Land of Love and Drowning: A Novel

by Tiphanie Yanique

  “I lived through a war,” Jacob said quietly. “They say there might be a next coming. But when this one come, I don’t plan on going.”

  “So what you planning on?”

  “Us. Me and you. You’re what I’m planning on.”

  Ronalda was already asleep. Jacob undid his pants and shuffled quietly out of his shoes. Anette slipped off her blouse and skirt and slip.

  “Can you swim?” Jacob asked, as they walked into the water.

  Anette didn’t look at him, for she didn’t like her answer. “I never learned.”

  “Lean forward into my arms,” Jacob said, once they were waist-deep in the cold water. His arms were lit up by the glowing worms of phosphorescence. Anette could live in those hands. His palms were up in a way that meant he would be touching her. Very much so. She was scared. It was too dark. Who knew what was in the water. What would claw her at the ankle and carry her out to sea. The water was cold. So cold. “You can do it,” he said. “I’ll make sure.” Assumptive, like the way he put his hands on her.

  Actually, he didn’t know why he said something so sure and foolish. Something he couldn’t honor at all. But Anette leaned into his arms, his palms at her belly. He felt her stiffen and yelp but she swallowed the noise. Her feet were going furiously, but not in that big splashing of his fellow island soldiers when he’d tried to teach them. “Kick,” he told her, but she kept her legs under. “Harder,” he said. He felt himself growing unsteady because of her propulsion. Then she stopped. “It’s too dark, I can’t see,” she said. “That’s nothing,” he said. “You don’t need to see to swim. Your hands are out in front, they see for you.” He stood and demonstrated in the air. Then he stooped and showed her, his arms slicing slowly through the water. “And more splash,” he said, because that was how he had been taught.

  “But splash will wake the baby. Bring the sharks.”

  He smiled and cupped his hands around her waist. “Sharks don’t come out at night.” Was that even true? He didn’t know. Maybe they would drown together. But he wasn’t thinking of sharks or the baby sleeping, abandoned on the sand. He was thinking of wanting and not getting. He was thinking of cooling and relaxing and not wanting to cool or relax.

  “We trying again,” he said.

  Anette felt the sand coming and going beneath her feet with the waves. She didn’t like standing in water where she couldn’t see the bottom. And just then, as though the sky had read her thoughts, the clouds swam apart and revealed the moon, bright as it could be. At Anette’s feet she could see the sand now. See the silver of tiny fish.

  “This time hold on to my waist,” he said. And when she did, she was right there where he, it, was. She could imagine the thick outline of it inside his wet shorts. When she lifted one foot and then the other, she couldn’t just hold his waist with her hands. She had to pull until she was hugging his waist, but then her face was at his belly. Then she could feel him. The coarse hair, that announcement. That trail of welcome. Her cheek at the hair, where it would leave an imprint on her face. “Let’s try a different way,” he said.

  This time he held her by the waist and she smoothed her arms in the water. Smoothed her feet. Her feet were pushing so hard and yet they were barely moving at all. Slow motion. Like she was stuck. She felt Jacob’s hands around her waist. Holding her up. Holding her. She kept pushing.

  She pushed, but then her legs fell, so heavy she would never fly. Again. Same. Then he stumbled back with the force of her effort and that caused her legs to lift a little higher. Until they realized together that it was his moving away and her following that kept her afloat. Or perhaps it was her pushing and him never going too far. There is more to think on this, but that time will come. For now she was learning how to swim and he was teaching her.

  Soon she reached her toe down and there was no sand. And instead of giving in to the depth, she turned to look for her child, as any mother would do at her death. But then she felt that his hands were no longer on her and she knew she was swimming. She looked to Jacob. He could still stand where they were and now his hands were at her waist in two seconds. “I have you,” he said. And she wrapped her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist, and he was grateful he could stand, because if not, she would have brought them both under. “You swam,” he said. “I swam,” she said. As if it were a magic he had given her.

  Though we old wives know it was her mother’s magic.

