, despite looking close, was actually almost a mile away from the Great House. All of the land there, the entire hill, even beyond the hill deep into the center of the island, belonged to Cassie and her sister Flora once the Reynolds family died off. And Flora had long since left the island, moved somewhere in California, leaving all of it to Old Cassie.
Maria Consuela went to the Great House each morning to drop off milk and groceries, sometimes to straighten up the kitchen and the sunroom; she was usually gone by noon. She told others she rarely ever saw the old woman. The only person she ever saw in the house, and even that was rare, was Señora Grise, the woman she believed actually ran the house for Cassie. Maria Consuela would enter through the door on the side terrace and leave the items she brought on the kitchen counter under a purple-leafed plant hanging precariously in a wire basket. These were her standing orders. Once a week, Maria Consuela cleaned the kitchen, which meant wiping down the counters; the kitchen was never dirty. The floor tiles in the kitchen and sunroom always appeared spotlessly clean, almost as if no one actually lived in the Great House. And Derrick, the butcher’s brother, went there twice a week to drop off major provisions, items he was told to leave on the wooden table on the back terrace. The field hands who worked the cane fields and orchards almost never laid eyes on Cassie and, at times, wondered if she really lived there; she rarely left the house. Cassie used to ride out to inspect their work, but with time it became more and more common for them to receive their orders by notes taped to the post at the bottom of the steps that led to the back terrace. Other than Maria Consuela, only cats entered and exited the Great House. Oh, there would be the occasional person who went there to seek help from the old woman, but Maria Consuela and Derrick were the only folks who dared to go there regularly. They had been chosen. They had been, in a sense, summoned.
People were usually warned not to look up at the Great House, even though this was a difficult task. It was the largest thing on any of the hillsides, its hulking mass patiently watching over all of us. The old women made sure, almost daily, to warn us not to look up at that house. There was never even a hint of a joke when they said this. But how could one avoid looking up at it? One can stare out at the harbor with the sunlight shimmering on its surfaces for only so long before tiring. The one thing that gleamed in addition to that sunlit sea was the Great House, its white walls reflecting the sunlight like a beacon.
Occasionally, foreigners would arrive on large boats and ask about the house, ask if it were an inn made to look like an estate home, ask whether or not it was for sale. Tourists are so stupid sometimes. These foreigners wanted to actually stay there! But the only response any of us could give was that the house was “unsafe,” at which these wealthy foreigners would look somewhat confused. They wanted to meet the owner, the innkeeper. They imagined this had to be an Englishman wearing tweed and riding apparel or sitting in a study sipping brandy while wearing a smoking jacket or an ascot. But this was not the case, and it hadn’t been the case since the Reynolds family died off. There was no one there except Old Cassie. And she was certainly not an Englishman. No one on the island sought out that woman unless they absolutely had to do so. No one.
They say if Old Cassie looked you dead in the eye, she would know things about you, about your future. But Miss Simpson would laugh and say that sometimes people confused Cassie with her sister Flora, that it was the sister who could do that. But it didn’t matter. What mattered was that we all feared Cassie, and Cassie probably liked it that way, or so we liked to believe. Miss Simpson once told me how many years ago, before Flora left, Cassie had cured a man of gangrene. She said the gangrene was so bad the doctor had warned the man his leg would have to be amputated. Even then, it was unclear if that could save the man. No one remembers what Cassie actually did for the man, but she cured him. Apparently, as this man was leaving the house, Flora looked him dead in the eye while standing on the front porch and then pronounced that he would soon be wealthy but would lose it all. She told him he would end up flat out broke, without a single penny to his name. The man thought this was Flora’s way of being foolish, which was a mistake in and of itself. He went to visit a relative in Miami a few weeks later. While there, he won the lottery: sixty-five million dollars.
He could have done anything he wanted to do on the island had he returned home. He could have built a big estate like the Reynolds Estate on one of the hillsides, could have owned a fleet of cars or boats. Hell, he could have owned just about everything the Church and the Reynolds Estate didn’t already own. He would have been as wealthy as the Reynolds family had been. But he didn’t come back. Well, not at first. He flew all over the world in private jets, stayed in unbelievable resorts, and ate only the finest foods. He lived a decadent life, a life of extravagance most of us cannot even imagine; but when he did return to the island, he was, in fact, broke. It was just as Flora had predicted, exactly as she had predicted.
