How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House

by Cherie Jones

  Perhaps her seed of anger grows.

  When Jacinthe reaches out to take Baby from Adan, to join him in hugging and holding and cooing over how beautiful she is, Lala strides over and says she must feed Baby first, it is past time for her feeding. She lifts Baby from Adan’s hands before he can respond, straightens Baby’s pale yellow smocked dress, and obscures her navel again. The baby, startled by the sudden loss of admiration and the sound and sight of her father’s fawning, threatens a cry, but Lala pays no heed. Perhaps it is the tenderness with which Adan retrieves Baby from her arms before she can fetch the bottle, and proffers her again to Jacinthe, perhaps it is the maternal madness that epilogues a recent birth. Perhaps it is that they are both a little house-mad from being locked inside, Adan in the tunnels and Lala inside with Baby, because they have to be careful, they cannot afford for Adan to be seen. Perhaps it is everything that came before it, or nothing in particular, but whatever it is that makes Lala not understand what she is starting, it is a costly deficit.

  Everything deteriorates. Adan lowers his eyes from Jacinthe’s but does not look at Lala. He looks at the ground as the sound is sucked out of the room.

  “Gimme back Baby,” is what he says to Lala.

  “I gotta feed she,” Lala protests.

  Tone stops squeezing his locks, closes the window against the rain.

  “It getting ready to clear up,” he says. “We gone, hear Adan? Gotta get this girl home before it come down properly.”

  “Gimme back Baby,” Adan insists.

  Jacinthe jumps up, relieved to have received the signal from Tone to go. She says to Adan that it is okay, she will come back to visit some other time, she will see Baby again then: Let her have her feed, she look hungry in truth, is okay Adan. Lala holds Baby closer, feels her stiffen and start to claw, refusing to be drawn into her mother’s bosom.

  Adan, insistent, tugs Baby back while sucking his teeth. A custard-colored bootie falls onto the hard wood floor and does not bounce. Adan is holding onto a little naked foot. Baby wails again.

  Adan is twisting the baby’s legs away from Lala. Jacinthe is heading toward the door; Tone is approaching Lala and Adan as they start to move with the baby suspended between them. Lala reclaims both legs, Adan moves his big, big hands to Baby’s torso and tries to lift the baby out of Lala’s arms. Jacinthe has reached the door, is putting on her sandals, Tone stands behind her, takes up much of the space in the doorway, keeps the light out, blocks the sight of Adan and Lala struggling over Baby.

  Thunder grumbles and barks. Baby jumps and both parents realize, at once, that this rite of possession is scaring her. Neither wishes to scare her. Perhaps this is why Lala lets go of the little legs at the precise moment that Adan lets go of her torso and Baby plummets to the floor in a flailing plumage of pale yellow and chocolate and lands with a soft thump and is silent. The rain pours down. Tone’s eyes widen but his voice remains calm, for Jacinthe, who is behind him and has not seen the baby fall.

  “We going now,” says Tone, watching Adan stoop to pick up the baby. “Come, Jacinthe.”

  He looks at Lala and his eyes are wide and fearful but he steps outside, closes the door behind him so sharply that the PEPSI sign rattles, hustles Jacinthe down the stairs in front of him so that she does not get the chance to look back inside, to see the baby being snatched from the floor. The thunder roars and Adan roars with it. Lala is crying. They carry Baby together, Adan’s large hands cradling her head, Lala’s fingers laced under her back. They place her on the bed, start running their eyes and hands over her, checking for anything broken. Baby is in that state of pure astonishment, the catch of breath in the buildup to shrieking her terror.

  “You see now?” yells Adan. “What the fuck you had to do that for?” And all the while his hands keep running over the miniatures of his own head, his own back, his own hands.

  “Oh God,” Lala is crying. “Oh God!”

  When Baby finally cries it is so deep and loud and long that it eclipses even Lala’s sobs, makes the claps of thunder outside seem like the buzzing of insects. Adan sucks his teeth, looks around wild-eyed, feels again the same bones his hands have already examined. Nothing appears broken and he passes Baby to Lala, where Baby submits to her breast. A few minutes later, when her wailing has softened to a snotty whimper, she is patted on Adan’s shoulder. Lala’s breast flops out of her shirt while she continues to fawn over Baby, still moaning on Adan’s shoulder.

