Book of the Little Axe

by Lauren Francis-Sharma

  “Mamá, they’ll soon wonder how long it takes to put a few pieces of coconut roll on a plate.”

  “You mean that evil one will wonder if she has me weeping inside here,” Mamá said. “That little sorcière, messing with me, is putting her head on the chopping block.”

  Mamá smoothed Rosa’s hair before opening the door for Rosa to pass with the tray.

  Tea had long ended when Francine brought the plates to the back of the house. Rosa could not remember ever being alone with Francine, and as such, she had never before noticed the tone of Francine’s voice—airy, as if practiced—and had never before noticed the scar across Francine’s neck from so many years earlier.

  “Did you make your sista and mudda do all this cooking by themselves?”

  “Make them?”

  “Your mudda is sick, you know.” Francine threw the food scraps into the yard. This angered Rosa, for she had always picked her way through anything offered to the animals.

  “She’s better now,” Rosa said.

  “For true?” Francine said this as if she, in her right body, knew things wrong-body girls like Rosa did not. “Eve had very much liked my cousin on my mudda’s side. They were hoping to be married.” Francine kicked the scraps toward the chicks as if she could sense Rosa’s irritation but did not care.

  “What cousin?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Does Papá know this?”

  “Fathers shouldn’t know everyt’ing about their girls.”

  “Papá wouldn’t like it.”

  “She was gointa do it anyway.” Francine crossed her arms, letting them rest upon the small bulge beneath her breasts. “But then your mudda was ill. Again. And Eve broke off the engagement. Now he’s promised to anudda because Eve told him you would never step in to help your mudda, told him that she had to stay to tend to your parents and you.”

  “Nobody has to tend to me.”

  Francine pulled hair from her face; it was thin and loose with its waves. “Eve will get fat soon, like your brudda. No one will want her then.”

  “Jeremias isn’t fat.” Rosa didn’t know if she thought her brother fat or not, but felt it wasn’t Francine’s place to call him so.

  “You’re not the one with that nasty belly crushing you at nights like a big hanging moon, so of course you wouldn’t t’ink so.” Francine watched Rosa with eyes that dared Rosa to contest her truth or challenge her decorum. Her head was cocked like a painting that’d been nudged off-center. “You’ll never win this, you know. Your fadda will eventually forgive Jeremias,” she said. “Or just feel sorry for him.”

  “I’m not trying to win anything.”

  “You can dig holes in the ground and fix a sick horse, but you can’t even make a cook-up?” Francine shook her head and Rosa imagined that Francine had already judged both Rosa’s ragged bonda poule hem and her frizzy hair that never tired enough to fall.

  “I cook,” Rosa said. “I’d be happy to make fish broth for you.”

  As Francine walked ahead of Rosa, Rosa thought back to the long Sunday afternoons Eve would disappear. How Eve would tell Mamá and Papá she was going into town for Mass and lunch with a friend, leaving a disgruntled Rosa to put out their Sunday lunch. She thought of the many times Eve’s face had been wet with tears, how Rosa had assumed it was because of Mamá’s recurring sickness. Rosa felt heavy inside.

  As Rosa made her way back to the verandah, she noticed Papá in the grass with Pierre, lifting him to the darkening sky, making the boy laugh until a long line of saliva fell from his lips. Mamá, seated in her feather-padded rocker, was reading papers Jeremias had given her, and she had a slight grin upon her face as if the words were naughty. Rosa took a place against the rail and Francine took Papá’s seat beside Mamá.

  “Jeremias, go and bring the extra chair from inside for your wife,” Mamá said.

  “I’m happy here,” Francine said.

  Papá held Pierre as if ready to toss him again. He looked to Mamá and shook his head.

  “Demas made that chair for himself,” Mamá said to Francine.

  “Myra,” Papá said. “It’s all right.”

  “Eve is bringing you another tea. Come and take it in your chair,” Mamá said to Papá.

  “Myra,” Papá said again. “Take it easy.”

  Francine stood, lacing her fingers across her stomach. “Pierre, come and say good night to Tante Rosa and Tante Eve.”

  Papá brought Pierre onto the verandah, setting him down before Francine. Rosa remembered the day Tío Byron had pulled Francine from the bed of his wagon. Papá had walked to the cart and Francine had reared back like a wild animal until Papá reached for her. She moaned as she held Papá’s hand. Later, Papá told Mamá that Francine had whispered to him that she was sorry.

