He Drown She in the Sea

by Shani Mootoo

  FOR THE SAKE OF BUSINESS

  Guanagaspar. Not as long ago.

  By the time Harry St. George was in his early twenties, most of the men he knew from his high school days were either married or engaged to be married. Dolly Persad worried about her son, saying that he was wasting away the productive years of his life on the gas station and on her. Every few days, when they sat in the choking twirl of smoke from the mosquito coil on the verandah, she would ask, as if for the first time ever, if he had met anyone in particular. Harry would laugh and tell his mother that every day he was meeting new people. Irritated by such a response, she would lecture him about getting old alone. He would answer that as long as he had her, he was happy. “Well, I am not company for a young man, besides, I not going to always be here. I ent no spring chicken no more,” she would say, pleased that he still cherished her company. He would answer, “But I thought only the good die young,” which would cause her to become pensive once she’d had a good laugh over such irreverence.

  One day she came home from a visit to the town center, announcing that they had a boarder coming to live with them. Why she had decided to take on a boarder, God alone knew; they certainly did not need extra income, as the gas station kept them comfortable. This boarder-to-be was a schoolteacher from the capital of Gloria who had recently gotten a job teaching in the city of Marion. Dolly had a builder fix up a room downstairs, and on the first day of the following month, a woman boarder arrived to live with them. She moved in upstairs, into what had just before then been Harry’s room, and Harry was displaced to the room below.

  One Saturday evening Harry was heading out from his downstairs room on the way to the cinema. The woman was leaning on the banister of the verandah, looking out pensively. It was the first time he had seen her without a book or students’ papers in her hands. They greeted each other, saying a formal good evening. Then, to his surprise, she asked if he was going for a walk. He answered that he was going to the pictures. She asked what he was going to see and announced that she had not been to a cinema in years. After that comment, it was only natural that he would invite her to accompany him. He saw the corner of his mother’s bedroom window curtain fall, and realized that she had been listening. Dolly came out onto the verandah with the woman, whose name was Cynthia. She asked if they would be home for supper. Before he could answer, Cynthia said, “Why we don’t go and eat barbecue chicken and chips after the pictures?” His mother piped in, “Yes, go and enjoy yourself, children. You young yet. What you want to come back here for? To sit down and do what with an old lady like me? To hear what hurting and what not hurting today? If you don’t go quick-quick, I will come, too, you know.”

  That was their first date, so to speak.

  Harry found himself distracted by his proximity to Cynthia in the dark movie theater. She wore a scent that wafted through the air and made people turn to watch her. Each time she spoke to him in the theater, she leaned close, and the warmth of her breath, the heat of her face near his, the flicker of her lips in his ears made him to want to kiss her even while she was speaking. Then, on the back stairs before saying good night, he kissed her on the mouth, a kiss that she returned only fleetingly.

  Subsequently they went out almost every evening—to buy corn, to eat chicken and chips, to see the sun set, to get Chinese food, and when next they went to the cinema, they bought tickets for one of the private boxes at the back of the theater. Two months later, Cynthia and Harry married.

  Without notice, Cynthia gave up her job as a teacher, and decided on her own to relieve Dolly from work in the gas station by going to work there with Harry. For a while he walked around in dazed happiness, awed that he, a boy from Raleigh whose mother was once a washer-ironer-servant, was now the owner of a gas station and a married man. He thought often of his stepfather’s counseling and felt that he was well on his way to fulfilling the dreams that Mr. Persad had set out for him. Without his mother’s or Cynthia’s knowledge, he had begun making plans to buy, for the time being, one more gas station.

  Soon enough, Cynthia began making her own suggestions about the business. She talked about diversifying, about carrying candies, toiletries, hardware. At first Dolly was amused, pleased even. But then, more and more, Cynthia seemed to want to take charge. Then Dolly grew concerned. She said nothing, but as the business’s principal proprietress, she kept her eyes wide open.

  Almost every day Cynthia sent Harry off the premises to check out other companies’ products—to the printers to make business cards and receipt books, to the sign painter’s house to commission one thing after another. There was always, it seemed, something for him to do away from the property.