In many ways, it was worse than she predicted; he actually owed money to a number of banks in America and Europe. It is just as likely he came home to the island to avoid the bankers finding him as much as the fact he was broke. In the grand scheme of things, it was easy to disappear from the eyes of the world by coming back to the island. No one in the world paid much attention to our small island in the Caribbean. What resources did we have to offer? Fish? The oceans are large and people can catch fish anywhere. Sugar cane? Rum? So many other islands offered up the same things and did so in far more abundance than we could. So what was the lesson here? What was the great teaching point? That you should be more careful with large sums of money? That you should invest and diversify your money? Save some of it? No, nothing like that at all. The lesson was that everything with those two sisters, whether you liked it or not, came at a price, sometimes a very steep price.
But as I was saying, Flora was long gone, leaving her sister Cassie to reign over all of us. And no one could say with certainty if having only one of those sisters around was any better than having both of them. Every morning, when Maria Consuela climbed part way up the hill to the Great House to drop off the groceries and clean up, the morning light, the sun behind the hill and the house, would litter the yard with shadows. The various shrubs and small manicured trees would throw long shadows across the walkways and paths. There, at the gate by the road, at the gate to the estate, she would see the decrepit royal poinciana tree that never seemed to grow. That stunted tree, at times covered in blood-red petals, always threw a shadow that resembled a rope hanging from it, a rope tied into a noose. This is no exaggeration. I have seen it myself. One of the shadows cast by the tree looks, for all intents and purposes, like the hangman’s folly.
As she walked up the long drive or climbed the terraced steps up through the gardens, Maria Consuela would see the cats heading out. Twelve cats would leave the house and skulk off to various parts of the town. Sometimes, these cats went as far as three or four miles from the house. Miss Simpson told us the cats brought information back to Old Cassie, told us how both Cassie and Flora could communicate with cats. Miss Simpson warned us to be mindful of what was said if you saw one of those cats nearby. And Old Cassie did, in fact, seem to know everything that happened in the town. At least it seemed that way. She knew who was out at sea fishing, knew who was driving taxi, knew who was lifting one of the ever-more-present tourists’ wallets. Nothing escaped her. For God’s sake, not even the face of God had escaped her. From a distance, you could occasionally spy her rocking in a chair on her side terrace. She looked so kindly up there rocking in one of her chairs. But Miss Simpson is the first to remind you, lest you could forget, that there is nothing kind about that old woman, nothing remotely kind about her.
Miss Simpson had known Cassie since she was a child. They had been in grade school together. Miss Simpson said Cassie was incredibly smart in a way that frustrated the teachers. It seemed as if the girl never needed to study. It was as if she just absorbed information. It appeared effortless. Miss Simpson called her “scary smart,” smart with maths, languages, history, science, everything. But she also admitted that Cassie was an arrogant girl. Cassie apparently told everyone she was going to be a doctor, a surgeon. But when Cassie’s real father old man Reynolds died, his son and his son’s family sent Cassie and her sister Flora to the convent. Flora eventually escaped the convent, but some of the old women claimed she was able to do so because Cassie cast a charm, put a spell on the groundskeepers so they would come and let Flora out.
The story changed all the time. How could it not? Once Flora was no longer in the convent, even stranger things began to happen, terrible things. One by one, the entire Reynolds family who were still living in the Great House, the ones who had forced Cassie and her sister into the convent, became sick, or went mad. They all died. By the time Cassie left the convent a couple of years after her sister Flora did, no one was left at the Great House. And the Governor General’s office turned the land rights, the rum distillery, and the Great House over to Cassie and Flora, the entire estate. Miss Simpson told us the Governor General turned it over to them because he was afraid of them, specifically Cassie. Cassie made people uncomfortable, even the Archbishop. Her half-brother, the younger Reynolds, the master of the estate then, hanged himself from the royal poinciana, the tree the Spaniards nicknamed the flamboyant tree, on the property near the gate, the very spot where Cassie’s real father had hanged men who had stolen sugar cane, bananas, or other crops harvested from the estate’s land. That beautiful royal poinciana tree was transformed into the very symbol of death, and many believe the tree refuses to grow because of all the terrible things it has seen.
