Book of the Little Axe

by Lauren Francis-Sharma

  “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “Your future together?”

  Papá moved toward Tío Byron, blocking Rosa’s view. He stood a few inches shorter than Jeremias now, but Papá’s shoulders were more squared, as if he’d been chipped from something more solid. “Byron, what’s this you sayin’?”

  “Jeremias knows what I’m sayin’, oui?”

  Papá took a step toward Tío Byron.

  “Francine is now with chile. Your Jeremias has made certain promises and I intend to ensure he keeps them.”

  Papá’s shoulders drooped, Rosa was certain of it, but quickly they firmed again, as if remembering those solid roots. Mamá, on the other side of Jeremias, gasped. “Jeremias, is this true?”

  “Non. I took her there to talk. We didn’t—I didn’t make promises.”

  Eve arrived with two full mugs of the root drink Mamá had boiled so long with cinnamon and cloves that it was now blood-red. She had a practiced smile—Eve did—one that evoked the utmost femininity, but Tío Byron scarcely noticed it as he snatched his and Philippe’s share from the tray, downing the contents in seven crude gulps.

  “Byron, you washed down your drink so be on your way,” Papá said. “We’ll be in touch.”

  “I know you t’ink of yourself as a man of integrity, but I know different.” Tío Byron belched. It was deep and long, and Mamá covered her mouth as if she were the one who’d set it forth. “I come to make sure my gyal has the future that garçon here promised.”

  “He doesn’t have a future unless I give him one. And this is not about my boy and Francine,” Papá said. “This is about two families. And I’m the head of this family. So I’m askin’ you again to take your leave, and I’ll say again that we’ll be in touch.”

  “Une famille, Demas. You believe us to be separate. This has always been the problem. It’s no wonder your boy t’inks this is all right.”

  “We’ll be in touch.”

  “What I can’t seem to get from Francine is how exactly garçon here convinced her he would make t’ings right.”

  “Francine is fifteen, Byron! She’s practically a woman,” Mamá said.

  “And Jeremias is a big boy! Look at him!”

  Rosa recognized the sound of Papá’s footsteps as they crossed the boards. Papá set himself before Jeremias as though he would not permit an assessment of the boy’s oversize. Big boys don’t have long childhoods, Mamá often said. “Byron, either you’re accusing him of somet’ing or you’re hoping he’ll keep his word. But you can’t do both. So, which is it?”

  “I’m askin’ him to be a proper man.”

  “You can’t ask a boy of twelve years to be a man.”

  “He snatches my Francine and takes her where he chooses. He’s certainly a man.”

  “He kidnapped her? Is that what you accusing him of now?”

  “Even if she went willingly, it didn’t give him the right to—”

  “I’ve done nothing!” Jeremias moved beside Papá. He was a small boy again, malleable, compliant, Demas’s son, if only for that one moment more. “I didn’t do any of that, Papá. It’s been weeks since I’ve last seen her. We had a quarrel and stopped speaking.”

  “A lovers’ quarrel, oui?” Tío Byron said.

  Eve and Rosa were now standing at the door, no longer troubled about being seen. Papá held Jeremias’s hand, reminding Rosa of the way male frogs kept their tadpoles protected in their mouths. “Walk with Francine next time you come,” Papá said to Tío. “I wanta hear this story from that mout’ of hers.”

  “As a matter of fact, I’ll bring she now.”

  Tío Byron and Philippe moved toward the wagon. Mamá, believing them to be departing, started after them, but Papá held her back. The five Rendóns watched Tío Byron instruct Philippe to unveil the cloth-covered wagon. Rosa rose to the tips of her toes, mouth agape, as Tío Byron hoisted Francine from the wooden bed. Her long dark hair, sweaty and creased, was pasted to the gauze swathing her pale neck. Tío Byron lugged her by the arms, tilting her torso so that she might be posed across the lip of the wagon to display her shrouded wrists.

  “Come now and talk!” Tío Byron shouted from below. “See what your boy has caused my girl to do to sheself.”

