They began along the trail with Creadon Rampley a head’s length behind her leading two horses on one lead. It was a morning like all others during dry season, holding the promise of a blue sky and a mocking breeze. Rosa rode with confidence and vigor. The sun’s break felt like the slow, warm rise of an irrepressible yearning, quickening the beat of Rosa’s pulse, her blood pumping as she rode harder, the bop and sway of the fillies reading like the elegant necklines of choice women, the stallions’ manes blowing like the carved hairs of the wildest Arawak boys. As she came upon a shallow woodlands, Rosa dipped beneath low-hanging branches as if she had created the swerves of that land—land that before long would disappear at the foot of three hills, one larger than the hill before it, wooded and shaded and pitted at its base with seeds and rotted fruits. And over those hills, new land would snake to the left and to the right until becoming a clearing that dove into the mouth of the stream where Rosa would take the horses to fill their bellies.
Rosa was aware as she rounded the last bend that it was there where usually she spoke aloud the words she’d never spoken to Mamá—telling her she loved her, that she wished she’d allowed Mamá to brush her hair without complaint. But that morning, Rosa spoke no words to Mamá. She listened, instead, to the thud of the horses’ footfalls, predetermined by their round, dense hooves, and watched their long strides make the brown-tipped grasses genuflect before her. And Rosa felt that perhaps this was not morning at all. Perhaps this was the end of mornings or the end of something she couldn’t quite name.
Creadon Rampley had fallen back. As Rosa cast her eyes behind her and watched him slump in the heat, Rosa remembered how Eve had behaved the first evening he sat for a meal. “Dios mío!” Eve later exclaimed. “Jolie comme une fille”—pretty like a girl, she had said—“but so much a man!” As they lay in bed, Eve had remarked on Señor Rampley’s strong square brow and thick eyebrows; his dense, sinuous hair in a long-steeped luminous black that shimmered sorrel; his cheekbones, high set; his chin like an arrowhead, the dimple in it like a split for hafting, the projectile point directing the eye to full pouty lips that seemed to make his skin glow bronzer. Eve saw in him a loveliness Rosa did not believe she would ever see.
Over the coming months, Señor Rampley continued to join Rosa on her morning turn-outs. Sometimes they led the horses on foot; other times they rode out on two and returned on one, and Rosa’s resistance eventually gave way, and she began to appreciate Señor Rampley’s helpfulness, resent less his presence, such that now when they ate their meals she found herself leaning in as he spoke, surprised by how important he made her feel.
Then one afternoon, an unexpected rainfall forced the four of them to take an early lunch. Señor Rampley, soaked through to his knickers, brought in wild yams. He had been excited to gift them to Eve. But Eve had responded most ungraciously. Flustered over having to give over the house to a meal before she was ready, Eve quietly complained to Papá that Señor Rampley might expect the ñames to be offered for that day’s lunch. Papá assured her that no such thing would be presumed, but still Eve fretted.
The three of them felt Eve’s displeasure thickset in the air. They sat quietly eating saltfish buljol, sipping pawpaw juice that Eve had steeped in sunlight. Papá finished his mug of juice first and looked to Eve to pour more. After she refilled it, he drank again. “Tomorrow morning Señor Rampley will go alone with the team,” he said.
Rosa drew a chunk of tomato from her mouth. “What do you mean?”
“He has learned a great deal,” Papá said. “Let’s see if he can do it alone now.”
“Of course he can do it. I taught him everything.”
“Sí, and now you will learn from Eve.” Papá shoveled a large spoonful of the buljol into his mouth, then spoke again only after he had chewed it all and sipped again from his cup. “Eve needs help in the house. There is wash pilin’ up, t’ree meals to be cooked a day, a floor that requires scrubbing.” His words sounded as if they’d been placed upon his tongue by someone named Eve. “It is time. One day you gointa marry and have chil’ren, and your mudda will turn over in her grave if I don’t make you learn what you need to know.”
“Papá, no!” Rosa leaned forward as if to press all her energies against Papá’s will. “I can help Eve in the nights. I’ll do the wash, the cleaning, but don’t take the horses. Don’t, Papá.”
“Basta.”
