Swimming in the Volcano

by Bob Shacochis

  “You ain fret about de mahn Collymore,” Emma Quashie reproached him from back in the doorway where she had gone, too lazy to chase the boy. She had spent the past year godless and melancholic, and she felt as if she were waiting to receive a new set of directions—from where, or whom, or what they might say, wasn’t the least bit clear to her. Then, she knew, she would have to reevaluate her changeless life. Naively, she thought perhaps God Himself would call her back into the church. She surprised herself by saying something that would prepare the boy for the time that would come, though there was no shape to that time in her mind, and no clock, and she felt bad as soon as she opened her mouth.

  “Collymore is relation to you, ya know. Now, shoo, go on.”

  To his hatred then was grafted the enigma of relation, which he would not stand for, and that same afternoon tried to disprove. At Norman’s Cove, waiting forlornly in the queue around Collymore’s boat for his fish, the boy looked hard to see an uncle, but there was no motherside or fatherside to the fisherman’s ugliness, and he did not recognize the sharp malice and furrowed insecurity of the man’s features as a model for his own. As if attracted by the boy’s examination, Collymore scowled, his eyes locking with the child’s, and he asked what Cassius was doing back so soon, what business did he have in Norman’s Cove.

  “You is no relation to Quashies!” Cassius blurted out.

  “Me? Ha!” Curling his lips to smile, Collymore repeated an old island saying, “Peewee, I is related to you de way Satan related to sin.” He lobbed a yellowtail snapper into the boy’s basket, and everyone except Cassius, who didn’t understand what the fisherman had meant, had a laugh. He felt the truth of it then, hearing the laughter, and understood to the extent that he could tell something hidden lay between the two of them, a bridge in the darkness, felt its connection inside him but could not imagine what it was and did not want it identified. Throughout the year he went to the beach for Emma Quashie’s fish, he brooded over the possibility that Collymore had the right to claim some greater authority over him than any other strange adult, and it was this brooding, translated into a child’s somber defiance, that Collymore took pleasure in trying to break.

  No matter how he ridiculed or taunted Cassius during that year, pinched his bicep hard trying to find the muscle, no matter how he made the boy so mad he wouldn’t step out of the rain to stand with Collymore and the other fishermen under the thatched lean-to where they hauled up their boats, still Collymore wanted the boy, and had no intention of letting Emma Quashie keep him, when the time came. Though he would not admit it, Collymore had become lonely on the water and felt the unlocatable itch of solitude. His succession of partners in the past he had not treated fairly, and everyone now knew better than to fish with Collymore. From his first sight of the boy, Collymore determined he was not a born seafarer; he could see it—there was too much churchy, go-dizzy woman in the child; there was no swagger, no love for the makings of a boat, no eye for the handsomeness of fishes. The boy was only stubborn, and oddly sensitive, and to make him a fisherman Collymore would have to make him rough. To get any work out of him he would have to eclipse his attention from the easy, land-people world of the Quashie house, Collymore figured. Too much a made-for-school boy and pray-to-God boy and cling-to-skirt boy, eh? with his mind overworking needless, no-profit things. But until the boy came of age, had grown into the oars, he would be a nuisance, and Collymore didn’t want him, had no more use for him than a pet rabbit.

  Yet he got the boy anyway, want or not, when disaster struck the Quashie household, two weeks before Christmas, four months before Cassius’ eighth birthday. Emma had fed a pork and bean dinner to the children, gathered them in the parlor for a half hour’s Bible reading—having swallowed her pride and joined the staid group of Baptists her husband favored—and then sent them to bed, Cassius still in the same room with his sisters but now with a narrow cot of his own. When the house was quiet again, she went to sit in the kitchen, waiting for Rupert to come home, hungry and full of gossip news. Lately he had been assigned to night duty, sleeping in, leaving in the afternoon, returning at eleven—an hour before he was officially free, but no one bothered about that. Night shift mostly entailed monitoring the short-wave radio link with St. Catherine, napping, playing cards with whomever came to sit in the free light, drinking a cold beer.

