O mother Ida, harken ere I die.
—Tennyson, Oenone
Orlando’s uncle fathered thirty-two children. Fifteen by the first wife, five by the second, twelve by the third. Now he lives with a Canadian woman, postmenopausal. You can hear them after the generator shuts down. When the island is still and dark as a dreamless sleep, and the stone crabs crawl out of their holes.
The ground here is pocked with dark craters, burrows, veins in the earth. They are beginnings and endings. Some small as coins, others big enough to swallow a softball. The crabs creep down these orifices like the functions of the body.
Fran has a gas stove, a bed, some shelves, a battery-run tape player. She cooks. People who weren’t born here can sit on the edge of the bed and eat, sip rum with her. Then unwrinkle some bills. Fran cooks lobster, or conch, sometimes she cooks stone crab. She was not born here either, her bed is narrow, and the batteries in the tape player are getting weak.
Orlando sets and checks lobster traps. All the men on the island set and check lobster traps. The traps are made of wooden strips, shaped like Quonset huts, a conical entranceway at one end. Bait is unnecessary. The lobster, scouting the margins of the reef, the sea chanting over him, will prowl around this trap until he finds the conical entranceway. He will scrabble into the trap, delighted, secure from attack. The lobster psyche takes solace in holes. When the traps are hauled the law requires the fishermen to release any lobster whose tail is smaller than three inches, a seeding measure. The fishermen do not release lobsters whose tails are smaller than three inches—nor do they take them to market. Instead they twist off the heads, make a welter of the sweet curled tails, black against the frayed and blanched floorboards of their boats, carry the bloodless white meat home to their pots. Orlando tells me that the lobster catch is smaller this season than it was a year ago, and that a year ago it was smaller than the preceding season. I nod my head. Like the point of a cone I say.
There are no roads, sidewalks, automobiles, bicycles or shoes on the island.
Tito is a grandson of Orlando’s uncle. Orlando’s uncle does not know it. The island’s population is just over three hundred. It is not surprising that a good number of the island’s inhabitants should be related to Orlando’s uncle, considering his energy. Tito does not live in the village, but in a shack in the jungle on the far side of the island. He lives alone, his eyes blue, his mother (now dead) English. Tito roams the forest with his .22, putting holes in birds and lizards. Their carcasses fertilize the soil. When he is hungry he lifts a lobster trap, spears fish, dives for conch. Or splits coconut.
The sun here is mellow as an orange. One day it will flare up and turn the solar system to cinders. Then it will fall into itself, suck in the ribbons of flame like a pale ember, gather its last breath and explode, driving particles eternally through the universe, cosmic wind.
Fran is forty, paints her toenails, wears her hair in short curls. The muscles of her abdomen are lax. She dresses in saris, halters, things of the tropics. Fifteen years ago Fran came to the island and set up residence in a ten-by-twenty-foot shack. For the first six months she had money. Afterward she cooked. Now she drinks rum beneath the bulb in her shack, finds coins for the island’s children, cooks meals for visitors and occasionally for islanders. No man, tourist or islander, has been known to satisfy more than a single appetite in Fran’s shack. Though not from lack of trying.
Coconut palms grow here, without (scrutable) design. The coconuts, elaborate seeds, fall to the sand like blows in the stomach. Wet from the rain, they lie cradled in the sand until one day they split. Coconut palms grow from the split coconuts, without (scrutable) design.
Tito and Ida have been observed walking hand in hand along the path to the far end of the island, the uninhabited crescent of bird and bush. In Tito’s right hand, Ida’s fingers; in his left, the .22. Ida’s face is wide, Indian, her eyes black. Black as caverns.
Conch fritters hiss on the griddle in Fran’s shack. Four lots away Orlando’s uncle sits in his yard, conch shells piled high, the wedge-headed hammer and thin knife at his side, a wet conch in his lap. He presses the spiral shell to his knee and taps at it with the beak of his hammer. Twice, three times, and he’s tapped a thin rectangular hole just below the point of the spiral. The knife eases in, the conch out, the shell in his hand spewing up its secrets. Konk he calls it.
I am sitting on the edge of Fran’s bed, sipping rum, chewing lobster. There is another man in the shack, a West German. He speaks neither English nor Spanish. We eat in silence. Fran wears a halter, her belly slack, at the stove. When we finish our meal the man stands, pays, leaves. I pour another drink of rum. Fran’s back is turned. I lay my hand on her flank. She tells me to leave.
