IN THE BRIGHT SUNSHINE OF THE NEXT MORNING, fears of Dadda’s jumbie coming back to haunt me faded. There was something bigger to deal with; something real, waiting just outside my front door.
I put it off a little longer by scrambling eggs for my breakfast. Through the window, I watched Sir Grandad, the resident mongoose, slinking through my tomato plants. He’d better not damage a one. I turned my eggs onto a plate and took them to the kitchen table. I wasn’t good at putting off the inevitable. I wolfed down breakfast and left the dirty dishes right there so, hoping that Sir Grandad wouldn’t smell them and break into the kitchen while I was gone.
In the hallway, I scuffed my feet into my tennis shoes and took a deep breath. What Ife used to call a “calming breath” when she was in her yoga phase. After she sprained her back tying her body up into knots, I didn’t hear anything more about chakras and kundalini energy again. She’d taken up t’ai chi after that, and then food combining. For two months, she would have only fruit and three pints of water for breakfast, then spend the next two hours running to pee every twenty minutes.
I went out onto the porch.
Cashew fruit. Family: Anacardiaceae. Genus: Anacardium. Species: humile. Variety: Precocious Dwarf. Other Names: Cashew, Cashew Apple. Part Used: False Fruit.
The dwarf-cashew grove was still out there, solid, real, and in full riot. The trees stretched their branches up, making alleluia to the first taste they’d had of the sun in over three decades. Something else must have been nourishing them down beneath the waters. The leaves were healthy and green, and each tree was bowed down with the red and yellow weight of cashew fruit. Overripe cashew apples had already started dropping to the ground.
I found myself at the gate of the fence to the grove. Then I was undoing the latch, my fingers remembering how the tooth of it always caught and you had to give it a little extra push for it to open with a click-crunch sound that only one thing on this broad Earth made: the gate to Dadda’s cashew grove. I pushed. It opened. I glanced at the latch; no rust. Mumma used to be forever oiling it.
I stepped inside. The ground was dry, not soaked with brine. There was the same little patch of scrub before you hit the scrum of trees. Little after Mumma was gone, Dadda ceased to care them. The fallen apples had sprouted trees which had grown to fill the rows in.
I stopped at the first line of trees. They were bowed down with red and yellow pear-shaped fruit, each with a shiny grey shell hanging below it. A few of the branches dipped so low that they touched the ground. I’d have to prune those back; they could root and sprout whole new trees that would compete with the others for soil and light. But watch at me! Thinking like I was going to take this straggly copse of cashews seriously.
I went a little way in amongst the trees. It was dark in there, spotted in places with shifting sunlight.
The smell. I had forgotten it; the cloying sweet smell of hundreds of fallen cashew apples. The reason I hated cashew juice, though I could drink distilled cashew liquor; the smell of the alcohol was quite different than the smell of the fruit. And now I was mashing overripe cashews beneath my feet with every step, releasing that overpowering odour into the air.
I squeezed through a few more trees, pulled a cashew apple off a low branch, remembered how the smooth, shiny scarletness used to feel in my hands.
A shadow moved at the corner of my vision. When I looked, nothing was there. I went still, held my breath to hear better. Was that a rustling noise? I threw the cashew apple I was holding in the direction of the sound I thought I’d heard. The apple flicked leaves and twigs in its trajectory, landed with a thump. There was another small rustle. The sound of feet moving out of the way?
“Hello?” I said. My voice broke. It was fucking dark in here. Maybe jumbies didn’t need nighttime; maybe they only needed darkness. I was surrounded by trees, their branches interlaced like fingers. My scalp prickled. I took a step backwards. Right into someone’s arms. I yelled. He wrapped them tighter around me. I pulled his thumb up to my face and bit into it. The arms released me one time, and I spun around to fight.
I once pulled Ife out of the way of a car before my brain had time to understand that my eyes were seeing a red Volvo bearing down on her. Same way so it was now: I was already cocking my elbow to drive into the man’s belly when it began to dawn on me that he had been speaking. And that the words had been: “Ow! Calamity, it’s Gene! Don’t—”
Momentum. Hell of a thing. Was a good 189 pounds of Calamity moving at speed behind that elbow. The blow was already in progress, and I couldn’t stop it.
Gene took a little step backwards and pushed on my arm. Not quite quickly enough; I gave him a glancing strike across his body. The air whuffed out of him as he fell. My elbow caught air. I overbalanced, and went right down beside Gene onto my bad knee. The pain made me shout. Gene was on his back, gasping a little for air, one hand on his solar plexus. He was sucking the bitten thumb of the other hand, watching me warily.
“What the fuck you doing in here?” I asked.
He scowled. “Getting my hand bit off by a crazy woman. Every second word with you have to be a swear word?”
“You didn’t have no right sneaking up on me like that!” I pushed myself up to my feet. My knee made a popping sound. “Ow.”
Groaning, Gene rolled to his knees. I offered him a hand up. He ignored it. I shrugged. “Fine by me,” I told him.
I held onto a tree trunk, shook my leg out to straighten it. The pulp of a cashew apple I’d landed on came detached from my knee and plopped to the ground.
Gene managed to stand up. Grimacing, he slowly straightened his back, one fist pressing against the small of it.
“I hurt your thumb bad?” I asked him.
“Jesus Christ, woman! You know how much bite force a human being can produce?”
“About sixty-eight pounds of pressure per square inch, on the back teeth?”
“No, that’s only for regular chewing. If you bite down deliberately, it can be up to twelve hundred pou… How you know that?”
“You’re fast on your feet,” I said. “Didn’t know you could move like that.” But actually, I’d experienced how agile he could be. “Come to think of it, I shouldn’t be surprised.” My face flushed.
He twisted his torso, making joints in his back pop. “I getting too long in the tooth for this kinda fighting, though. Going to pay for it tomorrow.”
“And your hand’s bleeding. Come into the house. I’ll throw some white rum on that cut.”
He grumbled, then said, “All right. But bring that thing with you.” He pointed with his chin.
In the dark, it took me a little while to see what he was talking about. It was a rusty cutlass, lying at the foot of one of the trees. I picked it up. “You… came with this? To see me?”
He kissed his teeth. “Don’t flatter yourself.” He stomped out of the grove, headed for the house. I followed him.
“You coming to put that alcohol on?” said Gene from my front door. “I don’t want to catch anything from you, you know.”
“It’s like they say.” My knee crunched and ached up all five steps. “Don’t trouble trouble or trouble will trouble you.”
Where had I put it? “I think it’s out on the porch. It had mud caked all over it.” Menopause memory loss, I guess. I smoothed the Band-Aid onto Gene’s thumb. “So, you want to tell me why you were sneaking around in my cashews? Help yourself to some paw-paw.” I indicated the orange slices of paw-paw I’d put on the kitchen table.
“Thank you.” He reached to pull a chair out from under the table, then stopped. “May I?”
“Awoah. Now you asking permission. All right, sit down.” He did. I sat in one of the other chairs, got myself a slice of paw-paw. The faint, soapy smell always made me want to blow bubbles.
“I just wanted to make sure you were all right,” Gene said. “The last few days must have put you through some changes.”
That surprised the laugh out of me. “If you only knew. Fuck.”
He grimaced at the word. Too bad if he didn’t like my potty mouth. He helped himself to a slice of paw-paw, cupped his hand under his chin so he wouldn’t get its orange juice on his uniform. Then, uncertainly, he said, “Those trees. Where they came… I mean, I didn’t see them the last two times I was here.”
“You didn’t? Why, Officer, you must be under some serious stress. Trees don’t just appear out of nowhere like that.”
“All right. All right.”
“You think maybe you should have a glass of water? Maybe you’re dehydrated.”
“All right. I’m sorry, okay?”
“Maybe okay. I’m not sure.” I was wearing my tough broad face, but inside I was giddy. He came to see if I was all right.
“How you knew about the biting force thing?” he asked me. Strips of orangey-green paw-paw skin were accumulating on the kitchen table.
He frowned. “You just said it back in the trees. Humans? Bite force?”
“Oh! That. Chuh. Can’t remember what I said twenty minutes ago, but the project I did on sharks in Fourth Form is still crystal clear in my head.”
He nodded. “I know the way. You get to be a certain age, you start to find the past make more sense than the present.”
“Excuse me,” I said half-jokingly, “I don’t think I’m quite at that age yet. And if things in my past didn’t make any sense then, I don’t think they going to start now.”
“Maybe not.” He glanced at his watch. “I have to catch the next ferry, or I’m going to be late for work.” He stood up. “You have a plastic shopping bag you could give me?”
“Yeah, man.” I got him one from the basket under the sink.
As we walked through the living room to the front door, he asked me, “How you learned to fight like that?”
“Michael taught me. When we were young.”
“A boyfriend?”
“Michael was never my boyfriend.” But you came to see if I was okay, I thought. Gene was starting to look more my type after all.
We went out onto the porch. Most of the mud on the cutlass had dried to a clay-pale colour. Gene picked it up carefully. Bits of dried mud sloughed off in clumps. He wrapped them and the cutlass in the plastic bag.
