The New Moon's Arms

by Nalo Hopkinson

  Gene pulled up behind me on the gravel road. We got out of our cars. He came towards me. Poor man; he looked a little shaky too from the funeral. “You’re home safe now,” he said. “So I will just go back and wait for the next waterb—”

  I felt a sudden panic. “No, don’t be silly.” I gave a little laugh. “The waterbus not coming for another forty-five minutes. At least come inside and have a cool drink.”

  He frowned. “But—”

  “No, I won’t hear any objections. I hauled you out all this way. It’s the least I can do.”

  “All right,” he said doubtfully. “If you’re sure.”

  “I’m certain.” I wasn’t, but I led him up the five steps to the porch.

  He pointed to the green wicker lounge chair and armchair that sat beside each other. “I’ll just wait out here,” he said.

  When I first moved back to Dolorosse, Dadda would sometimes let me help him out to the porch of an evening. I would lower him into the lounge chair, put his legs up so he could lie back. I would put a blanket around him and we would sit and watch the stars. Months now he hadn’t been able to do that. I started to ask Gene whether he liked grapefruit juice.

  Instead, I began to bawl.

  Gene leapt to his feet. “Mih lord,” he said. “You should sit down. You want me to bring you some water?”

  I tried to say, It’s all right, but words wouldn’t come out. The sobbing just got worse. It went bone deep, racking me to the core. Pretty soon I was wailing out my anguish, keening loud and harsh, like I was labouring.

  “Come,” said Gene. “Sit over here.” He tried to guide me to the chair, but my knees failed me. So he tried to bear me up, but I’m no fine-boned bird of a woman. I collapsed onto the floor. Best he could do was take some of my weight so I didn’t land braps like the soil on Dadda’s coffin lid.

  This wasn’t me. I wasn’t the type to faint away. I didn’t cry in front of strangers. But all I could do was pull my knees to me and rock, rock. And weep. A word came this time; pulled out of me with my breath: “Daddaa!” It spiralled up into the evening sky like a fleck of ash from a fire. It thinned out till I couldn’t hear it no more. The crying let up little bit.

  Gene got a good grip under my arms and tried again to lift me. This time he got me up and sitting on the edge of the lounge chair. He sat beside me. I hugged my arms around myself and rocked and wept. My muscles were rigid, like stone. They had to be. They had to hold me together, or I was just going to fly apart.

  Gene propped one elbow up on his knee, lowered his head into his hand. From the jerking of his shoulders, I knew that he weeping, too. So quietly. My rocking stopped. Slowly, giving him time to stop me if he wanted to, I put my arms around him. He choked out a sob; just one. He was making the soft, mewling sounds of someone trying to cry without noise. I shushed and rocked him like any baby.

  “I can’t believe he’s gone,” Gene gasped. “When I heard, it was like somebody punch me in the belly.”

  That got me crying again. I pressed my head into Gene’s shoulder. We held on to each other. Our tears wound down. “I wanted to sit with you on the floor,” he said. Through my face on his shoulder, I could feel his voice vibrating against my skin. “But the old hip have arthritis, you know?”

  I laughed tears. “Thank you.”

  He raised his woeful face. I leaned forward. And then we were kissing, wiping the eye water and nose running from each other’s faces with such tenderness. We managed to stand up together. In the back of my mind I was thinking this was wrong, this was disrespectful. I had just covered my father with cold earth. But all my body knew was that it had touched death, and it needed the antidote. I reached my hands inside Gene’s suit jacket, pulled out the tails of his shirt. I laid my hands against the warmth of living skin, flushed with blood from a beating heart.

  Gene was running the back of one hand gently down one side of my throat, then the other. We couldn’t seem to break eye contact. He whispered, “This is all right?”

  All I said was “Come inside.” I took him to my little bedroom. There, with tears running ignored down our faces, we helped each other remove the black grieving clothes, and took comfort in each other’s frail, living flesh.