  Eventually Cynthia began to do the books. Harry worried she wouldn’t do a proper job, so every evening he studied the day’s entries. To his delight, she slipped not once in her bookkeeping. Soon she suggested that she could do the banking, too. He and his mother grew to be impressed with her sense of duty and commitment, and Dolly gladly relaxed her wariness. Harry regarded them, his mother, his wife, and himself, as if from a distance—they had become a business family, indeed.

  But there soon came a time when Cynthia whispered in his ear no more. He would hold her hand as they lay side by side in bed at night, though she no longer wrapped her fingers around his. She would, rather, move her hand away to scratch some part of her body or fix her hair. She stopped looking at him when they spoke. Harry noticed but said nothing.

  One day Dolly, as if in passing, asked Harry if he hadn’t found it odd that Cynthia sent him off the premises rather often. Harry demanded to know exactly what his mother might be insinuating, for whenever Cynthia sent him off, it was to do station work. She only wanted him to be more aware, she answered, that the business was his—he shouldn’t permit anyone, not even his wife and, she added hesitantly, not even his mother—to run his business so freely. Harry retorted gruffly: he and his wife were doing a very good job taking care of things. Dolly was undaunted. She suggested—merely suggested, she assured him—that he return to the station unexpectedly sometime, just to make sure things were running smoothly, that one could never be too sure, and that since it was still a new marriage, one could easily say that it was common sense to make a little check. Maybe nothing would come of it, she said, adding, “Who knows?” in the most benevolent manner she could muster.

  Harry gave Cynthia three days’ notice that he would be going to the capital city of Gloria on the pretext that he needed to speak with a banker about some financing for expansion of the business, and since there would be documents to be signed by a lawyer, and letters of reference to be signed by this one and that, the day would be lost to Gloria—not to expect him back for lunch. That day he went to a tailor in the High Street of Marion to be measured for a suit. He returned an hour and a half later, unannounced, to find a man in the office with Cynthia. The man was sitting behind the office desk, and Cynthia was sitting on the desktop facing him. They were in the midst of some conversation that had them both laughing uncontrollably. When Harry entered, the man jumped up from behind the desk. Cynthia turned around calmly. Seeing Harry, she slid off the desk, and with remnants of her laughter still in the smile on her face and in her voice, she introduced the man as her cousin from uptown. Harry shook the man’s hand and said he had returned, as the car seemed to be giving a little trouble. He excused himself, saying he was going up the hill for lunch.

  Harry let a few days pass before, on the pretext of conducting that unaccomplished business in Gloria, he left the property again. Instead of leaving the city, he parked his car a few streets away and made his way by foot back to the house, whose front entrance was not easily seen from the station’s office. He stole upstairs to his mother’s bedroom and, from behind the curtain, his mother now peering from behind his shoulder, he waited and watched.

  The man showed up soon enough, and he and Cynthia left the property on foot. Harry followed them from a distance. They went to the same cinema he had taken her
to. He waited until they had entered the darkened theater, then he bought a ticket and entered. He saw Cynthia, ushered by the man, slip into one of the private boxes.

  Harry did not stay in the theater. He returned to the station, gathered up the accounting books, the ledger, and a box of loose receipts, invoices, canceled checks, and took them directly to his accountant to have them sorted and his books balanced. He returned to the office, where he waited for Cynthia and her so-called cousin, but she came back alone. Harry decided to wait until he had heard back from the accountant before confronting her.

  That evening after the station closed, enraged by the prospect of anarchy brewing in his house, Harry got in his car and, after several years’ absence, drove to Raleigh, directly to the location of the house he and his mother used to live in. The land where the house should have been had been encroached on by wild, tangled shrubbery. There was no longer a house there. The lopsided concrete front stairs were all that was left of it. He could still sit on it, he thought, and walked slowly to the strangely shrunken area. Suddenly a man rose sleepily from behind the stub of stairway. Seeing Harry, the man, pulling himself up with some difficulty, roared fiercely. Harry backed off. Once up, the man wielded a guava stick in one hand and a tin can in the other and chased Harry. A good distance from the place that was once his and his mother’s, he whipped off his clothes and hung them over the fallen trunk of a coconut tree, after which he walked into the sea. Waist-high, he stood in thick brown foam, waves rising, crashing and pelting toward him. The sand shifted rapidly under his feet and threatened his balance. Snakelike and trembling, lines of current wrapped about his feet like a lasso.