“Why you carrying around an old piece of something like that?” I asked him.
“Found it, just lying around.” He gestured vaguely out over the island. “Somebody could get hurt. I’ll dispose of it.”
Sweet guy. I waved till his car was out of sight. Went in and took a quick shower, changed into clothes that didn’t have cashew apple smeared on them. Time to get Agway yet? My belly was all butterflies from happy nerves. I looked at my watch. Good. Plenty of time to be on the next waterbus. I grabbed up my handbag and headed out.
On my way out, I glanced over at the trees. Now that I was watching them from out in the sun again, they looked only unkempt, only goofily short. Last week in the mall I’d spied a woman with a Chihuahua in her handbag. Her handbag, imagine! Suppose it had pissed in there, or shat? So shrunk up, it had looked like a rat. Any self-respecting member of its canine cousins could have had it for dessert. The dog had looked at me and I swear it’d trembled, mortified at what it had been bred to be. The trees looked like that Chihuahua. They were trembling too in the cool morning breeze. Just fermenting fruit on truncated trees. Maybe Agway would like cashews.
I HEAVED AGWAY UP ONTO MY HIP. I was really getting to take him home! He murmured at me and started playing with my necklace, a string of bright red-and-black jumbie beads. “Don’t let him put those in his mouth,” Evelyn said. “They’re—”
“Poisonous. I know. Went through that already with Ife. These are fake.” Still, I pulled the beads away from Agway’s hands.
“Let me walk you to the car.” She held the door to her office open to let me and Agway out.
“Chastity? Chastity Lambkin?”
It was Mrs. Winter, limping painfully towards me. Her ankle was wrapped. She was leaning on a cane on her left side, and on the arm of her son Leroy on the other. She eyed Agway in my arms.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
She stopped, puffing hard. “You remember, dear. That unfortunate accident. Your poor father’s funeral. I sprained my ankle when I fell. And I bruised my tailbone.”
“I’m so sorry,” I told her.
“Yes, well,” said Mrs. Winter. “If people are going to have outdoor events, dear, they really should secure the premises first. Make sure there are no hazards for others to trip on. Your father would have done that.”
Agway was staring curiously at Mrs. Winter. She frowned at him. “Your grandson?” she asked.
I wasn’t going to answer that. “I’m sorry you got hurt, Mrs. Winter.”
She peered at me little harder, and her nosehole flared. Her eyes widened. She looked like a marabunta wasp had stung her.
“That’s my pin!” she said. “You’re wearing my pin!”
Her pin? I had straightened out my gold pin that she’d been using to hike her drawers up, and I was wearing it on my blouse. “No, it’s mine.”
“Yours?”
“Yes, I found it the day of the funeral. I’m so glad to have recovered it. I lost it when I was just a little girl.” Holy crap. At the funeral—the pin! That had been the first magical power surge!
Mrs. Winter straightened up, gave me her best patronising smile. “No, Chastity. I lost it at your father’s funeral. I’ve had it all these years. I was using it to… I was wearing it that day.”
She’d been wearing my pin at her panty waist, to hold it together. I tried to keep my lips from twitching. “See what the letters spell, Mrs. Winter?”
She looked at the pin again. Agway reached to touch it. Gently, I pulled his little hand away. It had a sharp point, that pin. “Those aren’t letters,” spluttered Mrs. Winter. “They’re—how you call it—rococo.”
Evelyn leaned over and looked at the pin. “C, T, L,” she spelled out. “Chastity Theresa Lambkin. Oh, and I recognise it, too! Isn’t that the gold pin your mother gave you for your birthday? The eighth or the ninth, wasn’t it? I remember you bringing it to school and showing it off!”
Huh. I owed her for that one. Owed her for a lot, right now. Never mind.
“Yes,” I replied. “It’s mine.” I turned to Mrs. Winter. “I’m so glad you found it and kept it safe for me. All these years. What a generous thing to do.”
Mrs. Winter’s face was a picture.
“Well, you know Mummy,” said Leroy, amused. “Too kind-hearted for her own good.”
Agway burbled at me. He was getting restless.
“I have to go,” I said. “Time to give Agway his lunch.”
“Agway?” asked Mrs. Winter.
“Yes,” answered Evelyn. “Calamity is doing a wonderful charity for us; this poor boy’s family drowned at sea, and she’s fostering him.”
“She’s fostering him?”
“So good to see you, Mrs. Winter,” I burbled, heading for the doors to the outside. “See you at work next week?”
“That woman is a witch,” declared Evelyn once we were outside.
“True that.” Oh, this next thing was going to hurt. “I need to thank you,” I said, “for helping me just now with Mrs. Winter.” I managed not to choke on the words. “And for letting me look after Agway, too.” I sighed. “And for the car.”
“You’re welcome.”
We walked in delicate silence the rest of the way to my car. The mechanic hadn’t patched the flat tyre; instead, he’d replaced all four and the windshield. Evelyn had paid for it. Victoria perched on her spanking new wheels like a dowager in shiny patent pumps.
I opened the passenger side. A fiery belch came from inside; the car had been sitting in the sun for an hour. So I opened the driver’s side, too, to let some air flow through. Agway stared curiously at Victoria, and at the others in the parking lot. He pointed at it and asked me a question.
“I’m sorry, babby,” I said. “I don’t understand you.”
He looked frustrated, repeated himself, this time more irritably. He pointed at the car again.
“It’s a car,” said Evelyn. She tapped on the roof of the car. “Car. Can you say that?”
He just frowned at her.
“Calamity!” came a voice from behind me.
I turned. Leroy was running up to us.
“Yes?”
He stopped, panting a little. “I just want to ask you… Mummy’s too shamed to ask you herself, but I know she wants to know.”
“What?”
“Don’t laugh when you hear this, all right? Or I won’t be able to keep my face straight when I go back to her.”
“What she want?”
I didn’t have to do a thing. He was chuckling the moment he began to say the words. “She never found her bloomers that she lost that day at the funeral. She been thinking maybe somebody find it and been keeping it for her.”
Evelyn flashed me a look of mock-horror. I mouthed, I tell you later. “No,” I said. “Nobody did. At least, Parson never told me about anyone finding it.” I’d materialised the plate, too! The one that had dropped in the funeral parlour! Chastity used to have a favourite blue-and-white plate.
Leroy nodded, got his face under control. “All right. Thank you.” He left in the direction of where he must have parked his car. I had left that plate in Dadda’s house when I moved in with Auntie Pearl and Uncle Edward.
“What that was all about?” Evelyn asked.
“Mrs. Winter is my supervisor at work. Her panties fell off at the graveside during Dadda’s funeral.”
Evelyn cackled. “You lie! Right in front of everybody?”
I nodded. “Ee-hee.” I had had a hot flash in the funeral parlour, and my favourite plate had dropped out of the sky and broken. “She tried to kick the panties away so nobody wouldn’t see, but they tangled up her foot, and she fell. That’s why her ankle sprain.” Found, and then lost again.
Evelyn chuckled. “Man, I wish if I had been there.”
“You don’t hear the best part yet; it’s my pin she was using to hold the panties up. It was all warped out of shape when I found it on the grass.”
“Lord Jesus.”
That was the same look of devilment on young Evelyn’s face the day we were drawing pictures in school of what everyone would look like naked, and passing the pictures back and forth during Biology class. I wanted to tell her: Ev, I’m finding again. She would understand. But I didn’t say anything. Still too much rawness between her and me.
The car was cool enough now. I deposited Agway into the passenger seat and went round to the driver’s side. “Later, then,” I said to Evelyn.
She nodded, staring at Agway. “Such an incredible theory you have. About sea people, I mean.”
“Mm.” Theory, my big black behind.
“I want to drop in and see him from time to time. Just look him over, you know? Write up some notes for myself.”
I stiffened. “So, this is how I’m to repay you? By letting you treat him like a research subject?”
Her face went hard. “Calamity, why you have to be so harsh all the time?”
“I had good teachers.”
She sighed. “Well, most likely it’s nothing. These things usually are. I have to tell you, though; for Social Services to let you keep him, I have to confirm that he’s doing well with you.”
I glared at her, but she had the power to take Agway. Maybe he had, I didn’t know what—sea aunties, or cousins, or something. Fuck, if only he and I could talk! “All right,” I said to Evelyn. “When you want to come and see him?”
I had forgotten that gloating smile of hers when she got her way. “How about Sunday coming?”
“Six o’clock do you?”
“Six is perfect!” she chirruped. “See you then.” She waved, made an infuriatingly dainty Evelyn twirl, and went her ways. I kissed my teeth and got into the car.
WELL, if clothing was difficult to make Agway get used to, the car’s seatbelt was impossible. It was like trying to chain an eel. When we were both exhausted and he was weeping with frustration and anger, I finally gave up. I drove very carefully to the waterbus docks, just praying he wouldn’t try to climb into my lap. I kept all the windows but mine rolled up. Luckily, with a newly broken leg and a heavy cast, he didn’t seem inclined to move around much. He just gaped through the window glass and pointed, babbling away happily at the wonders he saw out there. From time to time he knotted one fist in his own matted-up hair with the shells in it. He even sucked at the shells.