  Now Pierre began to cry. Papá wiped his tears and whispered words Rosa could not hear.

  “You’re a kind man,” Francine said to Papá.

  Rosa perceived something in Papá’s countenance that she did not wish to see. It was only an instant, in one beat of a butterfly’s wings, that Rosa in her wrong body caught something in Papá’s expression that spoke to feeling so desperate for attention that one would snatch it from wherever one could find it.

  Jeremias reached for Pierre and nudged him toward Mamá for a goodbye peck.

  “Yes, give your Mémé a kiss and don’t forget your tantes,” Francine said to Pierre. “And I shall give your Pépé a kiss.”

  Francine moved toward Papá and placed her hands on Papá’s cheeks, pulling him into her in one quick and certain motion for a tender kiss upon the lips. It was the sort of kiss Rosa had never seen shared between Mamá and Papá. The sort of kiss that made Rosa’s insides tingle.

  “It’s nice to do that again, isn’t it?” Francine said, in that practiced, airy voice of hers. Papá nudged Francine away, his face twisted as if he’d been dropped into the middle of some strange woodlands and was unsure what to do with his eyes, his hands, his lips. Dirty. He felt dirty. Rosa was certain of this and she was reminded of Papá’s countenance the day Monsieur DeGannes had come, the shamefaced expression that suggested to Rosa that her father had had private thoughts, private doings, that could upset everything she thought she knew of him. Now Papá glanced at Mamá, whose head was cocked ever so slightly toward incredulous, and it seemed he would speak, but he did not.

  “Good night, Mémé! Good night, Pépé!” Pierre ran ahead of his father, who was now yanking the boy’s grinning mother down the staircase of the verandah.

  Jeremias did not come for Sunday lunch again and no one dared to make mention of it.

  Both Papá and Mamá had wished to be angry, had wished to ask and answer questions of each other, but silence was peace, and Rosa was beginning to understand that perhaps for every marriage this must be both true and necessary.

  And perhaps too this was true for fathers and daughters, for Rosa found herself avoiding Papá, feeling guilty for having seen his underbelly, the dark, hairy, unsightly pit of desperation so much like her own.

  4

  Papá stroked the Englishman’s horse. It was a Monday morning and he should have been on a smith job. “How long have you known?” he said.

  “From the very first days. I fed her well, have not worked her too hard.”

  Papá squeezed the mare’s mane at the ridge of her neck, attempting to calm her quivering. “Why didn’t you tell me? There’s milk already running down her hind legs.”

  Rosa knew Papá was pleased. It had been hard to keep it from him, and still Rosa was not sure why she had. She thought back to Francine’s words about fathers and daughters and wondered if there was not, in fact, a natural chasm that developed.

  “I assume it was Maravilloso?”

  “Sí.”

  “This is why you kept them together?” Papá threw up his hands. “It was a big risk.”

  “She’s smart. I knew he would like her.”

  Papá smiled. It was the fir
st time in many years she could remember Papá smiling the smile he had once saved only for her. “Sí. It’s hard not to like a smart gyal.”

  5

  The mare began foaling the same week Mamá fell ill for the final time. Mamá had been crying, for the pain had fleshed itself out and now spilled over like back fat from a too-small corset. Papá, like a man half his age, shuttled himself between Rosa, who was aiding the mare, and Mamá. When Mamá’s shrieks grew loud enough to hear from the stable, Papá dispatched Eve to Monsieur DeGannes’s with a request that DeGannes go and fetch the doctor.

  Papá gave Rosa instructions she was not certain she would remember. Her mind was on Mamá, who had, in recent days, eaten only a spoonful of rice here and there, vomiting much of it through the night. When the doctor came a few weeks earlier, he’d stayed for only a short time before calling Papá out to the verandah, where they whispered over each other—Papá’s whisper more like a hard stutter.

  “The doctor said you’ll rally, just as before,” Papá had told Mamá when he returned inside.

