Book of the Little Axe

by Lauren Francis-Sharma

  Eve had set out a bowl of roasted arvanço beans and four cups of warm soursop punch. Papá had called them together, demanding that there be after-meal teatime (without the tea, for it was too hot, he said), a tradition that had been all but lost in the year prior.

  “I ran into Madame Bernadette in town a f-few days back.” Papá chewed the loose strings of his sugarcane stick. Recently, the cane had begun to ache his left molar, so he had begun to set it to the right side of his mouth.

  “Oh, you just ran into her? I have a feeling she ran into you.” Eve laughed. “Her husband died some years ago. She’s been trying to find a replacement ever since.”

  “Well, she can keep looking.” Papá waved away Eve’s nonsense, but in the light of the candle lantern, Rosa noticed a slight blush of color beneath his cheeks. “She said that boy, her nephew, Lamec, got m-married and lost his wife less than a year later. A shame.” Papá sat himself straight, set down his cup. “A big fancy wedding they had. She tell me we sh-should keep your wedding small, Eve. We ent want no bad eye.”

  “Oh, these people and their chupidness!” Eve removed her shawl, the presence of which rang absurd in such a noxious heat. “People don’t want me to have a big wedding because they frightened I’ll show them up!”

  Papá smiled. Eve had somehow become more like Mamá since she and Señor Rampley had become engaged. Theatrical. Impudent. Papá appeared to enjoy it, as though it said something more certain about her happiness and about him as her father.

  “Lamec asked about you, Rosa.” Papá scanned Rosa for a reaction. “He told his aunt he’d like to c-come and see you again.”

  “His mouth’s not still burnin’?!” Eve threw her head back. “He better not bring that uncle of his or the old man will surely kick the bucket this time.”

  “Hush, Eve.” Rosa took in the slight smirk upon Papá’s face. They’d had fun with that story over the years. Laughing had been Papá’s way of forgiving her. But it seemed the debt was still to be paid.

  “I told her to have him come next Sunday for lunch,” Papá said.

  “Next Sunday?” Eve steadied the rocker beneath her. “That’s a fortnight before our wedding. We can’t entertain then.”

  “And I don’t want him to come again,” Rosa added.

  “He’ll be my guest and allyuh will make somet’ing for lunch that day.” Papá said this to both of them as though neither had spoken.

  “Papá, I said I have no interest.” Rosa glanced at Señor Rampley, who hadn’t looked up from his muddied boots. Papá caught the glance but pretended as if he hadn’t.

  “He’ll bring the lil ch-chile and—”

  “What chile? He have a baby?” Eve clapped her hands, then said to Rosa, “He’s lookin’ for a caretaker. Ooh, guess who’ll be the evil stepmudda?”

  “I will not be any child’s mother.”

  The air that early evening was thickset and gouty. Rosa felt strong, certain of herself. She drank the remaining punch, and only when finished did she notice that Eve hadn’t placed a sliver of sugarcane inside her cup.

  “Why don’t I have cane?” Rosa said.

  Eve set the shawl back upon her shoulders as if she were playing dress-up. “You don’t?”

  Papá tossed the husk of his cane out into the yard. It landed a few feet beyond the lip of the verandah. Flies attacked it as if they’d been lying in wait. “What does it m-matter, Rosa? Go and cut cane if you want c-cane.” Papá said this as if Rosa complained often.

  Rosa knew she shouldn’t, knew Señor Rampley had advised her against it, so Rosa set her jaw, wondering if it might keep. But it did not. “The afternoon we had the party here, I was caught in the storm.” Rosa began as if this would be a story like any other. Half listening, Papá took the bowl of beans from Eve and set it upon his lap. He ate the charred ones first, guaranteed to upset his belly and thus guaranteed to keep Rosa and Eve awake much of the night. The arvanço bucked around in Papá’s mouth.

  “I’ve been meanin’ to tell you how very rude it was of you to run off like that.” Eve aired herself with a green silk hand fan, purportedly made in the East Indies. She’d bought it in town when she and Señor Rampley had gone to sell Fat-Gyal-Hen’s eggs. Rosa noticed now that despite all the housework, Eve’s long fingers had remained so very delicate, like waxen finger puppets, the skin barely rippling, the nail beds a healthy blush.