If I never found his family, he would have to stay on land, go to school.
Oh, look; it’s Charity Girl!
Nobody was going to make this child a laughingstock. Not while I was around to draw breath. “First thing you need, my boy, is a haircut.”
When we got to the dock, Agway got excited. His first glimpse of the sea in two days. He tried to climb out his window, but only clunked his forehead against the glass. I ran my window up. He complained at me, clearly telling me that he wanted the stupid force field to go away. When that didn’t work, he tried pushing at the glass with his hands, grizzling the whole time. From grizzling he progressed to whining; from whining to something that sounded a lot like cussing; from cussing to a full-blown toddler tantrum of shrieking, bawling, kicking, lashing out. I had to slip the waterbus fare out with one hand through a chink in the top of my window. With the other one, I was trying to keep Agway quiet in his seat.
The ticket-taker peered into the car to see what all the commotion was about. “That’s the little boy!” she said. “The one you saved!” Cayaba Gossip Cable was clearly in full effect.
I steered the car one-handed onto the waterbus, found a place on the lower level where there was no view of the sea. Parked and pulled a flailing Agway into my arms. No way I could open the windows the whole way. “Baby boy, baby boy,” I said, “you can’t jump in the water. Not with this cast on your leg.”
He kicked and shrieked. His hand got me a good one in the jaw. Then his elbow connected with the horn. It blatted, and he jumped. He went utterly still. He stared at the horn. He leaned over and hit it again. He chortled at the sound. The people in the cars around us glared at me. It was going to be a long ride home.
WHEN I FINALLY PULLED UP in front of Dadda’s house, there was a small crowd outside the resurrected cashew grove. Lord, give me strength; what to tell all those people?
I turned off the ignition and thankfully opened the window. It had been blasted hot, having the windows up for the whole trip. Agway’s first cheque was going to put air conditioning in my car. Keep both of us more comfortable.
Over by the orchard gate, Mr. Lessing asked Mrs. Lessing, “What kind of trees they are?” The Lessings were my closest neighbours, a good mile away.
“Like you don’t have eyes?” she said. “Anybody could see arac apples growing on them.”
Two teenaged boys were swinging on the low fence. “So climb over and go inside then, nuh?” one of them dared the other. His friend just kissed his teeth, trying to look cool.
“Those not no blasted arac apples,” snapped Mr. Lessing. “And besides, how a whole orchard just spring up like that overnight?”
The two young men started lobbing pebbles towards the cashew trees. Mrs. Lessing made them stop.
Maybe I could sneak past them all and get inside the house. I opened my door and pulled Agway towards me. I got him as far as the driver’s seat when I heard: “Mummy, I could go and play in there?” My heart lurched. The little boy who’d asked the question was tugging at his mother’s hem and pointing at the trees.
She stooped down till they were eye to eye. “You not going in there unless I give permission. You hear me?”
He pouted. “Yes, Mummy.”
That’s when Agway did his trick again. He leaned on the car horn, grinning. Shit. He giggled as I pulled him out of the car and up onto my hip. My left lower back twinged at the motion.
I turned to face the crowd. Everybody was staring at us. “You see what you did?” I muttered to Agway. He reached towards the beloved car horn, nearly overbalancing the two of us. I stepped away from Victoria, kicked her door shut.
“Calamity; you reach?” It was Mrs. Soledad, coming towards us out of the crowd. I took Agway to meet his new babysitter.
“So this is the boy?” she asked. Today the hat was a snappy purple fedora.
“I’m calling him Agway.” Shy, Agway buried his face in my bosom.
Mrs. Soledad’s topper kept drawing my eye. Attached to the hat band, a jungle of cloth flowers fought for space with plastic fruit whose real counterparts had no climate zones in common: bright red hibiscuses elbowed dewy purple grapes aside; bougainvilleas in every colour tickled the cheeks of plump maroon American cherries.
“Who let his hair get like that?”
“I guess his parents.” There was even a snake lily in the hat band. And three loquats.
She kissed her teeth. “Have the child looking wild like that.”
Wild. She didn’t know the half of it.
“You going to want to get him some hats,” she said. She pointed at the sky. “The cancers, you know.”
Agway started to fuss. “He been cooped up in the car for too long,” I said. “Come inside with me, nuh?”
The Lessings were heading our way, the rest of our neighbours not far behind. I groaned.
Mrs. Lessing asked her husband, “If it’s not arac apples, then what?”
“Arac apples have their seed inside,” he replied. “You don’t see those have the seed on the outside? I don’t know why you won’t wear your glasses. Chastity; like you take up farming, or what?”
Mrs. Lessing added, “And who is this you have with you?”
“Don’t tell me he and all spring up overnight,” grumbled Mr. Lessing.
“He got lost at sea in the storm the other night,” I answered.
Murmurs of pity came from the crowd. “I read about him in the papers,” someone said. “It’s Chastity who find him.”
“He’s staying with me for a little bit.” Agway looked up at me, tried to reach for a nubbin of my hair.
“What’s your name, baby?” Mrs. Soledad asked Agway. He ignored her.
“He’s deaf?” asked Mrs. Lessing.
“Mannerless,” her husband said. “All the youths mannerless nowadays.” He glared at the two boys who’d been throwing stones.
“He just don’t understand English,” I told him.
“What then? French?” asked the woman whose son wanted to go and play in the cashew grove. I sometimes saw her riding the same waterbus with me on my way to work in the mornings. I’d never spoken to her before this.
I shook my head. “We don’t know what he talks yet.”
Agway, restless, started to fuss. “Look at that,” said Mrs. Soledad. “Maybe he need to change his diaper. Big boy like this, and not potty-trained yet. Calamity, take him inside.” She shooed me towards the house like any hen. Gratefully, I climbed the steps to the porch. To the crowd, she said, “Allyou must go away and leave the child to settle in. Calamity could explain about the cashew trees later.”
Like hell I could. Inside, I put Agway on the couch and peeked through the jalousie windows at the front yard. With me no longer there to interrogate, the crowd began to thin. As the Lessings turned to leave, Mrs. Lessing said to her husband, “Cashew trees? Her father used to raise cashews once upon a time, nuh true?”
“So he tell me.”
“I’M SO GLAD you can do this, Mrs. Soledad. I can’t thank you enough.”
“Yeah, man.” She was dandling Agway in her lap. She’d agreed to come and look after him every Tuesday through Thursday when I would be at work.
“Okay if I pay you every two weeks?”
“Ouch!” Her hat was on the floor, her head cranked towards her shoulder. Agway had discovered her two long plaits and was yanking on one as hard as he could.
“Shit, I’m sorry!” I leapt up to help her. “It’s just this thing he likes to do.”
Between us, we got him to at least give her enough play so that she could hold her head upright. To distract him, I gave him Dumpy. Didn’t work; he just took it in one hand.
“I should tell you, he don’t seem to like sweet things.” She nodded. Agway held Dumpy up in the air and inspected it.
“And I brought home some liquid painkiller. He might need to get it every four hours or so. Depend on if the leg’s paining him or not.”
“All right. Where he going to be sleeping?”
With a happy screech, Agway slung Dumpy across the room. Mrs. Soledad hissed as the motion pulled on her head. Dumpy hit the coffee table and knocked a vase down. I managed to catch it before it rolled off the table.
“You right, you know,” said Mrs. Soledad.
“Pardon?”
“You can’t thank me enough.”
AT LUNCH Agway licked all the butter off his baked potato before eating the potato itself. Then I put him on Dadda’s bed for a nap. I sat on the bed and watched him sleep. I would have to stay with him the first few nights to keep him from falling out of the bed, and to keep him company. But he would have to learn to sleep alone soon. After all, suppose I wanted to have an overnight guest? My body tingled with the memories of Gene’s skin against mine; of Hector’s eyes searching mine.
This room looked like an old man’s, not a young boy’s. I got a bucket from the kitchen and loaded it with Dadda’s colognes and creams and medicines from the top of the dresser, leaving only the dust. I got a singlet out of the dresser drawer and used it as a dustcloth. Better. I was halfway to the living room when I remembered the bucket full of medicines I’d left in Dadda’s room. I went back and got it. Threw them all out. Wasn’t making that mistake twice in a lifetime.
I took Dumpy from the living room and put him on top of the dresser. More like it.
I pulled open Dadda’s closet doors. A dry smell drifted out. I dove behind the hanging clothes, took out the suitcase Dadda kept in there. I piled all the clothes from the dresser into it and sat on it till I could get the zipper closed. “Beg pardon, Dadda,” I whispered. “You see that it’s in a good cause though, right?”
Out in the living room, the land line rang. So loud! It could wake Agway. I got to it on its third ring. “Hello?”
“Cal? That’s you?”