  She had come out of that cave on Blessée. Chastity wasn’t supposed to go into that cave. But she saw the little girl step out of it, squint into the sun, and look confused. Maybe the little girl’s parents let her play in the cave! Chastity felt jealous one time. But a little bit curious, and happy, too, to see another little girl like her. Except for school break times, Chastity didn’t have too many people to play with. Her school friends’ parents didn’t make the trip to the out islands often.

  “Hello,” said Chastity.

  The little girl shaded her eyes and frowned. She didn’t say anything. Her hair was tall for so; all the way down to her bumsie. And it was all knotted up, and the little girl wasn’t wearing her bath suit.

  “What’s your name?” Chastity asked her. The girl just stood and looked at her. In the silence, Chastity could hear the waves whooshing in and out of the cave behind the little girl. “Did you lose your bath suit?” Chastity said “lose,” because that was what she always told Mumma and Dadda; that she’d lost her bath suits. But really, she just didn’t like wearing them. She’d taken the last one off in the sea. Walked in up to her chest, rolled the suit down her body, stepped out of it, and watched the waves take it away. The water had felt so nice, flowing over her. That time, she’d told Mumma that a dolphin had stolen her suit. Mumma just shook her head and rolled her eyes.

  Something was wrong with the little girl’s skin. It was mostly a normal colour; sort of light yellow-brown, like Melody’s at school. But it was sort of blue-ish brown, too, like Chastity’s hands would get when she rooted around in the freezer for her favourite flavour of Frutee Freezer Pops. She liked the blue ones. Once she’d asked Dadda what kind of fruit made that bright acid blue. He’d told her it was sky juice. Next day she’d asked Mumma how they got the juice down out of the sky to make blue Frutee Pops, and Mumma had laughed her belly laugh that Chastity liked. The one with the little snort at the end of it.

  The little girl still didn’t speak.

  “Are you dumb?” Chastity asked. There was a little boy at school who didn’t speak too good. When he said words, they sounded all gargly. Jane Labonté who wore pretty red ribbons in her hair to school every day said that Walter was deafanddumb and her daddy said he should be in a home. But Miss said that Walter was fine, he was just deaf, and couldn’t hear how his speech sounded, and they mustn’t call him deafanddumb. He was taking special classes to learn to speak better. Chastity liked Walter. He would trade his orange juice with her at lunch time for cashew juice. Chastity liked the way the word “dumb” sounded. She would sometimes sing it over and over to herself when no-one was around to hear: dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.

  The girl took a hobbling step forward; another. She walked funny. She kept squinting at the sun and covering her eyes. She waddled over to Chastity, who laughed at the way the girl walked. But then Chastity remembered how Dadda had told her not to make fun of people. “I’m sorry,” she said to the girl. “How you hurt your feet? They going to get better?”

  The little girl just made a gargling noise, reached out her hand, and stroked the fabric of Chastity’s sundress.

  “Where are your clothes?” Chastity asked her. “Your mumma and dadda are going to be mad at you for losing them. They’re going to say, ‘We’re not made of money, you know? You should be more careful.’ Then your mumma and dadda will fight, and your mumma will go away and stay on the big island with relatives until she isn’t mad any more.”

  The little girl tugged at the shoulder strap of Chastity’s sundress.

  “No,” Chastity told her. “You can’t have mine.”

  The girl didn’t seem to mind. With a look of amazement, she slid her hand under the strap. She pulled at the neck of the sundress and stared down the front of it. Sh
e laughed, a wet, snorting sound. Water came out of her nose. She grabbed at the hem of the dress, yanked it up in the air, looked at Chastity’s bare legs, and laughed some more.

  Chastity pulled her hem back down. “You don’t have to laugh after me,” she said to the girl. “I don’t like clothes either.”

  And to prove it, she shucked the dress over her head and threw it up on the rock. Her panties followed, and her sandals. She could climb and run better without them anyway.

  The little girl watched solemnly until Chastity was as naked as she was. She gurgled some more, and smiled.

  “Come,” said Chastity. “Let’s go swimming.” She started off towards the beach, even though she knew she wasn’t supposed to go there if she didn’t have a grown-up with her. They wouldn’t go in very far.

  But the little girl wasn’t following her. Chastity stopped. The girl was still standing by the entrance to the cave, looking puzzled.