  Once the evening sun and the cool winds off the water had dried him, leaving an oily residue of salt grains on his skin, he dressed and went to the house of Uncle Mako and Tante Eugenie. Tante Eugenie was in the house alone. She immediately placed the coarse heavy palms of her hands on Harry’s cheeks. She looked in his eyes and clicked her teeth. Her breath smelled of tobacco. She said, “Is good to see you, child. What happen, something troubling you? If so, you came to the right place. The old man outside. Where your mammy?” She did not move about with her former characteristic briskness. She had gotten wider in her waist and had developed a forward bend. Uncle Mako, fit and strong as ever, sat with Harry outside by the fire that burned in the oil drum to keep sand flies and mosquitoes at bay. Uncle Mako clutched one of Harry’s hands in his. Harry regretted not visiting them sooner. Tante Eugenie returned with three enamel plates of fried carite and bake.

  Her mouth full of fish, shooting fish bones like arrows between her teeth, she told Harry of her own aches and pains, all the medicines the doctor had prescribed for her and which bush medicine she found to work better than the doctor’s pills. She complained that Uncle Mako still took his rowboat out every morning, God willing, still looking for the African shoreline, and how she worried that at his age, he might catch a heart attack and drop dead with all that heavy rowing in the middle of the sea, just like that. She reminded Harry about some of the people of Raleigh. The wood-carver of African faces had become successful, a supplier of carvings made out of the local Mora tree to a tourist shop at the airport and to a boutique located in one of the big hotels in the capital. He had done so well, Tante Eugenie and Uncle Mako boasted, that he had pulled down his wood house and put up a two-story one constructed of concrete bricks on the same plot. That carver had died only three months ago. Harry asked about Walter the taxi driver and learned that he had become a big shot. Mr. Walter had had a son. This son emigrated to New York City in the United States of America, where he had become a district attorney. Several years ago he sponsored Mr. Walter’s emigration, and as far as Tante Eugenie knew, Mr. Walter was still in that big city, living with the son and the son’s family and running three taxis, all of which he owned but none of which he drove.

  Tante Eugenie stood up to take the empty enamel plates to the water barrel behind the house. She told Harry, “Talk to the old man. Tell him everything on your mind, child. What else he there for?”

  Harry rose, went over to the rowboat. He lifted a paddle out of the boat, and knowing well that Uncle Mako had carved and polished it, he admired it. Leaning against the boat, he shoved the blade of the paddle into the sand and ran his hand down the gleaming shaft as he related much of what was on his mind. Uncle Mako stared at the horizon, and Harry wondered if he was listening, if, above the sound of the ocean and the wind, he was hearing anything; or if, as he used to do in the past, he was scanning the distance for his piece of Africa. Harry carried on talking, for it was a relief to speak out this misfortune even if his words were being snatched away by the sea breeze. Uncle Mako remained vacantly looking out to sea. When Harry shifted, about to get up, Uncle Mako turned to him. Harry must put his foot down, he said, he must not permit the woman to stay under his roof another day. He said he called Cynthia a woman because, as bad as she was, until Harry did something about it, she was still Harry’s wife. He ranted that if Harry had not been married to her, he would have lashed her with every cuss word he knew, up and down her back. He didn’t like to think of anyone taking advantage of a boy who was like his own grandson and a woman who was like his own daughter. Harry was taken aback.