“Michael?” My skin flushed hot. My fingers itched fiercely. Chastity’s once favourite mug, her blue-and-white cocoa-tea mug to match the broken plate, rolled out from under the couch.
“Girl, you never answer your cell phone?”
“Uh, reception still not too good out here. How you got this number?”
“Well. Good to hear from you, too. I heard about your father. Ife called me. I’m so sorry.”
“Beg pardon! I was going to phone you. Tomorrow. I just been so busy.” I was going to kill Ifeoma.
“Cal, you don’t have to pretend. I know how things stand between you and me.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say to that.
“Besides, it’s hell organizing a funeral. When Orso’s sister died last year, all the details simply overwhelmed us, you know. Phoning everyone, and the cards to be sent out, and the flowers. She had left Orso orders that she wanted a wreath made of pink orchids, and he couldn’t find any anywhere in the city.”
“Mm-hmm,” I murmured. Orso. Michael’s man. I would never get used to how affected Michael sounded now. It’s so he used to sound when we were growing up? I couldn’t remember.
“But listen to me rattling on,” said Michael. “To tell the truth, I’m nervous. Didn’t know if it would be okay to call you.”
“It’s good to hear your voice, Mikey.” It was, too. That was a surprise.
“How are you?” he asked. “It must have been dreadful.”
“I guess I’m all right. After all, I knew he was going. Was just a matter of when.”
“And, girl, how did you manage out on that lonely little island for so long? You moving back to Cayaba now?”
“I don’t have an apartment there any more. So I’m here in Dolorosse.”
“My God. But you’re selling that old house, aren’t you? You’re moving back into the city?”
Agway came crawling out of the bedroom, his face puffy with sleep. When he saw me, he rocked back onto his behind and sat rubbing his eyes.
“I’m probably going to stay here,” I told Michael.
He was silent for a second. Then he said, “All right.” Now he had on his brisk “here’s what we’ll do now” tone. “What kind of shape that house is in?”
“Truth? The outside steps falling down, and the porch feeling sort of rickety. And there’s two broken windows that Dadda never fixed, just boarded up.”
“That settles it, then. I’m coming out there.”
“What?”
“Michael Jasper Construction is going to get your house back in shape. You home in the day tomorrow?”
“Yes, but—”
“Good. Eleven a.m. do you?”
“Michael, I can’t just—”
“You will be there?”
“… All right. Yes.”
“We’ll do a first inspection. Be good to see you again. Ciao, sweetie.”
“But…”
I was talking to a dial tone. I hung up and went to check Agway’s diaper.
The touch of chagrin I felt when I heard Michael’s voice was still there. Three—no, nearly five years since I’d seen Ifeoma’s father.
I slept beside Agway that night. About six next morning, I had a hot flash that half woke me up. Then I nearly died of fright when my old red tricycle landed with a crash right beside the bed. Scared the piss out of Agway. “It’s okay,” I said to him. “It’s a tricycle. Can you say ‘Trike’?”
He blinked sleepily at me. I got out of bed. My nightgown was soaked through with sweat. I had a look at the trike. It still had the slightly warped running board and rust spots in places. It still had the streamers coming out of the handlebars, raggedy where wind, sun, and a none-too-careful six-year-old me had torn them. My heart was stuttering from the scare, but I smiled. “I think you’re going to like this one, Agway.”
He kneed his way across the bed to me. I sat and pulled him into my lap. He got a fistful of my nightie in lieu of hair, and put his thumb in his mouth. He had dried tear-tracks on his face. The fright from the tricycle, or had he been crying in his sleep?
A CAR WAS PULLING UP in front of the house. I put Hop on Pop down on the couch beside me, scooped Agway up from my lap, and took him with me to the living room windows. “ ’Op,” he said. “Pop.”
“Good boy.” It was Ife! And she’d brought Stanley. But on a weekday? We went out to meet them.
Stanley got out of the car and stared at the cashew grove. “Cool!” He slammed the door, catapulted himself toward the trees.
“Stanley Fernandez, come back here right now!” shouted Ifeoma.
“But, Mum…!” Stanley stopped on the gravel path outside the house, his shoulders slumped.
Ifeoma didn’t remove her shocked gaze from the trees as she said, “This minute, Stanley. Come and stand by me. You are not going in there.”
Good a time as any for me and Agway to make our entrance. I carried him down the porch steps to my family.
“Mummy,” said Ifeoma, “how did that—?”
I gave Ife a kiss on the cheek. “Why you not at work?” I asked her. “Why Stanley not in school?”
“I just decided to give us a little holiday,” she said. Then she bit her lip. Something she wanted to tell me, then.
I put Agway down on his feet in front of Stanley. “Stanley, meet Agway. Agway, Stanley.”
Stanley stared doubtfully at him. Ife gave him a gentle push forward. “What do you say, Stanley?”
“Hello?” Stanley enquired.
Agway made a friendly warble. I’d heard it a few times now. I figured it was his equivalent of “ ’sup?”
“Agway’s saying hello,” I told him.
“You gave him a name?” Ife asked.
“I didn’t hear him say hello,” said Stanley.
“Of course I gave him a name. You want me to call him ‘Hey, You’?”
“But his parents probably already gave him a name.”
“They not around for me to ask them.”
“Mum, can I get my hair like that?”
“Maybe, darling.”
“Maybe? I’m cutting those horrible knots out of Agway’s hair first chance I get. You can’t be serious, Ife. Don’t tease the poor boy.”
Ife pulled Stanley to her side. “You mean, don’t tell him I’m going to give him something when I have no intention of doing so?”
Here we go. That one was from chapter six, verse 212 of Ife’s Epic Litany of The Wrongs of Calamity. “I got you Black Barbie,” I told her.
“You said you were going to get me Pretty Changes Barbie.”
“And you wanted your hair straightened to match hers, and you asked me how to make your skin ‘nice and light’ like hers. You wanted me to buy you self-hatred.”
“Okay, you’re right. Maybe I should let Stanley do something that would help him to love his blackness. Like…” She looked mock-thoughtful, then snapped her fingers. “I know! Locksing his hair!”
“Ife! Be serious!”
“As a heart attack.”
God, Agway’s hair. I’d managed to cut two or three locks off this morning, but he’d screamed bloody blue murder when he’d seen the pointy scissors. I’d had to stop. Couldn’t take scissors to the head of a child who was squirming and fighting you the whole time.
Agway waddled a little way away, squatted down. Hugging his knees, he studied the ground all around him.
He best had learn to stand a proper haircut before he was old enough for school. Children were pack animals; let any one of them act different from the group, and the rest would bring him down.
“Why he walks so funny?” Stanley asked.
“It’s those patches on his knees; see them? They stick together if his two legs touch.”
Ifeoma looked at Agway’s legs. Her face went smooth with pity. “My God,” she whispered.
Agway picked up a pebble. He stood and came over to Stanley. Gravely, he handed Stanley the pebble. Stanley took it, stared aghast at his hand, then looked at me. “It’s all dirty,” he said. “Why he want to give me that for?”
Agway had been watching Stanley’s reaction closely. He’d been doing this with me since we woke up this morning—giving me pebbles. I couldn’t figure out what the blazes he wanted me to do with them. When I’d thanked him for one, he’d just looked disappointed. When I’d tried putting one in my purse, he’d burst into tears.
Stanley tossed the pebble away. “No!” I shouted, too late. But Agway shouted with laughter and clapped his hands. “To rass,” I muttered. Ifeoma tisked at my language. “That’s what he wants me to do with it.”
Stanley picked up another stone and gave it to Agway. The child stared at it, turning it around in his fingers. Then he flung it away from himself as hard as he could. He made a little dancing motion with his feet, grinned and chirruped encouragingly at Stanley. He searched around in the dust at his feet, picked up and discarded two more pebbles before he found another that he liked. He handed it to Stanley.
Ifeoma and I watched them trade back and forth like that for a bit. “Children,” I said to her. “For the first little while, they not exactly human, you don’t find?”
She gave a little wry snort. “Yeah,” she said. “Once I was in the shower, and I asked Stanley to look on my bed and bring me the bra that was on it. He brought me Clifton’s jockstrap.”
“No! Why?” This was more like it.
“That’s the only thing he could find that looked to him like underwear. He say he thought it was a one-bubby brassiere.”
I laughed. “You want to come inside for something cold to drink?”
“Okay.”
The boys were still doing their pebble toss. “Stanley, you want to go inside and watch tv with Agway?”
“Yes, Grandma.” Stanley wasn’t looking at us. He was looking for a stone for Agway.
“Well, don’t wait for us. Just go on in.”
“All right. Come, Agway.” Stanley reached for Agway’s hand.
The child gazed up at him, his face open and innocent. He put his hand into Stanley’s. They toddled up the stairs together.
When they were inside, I said to Ife, “You want to tell me what’s wrong?”
She replied, “I pined for that Pretty Changes Barbie for weeks, you know.”
“I’ll take that as a ‘no,’ then.”
“I didn’t sleep all night Christmas Eve. I kept imagining opening the box and seeing her inside.”