  Maybe she hadn’t heard what Chastity had said. Walter from school had to look at you to know what you wanted. “Come,” said Chastity again, motioning with her hand. The girl seemed to understand that. She ran a few steps, then put her hands on the ground and ran on her feet and hands, with her bumsie in the air. It looked like fun. Chastity tried it, but she couldn’t go as fast as the girl could. So she ran on just her feet. The little blue-brown girl loped along beside her like a mongoose. No, not blue. She didn’t have that funny blue-y colour to her any more; just pale yellow-brown skin.

  Chastity could smell the briny sea before she saw it. Then she could hear it. They rounded the last corner on the path: past twisty scrub grass and big rockstones stuck in the white sand; past the line of sea grape bushes with their shiny round leaves that stretched out along the beach as far as they could see. They were on the sandy beach now. The leaping water gleamed blue before them in the sun. Chastity knew why they called them “waves”; because they waved at you, beckoning you to come in and play. “It’s like sky juice, right?” Chastity said. “Only salty.”

  Laughing, they raced each other to the forbidden water.

  Gene was spooned behind me, half-dozing. His chest hairs were damp against my naked back.

  The booming of the sea sounded muffled. Light fog had rolled in. Sea or advection fog. So many years since Dadda would make me quote my lessons back to him, but I still remembered. Occurs when a body of warm moist air moves over a cooler sea surface and is cooled to dew point, which is the temperature at which condensation takes place. Cayaba had another name for it, though: jumbie breath. Was under cover of a night like this that Potoo Nelson and eighty-two other slaves climbed up the mountain and threw themselves off the cliffs into the sea at Rocky Bottom and drowned. In jumbie breath weather, people said the dead slaves came up out of the water and walked, looking for the man who had led them to their doom.

  I could hear the branches of the coconut trees thrashing. The breeze had picked up little bit. The fog drifting past my window was tattered and shredding now.

  Gene put his arm around my middle. My waist had gotten thicker these past two years. Even had a little overhang. Embarrassed, I pulled his arm higher, to under my breasts. He cupped one breast. We lay in that empty, floating bliss that comes after good sex. For the first time in days, my nerves didn’t feel stripped raw.

  The clock radio on my bedside table clicked on. “Chuh,” I said. “I keep forgetting to unset that alarm.”

  I felt Gene roll onto his back to look at it. “An alarm for nine o’clock at night?”

  “Mm-hmm. Time for Dadda’s last medicine of the day.”

  He grunted. We listened to the newswoman, her Cayaba accent clipped to near-BBC diction. Apparently Caroline Sookdeo-Grant had visited Holy Name Girls’ Secondary School yesterday. She had told them that women were half of Cayaba and the country needed their strength.

  “You think she could win?” I asked Gene. Election day was in a few weeks. The campaigning was hotting up.

  His grin was languid. “Over Johnson? You know he not going to lose any election he could buy.”

  “Mm. I don’t pay much mind to politricks. Never met a politician who wouldn’t try to convince you that salt was sugar.” I rolled onto my stomach, propped myself up on my elbows.

  The radio announcer continued: “The government of Cayaba has been in negotiations with the American institution the FFWD, the Fiscal Foundation for Worldwide Development. Today, Cayaba Public Radio learned that completion of these critical negotiations over Cayaba’s debt repayment difficulties has been delayed for a month. Samuel Tanner, economic advisor to prime minister Garth Johnson, said the delay means that Cayaba will be tardy for its deadline to reach an accord on an economic management strategy with the FFWD. The interest alone on loans from the FFWD currently exceeds $750 million. Without concessions from the American foundation, the country faces falling further behind in its repayments.”

  “Chuh,” I said. “Don’t need to be hearing that nonsense right now.” I reached over Gene and turned the radio off, enjoying the feeling of his chest hair tickling my breasts. Lazily, he stroked my arm.

  I was feeling a little warm. No, I was very warm. Then way too fucking hot. “Woi.” The heat rushed up through me like when you know you’re going to puke. My cheeks were stinging, sweat popping out on my forehead. I sat and fanned myself with my hands. So I was looking right out the window when it happened. I saw it happen. My breath stopped in my throat. “Holy shit! You see that?”