Cassie, by dint of her real father, is related to the Governor General. James Reynolds is her uncle, a man born and raised in the Great House. El pueblo gossip he had no choice but to turn over the Reynolds Estate to Cassie to escape the calamity that seemed to be targeting his family. One never really knows the truth of these things. El pueblo gossip about the Governor General all the time. The Governor General, the Archbishop, Old Cassie: they make up the trifecta of gossip. But say what you want about Cassie; if a child were sick, or a woman were sick with child, she was the first one the women ran to for help. No woman would take her sick child or a relative in labor to the doctor. The doctor here studied in England. He is English. He carries the quiet disdain the English have for us. And too many children have died from his medicines and vaccines. Too many women have died in childbirth with him. The women all went to Cassie, instead.
I remember well the time when the doctor told Julia Esperanza, one of the grade school teachers, that her son had meningitis and that it was too late, told her the child’s back had gone stiff and the fever was so high that all he could do was try to make the child comfortable. But Julia Esperanza picked up the child, carried him in her arms up the hillside road that circled the island, took him to the Great House, to Cassie. Cassie listened intently to the fearful voice of the grade school teacher, listened as she described how her son had gotten progressively sicker, how the doctor had said he would die. Julia Esperanza claims Cassie sat and listened, stood up, waved her hand and said “Foolishness!” She went outside and surveyed the yard, found the Scotch bonnet bush that was laden with the peppers, picked a faded orange pepper from the bush, brought it back inside and crushed it on the kitchen table with the bottom of a rum bottle before sprinkling its seeds into a tall glass of white rum. To this, she added a sprig of mint and some lavender dust before stirring the contents several times. She poured some of this in the then unconscious child’s mouth and splashed some on his back. She stared at him. She stared at him so hard that had he been able to look back he would have been struck dumb with terror. She apparently screamed something in a language Julia Esperanza did not understand and then shook violently. When she stopped panting, after she had regained herself, Cassie told Julia Esperanza to take her son home, put him in bed, and then go outside and kill a young goat with her bare hands, to do it in the front yard. Cassie told her if she did this, the child would be fine.
Julia Esperanza took the boy home, put him in bed, and went outside to kill a young goat. As if instructed by an invisible shepherd, a young goat simply walked up to her and then sat down at her feet. It was difficult work, and she cried as did it. Julia Esperanza bawled, but she did it. She held the goat in her arms and quickly snapped its neck. It was much easier than she had imagined, the twisting of the small goat’s neck and the way in which its body went limp after the terrible cracking sound. These things are always easier than people think. But the important part here is that she didn’t dare disobey Old Cassie. And the boy was fine the next morning. The boy was as he had been before he had fallen sick: running around the front yard yelling and screaming, playing with branches to build miniature forts. And one less family on the island took their children to the English doctor.
Twelve cats roamed the town in the daytime, and twelve cats returned to the Great House each evening. Derrick, the butcher’s brother, claimed Cassie named each cat after a noble region in Spain, told us how one cat was named Malaga, another Sevilla, and the mangiest one named Castilla, a fact that made many laugh considering the Archbishop’s surname was none other than Castillo. Some nights, you could see a fire up there off to the side of the Great House. Other nights, the house and yard were pure darkness. Miss Simpson tells the story of how an old drunk at the beach bar joked he had bedded Cassie on the lawn outside the Great House by one of those fires. He joked Cassie was old and shriveled like a prune but that she was still a lusty and fiery woman more than capable of pleasing a man. You already know nothing good could have come of this.
A few days later, the drunkard’s house caught fire. The blaze was spectacular, almost unearthly with the vigor in which it consumed the wooden house. People rushed to form a relay between the harbor and the house in an attempt to put the fire out. Bucket after bucket, the blaze remained insistent, but Miss Simpson was quick to point out that despite the fact other houses stood within mere feet of the blazing one, that despite the ever-present breeze that should have spread the blaze across the entire neighborhood, not a flicker of that fire strayed beyond the confines of its discrete burning. The drunk never made it out of the house. He was asleep, probably passed out from too much rum. We’ll never know. Miss Simpson said that this is what happens when you talk like that about Old Cassie. Miss Simpson warned us all that Cassie knew, that she knew everything: “Call her crazy and mean, my boy. Call her what you like. But never disrespect that woman, Diego. If you disrespect her, it come at a very high price.” Miss Simpson never joked when she said things like this. She meant it. Just like all the old women, she meant every word of it.