“Okay. I going to break this down for you. What happened to the Raggedy Ann I got you for your birthday that time?”
“That not fair! You can’t—”
“What happened to her?”
Small voice: “I tried to put her through the meat grinder.”
“What happened to the whatchacallit there—the Turnip Patch doll?”
“Cabbage Patch.”
“And?”
Smaller voice: “Left it outside in the rain.”
“For three days. Don’t forget that part. It was slimy with mildew when I found it.”
“Well, all right. Dolls kind of bored me. They looked so nice on tv, but when I got them, they were just plastic.”
“You see? So how I was to know you could tell one from another?”
“Because it was the one I asked for.”
I sighed, took her arm. “I have lime wash with brown sugar. Just the way you like it.”
“With ice?”
“Plenty ice. Come.”
IN THE KITCHEN, I got the ice and the bottle of drink out of the fridge, and poured lime wash for all four of us. I put Agway’s into a child’s sippy cup, the kind with the lid and the teat. He understood teats.
“Soon come, Ife.” I took the drinks out to the boys. Stanley was introducing Agway to the joys of science fiction tv.
Ife came out of the kitchen with our glasses. She handed one to me. Sotto voce, she said to me, “Clifton didn’t come home last night.”
“I see. You want to go out on the porch and talk?”
She nodded.
We sat on the porch steps. Ife said, “How that cashew farm come to be there, again?”
“I came home one night and it was just there.” I didn’t mention the little detail of my magical power surges. Sometimes a half-truth is better than a whole one. “You know strange things always happening in Cayaba.”
“But that don’t make no sense!”
“True that.” I swirled my lime wash around in my glass. The ice cubes clinked in the translucent pale green. “Plenty in this world don’t make sense.”
“Not like this!” She took a big gulp of her drink. Thought a bit. “Two, three weeks since I last been here? Maybe in that time—”
“In that time what, Ife? A whole cashew grove sprout and grow in two weeks?”
“Well, the trees not so tall…” she said lamely.
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t do like everybody around me doing. Don’t try to come up with a story to explain it, then talk yourself into believing the story. That thing out there don’t have no explanation. Until or unless it choose to go away back again, I have to live with that knowledge every morning I wake up and see it. Don’t let me have to live with that alone.”
“Please, Ife.”
Ife stared into her glass.
“Now, tell me about Clifton. What’s wrong? Something happen to him?”
She shook her head. “No. He texted me this morning. He’s okay.”
“Then why he didn’t come back? Don’t tell me he’s seeing somebody.”
“Nah. We were fighting. Again.”
“What about?”
Her smile was sad. “Better you ask what we don’t fight about. We war about whether Stanley going to take cricket or band. Whose turn it is to wash the dishes. Whether hotels should be able to have a lockdown on beachfront property or not.”
“And last night? What the fight was about then? It’s you who started it? I know your mouth hot.”
“I had a good teacher.”
“You know, I have this book you should read: Anger Management for Women.”
“Oh, yes? You read it yet?”
“Don’t be fresh. I’m your mother.”
She laughed bitterly. “Not ‘Calamity’?”
I closed my eyes. “Bravo. Hat-trick.”
The silence stretched between us like chewed-out gum.
“You been inside the cashew grove?” she asked me finally.
“A little way in; not far.” Thank you, daughter mine, for the change of subject.
She drained her glass, put it down. “You want you and me to go explore it?”
I gulped. Casually, I said, “Nah, it’s all right. Could always do that another day.”
Ife grinned. “You frightened!”
“No, that’s not it—”
“Big old hard-back woman like you, frightened of a few little trees.”
“Oh, yes? You think so, enh?” I knocked back the rest of my lime wash, clunked the glass down. “All right, I dare you. You and me, right now. In the cashews.”
She stood. “Right this minute. I double dog dare you!”
“What?”
She shrugged. “Don’t ask me. I hear Stanley say it.”
We let Stanley and Agway know where we were going. Stanley didn’t even look up from the television. He just grunted. As we went through the front door, I heard him say to Agway, “Those are Cylons. They’re the bad guys.”
WE PUSHED OPEN THE OLD GATE. The twisted trees huddled together shoulder to shoulder, blocking our view of what was inside. All we could see beyond the first row of trees was darkness.
Ife got a puzzled look. “But wait,” she said. “I remember this. How come I remember it? The pattern of the chicken wire on the gate, and this little picky path, how it jog to the left up ahead. Dadda brought me cashew-picking in here one time.”
My heart climbing up my throat, I shrugged I don’t know. Let Ife judge for herself.
“Mummy, this is Dadda’s cashew grove?”
I could breathe again. “It seem so.”
“But it can’t be the same one. How it could be the same one?”
“I don’t exactly know.”
“I remember that tree there”—she pointed—“how it look like a man holding his arms up in the air, with big long fingers, waving for us to stay out.”
“Oh, fuck. Why you had to go and say that?” It did look like an angry man with grasping claws.
“Beg pardon. Here. Make the sign of the cross and stamp your right foot two times. Then turn around in a circle—clockwise only!—and say, ‘The Devil can’t touch me, Santa Maria.’ ”
She demonstrated. I goggled. “Ifeoma Fernandez, where you learn that piece of nonsense?”
“You not going to do it?”
“No.”
“Then don’t tell me nothing when the Devil grab you and not me.” She smiled her pointy, impish smile, showing all her teeth. That meant she was scared, too.
I kissed my teeth. “Just hold my hand.”
We advanced into the trees. It was hot and close in there. The ground was dappled with sunlight. A breeze ssu-ssued in the trees, and the heat baked the sweetness from the fruits both fresh and fallen.
“I started working for Caroline Sookdeo-Grant’s campaign,” said Ife. “That’s why Clifton’s mad at me.”
“Another project? So the thing where you read people’s minds by watching which direction they look in not working out?” I scraped my hand against my jeans.
“NLP? It’s working fine. Caroline says it could come in handy. She wants me to come with her when she goes to talk to that foreign aid agency. She’s been working with the fishermen. They want to have a permanent shop in the market, but they need start-up capital, so Caroline’s going to try to help them to get a loan from the FFWD.”
“Mm-hmm. You know I don’t pay too much attention to politics. But all that sound pretty harmless to me.”
“Clifton don’t want me working for her. He say I shouldn’t be helping her party get into power, because she want to kick the big hotels out of Cayaba. He’s trying to work a deal with the Grand Tamany to host an annual music festival here, and he say he will look bad if his wife is working for Sookdeo-Grant. He say if the hotels go, then he and me going to be broke even worse than now.”
“Not you alone. Half of Cayaba.” My two fused fingers were prickling. Hot flash coming. Shit. I let go of Ife’s hand to scratch mine.
“But she don’t want to get rid of the hotels! She just think Cayabans should own them.”
“Whoever own them, I bet you a rum-and-water still going to cost ten American dollars at the Tamany.” I rubbed the itchy hand. What was going to appear out of thin air this time? My first training bra with its pointy, itchy cups of white cotton? That Beatles eight-track I used to have, that would change tracks with a clunk in the middle of “Blue Jay Way?” Some things need to stay lost. “Ife, I don’t know what to tell you about Clifton. I never lived with a man more than a few months. If I ever get so lucky, you going to have to teach me.”
That got a rueful laugh. “That would be a first.”
I chuckled. “Your backside.” We tromped on a bit more. “Remember that summer I took you to see Dadda? I think you were seven.”
“You took me a few times. They kind of mixed up in my head.”
“Well, that summer, your grandfather told me that I was a fool for dating the guy I was seeing at the time.”
“Dadda said I was never going to amount to anything if I didn’t finish school and go university. I told him I was making more than he, so he could just kiss my black ass. He invited me to leave. So I took you home. The following Monday, Doug phoned me. Told me had married a girl from Copra Corners on the weekend. Said him and me had only ever been casual anyway, and he hope I didn’t mind.”
Ifeoma kissed her teeth. “I remember Doug. He used to call that girl from your phone when you weren’t around.”
“He did?”
“I heard him. Plenty times. I didn’t like Doug. But he made you laugh.”
“True that. I met the girl afterwards. She seemed like a nice girl.”
“Not like you, enh?”
I grinned into the dark. “Never like me. Nice girls don’t have fun.”
Something rustled from deeper inside the grove. Ifeoma gasped. “What’s that noise?”
“Don’t squeeze my hand so hard!” I said.
“You squeezing mine!”
“You want us to turn back?”
“No.”
We took a few more steps. I stumbled on a rock. Ife held me up. Then she walked face-first into a tree. My breathless giggle had an edge of hysteria to it. She cut her eyes at me. She looked over my shoulder, and frowned.
“What?” I asked. The skin on my back was crawling. But I wasn’t going to look behind me. “You trying to psych me out, nuh true?”
Ife shook her head. “I know a way to see if this is really Dadda’s grove.”
“How?” I was beginning to get warm.
“Come over here.” She led me off to the left, then through two trees standing in each other’s arms. She stopped again. “I trying to remember… I think we go this way now.”