  “You think we should take she to Baxter’s General?” asks Lala.

  Adan sucks his teeth. He does not answer. He confirms again with his fingers that there are no large lumps on Baby’s head or back, no gross angles of arm or leg to signal that something is seriously wrong. He lays Baby gently down on the bed again, sits gingerly beside her, watches her nestle into sleep. Lala stands by his side, watching Baby, watching him.

  “Baby,” he is cooing, “my girl, my sweet, sweet girl.”

  Lala is poised above him, breast still bare, when he suddenly turns away from Baby and toward her. He bites her breast so quickly, so savagely, that at first she does not understand what has happened, but she sees his head on her chest, poised before the burning in her breast in the manner of a suckling baby.

  For one breath she is silent, and then Lala is screaming, “Murder! Murder!” in the way of the women in Wilma’s stories, as if the mere announcement of her imminent slaughter will save her. Adan’s big right hand finds her throat; she goes reeling into the chair that Jacinthe sat on, slapping her hand to her own mouth so she will not wake the baby with her surprise.

  Adan is about to yank her from the chair when Tone runs back up the stairs and through the front door. Tone is good at reassuring women, Lala knows, but she also knows that he has returned to reassure himself. When he comes through the door she turns away from him, rubs the water from her eyes, tucks the mangled breast away and buttons her dress above it.

  Tone feels the air crackling with something he cannot prove with his eyes. See the baby asleep on the sheets? See Lala start to make their bed around her? For a moment, Tone considers that this is strange, her thinking to straighten the bed when the baby could be hurt, but the thought escapes him as Adan starts to relay the story of the fall, a story in which Lala is the villain who refused to hand over Baby until the very moment that Adan decided to let Baby stay, and Lala therefore caused the fall. Tone does not comment on this story, he does not counter it with what he has seen or what he suspects. He does not challenge Adan, even though he knows that Adan’s version is the one that will stick. Instead, he and Adan begin to whisper about the baby and how close she came to disaster. Tone talks to Adan about lucky children he’s known – children who survived falls from great heights, serious diseases, and gory accidents unscathed. It is going to be okay, Tone says with his stories, Baby will survive like these children. Lala listens, but she does not believe, she does not look at either man. She wants to ask Adan, again, if they should take Baby to hospital, but she does not want to inflame him further, does not want to have to test her throat and talk in Tone’s presence, it stings so much she thinks she would be incapable of speech even if she did. Instead, Lala takes one of the sterilized bottles from the sink, washes it again briskly, just to be safe, puts a small pan of hot water on to boil and watches it, mesmerized, until it is just beginning to bubble. She retrieves the store-bought formula standing open by the sink and levels a scoop of vitamin-enriched white powder that quivers in her grasp, pours the hot water into the bottle, then the powder.

  Tone does not stay long, he says he does not want the baby to wake up on account of his presence, his unintentional noisiness, so he says his goodbyes again and he says that he is going back to the beach, where he has promised to meet a friend. Lala’s hands stop quivering when he says friend and clench instead. Friend is a word Tone uses to mean a middle-aged woman in need of a good time. A friend is a woman who will pay him.

  Adan is trying to convince him that it is okay to stay
. “Baby good good now,” says Adan, “she gone sleep.” Stay and talk because he not going on any jobs tonight. He still laying low, he explains, and a fella from St. Christopher coming to see him about a little job he think maybe Tone could help him with. Tone shakes his head No. He is not looking at Adan, he is looking at a deepening purple mark near Lala’s neck, a vivid red spot on the front of her flowery dress. Lala turns away, covers the bottle, shakes it fast, too fast. When she releases the teat, newly made formula foams out onto her hand and she howls, because it is hot, because she is hurt.

  Adan shouts something that Lala cannot hear, something that makes Tone’s fingers find the shark’s tooth hanging just beneath his collarbones and hold it tightly.