  4

  Mamá was determined to have Sunday afternoon tea upon the verandah. She said she would not have this thing with Francine and Byron put her back in the bed. Mamá had had short bouts of illness for as long as Rosa could remember. Sometimes she’d be without the use of her wrists and knees, bedridden for days, but inevitably, some turn would occur, and slowly she’d return almost to her old self. Yet even when she felt more fair than ill, Mamá was careful with her cast of mind.

  “Come, come, come and take a sit outside,” she insisted.

  Papá sat quiet in his rocker beneath the bronze bell, his tea in a cup upon the floorboards, too hot for consumption he’d said. Mamá, in the chair beside him, sipping hers, glancing at the front field, its grass blades, sharp and vivid, appearing as if joy had not evaded them. Mamá and Papá had not spoken much to each other in the weeks since Tío and Philippe’s visit. In the living body of their marriage, silence had always been the keeper of peace, but this time it coursed as though it were sludge, the lees of a sickly matrimony.

  Demas Rendón, a child of emancipated Negroes, had lived in the former capital city of San José de Oruña (Saint Joseph) all of his life. He met Myra Robespierre in 1784, when she and Byron came to his newly opened shop to order a hoe. Within weeks of meeting, Myra and Demas were married. Love, an afterthought for both. This fact was no secret in their home.

  For Myra, the big man with nary an education was an escape from ill treatment by an oppressive family led by her eldest brother, Byron. For Demas, the tall woman with too much lip for her own good was excellent stock for his future sons. The two were not so much one as like a wheel and axle, they sometimes said, both resolute that one would be useless without the other.

  During their first years of marriage, Myra had polished out much of Demas’s rutted finish, teaching him to read, offering him lessons on how to defer to others without losing honor, how to not only take pride in his ability to be more than one man, but to see it as an asset rather than a burden. And though Demas resented his wife’s maternal tendencies toward him, as well as her particular strain of Martinique haughtiness, he became certain that with her guidance and his natural talents he would break through and achieve a success that at one time in his life had seemed unattainable. Thus by 1790, Demas had earned a reputation as the most masterful and accomplished blacksmith in the Lesser Antilles, affording him the opportunity to purchase seventy-five acres of land upon which he and Mamá grew tidy rows of cacao, bred horses, and eventually built the home where they would raise their family. By plantation owner standards, the Rendón home would be quite small, but with Demas’s most excellent carpentry skills, it developed into quite a handsome three-room home, with a French double door, an open gable roof, and jalousie windows, all lightly obscured by a scant row of hedges. From a distance, one could see that the house, upon its raised foundation, offered unobstructed views of the town’s verdant hills and boasted twin beveled spires, like periscopes, one on the far left, the other on the right upon a dormer lined in a lace wood trim. It had stone steps that Rosa and Jeremias were required to scrub before Easter each year, ending at a wide verandah that allowed visitors to feast on an interior that would not be outdone by that of a French madame or a Spanish señora, for Mamá had in her possession soup chargers, teacups, eight pieces of silver flatware, a fine six-seat table with rounded corners, and two extra chairs for unexpected guests. But it was the Rendón children, not their home, who were to speak for Demas and Myra’s éclat. Eve, Jeremias, and Rosa were to be learned, charming, industrious. Their job was to make Mamá proud and to never embarrass Papá. It was a task the children were not always up to.

  “You know what I heard in town?” Eve sat on the top step, promising
to wade into her parents’ sludgy silence. As the eldest girl, it seemed she carried the special burden of the parental relations, willing when there seemed no way. “I heard Señor Cordoza was at that obeah lady’s house last week for quite some time.” Señor Cordoza was Papá’s occasional trading partner, a European who’d become a family friend of sorts. On occasion, Cordoza visited with Papá, but mostly they saw him at Sunday Mass with his wife and her pet pig that Padre José refused to allow indoors.

  “Which obeah lady?” Mamá motioned for Rosa to come to her. “The one with the dead husband in the house?”

  Papá shook his head at the nonsense that passed for conversation, while Eve laughed.

  “He ate from that woman’s pot?! He doesn’t know better?” Mamá spread her legs and folded her dress inward to make space for Rosa. From her apron she removed a hairbrush with a shagreen handle. Rosa shook her head as though she had a choice in the matter. Mamá eyed her with incredulity.

  “I hear Cordoza had already taken a liking to her before she give him the bois bandé in his tea,” Eve said. “Now he’s a slobbering lubber when he’s with her.”