The core of me flared like a wick. “No, it’s this way.” I pointed.
“How you know?”
“Let’s just say it’s like playing hot and cold. You coming?”
“You even know what it is I’m looking for?”
“Not a clue.”
But she followed.
I took us right, then left. Less sunlight here. My eyes were taking their sweet time adjusting. “Damn it, I can’t see a fucking thing.”
“Mind your mouth.”
“I’m fifty-three years old. I will swear if I want to swear.”
Something bonked me on the head. I nearly peed myself with fright. A cashew apple.
My left hand started to burn like I’d stuck it into a nest of fire ants. Then the other hand began burning, too. “All right,” I groused at them. “Jesus.” I backtracked us a bit and took a different turn. The itching eased.
“You still talk to yourself,” Ife said.
“Yeah, man. If I want intelligent conversation.”
“You are so weird.”
“Then I guess Cayaba is right where I belong. Go left here.”
Ife gasped. “Look it there.”
“What?”
“Just come, nuh?”
A few more feet, and we stood in front of yet another cashew tree. It was gnarled and half its branches were dead. Ife reached out and touched its bark. “Don’t touch it!” I said.
“Lord have mercy,” she said in a whisper.
I screwed my myopic eyes up and stared at the tree as hard as I could. The bark was studded with the heads of iron nails. “What kind of obeah this?” I asked Ife.
“Dadda did it.”
She put her palms flush against the nail heads. “It’s Dadda’s wish tree, come out of the sea.” Her voice was reverent.
“What you mean, ‘wish tree’?” He must have done this after I left. Chastity knew the cashew orchard like the back of her hand, and she’d never bucked up something like this in there.
Ife leaned her cheek gently against the nail heads. “He said to me, ‘Iron is magic, Ife. And living wood is magic.’ And then he gave me a nail and a hammer. He showed me how to put the point of the nail against the bark. ‘Hold it good,’ he said. ‘Don’t make the hammer mash your hand.’ ”
And all of that was in aid of what?”
“He told me to think about something I wanted real bad, to wish for it as I was driving the nail into the tree.”
“Dadda was like you that way.” I kicked through the undergrowth at the foot of the wish tree. Nothing. “Always some little ritual, some superstition.” I scrubbed my hands against the thighs of my jeans. “Jesus fuck, if my hands don’t stop itching me soon, I’m going to scratch them right off!”
“You allergic to something?”
“Menopause.”
“For true? Yes, I guess you about the right age.”
“No age could be the right age for this kind of botheration.” If Ife could be brave, I could be brave, too. I touched the tree. The itching faded to a tickle. I took my hands off the tree. The sensation ramped back up to burning. “Awoah. I get you now.” I started feeling up the tree itself.
“Mummy, what you doing?”
“When I figure that out, you will be the first to know.”
My hands found a hole. “Ah, look at that. Your wish tree is hollow.”
The burning was telling me to stick my hand down into the hole. “You must be mad,” I muttered. “You know what could be waiting in there to bite me?”
But apparently the burning did know its own mind, for it sped like bush fire up my two arms and blossomed into a power surge. “All right! Crap.” I looked around the ground until I found a good, long stick. I stood as far away from the hole in the tree as the stick would let me, and poked the tip of it down inside.
“Jeez, Mummy; be careful!”
“Doing my best.” The burning in my hands had faded to a faint pins-and-needles. I poked about inside the hole. Nothing, nothing. Then the tip of the stick jammed up against something soft and yielding. I dropped it and jumped away.
“What happen?” said Ifeoma. She was at my side in a second.
“It’s all right. I just jumpy.” I picked up the stick, poked around in the hole in the tree some more. The thing in there yielded when I prodded. “Feel like a pillow, or something.”
“Not a dead animal?” asked Ife.
“Jeezam. Could be.” The skin on my arms went into goosebumps. I drew the stick out. A loop of heavy cord was snagged around it. “Huh. If it’s a dead animal, it have its own leash.”
“Euw.”
I untangled the cord from the stick and pulled on it. After a little resistance, a dingy canvas duffel bag came out. It was knotted tight shut. Something had been stuffed inside. The bag wasn’t as heavy as I would have expected.
“What is that?” asked Ife.
“No idea.” My hands felt normal again. “I know about the bag, at least. Was Dadda’s.” It had probably been white once. But even when I was little, it had had this same stained cement colour. “He used to take it when he went fishing.”
The hot flash faded. Chills not too bad this time. I rested the bag on the ground and worked at the knot. Ife felt the bag. “Whatever’s in there is soft. Feel like cloth, or something.”
“Pity. I was hoping it was my inheritance.” I was joking, but my mind was running riot. Mumma’s clothes in there, maybe. The ones she’d worn on that last night, soaked in her own blood.
I finally got the knot undone. I pulled the mouth of the bag open, but in the twilight under the trees, I couldn’t make it out.
“Empty it out,” suggested Ife.
So I upended the bag. Something furry fell out and landed silently on the ground. I gave a little squeak and stepped back. I put the stick to work again. I unrolled the balled-up thing. “It’s some kind of animal hide,” I told Ife.
Stretched out, it looked to be at least six feet long. I couldn’t smell any decay. I threw down the stick and laid a hand on the pelt. It was supple. Good tanning job. I crouched down to see what I had caught. “I think it’s a fur coat,” I said. “Why, though?”
I picked it up. It was lighter than it looked. I shook it out. “Ife, you ever see a fur coat where they leave the head on?”
“I never see a fur coat, full stop. Not in real life, anyway. No, I lie. Sometimes hotel guests have them.” She came and looked at it. “Oh, God.” Her voice was sad. “This is a crime. Who would do something like this?”
I could make out the flippers now. I dropped it back onto the ground and wiped my hands against my shirt. “It’s not a fur coat yet, is it.”
“No. Monk seal pelt.”
“Why you figure Mumma and Dadda had a sealskin?”
“These fetch a lot of money. One time, police came to the Tamany and broke down a guest’s door. Took her right out of there in handcuffs. Confiscated two seal pelts she’d bought on the black market here. She was going to take them back to foreign and sell them.”
I had a sudden, sickening thought. “Oh, milord. Cashew bark.”
“Come again?”
“You use it to tan leather.”
“Euw.”
“Maybe they fell out over this, Ife! Mumma and Dadda. One of them wanted to tan seal hides to sell, and one didn’t.”
“Or they were arguing over the money.”
“My parents,” I whispered. “You think you know who people are.”
“Christ. Let’s just bury it,” said Ife.
“I will go you one better,” I told her. A bilious anger was bubbling up in me. “I’m going to burn the damned thing.”
I snatched up the pelt and wadded it into a bundle. I stuffed it back into the duffel bag and slung it over my shoulder. “Let’s go.”
Ife was staring at the wish tree.
“Dadda said I didn’t have to tell him my wish. So I only whispered it. Dadda never heard what I said.”
I thought she wouldn’t tell me, either. But then she said, “I wished for you and him to stop fighting. I wished we could go and live with him, not with Doug or Carlyle or—who was the boyfriend before that?”
“Nathan.”
The tears just sprung, no warning. I put my arms around Ife. She hugged me back and held me till I was quieter. “I have a hair clip in my pocket,” she said.
“I don’t follow you.”
“It’s made of steel, but steel is iron and something else, right?”
“Yeah. Nickel, chromium, or tungsten.”
“I hate it when you do that.”
“Go ’weh. You just jealous because my memory better than yours.”
“You making this wish or not?”
The clip was short and wide, its two halves hinged at one end. It was sturdy enough to drive into the wood without bending. Ifeoma pulled out the pin that held the hinge together. She handed me half of the clip. “One wish for you, one for me.”
“You go first.”
We searched around until we found a rock to use as a hammer. When we lifted it, earthworms writhed away from the open air. Ife squealed.
“Don’t fret,” I said to her. “We going to leave soon.”
She found a clear place on the bark of the cashew tree and positioned her “nail.”
“What you going to wish?” I asked her.
That brave, pointy smile again. “Not telling you this time.”
She drove the rock against the head of the clip. The tree shook and came alive. Pink things flapped and fluttered against our faces, grunting. Ife screamed. We ran, and didn’t stop until we were through the grove and into the sunshine. Ife was batting at her hair, screaming, “Get them out! Get them out!” Beyond the gate, Stanley was showing off his glider to Agway. Agway was looking up into the sky. His eyes and mouth went round with wonder. He pointed into the air above the cashew grove.
“Buuds!” he said. He was already picking up a word or two. He had trouble with his r’s.
I looked where Agway was pointing. I shook Ifeoma’s shoulder and pointed there, too.
Agway was right. Birds. Spoonbills. We’d disturbed them by hammering on the tree. They onked their curses at us and headed off in a diagonal line, their pink bodies glowing in the sunlight. Stanley struggled to get the glider to follow them.
Ife laughed. “That’s all it was? Birds?”