Rosa noted the tone. It was as if Papá had analyzed all the merits of her impending arguments. “No, it is not enough!”
“Rosa.” Eve looked to Señor Rampley as if to apologize for her insolent little sister.
Rosa stood, pushed her plate to the middle of the table, spilling the oily mixture of fish, tomatoes, onions. She felt her breath with the sharp sweetness of undigested peppers and took note of Creadon Rampley’s hanging head and melancholy eyes, appearing as if tragedy had struck him. “This was your plan all along, wasn’t it? You make me teach you and then you take what’s mine.” Rosa turned again to Papá, refusing to wait for Señor Rampley’s response, for the life they seemed to take for sport was very much her life. “You’re so blind, Papá, you can’t see his plan?”
“Watch yourself, Rosa,” Papá said.
“You spend years keeping this place close to your chest, sending your only son away, fearing what’s yours might wind up with Mamá’s family or the governor, and then this … this tonto comes and you just give it away?”
“Rosa,” Eve said again. “You’re a big woman. Behave!”
“Don’t ‘Rosa’! Everyone is always saying ‘Rosa’! You two don’t even know this man. Did you know he came here because he was running away from a murder?”
Papá turned to Creadon Rampley. “Is this true?”
“Yes. Yes, it is.” Señor Rampley sat forward in his chair, his fingers locked, as he looked Papá in the eye. “But since Rosa got this from readin’ my diary, I reckon she can tell you it wasn’t me who murdered that boy.”
“You went tru the man’s t’ings, Rosa? I ent raise you like this,” Papá said.
This was not where she wished to be. Patience, persistence, wait out your prey. Papá had taught her this. “All I’m asking is not to allow him to do this to us. He’s filled your head with these thoughts about what men should do and what women should do. I know men like him.”
Papá pinched his lips and shook his head. “No, you don’t know men like him.” Papá closed his eyes as though he wished the words he would speak next were not true. “But when you come to learn men, you will understand that you is not one of them.”
2
Rosa mourned. Perhaps the Curse of Seven had been extended, she thought. And yet this particular grief was felt by no one else. They now treated her as if it should be in her nature to find joy in mending men’s trousers, in sweeping plumes, in making soap from ashes. In tediousness.
The Rendón meals were seasoned with Rosa’s tears. And Eve appeared to take great satisfaction in eating them. Eve chided Rosa for every misstep, for not putting forth the same effort she said Rosa would have extended with the horses or the swine or the calves. She invoked Mamá’s name to shame Rosa into pickling vegetables and squeezing the life juice out of fruits, invoked Mamá’s memory to guilt Rosa for not wishing to be a second-tier mucama in her own home. Rosa was to kill babies she’d fed since birth, clean them, salt them, stuff them. And if that were not punishment enough, Eve demanded that Rosa serve. Serve Papá. Serve Creadon Rampley. Pour their water and ginger beer, dish out their food, carve her babies before them, while listening to them discuss her horses, her barn, her land.
To lose your life while still living it is to know no greater sorrow.
Rosa was in a prison of Creadon Rampley’s making.
Oh, if they could only see that man for who he was!
Eve flirted with him as if he were Henry VIII and she, Anne Boleyn. She chatted incessantly about him. About the stories he told of buffalo herds, deep white snow, rugged cliffs, frozen m
ountains. “Bueno y hermoso!” Eve would say, and she’d remark on how much Papá valued Señor Rampley, how happy Papá was that Señor had given up his prospecting dreams.
And Creadon Rampley … shameless! “How is Eve? Please tell her good mornin’ for me.” He no longer sought Rosa’s opinion of the horses, of the feed, of the condition of the soil. He wanted Rosa to be only their go-between, the keeper of their silly love secrets.
“You know she doesn’t favor you.” Rosa said this to Señor Rampley while he inspected the hay for mold, performing the task as though Rosa hadn’t been the one to teach him. Oh, how men can erase! Rosa thought. “She’s nice to you only because Papá tells her to be.”
Señor Rampley grinned, though the muscles in his face quivered. Before Rosa turned on her heel, she noticed the lines deepen across his forehead. That night at tea, Señor Rampley sat quietly, observing Eve as if for any signs of repulsion or repudiation. Eve offered none, of course, but still, it gave Rosa the smallest bit of joy.
