Had Plum found Lenworth and come to Anchovy then, she would have found a tomboyish girl with dimples like Plum’s, almond-shaped eyes that were too brown to belong to someone with such dark skin. Had Plum come then, she would have found a not-yet-sophisticated Pauline worrying about the plumbing in the old house, the tank nearly empty of water, the duck ants again making nests along the wall, the springy floor boards in the tiny living room, termites that were slowly eating away the wood in the house. And she would have found the little girl who would not smile at Pauline, the tomboy of a girl who wandered off with the neighborhood boys as if there was something out beyond the house waiting to be found by her.
And she would have found Lenworth embroiled in another scandal, the circumstances somewhat similar to hers: a school employee and a student caught up in a friendship that seemed too close, a school staff rooting around for the truth, a girl clamming up and protecting him to the very end, and Pauline aware of the sketchy details of the school’s inquiry, boiling with anger.
The house in Anchovy was too close, too small really to contain both Pauline’s explosive anger and Lenworth’s fear of exposure, without the two competing emotions surging and spiraling into a cataclysmic encounter.
Pauline, heavily pregnant and rocking her first-born, Craig, yelled through an open window, alternating between cooing and whispering to the frightened two-year-old and pressing her enormous belly against the window frame as if to catapult her words through the louvers. Pauline and Lenworth had forgotten Opal, who was too young to understand the nature of the quarrel, the possible loss of his carpentering job and too scared to move. So she stood still, a shadow in the shadows, a mute within the muted rooms, tears dripping down her face, her fingers laced together, her feet as stiff as a statue’s. She wanted to go to him, the quiet one, but couldn’t get her feet to move from within the shadows and propel her body through the lit dining room within reach of Pauline’s voice and out to the verandah where her father sat. Opal stayed in the dark, uncomforted, neither savior nor saved.
In truth, Lenworth’s situation with the student was not at all the same as his relationship with Plum. The facts that he should have told Pauline: The girl had taken to stopping by his campus workshop on a daily basis. He didn’t turn her away. The girl’s mother had found a letter to him and she refused to believe that nothing untoward had happened between her daughter and him. Lenworth thought it best to keep quiet lest someone dig deep and find out about him and Plum, the circumstances under which he had left his previous teaching job, and how he had left Brown’s Town with the baby girl, how he had abandoned the baby’s mother in the hospital.
Instead of fighting and risking exposure, he had walked away from the job and the school and into a verbal brawl with Pauline.
Lenworth stayed outside, still in the shadows, watered by the night’s dew, weighing the mistakes of his young life like a ball he rolled from one palm to another. Long after Pauline’s rage had subsided and the children had gone to sleep, he slipped into the old chicken coop he’d converted into a workshop and lay down on the new sawdust—cedar and mahogany and pine commingled—which only a day earlier he’d laid down like a bed of moss on the dirt. The limbs of a cherry tree brushed across the roof, and in the distance an owl hooted. Much closer, the night insects chirped away, unconcerned with the other life forms quieting themselves and bedding down for the night. The sky, clear and cloudless, glittered like a sequined dress. He couldn’t see anything beyond the circle illuminated by the oil lamp, but he wasn’t concerned with the imagined or real thing that lay out there beyond the converted chicken coop. An old sewing machine, whose tabletop had been devoured by termites, stood before the worktable. He envisioned the scrolled metal legs, with Singer stamped across the back support, as part of something else, living a new life far removed from its former one. He hadn’t yet determined what it would become. The base of a dining table? The sides of a bench? Sometimes, he still liked to think of himself as an engineer, but in truth he was a former math whiz who once taught high school math and chemistry while he saved for university, and who now worked as a carpenter and knick-knack maker who turned other people’s garbage into something of value.
He took the table apart, sawing and breaking the weakened wood, dousing it in gasoline, which he hoped would kill any remaining termites or at least stun them until morning when he could burn the piles of wood. He sanded the rust and paint from the scrolled metal, ran his fingers over the smooth surface he had revealed, then wiped it clean and painted it anew, brushing with quick strokes though he knew it was work best done in daylight when he could see the crevices he had missed, the bubbles of paint he failed to smooth completely. But he worked steadily through the night, moving his hands like a robot calibrated only to move a brush back and forth.
That night, while he worked with the scent of sawdust and paint tickling his nose, he also broke down and rebuilt himself. He took the man Pauline had seemingly discarded, stripped bare his soul, tore apart every bit of his life, the one fact he couldn’t dispute—he hadn’t discouraged the girl from coming to his workshop—and began rebuilding a man who would indeed be valued. A man who had control over his own life.
While the paint dried, he sketched out the top of the table, trying to decide on a round or square top or a plank of wood that retained the uneven circumference of the tree trunk with its natural grooves and pockets intact. In the end, he chose the circular top with its natural characteristics erased.
By morning, when slashes of sunlight began appearing, when the dew drops still hung on the leaves, when Pauline emerged from the house and looked around the verandah and down the hill for a glimpse of him, he had a plan to save his soul and his family, to remake himself as a carpenter planes and sands and remakes wood, a plan that even the devil couldn’t mock.
He would become a priest, remake souls instead of other people’s discarded things, make up for his one great sin with a life of pious devotion. And make up for the one life he had irreparably wrecked—Plum’s.
He lay down on the sawdust, his nose against the scent he liked, and slept. By the time he woke, the sun was way overhead, the house above the workshop quiet. He brushed the sawdust from his body, cleaned up, bathed away the scent of sawdust and paint, and left for the Baptist Church in Mt. Carey. He took the narrow, rutted, and marl-filled road that emptied out onto the main road and continued along until he reached the slight hill upon which the Baptist Church stood. He waited for the pastor to come, his surety and confidence in his decision to swap his current life for the priesthood building as he waited in the shadow of a palm tree on the rocks that overlooked the stony graveyard. Somewhere below the church lay the bones of one or another of his relatives he hadn’t known and whose offspring he wouldn’t ever know. He wasn’t concerned with progeny, though. Instead, he was concerned with something else he had come to understand: what it meant to have agency, to have the capacity to exert power and control over his life. Despite the scandal threatening to disrupt his life, he felt he had agency, the power to choose another way of living. If he couldn’t teach or be an engineer or make do with the life he had built in Anchovy, he would become a priest. Engineering and the priesthood were one and the same, he thought; engineers built foundations for buildings, and priests, likewise, helped congregants build foundations in Christ.
The pastor, the Reverend Alexander Turner, who was also on his way out, didn’t bother with pity or judgment. Instead, he laid his hand on Lenworth’s head and prayed. In the end, Lenworth’s rationalization about engineering and the priesthood being one and the same didn’t matter. The pastor, who had his own checkered past, endorsed the plan wholeheartedly, recommended a seminary in Maryland where he had once taught, and fished from a drawer the paperwork to get him started.
“Got this for another young man who changed his mind,” the pastor said. “You will make better use of it.”
And so Lenworth started on a journey toward a career he never imagined, an escape hatch that took him out of Jamaica to the Maryland suburbs, away from the life he had pulled together in Anchovy and the problem with a student that threatened to mushroom into a permanent stain on his character and life. And so he defied the devil making a mockery of his good intentions, the devil’s attempts to muck up the life he had pulled together in Anchovy.