  Still, for Jacob and Anette this was exactly what they needed it to be. She loosened her arms and legs, and swam a few strokes toward the shore. Then stopped, putting her hand over her mouth, laughing quietly. “I can’t believe it would be so easy.”

  Because it was too easy. Easier than it had been for the boys in the Army. So simple and so fast. Like with a baby who has taken its first steps when the mama wasn’t looking and so surprises everyone when she simply gets up and walks. A genius baby. Or a miracle.

  —

  They had already made their private vows and already Anette’s wet panties were off when Ronalda awoke. It was the time when the child usually awoke to nurse and be changed. Anette released herself from Jacob and slowly undid the child’s buttons, slowly unfastened the wet cloth of diaper. Anette stood, right there in the big moonlight, and her body was like a shadow standing before Jacob. The naked mother and child went to the water. The water was cool and Ronalda gripped her mother tightly but did not cry. She was not that kind of baby.

  Anette eased them in until Ronalda’s little bottom was submerged. From the sand, Jacob looked on and knew that this was his life. Anette had wanted him so immediately, believed in his love so instantly. So, yes, that was his confirmation. He felt a valve turning in his body. He had reserved this honor for his mother, and even now he thought of his mother, and though the thoughts were all crossing together, he still felt the tight burn between his legs.

  When Anette came out of the water, she and Ronalda were both shivering but everyone was quiet. Anette and Jacob did not know for sure if there wasn’t someone else taking a sleep way down on the beach; they weren’t sure if there wouldn’t be someone walking by to set up early in the market. But they felt ancient and natural, like they were, just tonight and just here, alive in a time before Americanness. A time before any kind of ness.

  Anette lay her own wet body and Ronalda’s small, wet body down, and Jacob wrapped them and himself in the embrace of the sheet. Ronalda rooted into Anette’s chest until she found the breast and the swollen ready nipple. Jacob curved his body to mold Anette’s. And he rooted into her until he found the other ready swell. And it was all bodies and all together. “Claim me like a country,” Anette whispered. He didn’t hear, but it didn’t matter. He already felt they were native to each other.

  The waves receded. The moon receded. The sun spied from the horizon. Anette held Ronalda, the child’s mouth on her breast, and Jacob held Anette, his mouth on her shoulder and neck and arm, and Anette felt the rise and the wrongness of having both these things at once, and the knowledge that she wanted, wrong and all. And Jacob held on, one hand grasping for brace in the sand, the other feeling for stomach and finding her stomach and finding Ronalda’s little girl toes and the heel of her little foot and her soft baby calf and still touching and gripping, and it all feeling ancient and right until the sun burst out from the water like sin or a sign or perhaps just like the sun, and showed Ronalda’s eyes open and seeing. And Jacob opened his eyes to see as he came to and there were Ronalda’s eyes looking at him over her mother’s body and it was exactly as though it was her he was making love to. And he felt her little plumpness in his hand and he released himself and never again looked that Ronalda in the eye.

  They all three lay there. And Anette knew and felt that it wasn’t right because they’d all, even the child and the sun, been in on the lust and love. Jacob gathered himself, and because he was still a man with soul, he dressed them both. Buttoning them up awkwardly because, as the youngest of his mother’s children, dres
sing someone else was nothing he’d ever done before.

  “This is our real life beginning,” he said, because as the man he knew he was the one to say it first.

  52.

  In Freedom City, Eeona saw the extent of Kweku’s back hair on the second morning. After all, during their first storming only she had been naked. The hair swathed most of his back and it disgusted her over breakfast, but then it thrilled her later when they went to the mattress again. That is how it would be with them. During their loving, she would pull on his back hair until he wrapped his hand around her neck, choking her into releasing. But then again at breakfast she would avert her eyes when his back was to her. The rest of his body was deceptively smooth.

  Eeona felt that it had all been decided. She would make herself the mistress of this eight-legged house and it would be grander even than Villa by the Sea. Eeona saw the hibiscus growing wild and wonderful in the yard. And then all she had to do was see the rest in her mind. A grand house. A captain as master. Her as madame.