The blacksmithing work picked up again. Papá spent more time now manufacturing rifles, wagon parts, horseshoes, screws. The customers—the English, the French, the Spaniards—flocked to the property from morning ’til late afternoon, ogling the acreage as well as Eve, who often greeted the men at the gate and directed them to the area behind the stable, where Señor Rampley and Papá had built a larger workspace.
When Rosa found time alone with Papá, often she pressed him to release her from the clutches of domestic bondage. Papá told her more than once that she knew nothing at all about bondage and was disappointed she would say so. But Rosa could not hear such an admonishment and would point out to him how Señor Rampley had been improperly attending to the needs of an expectant Martinique, and mishandling significant tasks at the stable—bringing in the horses too soon, not sweeping the barn vigorously enough. And more often than not, Papá listened and took her suggestions back to Señor Rampley, who’d correct course, making Papá all the more pleased with him.
It was after lunch on a Sunday when Rosa left Eve and Señor Rampley on the verandah to whisper silly sweet nothings to each other. Papá was at the stable, finishing work due in the morning. When Rosa arrived, she found him with his back to the door, his head dangling from his neck like a too-heavy weight.
“You can’t keep me forever doing this. I’m not Eve. I won’t die trapped.”
Papá didn’t turn to face her. It was as if he wished to spare her the embarrassment. “Watch how you speak to me,” he said. “And Eve does not feel trapped.”
Rosa took a breath to remind herself that it was, indeed, Papá before her. And that though she was a big woman now, there was a proper way to speak to her father. “How do you know, Papá?” she said. “Did you ever ask Eve or Mamá what it was like to live this life? To be bound to living between four walls. To have others demand drink and food and cheer and comfort, ceaselessly. Do you know what it is to deny oneself all pleasures? I never asked them. It is miserable.”
Papá turned the lathe with a metal rod in hand, twirling it, searching for ruts in its surface. “And you t’ink to be a man is easy?” He set the rod on the worktable. A table with a foot treadle carved with the initials “D.R.” that Señor Rampley had built for him. “To know that if you should fall, you will bring down others—others you love more than life? That there are men waiting outside your gates to ravage and seduce all that is yours? That there is no one to trust with your fears? That to trust even in God is to be weak?”
The rod rolled to the edge of the table and Rosa waited for it to plunge, but it remained poised, as if Señor Rampley had foreseen that very moment. Rosa thought then of all she’d not foreseen—Papá’s losses, his clandestine dealings, the many ways Papá had tried and failed to protect what was theirs.
“You couldn’t know how that can build up inside a man.”
“Then we should both be free to choose.”
“Choose? You wish for the right to choose when men will never have a choice?” Papá rubbed his hands together and wiped them on his work apron. “No man can live outside of manhood, what the world t’inks manhood should be. You t’ink if a man cannot remove himself from beneath his own burden he’d be so generous as to help a woman?” He picked up the rod again. “But I am your Papá. And I’m the one who let you believe you could choose.” He shook his head, as if still surprised that he had ever thought of Rosa as anything other than the woman figure before him. “So, lemme give you somet’ing important to do. You can help Martinique when she’s ready to foal. And beneath your mudda’s side of the bed, there’s a stack of books that that man sent for Jeremias. I want them returned to him. Take the ride there, catch your breath, and when you come back, I never wanta hear you complain about this life I been killin’ myself to give you.”
3
The wife was, indeed, ugly. And bad-tempered too. As was her baby.
When Rosa arrived, a housemaid about the same age as Rosa was seated upon a worn, armless chair, under the shade of a saman, nursing a waxen-colored infant. Rosa removed the books from her sack and set them into the grass beside the maid until she stamped her foot to suggest that that was not the proper place for them and, in doing so, caused the baby to unlatch. Rosa felt herself sickened by the yellow-tinted milk trickling from the maid’s swollen nipple. The maid sighed with frustration, offered the baby the other breast, but it would not be assuaged, its bawling growing more feverish as Rosa knocked upon the house door.
