Sister Ivy reordered Lenworth’s life, coaxed and coached him into a manhood he never imagined, but did it so subtly he thought he had done it himself. He was the son she never had, and she the mother he wished his own could have been—educated and independent and assured. Exactly what he wished for Plum. So when Sister Ivy said, “Every baby must be blessed,” Lenworth’s only reply was, “Yes, of course.”
They were on the verandah, Sister Ivy still in her Sunday best. The brim of her hat quivered with each movement of her head and each coo directed at Opal, who lay with her head cradled by Sister Ivy’s knees. The afternoon was quiet, almost mournful and funereal. The radio played in the background, but the music—a mixture of gospel and slow songs about lost love—and the announcer’s drawl fed the mournfulness. Even the clouds, thin and wispy, drifted listlessly across the sky.
“Not a christening or a baptism. Just a blessing. She’ll get baptized when she’s older, when she can make that decision for herself and choose to be baptized.”
Lenworth nodded again.
“But you going to have to come to church with me between now and then. Show them you are a Christian.”
“Of course.” Lenworth nodded again.
“She must favor her mother. She don’t have a thing for you.”
Lenworth heard the unspoken question, “You sure the baby is yours?” But he brushed that aside, for he was sure that Opal was his. Opal had his chin—round where Plum’s was a bit more elongated—and toes—long and thin and the second toe longer than the first—or so he thought, but he didn’t say that.
Sister Ivy looked up at him and back at Opal. “Dead stamp of her mother, no true?”
He didn’t want to, but he found himself describing Plum. Unforgettable: flawless skin, like whipped chocolate batter; almondshaped eyes that turned down at the outer edges and irises a shade lighter than her dark skin would suggest. Lips softened with a dab of natural cocoa butter. She had a way of making him think ordinary, everyday things were extraordinary. Not that he didn’t already know that many things tossed aside had secondary uses. Plum made him look even more keenly at things he wouldn’t have given a second thought: orange peel that he normally tossed on a heap made a great tea; thick and hardy coconut shell, when polished and smoothed, made a unique bowl.
He chose his words carefully, tiptoeing around what he knew to be true: Plum made him forget he was an adult and she a graduating student. Made him forget to hold himself back. He fell with head, heart, and soul, taking her with him, mixing up love and desire and loneliness with the fear of being exposed and the fear—both hers and his—of being abandoned again. And in the end, the adults would believe he led her, but the truth was that they tumbled equally into their illicit love.
Unforgettable. The girl in the pale peach dress, sitting in the back of the school auditorium giggling at something an adult onstage said, covering her mouth and her eyes, hiding the laughter. The girl in uniform sitting in the middle of a hired bus among girls in identical uniforms, yet somewhat different, eagerly looking out the window at the passing countryside, drinking in the hillside villages, the roadside vendors holding up bags of peeled fruit, peppered crayfish in bags, oranges tied to a stick, drinking it all in and questioning the need for the red mud lake, the logic of putting manufacturing residue that peels the skin so close to villages, the toxicity of such dangerous chemical residue so close to human life.
“Effluent,” he said. “That’s what it’s called.”
“Effluent.” She twirled the word around her mouth, weighing it, tasting it, and returned to the practical. “Will it ever dry up?”
“Eventually.”
“Then what will become of it?”
“Don’t know.”
“What an awful way to die. To fall into an acidic lake and watch your skin peel away.”
“It doesn’t happen often. Everybody knows how dangerous it is. Plus it’s not that easy to get to it.”
“Still . . .”
He remembered her as the girl in the red dress on the shop piazza, waving at him, her face scrunching up into a ready smile, her fingers reaching out to grasp at his then pulling back. The girl on the beach, hiding her bathing suit and her body beneath an over-sized T-shirt, holding her head in her hands and sobbing, comparing herself to a discarded bag of old clothes her parents found and shipped abroad. She hadn’t been allowed to return to Brooklyn, to the brownstone on President Street, to the friends she hadn’t bid goodbye, to summertime hopscotch and jumping rope. A single summer vacation had turned into one long, unexpected expulsion from the only life she’d known. Expelled. Excommunicated. Exiled. Each day she had another word for what her parents had done, for how they had reengineered her life without her knowing it, for how they had sent her away as if she hadn’t mattered at all. Unforgettable.