  They had all found comfort in Papá’s words, for they had seen Mamá revert nearly back to her old self many times before. But now it all felt different. Mamá was not a woman to shout and carry on. The pain must have been severe, like waves determined to crash or tree roots that extended deeper and farther than the canopy of its branches. Rosa wished, yet did not wish, to be with Mamá. Rosa felt to be stingy with her love was a necessity now, for not to be so meant feeling everything. And Rosa did not wish to feel everything. So Rosa comforted the mare and prayed too for her mother’s comfort; prayed for the continuation of Sunday lunches (even if it included Jeremias and Francine); prayed for Mamá’s nagging about her hair, her too-wide nose; prayed for Mamá to recover, even as imperfect and disappointing as Mamá could be at times. And maybe if Rosa were being honest with herself, she would have known that the feeling of despair she felt was not only at the thought of losing Mamá, but also at the thought of losing the one thing she was certain made them still a family. Rosa knew she would never share a language with Mamá as Eve did, nor share a life-building with Mamá as Papá had; she would never garner Mamá’s attention like Jeremias; but she and Mamá had had all the in-betweens. And in any family there were plenty of in-betweens. Rosa was beginning to understand what Mamá meant about meeting someone you love halfway, about looking for love in the places you were most likely to find it—at the pot in the yard (though you may hate the pot) or beneath rough hands brushing out your tangled hair (though you may hate the brush)—and she thought that perhaps Mamá had not been stingy with her love so much as giving Rosa love in the best way she knew how.

  When the doctor arrived, Papá sent Eve to retrieve Rosa. Eve’s face was a nautical map of dried tears. “Go and see her,” Eve said.

  “I cannot leave the mare.”

  “Rosa,” Eve whispered. “I will look after the horse.”

  The walk to the house seemed longer than any Rosa had taken before. She observed all the worn sideboards, the twigs scattered across the earth like veins, the dried leaves suffocating patches of grass. There was Fat-Gyal-Hen pecking her own dear chick; tomatoes now splitting, too ripe on the vine; a sun that was suddenly too bloody weak to fight a batch of fluffy clouds.

  The doctor’s closed bag was atop the table in front of Mamá’s chair, posed, as if needless. Mamá’s groans were so deep, so sullen, that it seemed on the other side of that curtain not to be her mother at all. And so Rosa peeked inside, expecting, hoping, to find someone other than her Mamá and what she found was a pocket of air clogged with the heat of a fiery body that seemed to wish to rid itself of a calabash stomach, a belly so swollen it looked much the same as the belly on Mr. Abbott’s mare.

  Mamá lay atop the sheet. The same sheet Eve hung on the line on Saturday mornings, the same sheet Rosa heard rustling beneath Mamá and Papá when they believed she slept. It was such a small thing to dwell on—this sheet—yet it seemed that its life was intertwined with the life atop it. As Mamá writhed, so too did the sheet; as Mamá stilled, so too did the sheet. Rosa trained her eye on this sheet as Papá urged her to inch closer to Mamá, demanded that she sit in his seat at the foot of the bed, where the sheet snaked between Mamá’s waxen feet, beneath her plump toes, around her swollen ankles, connected to legs so thin they could not possibly bear the weight of her real mother—her mother, taller and stronger than any woman Rosa knew; their mother who fussed and worried and cooked and shoved boiled cassava into Rosa’s growing body, willing Rosa to become someone worthy of all the trouble.

  The room felt too quiet. Rosa wished for words, any words, for it seemed without them that the three onlookers—she, the doctor, Papá—anticipated something. It was as if the silence suggested an expectation of performance. And words, perhaps, could keep such a performance at bay.

  “La cheval is foaling, Mamá,” Rosa whispered. “It’ll be the best one yet.”

  Mamá pursed her lips and sucked in a threadbare breath. Like it was worth safekeeping. It seemed a world of effort for her to perform this feat and even more for Mamá to whisper that one word—one word that spoke for all the many she hadn’t before spoken: “Nom?”

  Tears burned the corners of Rosa’s eyes, falling like soldiers single-filing their way around her clenched jaw. Mamá was meeting her halfway. Maybe Mamá always knew that Rosa felt like herself in Jeremias’s trousers, knew to let her roam and discover and dig that land as often as she needed, knew not to force her to marry, knew that what Rosa most needed was to feel the blood of that land, pulsating around her. Maybe Mamá knew it all.