  Tone asks her something, checking to see if she is okay, so she nods and does not look at him and does not respond or look at Adan looking at him asking her. Instead, she puts the bottle in a container of cool water before setting about cleaning up dots of spilled milk from the floor.

  “A man want to bring in a little food,” Adan explains to Tone, “high-grade thing. That way you tell me about, through the tunnels, that is a boss way, Tone. The man serious, we could make something. He coming here just now. Ever since I make this plan with this man to meet tonight and talk.”

  Adan doesn’t understand why Tone still wants to leave, why he doesn’t see that this offer of inclusion is a promotion of sorts, an elevation from being trusted with half a pound of weed to sell to his clients on the beach at a premium, and having to return the cost of the consignment to Adan when he is done. Lala doesn’t understand why Tone doesn’t hurry up and leave. She does not like the two of them in the little house at the same time, but she guesses that Tone knows that by staying he will spare her, that he has already figured out what it is that she needs.

  “As man, I going check you tomorrow, Adan,” says Tone, bouncing a loosely made fist against Adan’s. “Take good care of Baby. We going talk ’bout it tomorrow, seen?”

  “She all right now,” Adan assures, dismissively. “The man is a serious man, Tone. We could make something good.”

  “Seen, seen,” says Tone. “I going check you about that tomorrow, though.”

  “Tone – ”

  But Tone is out the door and Adan’s forehead furrows at the doorway for too long after his right-hand man has exited it.

  Baby is so soundly asleep that she cannot be coaxed into taking the before-bed feeding, which Lala decides to save, in anticipation of Baby waking, hungry, around 2 a.m., as usual. But the next morning Baby does not wake up.

  Chapter 7

  Martha

  12 November 1948

  Martha Mason is not a bright girl, but there are a few things she knows.

  First and foremost, Martha Mason knows her place. She knows that she is a descendant of the scorned Redlegs of St. John, the poor whites whom both the black descendants of slaves and the white descendants of slave masters look down upon, and as such, that she is the equal of neither. Secondly, Martha Mason knows that she is penniless. Her father, Gilbert, has just been fired from the Central Foundry for throwing down a lit match he used to light a cigarette he shouldn’t have been smoking on the job. Gilbert is a good technician, but this one foible has led to a fire that burns a hole in the center of town, and he is let go. Gilbert is lucky that all he has lost is his job but it does not feel like luck to his family, for whom his pay is the only source of sustenance. For two weeks the family of seven has been rationing one meal a day and as of yesterday, Martha has assumed the age of majority without the proverbial pot to piss in.

  Martha Mason does not fool herself – she also knows that she has no head for numbers, no heart for nursing, and no hands for housework, so she knows that she must find and hold onto whatever employment the gods might allow to fall upon her.

  This is why Martha Mason is blinded by tears as she walks the wrong way down the gently curving driveway of Baxter’s Plantation at seven in the morning, a driveway fringed by cabbage palms that legends say still hang heavy with the souls of the slaves who had been drenched in cane juice and tied there to be tortured by the stings of red ants. Martha is crying because, despite all she knows, she has still managed to lose the gift of a job that is only three days old.

  Martha is barefoot, and dust clings to her toes as she wonders what she will say to the auntie who’d begged to get her the job as a maid in the Martineau household at Baxter’s Plantation, with the assurance that Martha was very good indeed at housework.

  It is because of this crying that Martha almost misses hearing a spanking new Morris Minor rolling to a stop beside her and James Martineau bidding her stop crying, this instant. She is pretty as pretty can be, says James Martineau, but if no one has told her that she’s an especially ugly crier he doesn’t mind allowing her to know. Martha accepts the offer of a gentleman’s monogrammed handkerchief from a hand the color of fresh-cut mahogany and blows her nose without grace before she takes in the two kindly brown eyes staring at her from beneath lush black eyelashes.

  Martha Mason may not be bright, but she is not above begging, either. By the following morning Martha is at work as the secretary in James Martineau’s office on Bay Street, typing his letters, making his coffee, managing his meetings, not unaware of the pleasure he derives from telling unexpected visitors to make their appointments to see him with her.

  “See that white lady there?” he is wont to say, snapping his suspenders against the starched white of his long-sleeved shirt, a slight slick of sweat making his forehead shimmer. “She works for me. You got to speak to her first before you can speak to me, you understand?”