  That evening though, around ten o’clock, there was a rare sort of emergency, and Rupert was called upon to respond. The station telephone rang, a rarity in itself, since phone service on the island was virtually nonexistent. On the line was Van Jones, a white man, a licensed ship’s captain and a well-known smuggler, the descendent of Cotton Island planters who had supplemented police-force wages for generations. Jones was furious, and Rupert Quashie had to hold the receiver in front of him to listen to the tirade, or else have his eardrum damaged. One of Jones’ workmen had come breathless to his house on windward, telling of a Carriacou boat, emboldened by the opportunities of the holiday season, unloading cases of contraband liquor, cigarettes, and transistor radios on the beach at Scuttler Bay. For obvious reasons, Jones demanded that Private Rupert Quashie take action against these trespassers, and Quashie said he would see to it. His plan was to go to Scuttler Bay, fire shots into the air, and go home. That would be the end of the affair, since contrabanding was a stable, well-defined, and coded enterprise, and nobody would do it if they thought they would be shot for their trouble.

  But scaring off maverick smugglers from Carriacou was not the simple business Rupert Quashie imagined it would be. Later that night, he was pushed out of his government-owned Land Rover in front of Van Jones’ gate, sending the two Alsatian guard dogs into a frenzy. He was alive but beaten unconscious, bleeding from the mouth, nose, and ears, and had been shot at close range in the knee. Emma, who had fallen asleep at the kitchen table, awoke at dawn to a pounding at the door and a man who brought her the inadequate explanation that her husband had been mashed up and taken by speedboat across the channel to the hospital in Queenstown. They brought him back to her six days later, ending one vigil of sleepless prayers and beginning another. His head was wrapped with tape and bandage because his skull had been fractured. What she could see of his face remained puffy from the blows, and his right leg was in a cast, the knee ruined. She fed him from a carton of sedatives and painkillers that arrived with him, not being able to bear the sounds of his misery. There he stayed, alone in the bed of his marriage, enfeebled and listless, neither incoherent nor lucid, neither suffering greatly nor healing quickly, but in any case dormant, lost in the backwater of the violence that had washed over him, day after day. There Emma stayed too, round the clock, in a chair pulled next to the bed, holding the galvanized pan into which he emptied himself, cleaning his withering body with a wet dish towel, even—once—relieving the pressure of his seed with her hand, and all the while petitioning the Lord Jesus with nonstop prayer until, inevitably, she brought Legba and Erzulie Mary and the rest of the ancient spirits back into the house, and with them came the forgotten image of Miss Diedra in ecstatic repose, and Emma’s jealousy for the god-favored girl got twisted up with her anger over her husband’s tailspin of misfortune. Lack of sleep and lack of hope were making her lose her mind, but out of the stray of her thoughts, a truth formed, bright and bitter and redeeming—she had forsaken the old ways, the oldest the island knew, and Erzulie Mary had placed a curse upon her in revenge. Now, without the priest to advise her, Emma Quashie would have to concentrate on a solution.