Monsieur’s wife was called by another housemaid. The very English-looking woman glared at Rosa as though she’d never seen anything like her. Rosa had never been able to explain what it was to be the tangible embodiment of a tale, of a legend, of fear. But she knew it when she saw it, for it was always in the set of the jaw.
“And who might you be?” The woman clutched her collar as if chilly, but Rosa had seen this gesture before, this pinching at the neck, as if to reinforce her own propriety and suggest Rosa’s impropriety.
Rosa remembered years earlier, when Mamá decided it was time for her to accompany Jeremias and Eve to the schoolhouse. Mamá had wanted Rosa away from the horses, wanted her “to learn to write letters,” wished to give her some refinement. Rosa was the youngest pupil in the schoolhouse. The one who knew the least. And “the blackest one too,” Señora Cecilia, the teacher, once reminded her. Señora Cecilia would clutch the buttons at the top of her blouse and recoil from Rosa any time a smidge of anything could be seen on Rosa’s little face. The same smidge that might have melded into the lighter skins of the other children, but against Rosa’s lambent dark brown, gleamed.
One day the students had eaten zabocas for lunch. Rosa had been given a morsel of a too-ripe one, the pulp of it grey and mushy. A boy, Manuel, who called the zabocas “avocados,” argued that the smidge of zaboca on Rosa’s face was, in fact, a blob of snot. He laughed at Rosa. Then the other children laughed, alongside Jeremias and Eve and Señora Cecilia. Rosa did not weep until she returned home. When she told Mamá she didn’t wish to go back to the schoolhouse, Mamá told her that “fear has no place in my home” and sent her to sleep on the verandah for the night. By morning, Rosa’s skin was pocked red from a night of hosting mosquitoes. Her face was swollen and tight, and Mamá held her and said, “You’re uglier than you were yesterday. This will happen to everyone. Go to that schoolhouse this morning and if that devil-boy says one word about you, you bounce him, you understand? Cuff his ears and make sure he’s on the ground when you tell him that your Mamá said you could do so.”
Rosa stood tall now, looked down at the square-hipped Englishwoman, resisting what the woman’s eyes spoke of Rosa. “I am calling on Monsieur.” Rosa said the words first in Spanish, then in French, then in a well-formed English, as though she did not know which tongue the woman spoke. Rosa quite enjoyed the surprise on the woman’s face, so Rosa continued in Spanish. “If he is unable to greet me, please tell him that my father, Demas Rendón, has returned his books and gives his mos
t sincere thanks.” Rosa offered the books to the woman who pretended she understood what Rosa had said.
“He is out with the horses.” And the woman closed the door.
Rosa found Monsieur DeGannes behind the stable that Papá had helped him build. Jeremias, as a lad, had accompanied Papá many days during that year of construction. Jeremias would come home excited that Monsieur DeGannes had paid him some mind. Now, as Rosa looked upon Monsieur she could not remember if his hair had always been speckled with white. He was flushed with sweat, taking an axe to wood, his lips parched, his linen shirt unbuttoned. Rosa had never known Monsieur to be a hard worker, but much had changed since the English had arrived. She wondered, as Monsieur kicked the splinters aside, what work Papá had done for him, wondered if Papá had repaid all the money.
“Aah … I have not seen your face in some time.” Monsieur DeGannes set down the axe Papá had gifted to him and reached for his hat. “Your brother speaks of you often.” He walked forward to greet her. Rosa did not remember his smallish teeth or his dark, thick lashes. And now his French pealed with an accent of English he must have been required to speak at home.
“I didn’t know he still called on you, Monsieur.”
“Oh, we are good friends. He and mademoiselle have paid me visits. Less so now that I have come to the long, dark channels of le mariage.” Monsieur laughed, and Rosa supposed she should have joined him, for he seemed disappointed that she had not.
“If I had known, I would have left these for Jeremias to return to you.” Rosa held up the books. “My Papá offers his thanks for lending them to Jeremias.”
“We both know that is not true.” Monsieur reached for the books and in doing so, his thumb grazed the back of Rosa’s hand. Rosa went rigid and he watched her for a moment before browsing through the titles, smiling at some, frowning at others.
Book of the Little Axe Page 23