  It didn’t take long for one thing to lead to the other is how Martha will describe the ensuing courtship to their daughter, Mira, many years later. It didn’t take long for Mira to come along. She will explain, matter-of-factly, that Mira is named after a married Portuguese woman her father remembered from a brief affair he had in Brazil.

  James Martineau puts his mistress and his Mira into a tiny stone house in Britton’s Hill and hardly visits them there at all. This is not an issue for Martha, who understands that a Martha is not a woman befitting of a Martineau. In the year in which the first black man has been elected to the island’s Parliament, an established black businessman like James Martineau does not then go and align himself with someone beneath his own precarious station.

  Martha understands this, but she struggles to explain it to Mira.

  James Martineau has his Mira cared for during the day by an old black woman selected by his mother, and baby Mira is brought to his office at 3 p.m. each afternoon, where she is taught to sit quietly near Martha’s desk and play with her crayons while Martha types and files and administers. Badly. Martha Mason is never promoted, but she does not aspire to promotion; she aspires to a roof over her head, clean clothes for her daughter, sufficient flour and oil from her paycheck to make a month’s worth of bakes for breakfast. She aspires to enough. Each month James Martineau slips her a white envelope with Mira’s name on it, and it is from this envelope that Martha takes money for Mira’s smocked dresses and frilly socks.

  James Martineau, one of the few wealthy black men in Paradise, is tall and reedy, with a high, intelligent forehead and the ability to engage and dismiss at will. While he paces the floor, dictating one thing or the other to Martha, he sometimes stops and catches his daughter Mira looking up at him openmouthed, and on these occasions he reaches over and rubs circles across the middle of her forehead, taps her nose with this thumb, and returns to his pacing.

  When Mira is four, James Martineau marries a certain Miss Musson, the blonde daughter of a wealthy white merchant. In another four years, Ms. Musson has borne him three café-au-lait daughters and these little girls also come to the office in Bay Street, all dressed up in velvet and lace that costs more than the sum of money in Mira’s envelope. None of this is a problem for Martha, but how to explain it to Mira, whose forehead aches with longing when James Martineau fusses over an
d pets and kisses these three little girls? How to help Mira understand her mother’s hiss when she draws too close to James Martineau on these occasions, hoping for the reassurance of his thumb on her forehead? When Mira and one of the Martineau girls get into a fight over the seat placed closest to their father in the office, James Martineau orders that Mira should no longer be brought to the office after school. To console her daughter, Martha offers her a trip to town and an ice cream, which she pays for with money from Mira’s envelope.

  Martha Mason is not bright; she cannot see how this envelope will impact her daughter in the future.

  Chapter 8

  Mrs. Whalen

  16 August 1984

  For the most part, Mira Whalen stays in her room with the curtains drawn, the light firmly shut out. When she ventures outside her room, when she can be coaxed by Rosa or Sam to eat something, she sees the antique mahogany planter chairs with the curved arms, the Persian rug, the tables of carved limestone topped by heavy, green-rimmed glass, and she remembers that this is what she has wanted for as long as she can remember – this spouse, this house, this life.

  There are two versions of how Mira Martineau met Peter Whalen. In the first one, British Hedge Fund Manager meets Island Girl and they fall head over heels in love, a love that leads to marriage and a joint life in London, where Peter is based. This is the story Mira had planned to tell their children and grandchildren; it is the carefully rehearsed version she relates at lunches and teas with Peter’s friends in Wimbledon over Earl Grey and petits fours. In this version, the island is Paradise. It is hot, beautiful, and drenched in beaches so blue you’d swear that blue is the color of water.

  But there is another version, and Mira suspects that her mother prefers it, this other version that Mira never relays. In the hidden version, Mira Whalen is a whore, the kind who chooses to be a whore, the kind whom people don’t dare say is whorish, whose crowning achievement is becoming a wealthy man’s wife. These whores are widely considered to be better than their counterparts who work behind the Holborn Hotel, simply because they are presented as having other options and therefore whoring is given the guise of something else. Usually, this something else is love.