  Only the children fully witnessed the bewildering progression of her madness. Always temperamental, she now terrorized them with a campaign of scoldings and shrieks and unwarranted spankings whenever she stepped out of the bedroom. Then, it was as if the children no longer existed. She stopped cooking, and for days the boy and his sisters ate stale bread and tamarind jam by the spoonful. The fish Cassius returned home with lay in a plastic basin in the kitchen, spoiled and stinking. She forgot washing too, and simply threw her own und
erthings out in the yard, where dogs would come and eat them. Often the children would snap awake in the middle of the night to hear her singing hymns in a voice that wavered eerily, and then one Sunday after sundown, they watched her dress in white, tie a white bandanna around her head, and leave the house. Hours later, she was carried back through the door in a faint, and dripping wet, because, guided by the new priest that had finally emerged from within the ranks of the Church of Christ of the Crossroads congregation, she had been mounted by Erzulie Mary, and the goddess had ridden her into the sea, looking for Agwe, god of the water. The men who brought her into the house were sent outside; the women came in to dry her and slip a nightgown over her head. By then Emma was conscious but unspeaking, her eyes still looked ready to pop out, and they took her arms and helped her walk to the children’s room, laid her down on Cassius’ narrow cot so that the boy found himself sleeping with his sisters one last time, and they hugged each other with desperate affection, counting their mother’s snores which seemed to them full of pain and torment. Here in the room with the children was the first Emma had slept straight through the night, other than her noddings and driftings in the chair next to Rupert’s bed, since they had returned his wickedly injured body to her. In the morning she awoke to the children standing over her, but she did not move or talk to them or calm their apprehension, until finally they took themselves off to school. The rest did not cure Emma Quashie, but it focused her, and she stayed where she was throughout most of the day, hearing her husband’s weak voice call to her for his bedpan and tea. Her mind returned to the beach, the possession which had begun in the usual way with an emptying of herself through the hymns and the rum, the drumming and the dance, the seizing of her thoughts by a purple fire, but then the transformation had assumed an unimaginably violent character. Her spirit self had understood—had collaborated—with what was going on—she was taking the beating and torment her husband had suffered, taking it away from him, taking it upon herself so that he might be free of it. This was the commerce of the gods, the only trade they valued. When she could no longer bear up to the savagery of it—her mouth and eyes shut from the iron-hard blows, her head split open and one leg like a twisted scream—she collapsed—but this was the worst of all—into the bone arms of the dead Miss Diedra, who couldn’t support her, and together they were thrashed and tossed into the sea as if by an earthquake. Miss Diedra had a mouth like a dead horse’s, with its fire-scarred vise of long teeth, seeking Emma Quashie’s ear. Her voice flowed into Emma like a molten cloud: “We is blameless, when we do she mischief.” Now that Emma had spent the day staring through an aperture in the world at the vivid image of this revelation, she knew exactly how she must interpret it. Miss Diedra’s blood—the blood of her spirit manifested in the blood of her flesh—was a carrier of hardship and woe and damnation, and walked the earth to this day in the vessel of the boy, a new generation of calamity. Miss Diedra had been his first victim; Rupert Quashie his second. This is what she now saw clearly, that the boy was marked by evil, and gathered it as innocently as the flowers he often placed on her pillow in the mornings, and he must leave her house, forever. The children returned from school, cautious and hopeful, and stood quietly at the foot of the bed. Emma had no strength yet, or will, to raise herself and do what must be done. She let them kiss her, made them promise not to be spranksious—Never trouble trouble till trouble trouble you!—to go help their father alone in the bed, and to feed themselves, and wash, eh? and pray. When night fell they slipped back into their room, curling like cats on the second bed, careful not to disturb their unconscious mother. Cassius fell asleep dreaming of the flims—films, the movies Rupert would parade them to the last Saturday of every month, when the flim man arrived from St. Catherine and set up his sixteen-millimeter projector in the old cotton warehouse, and hung sheets from the rafters, and the white man from windward came with his generator and made electricity—spent a last, foreshortened night in the Quashie house dreaming of the glorious charioteers he had seen in Ben Hur, the horses racing and pawing behind his fluttering eyes, and awoke suddenly and in confusion to the dark middle passage of his journey into manhood.

  Because it was a school day, when his mother shook him before sunrise and told him to get dressed and come with her, he put on his blue shorts, white shirt, and hard shoes while his sisters observed him with sleepy detachment, not yet awake enough to comment on their mother’s inexplicable behavior. Then, without food or tea or extra clothes to prepare him for the life ahead, she pulled him by the hand, out the door and down the road, the boy embarrassed that she was outside in only her thin nightshirt, like a sleepwalker. When she turned off onto the path up Paley’s Hill, Cassius knew where she was taking him, but could not begin to imagine why. When he asked—twice; and minutes later a third time—she ignored him. From the top of the hill he could see dawn break its seam far beyond the ghostly silent churn of the waves on the windward reefs, the phantom white walls building and toppling like a movie without sound. The sight somehow made him remember his wonderful dream of Roman heroes, but with this memory came a longing for his father that was so forceful, like a punch, that it took the wind from him—Rupert had gone, he had lost Rupert, his father, the proud and happy man who took his three children to the cluster of houses and stalls that served Cotton Island as a town, every Saturday morning, to buy them ice cream, when it was to be had, or candies when it wasn’t. The only disappointment Cassius had felt on these excursions was because his father would not wear his uniform. In fact, only at home, coming and going, had he ever seen his father in uniform, which led all the Quashie children into the bad habit of bragging to their playmates that their father was a soldier or a general or an officer for the Queen—it was all the same to them. And now the man Cassius had revered, the man who sat with him and his sisters on the benches of the dark warehouse with the crowd of bawling and spellbound children, had been thrown down, and his mother had gone crazy and was taking him to Collymore.