  But Kweku was no regular man. He was a rejected man. His chest, and the organ in it, had closed like a seawall and no sweet water would wear it down. He wasn’t a man at all. He was a myth. He could fly a plane. He could trick an obeah woman. He could steal the stories from any lady of the sea.

  After a week of Eeona, he began staying away. Some nights he wouldn’t arrive to his arachnid house until after dark and then he would come in smelling of rum and saltfish, which were also the scents of sex.

  He was a man of stories. And that was the only way he could live, in other people’s mouths. Down in La Grange he would sit in a rum shop and listen to stories about his other self. “You hear about the Navy man from St. Thomas who leave his obeah woman, run way to Puerto Rico, and get lost in the rain forest?”

  “Yes.” He would nod. “I hear he disappear for good, man. But I hear he used to give it to she good, too. And he only make he self lost because the obeah wife was too nagging, man.”

  “But Kweku, where you hear that story? It ain smallie Anegada you from?”

  “Even on Anegada we hear things. But watch, no. I ain think you drinking enough.”

  In order to stay alive as Kweku Prideux, the Anancy, he needed to hear stories about himself, needed to be the mélee. And in this way he isn’t unlike other humans who find themselves unexpectedly in the Americas.

  Kweku also knew that Eeona might reveal him, his pre-spider history. And so he kept her away from other people. He only let her leave for drives in the country with him. She would dress in something nice that he had brought for her. Something earth-colored, no more of her Virgin Mary blues—he wanted to be constantly aroused around her. He made her go barefoot—to keep her from roaming too far, though he told her it was because he loved her feet and always wanted to see them. By then Eeona would have gone naked for him. She was a lady, but she was also in love. When he left, she would sit in her seat waiting for him, legs crossed at the ankle, like a woman of wealth.

  53.

  Freedom City, St. Croix, was some forty miles from Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas. It was double that from Anegada. But still, it was close enough. After all, Kweku had told Eeona that the atoll was his homeland. After a few weeks of Kweku, Eeona began to think of her father. Her father stepping off the ship. Her own words like a sharp knife at his belly. Her father drowning for love of her.

  On St. Croix, Eeona didn’t know a soul. Some Americans lived in the houses nearby, but there was no occasion to visit them and, besides, she needed to be official to do that. She needed to be Kweku’s wife, not just his live-in concubine. Kweku wasn’t falling easily, after all. And so many other men had! What was taking this man so long? Perhaps she had given too much too quickly. It made her wild to think of it, made her want to jump off the balcony.

  The first half of every day became full of thoughts of her father. She had once asked Papa if he had ever put his mouth on Mama like he’d done with her. Now alone in a quiet big house Eeona remembered that Papa had looked at her as though she was a grown woman and had said no. And she had thought, good, his mouth is mine. But then he had kept staring at her and said, “But I have done it. With the one who taught me. Rebekah, the mother of your half brother, Esau.” And it was as if they were not discussing intimacy, but discussing something like sugar or molasses—like business. And Eeona had wanted to kill Owen Arthur right there. For wasn’t it clear that there would be nothing for her? There was a son, even, a son who might get the land and the house and everything due to Eeona. And she wouldn’t even be left with Papa’s love, having to share not only with Mama but with this Rebekah woman, too.

  In this Anancy home Eeona obsessed over these sad recollections. Visions, really. Papa walking until there was no more walking, only falling and falling and then sinking to the sand.

  But now wasn’t Kweku Prideux better, best? He was Eeona’s alone. In the mornings, she would sit to write with the paper and pens Prideux brought her. This was her transition time. Each day she wrote a letter to her sister, explaining where she was. Explaining that she was happy. That she had a house, despite the cobwebs that kept reappearing. Soon everything would come, she wrote, soon all would return to her. She reminded Anette to avoid that Esau, that fellow from the newspaper. Despite the sea between them, Eeona was still watching over Anette, still keeping her safe.