  “I had to take shelter at Monsieur DeGannes’s,” Rosa continued.

  “I heard from someone that he’s been quite under the weather,” Eve interrupted.

  “No, I think not,” Rosa said. “Or if he has been, Francine must be his private nursemaid.”

  Papá stopped crunching. Half-gnawed beans sat like pottage on his back teeth. He moved forward, off the seat of the rocker, toes roosting, straining to hear her. “What is this you saying? You only now m-mentioning this?”

  “But you’re only now telling me about the lunch next Sunday,” Rosa shot back.

  “That’s not the same,” Eve said.

  “And what would you have done, Papá?” Rosa continued. “You said many times that Jeremias is no longer your son.”

  Eve shook her head the way Mamá would have done. Rosa is not good enough. Rosa has never been good enough. “How long has this been going on?” she said.

  “Perhaps since forever.” Something about this thought amused Rosa. The idea that they all had pretended to be guided by the mores of integrity and decency and high moral rectitude, and still they’d suffered the shame of whores. It was as if nothing had ever been perfect and Rosa felt she could no longer trust that the earth beneath her would not open its big, ugly mouth and swallow her.

  Arvanço balls, little purveyors of belly wind, were scattered across the verandah. They had fallen during Papá’s harried departure, and now, Eve was on her knees collecting them, muttering loud enough for Rosa to hear. “You can t’ink of no one but yourself?”

  Candles flickered at Eve’s bare feet. Always, Eve washed them before bed, massaged them with coconut oil. Those soft feet were the marks of a woman who held her place in the annals of womanhood.

  “This will ruin our wedding day. You only mentioned this now so Papá would forget about Lamec. But he won’t forget.”

  There were tears in Eve’s eyes. Eve, who had stood tall and emotionless the day they buried Mamá, gripping the family’s Bible. She’d read Mamá’s favorite psalm in the certain way she’d read it every night that Mamá had lain in her sickbed: “Surely, he will save you from the fowler’s snare.” And continued reading even as they lowered Mamá’s casket into the ground, her voice unwavering. The undertaker hadn’t told Papá until just before the burial that they’d set Mamá into a casket made for another woman, average-sized, who’d died clearing bush for a new coffee plantation. That they’d had to break Mamá’s ankles and set her chin upon her shoulder to fit her inside. “He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge.”

  “I’m getting married,” Eve said now. “And Papá’s got his eyes set on Madame Bernadette. Nobody wants to tend to you any longer.”

  4

  Jeremias turned Papá away. Papá returned to Tío Byron’s the next morning and the next. In the evenings, he reported all the happenings to Eve:

  “They does have my boy in a lil lean-to that they put up in the yard, tellin’ him it’s best if he and his wife have some time apart. There Jeremias is, livin’ in this six-by-six room like he ent have a home.” Papá told Eve how he wanted to snatch up Jeremias from the place, but Jeremias wouldn’t budge. How he was sure some root had been put upon his boy. “You shoulda seen Philippe and Byron c-carryin’ on at the door, callin’ me every unholy name there is, and oh! how them chil’ren bawled seein’ this com-commotion between their abuelos!” Papá told Eve that Francine had not been home the first night he’d gone there, but she’d been ready for him the second day. “She wearin’ that white lace t’ingy on she head, some charlatan’s idea of a nun’s
habit, and she c-climb my back like the snake she is, p-poundin’ me with both fists, like I ever done anyt’ing to she! At least Jeremias had the decency to p-pull the woman off me, but eh-eh—what kinda woman is this they raisin’ up there?” Papá adjusted his hat. “I shoulda beat her. But me promised Myra when we married that I ent never ever beat a gyal and never would, and I wasn’t lettin’ that Jezebel push me to b-break my word to my woman.”

  It was the third day. Papá’s face was still webbed with fine pink scratches when he left in the early morning for Tío Byron’s. Before leaving, he told Eve that that would be his last attempt, that Jeremias might very well wish to stay with those people.