  Mamá pulled Rosa’s arm and set her down upon the floor of the verandah so she could get a good grasp of Rosa’s hair. Rosa did not think of her hair as needing Mamá’s intervention, for though it was linty, the strands of her plaits had yet to unravel and were not near downy enough to require redoing. As Mamá began to pull apart the strands, Rosa set her hands atop her head and Mamá rapped her knuckles with the brush. “No,” Mamá said to Eve, “that woman must’ve given him something long before. You’ve seen her. Only obeah could cause such a thing.” Mamá licked her fingers and set the saliva at the tip of Rosa’s plait. “Cordoza thinks too much of himself to be with that ugly woman.”

  “I hear he come from her house wearin’ some too-short biddim bim trousers inside out. The seams his wife restitched and the patch in the crotch—there for everybody to see.”

  Rosa giggled, for Eve had told her she had visited with the obeah woman on occasion, and in return for covering Eve’s absences, Eve shared stories she’d heard of scorned African women who took flight in the nights, philandering men, neighbors who hid furry tails.

  Papá peered beneath the shadow of his hat brim, expecting Mamá to admonish Eve, but Mamá only chuckled. “Eve, enough.” Papá’s face was grave, the lines at his eyes webbed.

  “Papá, I only tellin’ what I does hear.”

  “Ow!” Rosa cried, crossing her arms over the top of her head. Mamá rapped her wrists this time.

  “Myra, this is the kinda talk you encouraging from a young lady?” Papá said.

  For a few moments, Mamá said nothing. She brushed Rosa’s hair with long, maddened strokes, while Papá seemed to relish the dampening effect he had had on her. Then Mamá rested the brush on Rosa’s shoulder. “If men didn’t have so many dirty secrets, Eve would have nothing to speak of.” Mamá returned the brush to Rosa’s hair and ran it across a knot.

  “Mamá, it hurts!”

  “If you stop fighting, it wouldn’t hurt!”

  “Oww!” Rosa wailed.

  Eve looked to Rosa, then to Mamá. “Let me finish her hair for you,” Eve said.

  When Mamá dropped the brush on Rosa’s thigh, Rosa jumped up from the verandah floor. Her hair had grown and tickled her neck, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about its brushed-out length. Rosa pushed the strands from her cheeks and caught Eve looking to Papá now, her eyes brimming with mischief. She had this way about her, as though she could make rose petals from thorns. “You t’ink next time you see Señor Cordoza, you could tell him that Mamá could sew him a pair of trousers with extra buttonholes, so he could just—”

  “Eve!”

  Jeremias laughed. Snorted, in fact. It was the first time Rosa had heard him laugh in weeks. She didn’t realize until then how she’d missed it.

  “Was that your belly makin’ wind, Jeremias?” Eve said.

  The three of them laughed all the more, but Rosa stifled her chuckles, hoping Papá would appreciate her attempt, wondering how she so often found herself trying to please both Mamá and Papá when she knew that pleasing one often displeased the other. As Rosa moved toward Eve, she looked out at the road and saw a rider. The amber light of dusk was upon them, but still, Rosa made out the figure. “I guess you’ll be able to tell Señor Cordoza about the trousers sooner than you think.”

  Papá tugged at his braces, watching the pace and posture at which Cordoza rode. One could tell a lot about what’s to come from how a man rode, he often said. And by the looks of the strides, something was amiss.

  “Myra, please go and bring out a proper cup of tea for Señor Cordoza, and, Jeremias, bring a chair from inside for him to sit.”

  Señor Cordoza was a squat, coconut-oiled Spaniard with a goose neck. He had been married twice, both times admittedly for money. The first wife had died in childbirth, and afterward, it was said, he wailed like the baby he lost until his father-in-law gave him a decent enough sum to make the whining stop. The second marriage had landed him in the West Indies, where he found himself keeper of his new father-in-law’s hilly property, wishing the second wife and her swine would take the path of the first wife.