  Eeona would give the letters to her Prideux to mail, but Anette never wrote in return. Did Anette just not miss her at all? Perhaps Anette had figured out that it was Eeona’s own fault that they were orphans. Eeona’s own fault that they’d lost everything. Eeona thought on this blame for the first time in her life. But then, because she is still Eeona, she didn’t think on it too much.

  Eeona spent the second part of each day readying for Prideux. She swept the floor and the cobwebbed ceilings. She wiped the cans and counters clean. Then she began readying herself. Bathing in a bath of bay rum leaves. Lotioning her body with avocado pear and rainwater. Conditioning her hair with the mash of coconut jelly. Eating honey with bits of mint leaves. All of this growing wild right outside the house. The readying would take hours. Which was good because sometimes Kweku didn’t come home for hours and hours. All this she did for him out of her own free will. If she was lucky, Kweku would honk the horn when he arrived, making it bray like an animal, and she would walk out to him—bare feet and all. They would go on drives. They would go to the edges of the island. They would go to cliffs. They would go to the Rain Forest, where he’d first come to his senses when his wife had cast him away. They would make love in the car, he pressing so hard against her chest that she almost passed out. From the love of it, she supposed. They never visited other people. Never needed to, he said. They had each other. The rest would come. Was coming any minute now.

  Besides, Kweku kept bringing her notepaper for her Anette letters. “One day we’ll put all your writings in a book and sell it.” But it was just something he said. Something to make her feel treasured and therefore vulnerable. She stared at the page of whiteness with hope, as if it were a frothy ocean. With the black-ink pen he gave her, she wrote epistle after epistle to the unresponsive Anette.

  “But you must forget your sister,” Prideux said one day. “You need to write bigger things. About we V.I. people. Write about me flying beyond the blue horizon, why not. Not no stupid letter again. Even your sister ain care about that.”

  Eeona was sensitive, as women from the class she was born into were raised to be: Anticipate when an elder would like more tea. Anticipate when a young man would like to speak with you. But this meant that Eeona could also detect even the mildest disgust and disfavor. This man was one who didn’t land at her feet like every other man had done. And this was so confusing, so painful, so human that Eeona felt it must be love, the real thing.

  She knew, by now, that she was going to have a child for this man—her man. And wouldn’t their child adore the stories Mama Antoinette had told? Eeona started writing the Duene. She began with the Ane
gada women, those of great beauty with backward-facing feet. It was not long, however, before . . .

  “My darling Prideux. Have you seen my writing?” For days she asked Kweku Prideux, three and four times an hour, where the story she had written just moments before had disappeared to. Sometimes she was angry and firm, like her old self. Sometimes she was very sweet, begging if he knew.

  “No, baby. You know I don’t read plenty.”

  “My story has just disappeared.”

  “Stories about important things, baby girl? Tell me what they name?”

  She had renamed it so no one would suspect it was really just a childish fable, so Kweku would not suspect she was really just a child herself. “Drowning,” she whispered, as if the walls might hear.

  “That there sound like it ain appropriate for a lady,” he said. “Maybe is good it gone. Maybe I shouldn’t have buy all that paper. You ain ready. We need the real St. Croix stories. Like Anancy or Cowfoot Woman. But modern, for now times. So people know we real.”

  By now even he knew that she was pregnant, even though they did not speak about it. She was slowly nesting into the small room off the foyer. She kept it clean. She ripped rags into nappies and kept them in the closet. She thought on how she would ask her Prideux to purchase her a needle and thread to start the layette. In this small room there was a small desk and a small chair and from that position Eeona could study any person coming before they even knocked on the front door. But no one ever came. Her man sat now at the little child’s desk he had hauled home for her, a gift. His body was still, only his eyes darting around.

  She looked up to him from the floor where she sat, tugging episodically at her hair. “Please help me find it.”

  “I don’t know where it is, baby girl,” he said. “Maybe it fly away like me.” And with a hand he mimicked a flapping.