  That same morning, Rosa set out the horses slightly west of the usual riding path. The earth was crisp and unwelcoming, as there’d been no rain since the afternoon of the party, the same afternoon she kissed a man for the first time and he’d run away. When Rosa steered the horses back onto the usual path, Monsieur DeGannes was at the bend.

  It’s a funny thing about sunlight. Like odors and sounds, sunrays falling in just a certain way can bring back memories too. The light that day fell striated and hungry, like the first morning she’d set out the horses with Señor Rampley. She’d been angry then, confused about Señor Rampley’s place there, and now she thought how so little had changed.

  The horses strained against their tethering, eager to begin their grazing. They pulled the line, hoping to inch past Monsieur as he dismounted. Purple bags of flesh puckered beneath Monsieur’s eyes. He seemed unsteady on his feet as he tied his horse to a crown-shaped saman tree, among many like it, which he and Papá used as markers between their lands.

  “Are you in need of help, Monsieur?”

  “My wife cannot know.” Monsieur walked a crooked line toward Rosa. At first, she wondered if he’d been drinking, then thought better of it, thought Francine must have spoken to him, must’ve told him that Rosa had seen them.

  “Come with me.” When Monsieur reached for Rosa, Martinique reared back and Monsieur, disgusted, swiped Martinique’s snout. Rosa wished to strike Monsieur, but instead she set her hand gently upon Martinique so that she wouldn’t forget herself.

  “She’s there.” Monsieur pointed into the thorny sunrays as though he’d lost his sense of direction. “Francine is there. She has done a thing, a most terrible thing.” Monsieur pressed his palms together, as if to plead for a trust he had not earned. “My wife cannot know.”

  By the time Rosa arrived to Monsieur DeGannes’s stable, Pierre had bled out. Monsieur had left him to die in a ravine of blood, fearing that if he sought help for the boy, his wife would leave him. And take with her the money.

  This he did not say, but he did not have to.

  Rosa knelt beside Pierre and lay her hand upon his chest, staring down at his blood, sticky and rich and horrible, soaked through to his skin, his bones beneath the sodden shirt, delicate like a robin’s breast. She felt, even as she touched him, his absence. Felt the guilt cutting and splitting away at her for ever questioning his belonging to the Rendóns. Pierre had always belonged to them. Rosa had long believed she would never have a child of her own, so Pierre had become her Quite a Bit of Fun. Her Quite a Bit of Fun who would never again smile for her.

  Monsieur told Rosa the story in fragments. Francine had brought the boys with her. It had been early morning. The house was still. Francine knew he liked to get away before the wailing of his colicky baby began. He’d complained to Francine about his new life. He’d told her it was an arrangement about which he was not happy. He knew it was what Francine had wished to hear. When Monsieur arrived at the stable, the boys were petting the horses. Francine had never before brought them with her. They were handsome boys. Pierre, not even eighteen, had the maturity of an older man. Was most articulate. Reminded Monsieur of Jeremias. Monsieur said those words to Francine. He reminds me of Jeremias. And it was then that Francine became visibly angered. Said she needed to speak to him alone. They walked deeper into the stable. Pierre kept François entertained, seeming to pretend he couldn’t hear his mother telling Monsieur that she wished for Monsieur to commit to a future with her. That he was obligated to do so. When Monsieur laughed and said he could not, that he would not, Francine turned for a cutlass that Monsieur had stored behind two wooden pails and she ran toward the boys. Pierre had protected François. He’d taken the slashes in his little brother’s stead, and Monsieur had run after Francine intending to snatch the blade, he said, but was unable to stop her from taking it to her own neck. Afterward, he placed the hysterical François into the wagon Francine had driven and steered it several hundred yards behind the stable and bound the wagon and the boy to a tamarind tree. “Because my wife cannot know,” Monsieur said again.

  Pierre’s face was frozen in a grave sneer. He appeared nothing like the smiling boy who’d devoured Mémé’s crème and begged “Rotha” to take him to sit upon the big horse. That smiling boy was who Rosa wished to remember, even as she and Monsieur set that smiling boy’s body onto the wagon bed beside his mother, even as Rosa lifted François, covered in that smiling boy’s blood, to sit on the sundrenched seat beside her.