I couldn’t find my half of the hair clip. I’d dropped it when we ran. Wasn’t sure what I would have wished for, anyway. The past to stop haunting me, maybe.
A car pulled up on the road; a bright yellow Beamer convertible. “Who’s this now?” I said. Somebody had plenty money to spend on a fancy ride.
Two men got out. One of them waved at us. Ife waved back. “Daddy!” she shouted.
Michael. And he’d brought Orso with him.
I strode out to meet them. “You said you would call first! I thought you were coming later.”
“You going to give me a hug, or what?” He opened his arms. I stayed where I was. He stepped back from me. “You know Orso,” he said.
I tried to smile back at Orso. It felt fake on my face. Probably showed.
Ife’d come running to greet them. Michael hugged her instead. He asked me, “This is a bad time? We called. About a billion times. No answer on either phone.”
Right. Hadn’t turned my cell on for the day. As to the land line phone, I’d unplugged it and hidden it away last night after Agway had assaulted it once too often.
“I called Ife, though. She said it was all right.”
“She did, enh?”
“Ifeoma tells me you have a new dependent now?” asked Michael. “You still full of surprises. Where he came from? You hiding a paramour here you not telling me about?”
I scowled. “He’s a little boy, maybe three years old. His parents got killed at sea in that bad storm.”
“Christ.”
“I found him washed up on the beach the next morning. They’re letting me foster him till they know what to do with him. He don’t speak English.”
“Wow. You want to keep him, then?”
“I don’t know.” I don’t need you, I thought. I got a baby without you this time.
Michael eyeballed the house. “Not bad,” he said. “Good bones.”
Orso said, “I’d like to figure out the facing direction, though. Maybe the entrance should be somewhere else.”
“Why?” I asked him. “I like it where it is. You know; right off the driveway?”
Ife was glaring at me. Now what?
“It’s a matter of balance,” Orso replied. “The line the eye follows as you enter the property. What parts of it get the morning sun first, where you plant your decorative shrubs, that kind of thing. You see? The built environment should complement the natural environment.”
“I get it!” said Ife. “The chi of the land needs to be in harmony.”
Orso lit up like a Christmas tree. “Exactly! I didn’t know you were into feng shui?”
“Just a little. I took a course last year.”
Someone else was tromping up the gravel road. I squinted. Blocky body. Grapefruit pink t-shirt. Black walking shorts. Oh, shit. Hector, just dropping by, like I’d told him he could. Yes, the universe was unfolding the way it always did: in chaos.
Hector waved when he saw us. “Good afternoon,” he said when he was in earshot. Ife pursed her lips when she saw him. I was pretty bemused myself. First time I’d seen him in something that wasn’t neon and skin tight. His colour sense hadn’t changed, though.
“I’m interrupting something?” Hector asked. “I could come back another time.”
“No; stay.” Be good to have at least one adult in the party that I wasn’t vexed with.
“I brought beer.”
“Then definitely stay! This is my daughter Ifeoma, and that’s Michael, and that’s his friend Orso.”
Orso and Michael exchanged glances. Hector smiled a greeting. Then he spied the tricycle where I’d stashed it beside the house. “Yours that?” he asked me. “I used to have one like it. In green.”
“I figure maybe Agway could use it,” I told him. “But it going to need fixing up.”
He went over and inspected the trike. “It only need some screws tightened and a new seat. New wheels. Maybe a fresh paint job. You want me to do it for you?”
“All right,” I told him. Be a good way to get to know him.
Michael said, “We could go in and look around now?”
“I guess so.” To Hector I said, “Michael wants to renovate the house for me.”
Orso told Ife, “You know, I even make up a bagua first for each property we design? Mikey, you coming?” Orso and Ife headed up the porch steps together, chattering happily about whatever a bagua was.
Blast you. I was calling him “Mikey” long before you even knew him. Chuh. I picked up the duffel bag. Hector and I followed.
“Saturday a good time to come and fix up the tricycle?”
“Yeah, man.”
“YOUR LIVING ROOM WINDOWS TOO SMALL and dark,” said Michael. He and Orso were sitting on my couch, poring over a lined notebook they had put on the coffee table. “What you think about one big picture window?” He reached for his beer bottle and had a drink.
“Maybe. You went grey since I saw you last.”
“Salt and pepper, thank you, please.”
“You look good.” He did, damn him. If anything, more beautiful than he’d been at seventeen. He used to be lean like a whip snake. He had filled out. He was sporting a sexy goatee. And he looked relaxed.
“And that pantry is a disaster; you saw it, Orso? Narrow and dark with a naked lightbulb and a pull string.”
“I saw,” said Orso.
Over by the television, Agway, enraptured, was watching a fashion makeover programme. Stanley had wandered over to us to see what the adults were up to. He patted my arm. “Grandma-I-mean-Calamity; you could help me pick a science fair project?”
“We’ll talk about it later.”
“But I need to tell my teacher my project next week!”
“Of course, darling. I’m back to work next week. Come to the library then, and we’ll find you a good project.”
“What kind of science you like, Stanley?” asked Hector. I’d brought the chairs from the kitchen and put them around the coffee table.
“I don’t know,” Stanley answered shyly.
“You can give Hector a more informative answer than that, Stanley,” said Ife.
Stanley looked at the floor. “The cool stuff, I guess.”
Hector laughed. “So, you think biology is cool?”
Stanley screwed up his face.
“Okay, guess not. Not even boa constrictors?”
Stanley shook his head.
“Not even sharks?”
Stanley’s eyes lit up. “Yeah! Sharks kick ass!”
“Stanley!” said Michael. “Sorry, Ife. Beat you to it.”
Michael reached for Orso’s hand. I wished they wouldn’t do that in public.
Hector said, “I once spent a summer catching sharks and sticking cameras to them.”
“You did?” Hector had made a new friend.
“I did. Maybe your gran can bring you by my boat one day, and I’ll show you what the sea looks like from shark’s-eye view. I even have a few shots of a shark making a kill.”
“Cool!” said Stanley. “Calamity, we can really go to Hector’s boat?”
I nodded.
Hector glanced Orso and Michael. They were still holding hands. “The two of you live here on Dolorosse?” Hector asked them.
“No,” Orso replied. “We have a beautiful house on the big island. Up by the hill at the foot of Grandcastle Street. Michael’s construction company built it.” And he patted Michael’s hand. They beamed at each other.
Time to nip that line of conversation in the bud. I leapt to my feet. “Anyone like a drink? Coffee? Tea? Cashew wine? Hector, come and help me throw together some snacks.”
“Nothing for me, thanks,” said Orso.
“Me neither, Cal,” said Michael. He turned back to Hector. “And it’s Dolores.”
“You mean, like Mary? Pleased to meet you, Dolores.”
Michael laughed. “No, I mean that’s how we pronounce the name of the island. Like the woman’s name.”
Orso leaned back in the settee. “You were on the right track, though.” He pointed to himself. “Mary.” Then at me, with a sly smirk. “Not Mary.”
Ife and Hector cracked up laughing. What the ass? Then Michael must have gotten the foolishness devil in him too, for he pointed to himself. “Mary.”
Ife tapped her own chest. “Not Mary. Not last I checked, anyway.”
Quizzically, Michael pointed at Hector. Hector flicked a glance at me. “Mary,” he said.
Orso snapped his fingers. “Yes!”
“… and Joseph.”
“Oh,” said Orso. He didn’t look any too pleased.
“Really?” Ife asked.
I shook my head and stood up. “Well, since I’m clearly not part of this conversation, why don’t I just get us some snacks? Sound good?”
Michael said, “You know, it’s kinda isolated all the way out here. You should come and visit us, Hector. Meet some of the gang.”
“I could fry up some plantain.”
“I would love that,” Hector replied.
“Good,” I said, pretending I’d misunderstood. “So you can come to the kitchen and give me a hand, then.”
“Mummy, I’ll help you. Looks like the guys are getting to know one another.”
Hector smiled his thanks at her. “Really?” she asked him again. He laughed.
I picked Agway up from in front of the television. “Come, babby,” I said through my teeth. “Time for your lunch.”
As Ife followed me and Agway into the kitchen, I heard Hector say, “So, you live together, then?”
“Oh, yes, my dear. Number thirteen Grandcastle; a good luck number.”
I waited till I was out of earshot, in the kitchen. “Oh, yes, my dear, a good luck number,” I mimicked under my breath. I sucked my teeth.
“Please don’t start that,” said Ife. She sounded exasperated.
I put Agway in the highchair. Sally from over the way had lent it to me. I got a broad mango from the fridge; put it on a plastic plate and set it down on the table in front of Agway. I fetched two ripe plantains from the pantry. “Put the frying pan on to heat for me, nuh?” I asked Ife.
But she wasn’t going to let it drop. “Why you get on so bad around Daddy all the time?”
I got a sharp knife, started peeling the plantains. “Because he don’t have manners. Why he and Orso have to be always flaunting themselves like that?”
“Flaunting how?”
Agway had peeled his mango with his teeth. He put it down on the table beside the plate and started happily devouring the skin.