There were only five nuns left at the convent. There were other women that lived there, but they weren’t nuns. Some of them dressed like nuns, but they could not be called Sister. Sister Juan Martín, the Reverend Mother, was the oldest of the nuns. She had come to the convent from Cuba as a young woman. She had entered the convent with Cassie and her sister, Flora. At the time, they were the first three women to come to the convent to become nuns in many years. Some say it had been a good ten years since any other women had come there to study and then take the vows. The Sisters ran the grade school and the high school, the hospital, and the flea market. They still do, even to this day. They fed and clothed the really poor, loaned money to fishermen who needed to repair boats. They were some of the only women that men lowered their heads to out of respect. Despite the fact no one paid an ounce of respect to the three priests on the island or Archbishop Castillo, men lowered their heads for the nuns.
Two of the three priests, along with the Archbishop, drank in the bar with all of the other men. They swore. They stumbled out of the bar at the end of the night drunk and disheveled. They were anything but celibate, and they sat and talked about women just like the other men. They were men first and men of God second. They spoke Spanish or English first and Latin second. As for the third priest, he was one of us, el pueblo, but he was a stern man, a bureaucrat, a numbers man rarely seen unless one went to the Archbishop’s mansion. But the Sisters? No, they lived a life of devotion. If one of them came into the corner shop and ordered a soft drink, someone would run up and pay for it. If they ordered groceries, people would fork up money to pay for them. Even folks who had little money to begin with would sacrifice their last dime for those women. The Sisters never paid for anything. They were that good.
But Sister Juan Martín, yes, she had started at the convent at the same time as Old Cassie and her sister, Flora. And try as you might to get her to say something about her old compatriots, she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t say a single word. But honestly, no one ever asked her about Flora. Flora was gone, was somewhere in America. The one we all craved information about was Cassie. Sister Juan Martín would smile and say: “Now why would you want to hear about Cassandra?” It would sound like a question, but it was never a question. It was, in a way, a call to silence. You knew she was never going to say a word. I once heard Gran Señor Murillo, the old Cubano who collects fees down at the docks, try to get Sister Juan Martín to say something about Cassie by addressing the nun by her birth name. But not even that worked. No amount of history or familiarity could get her to say a bad word about Cassie. The Sisters never spoke ill of anyone, not even Old Cassie. But that didn’t stop folks from trying to get them to do so.
Teenagers back then used to sometimes joke that Old Cassie probably left her house in disguise and that she might well be standing near the Spanish fountain or sitting over by the market near the square. This was done just to scare other kids; it was difficult not to talk about Old Cassie. She came up daily, the way the weather comes up in conversation. The weather here is almost always the same: hot, muggy, breezy some of the time, but everyone talks about it anyway. It was the same with Cassie. People wondered what she did with all of that money she had, the land behind the Great House, the house itself. They wondered what she ate, if she drank the rum from the estate’s distillery, if she ever went on holiday. People couldn’t help it. They talked about her all of the time, stopping only because they spied a cat nearby.
Miss Simpson told us that Cassie actually started medical school. She was the only woman in her medical school class in England. Miss Simpson said Cassie’s real father, old man Reynolds, was strangely proud of how smart Cassie was. She was first in her class in high school. She was studying medicine when old man Reynolds died. The Reynolds family refused to continue paying for Cassie once William Reynolds was placed in the ground, told her to come home to the Island to help out at the Great House. Cassie had no other family. Her mother was old and sick then, too sick to help her or anyone else. The man we all originally thought was Cassie’s father died mysteriously several years before that in an accident one morning as he took his boat out, something involving him getting caught in his own net and being dragged quickly down into the sea and drowning, the weight of his body in the net anchoring the boat in the harbor for days before anyone realized what had happened. But even before that, old man Reynolds had taken Cassie and Flora as his charges, and with time it had become known that he had fathered them both, that he had slept with their mother Tita Diaz, the healing woman.
When Cassie received the orders from the Reynolds family to come home after old man Reynolds died, she did. She had no choice. Not even Miss Simpson knows exactly what happened in the Great House in the time after the old man’s death, but it had to have been bad. Cassie and Flora did not go to the convent of their own free will. Many seem to know that aspect of the story. They were forced into the convent by their half-brother and his wife. Cassie had done something terrible, but no one seemed to know or remember what it was she had done. One never questioned a “half-milk” like Cassie or Flora, and one definitely never questioned the “milk-bread,” what the old people called the full English like the Reynolds Family. You could question el pueblo or the Indians or the blacks, but you never questioned a “milk-bread” or a “half-milk.” You never so much as looked one of them directly in the face. What we know is the Reynolds family had proclaimed that Cassie and Flora could no longer live in regular society and that they had the two of them hidden away at the convent. Maybe they believed God and His Holy Church could change them, save them, perhaps. We will never know.