  Rosa touched the sheet, tugged on it so Mamá would know she was a part of the very thing that was working to keep her held together. “Martinique,” Rosa said. “If it’s a girl, the pony’s name will be Martinique.”

  Mamá pushed forth a smile. A full, toothy, fanciful smile. As if she was so pleased that it could take that threadbare breath away.

  Then Eve’s voice came in through the window, sharp and shrill, slicing Mamá’s smile like a cutlass through cane. “She’s down! It’s comin’!”

  6

  1804 to 1811

  Mamá’s death felt like a curse. “The Curse of Seven,” Rosa thought to name it.

  On the last Saturday of every month, Padre José sat upon Mamá’s rocking chair and read verses of the Bible to Papá. After every recitation, Papá would say to Padre, “What is this t’ing you call religion that refuses to offer hope unless I excuse your god for the infliction of suffering?” Then Papá would ask to see Padre’s Bible and draw his attention to certain passages:

  “And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten; and the famine shall consume the land” (Genesis).

  “They shall burn them with fire for seven years” (Ezekiel).

  And Padre, who thought it his duty to console even the faithless, would shrug, request Papá’s patience, and reaffirm what the obeah woman had also told Eve after Mamá’s passing—that there would be a long period of mourning ahead for the Rendón family.

  1804: A proposal of marriage to Eve was rescinded within seven days of its issuance. The boy’s godfather came on a Saturday to meet with Papá. He told Papá that the family had simply changed their minds. When Padre José arrived for his Bible reading, moments after the godfather had sipped from Mamá’s teacup, Papá told Padre that his Bible would not be needed since he, Papá, planned on “cussin’ up de place.” Papá did not bother to wait for Padre’s departure before he took the cup from the godfather’s lips, called him a lying bastard, and shouted out behind him, “Eve will find better than your nincompoop boy!”

  1805: More than half of Papá’s cacao crop burned under severe drought conditions. The sales for the remaining half were most underwhelming, and Papá had almost missed paying the levies on the land.

  1806: While cooling horses in the river, Rosa was bitten by a coral snake. Its venom caused her to sleep for thir
ty-seven days. When she woke she told Eve she had seen Mamá in a dream wearing a lime-green frock, holding forth a baby boy, demanding that she wake.

  1807: The country was on the verge of bankruptcy, and though the pressure that had been building around the seizure of Papá’s land was temporarily relieved, the mold infection in Rosa’s garden proved to be damning for the family’s reprieve. The hens had eaten some of the moldy crop and became so ill that they produced only a half dozen and one eggs in a span of forty-two days. For the family, there remained only corn.

  1808: Most of Port of Spain burned to the ground. Rebuilding efforts were thwarted by a plot hatched by slaves to kill every Englishman on the island. Jeremias’s second son, François, was born then, two months too early, almost dying on the night the monsoon-like rains began flooding roads, breaking fencing, ripping away part of the Rendón stable’s sideboards, and entrapping them for thirty-five days so that the sale of their small crop of cacao had to be postponed for eighty-seven days until the next ship from England docked at port.

  1809: Eve’s next intended, a boy from a landowning family that had agreed to put his land together with Rendón land and save both families from potential ruin, fell ill with fever. To his family’s great joy, his mother’s half sister nursed the boy back to health, but when he recovered, the two ran off together. Papá had a worse name than “bastards” for that family.

  1810: Near the end of that year, when the cacao crops were robust again and it seemed Papá had remade the earth with his own hands, and the rain gently rained and the mangoes grew fat and fragrant, and the vegetable roots sprawled like branches beneath the earth, and the tomatoes fell to the ground like sacks, and the horses grew muscles like river boulders and the stream waters swayed like babies in hammocks, the governor’s men came for Papá’s land. They placed a placard at the gate, just next to the palm trees, noting that Papá had seventy days to pay back taxes. Papá swore he’d already paid but, to his shame, could produce no receipt, which did not surprise Cordoza, for he’d told Papá this had been the governor’s plan all along. When Papá’s financial vulnerability became local gossip, seven Frenchmen began a bidding war. They asserted that after a winner was declared, Papá must sell to their highest bidder. Papá did not take kindly to the men’s assertions, and so he began a regular nighttime vigil alongside his musket, which ended on the sixty-third consecutive day, Christmas morning, when Eve found Papá facedown on the verandah, weak with exhaustion.