“Holding hands like two nanas, telling people they living in the same house, calling other men ‘my dear.’ ”
“And when you do that, what you call it?”
“When I do what?”
“Hold hands with some guy. Call him ‘my dear.’ ”
I sucked my teeth. “Oh, don’t be dense. You know that’s different.” Sometimes I couldn’t understand what went on in the child’s crystal-gazing mind.
“Buuds!” said Agway, showing me the seagull design on his plate. “Buuds, Mamma!”
“Oh, isn’t he sweet, Ife? He’s learning so fast!”
“You make him call you Mamma?”
That pulled me up short. “I didn’t make him do anything.”
“How come you want that little boy? You never wanted me.” Ife’s voice was tight.
“What? Ife, that’s nonsense.”
“It is not! You make him call you Mamma when you don’t even want me to call you Mummy. You never used to want people to know you had a daughter. So how come he’s calling you his mother?”
“Ife!”
“You didn’t want me then, and you still don’t want me.”
“Stop the stupidness. Just put some oil in the frying pan for me, please.”
“No.” She went and sat beside Agway. He was drawing sticky circles on the table with the peeled mango. “Nobody want fried plantain, not even you. You just trying to distract the three of them from talking to each other.” She held her hand out to Agway for his unwanted mango. He put it in her palm. She started eating it.
“More sweet things again? Last thing you need, you know.” When the silence had gone on a little too long, I looked up from my chopping to see her hurt, wet eyes. My heart clenched. I sighed. “Oh, sweetheart,” I said. “I didn’t mean it like tha—”
“Ifeoma is fine the way she is,” came a voice from the doorway. Michael was standing there. “She’s all curves, just like you. She have your eyes, the shape of your face. It’s just your sharp tongue she don’t have.”
“How long you been eavesdropping on me and my daughter?”
“She’s my daughter too. At least her father wanted her.”
“Mummy, Daddy, don’t fight,” moaned Ifeoma. Agway’s eyes were taking it all in.
“And how come you call him ‘Daddy’? That man was never a father to you!”
“And whose fault was that?” Michael demanded.
Orso and Hector had joined Michael in the doorway, and Stanley was peeking around the jamb. “What going on?” asked Orso. He put a protective arm around Michael’s waist.
I stamped my foot. “Don’t touch him like that! Not in my house!”
“Calamity,” came Hector’s voice. “Please put down the knife.”
I’d been pointing with the sharp kitchen knife in my hand. They were all staring at me, even Agway. I put the knife down on the stove. “I don’t like it,” I said slowly and carefully to Michael and Orso, “when you carry on with your sodomite ways in front of children. This is the house my father died in, and I’ll thank you to respect his memory.”
“Clearly that respect don’t cut two ways,” Orso said.
“I think I’m going back to the boat now,” Hector told us.
I glared at Orso, my mouth working. My blood was boiling. I could feel the sweat popping out on my forehead. I rushed at him. “You. Shut. Up. You just shut up right now!”
Something materialized out of the air and landed on the ground between us. It shattered when it hit.
“Now she’s throwing things at us!” hissed Orso. Agway started to cry. “Michael, we leaving this house this minute! I refuse to do any work for that woman.”
From the shards mixed in with a few coins, it looked like the piggybank that used to sit on my little vanity table in the house on Blessée.
Michael cut his eyes at me. “Later, Ife,” he said, his voice low and controlled. “Same time Sunday?” She nodded.
Michael and Orso left the kitchen. As they headed through the living room, Orso said loudly: “I told you that woman don’t have no kind feelings in her heart for you! Never did, never will.”
My ass. “What you know about it?” I yelled after him.
Hector’s eyes were big as limes. He cleared his throat. “Maybe they could give me a lift into town. To buy the things for the tricycle.” And he fled too.
I rounded on Ife. “What he mean by ‘same time Sunday’?”
“Sunday is when we go and see Grandpa,” Stanley piped up, mischief on his face.
“I told you not to tell her!” Ife said to him. “I told you it would only cause trouble.”
Stanley pouted. “Grandpa told her first.”
“And so everything Grandpa do, you going to do?”
The hot flash passed, leaving me shocky and shivering. “You go to Michael’s house every Sunday?” I asked them. “When it’s like pulling teeth to get you to come and see me?”
Ife looked down at her hands. “I finally realised you couldn’t stop me,” she said. “I found his number one day and called him. It’s been good for Stanley to have more men in his life.”
“Men?” I squeaked. “Michael and Orso?”
“Orso’s teaching me how to play cricket!” Stanley told me. I just stared from one to the other, lost.
Ife stood up. “You happy now?” she asked me. “Now that you’ve tried to make everybody as miserable as you?” She wiped Agway’s hands clean with a corner of her sackcloth dress. “I pity this child,” she said. “Come, Stanley.”
“Okay. Ka odi,” he said to Agway, waving.
“Ka odi,” Agway replied.
“What, like even the two of you talking so I can’t understand?”
“Who have ears to hear, will hear,” Ife told me. She stepped over the ceramic shards, out into the living room. Stanley followed.
I yelled, “You best watch Orso with that child! You hear what I’m telling you, Ifeoma?”
The front door closed very quietly. A few seconds later I heard Ife start up her car and drive away.
“Shit. I really gone and done it now, Agway.”
He climbed backwards off the chair, toddled over to the tv and plumped himself down to watch the cartoons.
I got the broom, started cleaning the mess up. I knelt with the dustpan to sweep up the piggybank pieces. As I did, a stab of pain went through my trick knee. I used one hand on the floor to steady myself, then began brushing the shards into the dustpan.
My hands. When age spots started coming out on my hands? I put down the dustpan, sat back on my haunches. My palms still looked more or less like I remembered them, but the backs of my hands were a roadmap of the tiniest wrinkles. “Next thing you know,” I whispered, “my bubbies going to be neighbours with my navel, and I going to be wearing a diaper.”
Who tell me to set my cap for Hector, anyway? What a forty-year-old man could want with a matriarch? I watched the wet tears plop into the dustpan amongst the pieces of broken crockery.
Uncle Time is a spider-man, cunnin’ an’ cool,
him tell yu: watch de hill an yu se mi.
Huhn! Fe yu yi no quick enough fe si
how ’im move like mongoose; man, yu tink ’im fool?
—Dennis Scott, “Uncle Time”
Someone knocked at the door. It was about the time when Mr. Mckinley came by every Saturday with the morning’s catch. I put my hand over the receiver. “One minute!”
“You have to go?” asked Gene. He’d called to see how Agway was doing.
The knock came again. “Soon come!” I yelled at the door. “Yeah, I have to go.”
“You busy Thursday evening?”
“No. Why?”
“You want to go and catch a bite?”
“Yes! I mean, that would be nice. Listen, talk to you later, all right?”
“Later.”
I swear I sprouted wings and flew all the way to the door. Mr. Mckinley and his two strapping sons had given up on me and were walking away. “Morning, Mr. Mckinley,” I called out. “Morning, Gerald, Leonard.”
They came back.
“What allyou have for me today?”
“Nothing,” answered Mr. Mckinley.
“Nothing?”
“Me and the boys didn’t catch nothing but few little shrimps today. Other than that, not a stinking thing in the nets, pardon my language.”
“But how—?”
“It’s Gilmor. Years now the fishermen been saying that Gilmor killing the fish.”
“You want any of the shrimps?” asked Leonard, a beefy man in his twenties with arm muscles like cable from hauling nets.
“Yeah, give me about two pounds, nuh? Let me get a bowl from the kitchen.”
They ladled fresh shrimp into my bowl. I counted out the money from my purse and handed it to Gerald. “So what allyou going to do about this state of affairs?” I said lightly. “Can’t make us have to import snapper from Trinidad.” My mind was really on seeing Gene next Thursday.
“We going to do something,” said Mr. Mckinley. “That’s for sure. That’s what we come to tell you. A week Monday.”
“What happening then?”
“Johnson having the ceremony to open the new Gilmor plant.”
“Here on Dolorosse.”
He nodded. “The fishermen and the salt farmers; Gilmor being doing us wrong ever since they opened shop in Cayaba. Now they going to bankrupt the few salt farmers left on Dolorosse and Tingle. I don’t know yet what we going to do, but we going to do something.” He handed his tackle box to Gerald, shook my hand between two of his. His palms were hard like horn. “Hope you going to come out and support us, Miz Lambkin.”
“I… well… I’m working that day.”
“Ah. Be with us in spirit then, yes? I know how you like your snapper. Walk good.”
I watched them go on towards the next house to spread the word.
I took the shrimps into the kitchen, to find that Agway had abandoned the sheets of foolscap I’d given him and was drawing on the wall with a purple crayon. “No, Agway! Bad!”
I put the bowl down on the table and went to get him away from the wall.
Thursday evening, me and Gene! I tried to weigh who I liked better, Gene or Hector. I picked a surprised Agway up and took him on a waltz around the kitchen. “I’m going on a date, babbins!”
Agway eyed the shrimps on the table.