  Below in the cove, the lanterns of the fishermen bobbed as they readied their boats for sea. Emma Quashie tugged Cassius down the path to the gloomy sand of the beach. Collymore’s boat was half in and half out of the water. The fisherman himself was a black shape just now stepping out of the sea grapes that concealed the decrepit shanty where he lived. On his shoulder, like a gladiator’s lance, he toted his boat’s mast with its wrap of lines and sail. He couldn’t help but see the woman and boy off to the side of his boat, waiting, but he behaved otherwise, stepped the mast in the bow of his catboat without acknowledging them, stowed his fishing gear and began to push off into the shallows.

  Before the boy knew what terrible thing was happening, his mother had swept him up and charged knee-deep into the water. He began kicking when she tried to put him in the boat, but she did it, letting him fall onto the middle seat, and there he was, insensible, stupefied.

  “Go wit you faddah,” she said to him, nearly bellowing, and to Collymore, “Reap what you sow, mahn. He stayin by you now.” And then she was gone, whirling away in the lavender shadows of dawn. For the boy, all was movement, unfamiliar and already sickening, and himself locked into the center of it.

  Collymore unfurled the sail and let the boat be nudged seaward with the light breeze running off the land. Cassius, facing Paley’s Hill, began to shiver, squinting hard to see—but not seeing—his mother mount its slope toward home. The hill itself flattened, revealing the shape of taller hills behind it. Even then he stared miserably at the spot where he hoped to see her, so that he would not look at the fisherman Collymore. But he could see the black petals of scars on his legs, the brute hands clutching the ropes, and that was enough to terrify him. As they passed the headlands of the cove into open water, Collymore spoke to him, gently.

  “Peewee, duck you head—we’s tackin, nuh?”

  Cassius remained immobile, his eyes on the near distance where the land shrank away in the feathers of their wake, as if he had not heard or understood. Collym
ore brought the boat slowly around, until the patchcloth sail luffed, and the boom tapped, lightly and unheeded, against the boy’s shoulder. “Drop you head, bwoy. Drop it.” Eh, but the damn boy plug up his ears! “Suit youself, toonkins,” he said, surprising even himself with this term of endearment, “but ahead lie plenty to-do-ment, so on we go.”

  Collymore showed no anger, only determination that the boy learn. The boat swung around to its new heading. He had changed course delicately, but a gust whipped the boom smartly across to the opposite beam, slapping the boy hard enough on the side of his head to drop him where he sat, dazed, a welt rising near his temple, his face contorted with betrayal. Why had he been abandoned? He could not understand this—could not! Why was he being taken out on the treacherous ocean—yes, yes, the Sinbad thing—by the one person he hated? He could not understand. Why had his mother said this man who caused him so much dread was his father? He could not understand, and he was powerless, no one could help him, and he wished he were dead.

  Collymore got no answer when he asked the boy if he were all right. This business going take time, he thought to himself, but here he was in his element, a fisherman, and had no problem with time as such. He unraveled a troll line, put a lure off the stern. They sailed on over the friendly shallows toward the sun, levitating behind the waves on the reef. Cassius felt the warmth of the first ray play on his back but he still shivered uncontrollably, in the position he had been knocked into, head cradled in his arms, his legs dangling awkwardly over the boards of the seat. The tips of his school shoes dipped in and out of the water that collected imperceptibly in the bottom of the boat.