In 1962 Hurricane Hilda stirred up waves thirty-five feet tall and churned them across the Caribbean in the direction of the island. The sky was smoky, dark as iron, the wind bent the trees, hurtled coconut and leaf. Tito and Ida were children, Fran was in her prime, Orlando’s uncle had never heard of Canada and was yet to father four more children. The reef broke the biggest waves. All the traps were lost, the boats staved in, the shacks collapsed. Eight feet of salt water (home to lobster, conch, brine shrimp) washed over the island. Five drowned. The wind screamed blood and teeth.
The Canadian woman takes the biweekly boat to the mainland and Orlando’s uncle is alone. I see him in the yard, feeding chickens and turkeys. His face is like a mud pond dried in the sun. But his hair is rich and black, he walks straight as a hoe and his arms and chest are solid. He no longer checks traps. Instead he cleans conch. Soaks the white meat in lime, sprinkles it with pepper, and exercises his aging teeth. The protein does him good.
There is no law on the island. No JP, no police, no jail.
At night I lie in my hammock, listening to the rattle of the crabs as they emerge from their burrows (dark to dark) and prowl through the scrub. I watch the sky: fronds like scissors, stars like frost. There are meteors, planets, spaces between the stars, black holes. The black holes are not visible, but there nonetheless. Stars bigger than the sun, collapsed in on themselves, with a gravitational pull that sucks in light like water down a drain. Black holes, black as the moments before birth and after death.
Ida’s toes in the sand, sea wrack, the shells of conch, heads of lobster. She strolls past the boats, past the trembling docks with the outhouses perched over them, past the crude gate and the chickens and the turkeys, on up to the door of Orlando’s uncle’s house. Her mother is Orlando’s uncle’s granddaughter. She knows it, and Orlando’s uncle knows it. Neither cares.
Between the shore and the reef is a stretch of about half a mile. The water is twenty or thirty feet deep, there are nests of rock, plains of sweeping thick-bladed grass, rolling like wheat in a deep wind. Among the blades, conch. The handsome flame-orange and pink shells turned to the dark bottom, the spiral peaks indicating the sky. You dive, snatch at the peaks, turn them over—they are ghostly and gray, a hole, black hole, tapped in the roof. The vacant shells frighten off the living conch, Orlando tells me, like a graveyard after dark.
Still in the afternoon heat, dogs chickens children asleep, the generator like the hum of an organ, there are cries in the air, sudden as ice, cries of passion and rhythm, the pressure of groin and groin, cries that squeeze between the planks of Orlando’s uncle’s shack like air escaping a brown paper bag.
Tito’s shack is difficult to find in the dark. For one thing, the island is washed in night after the generator shuts down. For another, the path is narrow, not much used. If you step off the path you run the risk of snapping an ankle in the ruts dug by the stone crabs or of touching down on the carcass of a bird or lizard, sharp plumage, wet meat.
The Canadian woman was not hurt, but Orlando’s uncle is dead. She’d been back two days, it was dark, she stepped out to squat and urinate. I’d heard them celebrating her return: I swung in my hammock, thinking prurient thoughts, listening. I heard the door slam, I heard the five shots. The man who came out by boat from the mainland dug a bullet from the headboard of the bed. It was a small caliber, .22 he said. He asked the islanders if any of them owned a .22. And he asked me. We knew of no one who owned a .22, we told him, and he returned to the mainland the following day. Dark and sudden, these events have adumbrated change. Fran and the Canadian woman live together now. I visit them two times a day, eat, sip rum, pay. Orlando’s uncle’s shack stood empty for a few weeks. Then I moved in.
Deep in the shadows I spread a towel across the ground. It is too dark to see them, but I know the holes are there, beneath the cloth, the island pocked with them like a sickness. She stretches her back there, drops her shorts. Her knees fall apart. The breeze drifts in from the sea, bare night sky above. The sand fleas are asleep. I kneel, work myself into her, poke at her mouth with my tongue. Ida, I whisper, burrowing into her, dark blood beating, rooting, thrusting, digging, deep as I can go. I want to dig deeper.
(1975)