  “Her neck …” François turned toward Rosa and begged with his confused expression for Rosa to peer again at the two bodies behind them. “Her neck is smiling,” François said of his mother. “She doesn’t like to smile.”

  Rosa turned to observe Francine, the white of her dress barely discernible beneath the bright red, and the new scar stretching as if to bury the old.

  “Will Pierre wake up on the third day like Jesus, Tante Rosa?”

  Rosa pulled François close. She did not wish to tell him that Rendón soil did not seem to yield miracles any longer.

  5

  They set Pierre to rest into the ground early Sunday morning. He lay next to his Mémé. Papá would have it no other way. Padre José could not or would not offer rites for Francine. She was lain to rest on Robespierre property.

  The same guests who’d been there to celebrate Eve and Señor Rampley’s upcoming nuptials had returned. Someone had given the Rendóns ‘bad eye,’ it was said. Too much happiness with that Yankee coming to marry the older spinster. The house needed a cleansing. Madame Bernadette told Papá that she and the other women from church would take care of it before the wedding day.

  By late morning, the house was empty and Jeremias took to Papá’s bed. In the coming nights, he and Papá would sleep (or barely sleep, as it was) with François between them. Papá would pat François’s head, Jeremias, his back. The father, the son, the jumpy ghost of a child.

  It was early afternoon when François sat beside Eve at the table. His thin lips seemed to have broadened from the black molasses Eve let him lick from the spoon and the two spoke not of the funeral but of the wedding. Of the dessert crème he would eat, of the new trousers Eve would make for him, of the bougainvillea she’d put in her hair before she danced. And when François found himself swelling with the future, he went upon the verandah, pulled at his braces, and told Eve he still hoped for Pierre to come.

  The man arrived inside a striking wagon of cherrywood that bore a curved bed and a supple leather seat. He wore a topcoat and a tall hat that looked to be from a catalogue. He had an impressive physique, and the smell of bastille soap folded itself in a breeze that blew past Mamá’s lace curtains, as he approached the portal holding a white orchid. He touched François gently on the head and greeted Rosa with a slight bow at the waist, offering her the flower.

  “Oh Lord, bon dieu! I—” Rosa began.

  François walked down the verandah stairs to peer into the wagon bed. Eve arrived at the door then, gathering Mamá’s apron in hand. “My God,” she said. “Please, please, come in.”

  After finding the wagon empty, François returned to the verandah and asked the man, “Mon frère is not coming, is he?”

  The man smiled. “I’m sorry, lil one, I don’t know. I comin’ only for lunch.”

  Papá apologized
and told Lamec what a time it’d been for them, but that they were pleased to have him. After Lamec offered his condolences, Papá set him on the verandah with a cup of tea while Eve dished out the funeral food the guests had left behind: stewed fish, fried cabbage, boiled cassava.

  “Rosa, c-come lemme speak to you for a moment.” Papá beckoned her in a throaty whisper. Between seeing guests out and keeping François company, Rosa had not had an opportunity to change out of her service clothes. She was in unusual form, wearing Eve’s low-waist indigo-blue dress with her hair coiled like a boa resting easily on a sturdy branch. Eve had told her more than once that she looked nice. Apparently, grief became her. As Rosa followed Papá to the back of the house, she thought what a thing for grief to be one’s most lovely state.

  “Papá, I don’t want—”

  “You t’ink I bringin’ you back here so you can talk?” Papá dug his boot tip into Fat-Gyal-Hen’s dirt. He formed letters but not words in the earth. He had said almost nothing since Rosa had driven that wagon with Pierre knocking into Francine like rotted melons. Rosa didn’t know how he’d managed to stay on his feet during Padre José’s reading from the Book of Wisdom. “The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God.” But now, Papá looked stronger, bitter like tea steeped for too many hours.

  “You’re spoiled, Rosa. And this is my fault,” he continued. “But it’s ending right here.”

  “Spoiled” is what men called girls whose disobediences they secretly enjoyed.