  Now, he and Papá, hoping to deter eavesdropping, spoke in English, while Mamá reheated water, stirred in the honey, and clinked the spoon against the rims of her teacups. She had brought her special set of egg-blue porcelain cups from Martinique, which had been given to her grandmother by her grandmother’s French madame. When Mamá delivered the tea to the verandah, she set the Martinique cups down as if to display them and waited upon the porch to hear the news Señor Cordoza had come to deliver. But Papá, with the flick of his hand, sent her away.

  Mamá, angry, returned inside and instructed Jeremias to sit beneath the sill so that she might know all the things Papá would not share with her. Rosa sat beside Jeremias and watched as Señor Cordoza sipped from the cup, inhaled the scent of Mamá’s tea, then sipped again though Papá had yet to touch his. Each time Cordoza had come to their home, he’d mentioned how much he admired Mamá’s black-rose tea. To Rosa, this compliment seemed always to evince a liking for more than Mamá’s brew.

  “I’ve received news that the English will soon arrive,” Cordoza said. “This could be very bad for all of us, but most especially for you.”

  “What specific information have you, Señor?”

  “Come, Demas, those French privateers have been blocking the port for weeks! The English merchants can’t conduct their business in Port of Spain. How long do you think they’ll allow that? And now with Spain at war with them, it is only a matter of time before the English begin attacking the colonies.”

  “But you can’t be sure of this, Señor.”

  Cordoza sipped again and set his cup atop the saucer. It wobbled, and he waited until it settled before speaking. “After L’Ouverture in Saint-Domingue, it is clear France is weak. Our upper class, particularly the French royalists, are frightened that the instability in Saint-Domingue could spread here. The Saint-Dominguans who escaped have come to tell of their horrors. With such stories of instability, it would not be a surprise if the English were to try and seize French assets and, once in the Caribbean Sea, come to learn how exposed our Governor Chacon has left us.”

  The 1791 Negro revolt in Saint-Domingue had resulted in a thousand ruined plantations and three thousand Frenchmen with their heads balanced on spikes. The English and Spaniards had taken full advantage of the chaos and joined the fight alongside the enslaved, until in 1793 the new French government abolished slavery so as not to lose complete control of Saint-Domingue. But the isle’s fate remained an open question. And as Rosa would learn later, this uncertainty had affected the entire chain of islands.

  “If this happens, maybe a year or two at most we will have,” Cordoza said.

  “The French on this island have no reason for concern,” Papá said.

  Señor Cordoza rubbed the pal
ms of his hands on the arms of Mamá’s kitchen chair. “Ay, there are bands of revolutionaries—French farmers—roaming the streets at night, trying to create a fever-pitch among the coloreds to overthrow Chacon. There is much reason for concern.” Cordoza looked to Papá as if he intended to pose a question. “I had imagined with you being a free Negro and Myra being colored that you would’ve been pulled into their protests.”

  Papá paused as if considering the best response to what he felt was a clear accusation of treason. “You presume me so naïve that I can be incited by Frenchmen who fare worse than me? Why is it that the moment there’s unrest in this country, I can’t be a Trinidadian? You Spaniards talk of goin’ back home every day you here, but here I am with no home country I can name, and still I can’t claim this one? I can only be a Negro and my wife only a colored? Why can’t I be Trinidadian too? Trinidad is, after all, where I lay my head, Señor.”

  “Sí, sí, of course, you are correct. The people who are promoting this conflict do not think of themselves as Trinidadians. They are opportunistic and—”

  “And we have nutting on this island to offer any other crown. We are all barely surviving and—”

  “You are surviving better than most.” Cordoza stared into the well-sanded ceiling of the verandah and looked to Mamá’s teacup. “Many of your Spanish neighbors do not own two matching shoes.”

  “This is true of many neighbors, not just Spaniards, Señor. Look around. Negroes, both free and enslaved, and coloreds and French, all alike, suffer. Relief can only be had when we put away our individual desires and instead work tirelessly to satisfy the needs of the ‘we.’”

  Indeed, Papá knew of the unfortunate state of his fellow countrymen, many living in nothing sturdier than mud huts. He had immense compassion for them, and yet Papá believed in his heart that he had made his own way. He had lost his mother to an abscess in the bowels, his father to a planter’s temper, and his only brother had headed south into the brambles when Papá had just begun his apprenticeship. So Papá had created himself in the image of no man he knew.