But you already know what happened. All of the Reynolds family, one by one, died. Cassie’s half-sister-in-law tripped and broke her ankle, stumbled and fell into a ditch. They took her to the doctor and he splinted her ankle. She limped. She was in pain. Men were called from the streets to help carry her back to her car. But then, on her way home, a tree branch fell and hit the car. Some even say it was a branch from the shak shak tree, the flamboyant tree by the entrance to the Great House, that fell on the car. The driver lost control, swerved and ended up going over the embankment to plunge headlong into the sea. The sea’s many layers swallowed the car whole. Both she and her driver, if they weren’t already dead, drowned. You can still find the spot where the car left the road in its lunge for the sea; a small white wooden cross is staked in the dirt there on the side of the road that circles the island, planted not too far from the entrance to the Reynolds Estate.
Both of Mrs. Reynolds’s children died mysteriously. A frightened horse kicked the girl in the back of the head, and she was found dead on the speckled gray gravel out near the stables behind the Great House, the blood pooled like a lopsided halo around her crooked head. The boy died in an accident out in the fields, his body hidden carefully in the sugar cane for almost two weeks. And, well, you know what happened to Old Cassie’s half-brother, the younger Mr. Reynolds. He hanged himself in the front yard by the gate to the Estate, hanged himself from a branch of the stunted royal poinciana tree standing guard there, his body swinging for all to see when the morning light crept over the hill behind the Great House.
It is never easy to know a story well. Sometimes, all one can gather is an impression. Sometimes, Time itself muddies the details to the point little if any fact remains. The younger Mr. Reynolds saw ghosts, some say, saw his own dead father beating one of the children to death. The younger Reynolds was sick and told by the doctor he would die a slow and agonizing death. The younger Reynolds was heartsick after the loss of his wife and children. The younger Reynolds wanted to test out a wild theory about reincarnation. None of these is true, and yet they are all true. Miss Simpson told us the younger Mr. Reynolds was a weak man and that he was simply too weak to withstand the curse left on the land by Old Cassie and her sister Flora. But none of that branch of the Reynolds family remains to confirm or deny any of this. None of them can tell us what happened between Old Cassie and the younger Reynolds and his wife. All that is left is the Great House and the land. All that is left is silence.
Old Cassie watched over us all from the Reynolds Estate. She had all of their money and all of their land. She had their standing, the people afraid of her much the way they had feared the Reynolds family for almost a century. El pueblo call up their best English when they address her, if they dare to address her. But no one called Old Cassie a Reynolds. No, she was something else altogether. Miss Simpson said that people from abroad sometimes came to the island for her help: sick people, really sick people, dying people. And Cassie spoke to them in their own languages; she knew English, Spanish, French, German, Hindi, and Patois. She even knew Chinese and Portuguese.
How the foreigners found her, how they found out about her, is anyone’s guess. They say that when the Governor General’s favorite young housekeeper was sick with pneumonia, the fever so high the girl had become delirious, he reluctantly took her to Old Cassie. We have no way of knowing what she did exactly, but she cured the girl of her illness. Even to this day, el pueblo claim this is why the Governor General turns a blind eye to the odd things that happen on the grounds of that old estate. One wonders what the Sisters would have done if one of them were to become sick. Would they have gone to Old Cassie? Would that even be possible?
But they never had reason to go to Cassie. Those women were never sick. Even now, they are never sick. They remind us that cleanliness is next to Godliness. They moved around as if their feet were cautiously floating above the ground beneath those habits. They prayed for our souls and our bodies. They made sure things got done. They listened to us and cared for us. And Cassie? She crushed a whole pepper in the bottom of a glass and added hot water. She drank this the way many of us drink tea or coffee. She sometimes rocked in her chair on the side terrace of the Great House. She gathered her evidence and her information. And was she ever sick? Did she ever need care? Back then, no one could have predicted. What the women did, what they did faithfully, was to pray for her. They lit candles at Santa María Estrella del Mar and prayed to the Madonna. They prayed for the woman who saved their sick children, the woman who helped them give birth, the woman they all believe saw the face of the Devil and lived.