  “See what?”

  I didn’t answer; couldn’t. I shoved myself off the bed and over to the window. Only wisps of fog left, and the crescent moon glowing down to help me see. I knew the distant silhouette in the window; knew it in my bones. “That wasn’t there before,” I said. My lips trembled as I spoke.

  “What?” Gene was up out of the bed now. He joined me at the window.

  I could only point. My extended hand shook. Rooted on the cliff as though it had always been there was the almond tree from my childhood. “That tree.”

  “That tree?” Gene echoed.

  “It just appeared out of nowhere.”

  “It just appeared?”

  Pique was better than terror. “What, like you turn Polly parrot?” I said, trying to sound teasing instead of scared no rass. “Yes, the tree. It just came there now. Wasn’t no tree there before.” I grabbed the window ledge to hide my shaking hands. I’d spent the morning up in that tree the day that Mumma was really gone for good. Now I was cold and shivering, damn it all to hell. I stepped into the lee of Gene’s body for some of his warmth.

  Gene stared out the window, frowning. His face was creased with sleep and puffy with weeping. He looked like an old man. How I come to find myself knocking boots with a senior citizen?

  “I don’t quite follow you,” Gene said. “That tree. You never see it before?”

  I nodded, my mouth open. “I saw it,” I whispered. “It wasn’t there, and then it was. Is from Blessée. Went down when the island went down.”

  Gene stepped completely away from me; turned and began gathering his clothes off the floor. “You need to get some rest,” he said.

  “You think I imagined it!” I fought to keep my teeth from chattering. I was shuddering with the chill.

  Gene stepped into his underwear, pulled up his pants. “You will feel different after a good night’s sleep. Grief make a person see and do strange things.” He zipped up.

  I made myself turn my back to the window. “You mean like bringing some strange man home and screwing him in my father’s house?” I meant it to sound like a challenge, but the words came out trembly, half shame, half plea.

  Gene stopped buttoning his shirt. He shook his head. “No, that’s normal.” His voice sounded so ordinary, the way you might say that of course it rains after the rain flies come out.

  I glanced back out the window. Tree still there. “Normal? How you can say that what we just did was normal?”

  “Funeral sex.”

  “What?”


  He came over to me, took my two hands in his. “I said, funeral sex. Never happen to you before?”

  “No. People don’t drop dead on me regularly.”

  He gave a wry smile and let me have my hands back. “You must be younger than me, then. Two strangers at the same funeral find themselves in bed right after. Don’t feel bad. It’s a thing grief does. I see it before.” I hated the compassion in his voice. “It just never happen to me before,” he said sadly.

  I asked him, “You know what else never happen before?”

  “What?”

  “That tree, damn it! It wasn’t there before!”

  “I know that’s what you believe.” He went and flicked on the light. I squinted in the sudden, painful brightness.

  “I know that’s what you believe,” I mocked him. “You don’t know. Don’t you dare patronise me in that mealy-mouthed kind of way!” I found a nightie in my dresser, pulled it over my head. “You sound like Ifeoma. I didn’t see that tree before because it wasn’t there before!”

  A hardness came over his face. “Calamity, you’re hallucinating.”

  I strode over to the bedroom door, yanked it open. “And you are leaving.”

  “Damned right.” He brushed past me. From the hallway he said, “Drink a lot of water and try to get a good night’s sleep.”

  I leaned out the door and snapped, “Don’t you tell me what to do!”

  He glared at me. Stomped out into the living room. I stood in my bedroom. Every time I looked towards the window, I got the shakes. Gene came back into the bedroom.

  “I told you you could come back in here?”

  He made a face, squared up his shoulders. “Sorry for trying to give you orders,” he said. “Bad habit.”

  Just like that.

  “You’re a strong woman. I can see that. Looking after Mr. Lambkin all those years. But who looking after Calamity?”

  He wasn’t going to get around me by being nicey-nicey. “Calamity looking after Calamity. She one.”