And forgettable: he walked out of the hospital with the baby girl and left Plum there, asleep and expecting to wake and nurse her child. Abandoned. Left again like a bag of old clothes. Liberated, was what he preferred to think. Without a baby holding her back, she would be free to pursue a fuller life—an education and a career—all the things that he had taken from her by making her a mother too early, all the possibilities his own sister, who had left home for the police academy and returned with a baby boy, hadn’t had. He could list more than a handful of girls he knew with stilted and stifled ambitions. He didn’t wish that for Plum.
Of course, he didn’t say the latter parts, not how they met and not the truth about how he came to be Opal’s only parent.
Monday mornings, Lenworth found himself collecting coconut shells from his neighbors. He could have gone on any day, but he knew with certainty that the red beans and rice that was a staple of most every Jamaican household’s Sunday dinner would have been made with fresh coconut milk. And so he walked from house to house with a crocus bag collecting the hard pieces of shell that his neighbors would have otherwise thrown away.
Back in the workshop—the converted fowl coop—and Opal in the house with Sister Ivy, Lenworth broke the shells even further and polished the pieces before mixing them with resin and shaping bowls and platters and kitchen utensils and tabletops. He liked the solitude of the workshop, the smell of cedar and varnish, he liked Sister Ivy’s smile when she passed in the evening and saw the shimmer of stained wood or polished coconut shell, or the simple, clean lines of a large serving platter he had completed.
Sister Ivy took charge of finding the wholesaler who bought most of Lenworth’s pieces in bulk. It was she who sent him the women who sold goods in various craft markets and stalls in Montego Bay, and who bought small quantities of the smaller items they knew tourists would buy.
At another time, he would have thanked Plum for letting him see the value of discarded coconut shells, for reminding him that ordinary things were sometimes extraordinary.
Sister Ivy took charge of every detail of Opal’s blessing as if Opal were her own grandchild. She set the date and time with the minister at the Mt. Carey Baptist Church, and saw to it that Lenworth went to service in the weeks leading up to Opal’s blessing. And now on the morning of—a cool, cloudy January morning—Sister Ivy dressed Opal in white, a dress covered with frills and lace and a large bow on the front of the bodice, socks that were also fringed with lace, and patent leather shoes—all gifts from Sister Ivy’s daughter who lived abroad. She led them down the hill away from Lenworth’s house, Opal propped on her shoulder, and Lenworth walking behind them like a dutiful son, carrying two Bibles and hymnals and Sister Ivy’s vast patent leather purse.
An anemic sun peeped through the clouds as if it welcomed a reprieve from its job. The road through the community was a mixture of marl and stone, pockmarked with depressions where puddles from the previous night’s rain had formed. The vegetation to the right was thick and green and lush, and he suspected there was water underground that fed the vegetation in that particular area. It reminded him of home, the town where he grew up. As quickly as the thought came, he shoved it aside, for he didn’t want to think of his mother in Clarendon waiting for news of the newborn grandchild or for him to come home with his new family.
Plum. He couldn’t think of her either. This moment, Opal’s blessing, should have been hers and his, not his and Sister Ivy’s. But he wouldn’t allow himself any regrets, not this particular morning.
The road emptied out on the main road toward Montpelier and the south coast. A few more turns and they were there, walking uphill to the old church, which had been destroyed by fire and slave revolts on more than one occasion, and rebuilt time after time. Without the sun lighting it, the building’s gray stone and concrete walls were dull.
Lenworth had no particular affinity for the Mt. Carey Baptist Church, or for any church, and he wanted only to get through the morning’s service, to escape the energy that infected the congregants in sudden bursts of “Amen” and “Hallelujah” and “Praise the Lord,” and fits of uncontrollable quaking and rolling. He was never one for those kinds of histrionics and if he had to attend any church he preferred the more staid Anglican Church with its subdued form of worship.
For a brief moment he held Opal. It was just long enough for the minister to impart his blessing, but she squirmed and cried a full-throated howl, only settling back into a whimper and then quiet once she was back in Sister Ivy’s arms. Lenworth knew then what the pattern of his life with Opal would be like. But again, he allowed himself no regrets. Everything he had done since that September morning when he walked away from Plum had been for Opal. Everything he did on that September morning had been for Plum—his gift to her.