  Uncle Mako continued to give his advice. If Harry found money missing, he should not go to the police. Count it as a loss. But no matter what, he must not wait a day longer—for in every thief, there is a murderer slumbering. Harry must throw her out come morning. Then he turned to the ocean and complained about town girls, about how these girls nowadays were getting too much education, and said Harry should have come back and married a simple girl from the village. “A good lashing once, just once and watch,” he said, his hand raised and forefinger pointing to the sky, “she wouldn’t try one bit of nonsense again.” Despite the gravity of the conversation, Harry smiled; he knew of Uncle Mako’s exaggerations and could not imagine that Uncle Mako or anyone else ever would have dared laid a hand on Tante Eugenie. Uncle Mako added, as if by the way and for good measure, that he knew all along Harry would never consider taking a girl from Raleigh, that he and Tante Eugenie knew he would do like his father, who, even after having lived all his life in Raleigh among the people of African descent, still went far inland to find himself one of his own kind. He said Harry’s father was lucky because the woman he met, Dolly, was a good woman, but they all knew she was never at home in Raleigh. Harry understood that Uncle Mako was taking the opportunity to tell him he and Tante Eugenie felt abandoned by him and his mother. He sat outside with Uncle Mako awhile longer in silence until Tante Eugenie, from the doorway of the house, shouted their names above the seaside sounds. Inside, she had laid a table with three glasses and a bottle of pineapple babash.

  Harry did not return to his home in Marion until past midnight. Cynthia put on a good display of being worried and angry that he had left without her knowing and that he had returned so late and so drunk. She said he was, after all, a man like all others. He surprised even himself when he told her to hush her mouth before she regretted that he had returned at all. The following morning Harry showered, ate something his mother had prepared, and at nine left the house again, telling only his mother where he was going.

  At the accountant’s office, Harry learned that from the time Cynthia had started doing the banking, up until the week Dolly had alerted her son, over eight hundred dollars had gone missing. There was a personal canceled check made out by Cynthia to Mervyn Gopeesingh, her man friend.

  Harry searched and found Mervyn Gopeesingh’s name in the telephone book. He wrote down the address and telephone number on a piece of paper and pocketed it.

  Harsh words had hardly ever passed between him and his mother. But now he stood in the kitchen quarreling with her; it was she who had taken in a boarder whom she knew nothing about, and it was she who should deal with the mess at hand. Harry went to the station to use the telephone there. On his way back to the house, he heard Cynthia screaming a
t his mother, calling her a liar and a user. He had had enough. He rushed to the room. He stood by the door and told Cynthia to pack her clothes. She opened her mouth to say something to him, but he stopped her by waving the check stub at her while saying that Mervyn Gopeesingh was on his way there, he would meet her at the corner, outside the property. She was about to grab the stub from him, but he pulled it out of her reach and told her that if she didn’t go easily, he would use it to land her and her Mr. Gopeesingh in jail for the rest of their lives. She started crying and begging forgiveness, and to Harry’s great surprise, his mother marched farther into the room, pulled out a suitcase from under the bed, and threw it open on the bed. Dolly herself began pulling out all the clothing from the dresser, all her cosmetics, her shoes from under the bed, and a nightgown that was hanging behind the door. She pushed it all haphazardly into the suitcase, shut it, and threw it into the yard. She went behind Cynthia, who had covered her face with her hands and was sobbing, and shoved her right out of the yard and into the street.

  Harry picked up the suitcase and pushed it hard against her. Dolly had gone back into the house; Harry told Cynthia she was heartless, treating a good woman like his mother the way she had. She had no gratitude, no pride. To his surprise, a shoe came flying over his head and hit Cynthia on her shoulder, and then another shoe went flying to the far side of the street, and another nightgown came floating over the fence and landed beside them. Dolly had final words, too. From the yard she shouted out, with no care for the ears of bypassers, “Listen, you! You get far-far-far from Marion. You hear? And don’t come near this town or anywhere near my son again. Otherwise I will make stew out of you and your name. And tell that good-for-nothing wretch you had boldface to bring on my property I will put him in jail if he set foot near these premises again. You hear? Now get away from here. Gone! Harry, get back in here. What more you have to say to she? You don’t owe her nothing, you hear? Come in the yard now!”