* * *
A few scattered lights burned on the ridge of low hills as he arrived in the cove, long after nightfall. It was magic that brought him back, since he hadn’t really known the way, knew nothing about navigation that he could say to himself. The boat was impossible to beach without help; he threw out its scrap-iron anchor, took nothing but the Clorox bottle of tepid drinking water, and waded ashore, stepping over the middens of shells in his bare feet without feeling their broken edges. There were no people about, but cattle nuzzled on the spindrift, and they made him nervous, made him hurry along.
There was fire under the gummy icing that blood had formed on his forearm. Inside Collymore’s shanty, the darkness pulsed in such a way that he felt an identity within it that was his own. He opened his father’s wardrobe and felt around until he found the half-empty jar of bush rum and drank it as he stood, greedily, until it was finished, his first and last taste of the cheap escape that was liquor. Then he swigged the remaining water from the Clorox bottle too, and he would have drunk more, anything that was liquid, but there was nothing left in the house. He wrapped his arm in a filthy towel, stiff with mildew, because he had bumped it, rummaging in the dark in the wardrobe, and he could feel it bleed anew. His head filled with bursting light, splintering, swirling pain. He staggered to the front room and sprawled on his back on the car seat, his feet planted on the floor to fix himself, tormented by the jack spanier sting of a lifetime of curses, the cringing shame of his father’s blows, the mongrel’s life of debasement in which each day was like their first encounter, and until he lost consciousness, the child that he had been stumbled up the thorny slope of Paley’s Hill, hugging the elephantine parrot fish, all the creatures of the sea sinking the bright needles of their teeth into his ankles, and Collymore their master, driving Cassius forward with a staff made from the dried pizzle of a bull. Then, as the drunkenness and fatigue guided him toward oblivion, he was suspended again in the pool of ocean, chalk-blue, the color of the robe of the Lady, maneuvering himself toward the sorrowful eyes to kiss the hawksbill turtle that was transformed—like in the stories of mothers and teachers, like in the church in his days of innocence—to a welcoming angel.
In the lavender silence of dawn, the fishermen came down to the water to discover the oddity of Collymore’s boat standing off from the beach, its sail unfurled like a laziness, the hindfin of the loggerhead still lashed to the gunwale, waving toward the men on shore. They hauled in the boat and a boy was sent running to fetch a hook scale from a cattleman up behind the beach. Then they hung the shredded ham of the turtle’s leg up and it weighed at 103 pounds, so that they figured the whole animal, before the sharks tore it up, would likely have been over eight hundred. In a group they went to Collymore’s shack, impatient for his account of yesterday’s adventure, but there the mystery only multiplied. They examined the boy’s mangled arm with foreboding, and tried to question him, but he wasn’t interested in waking up, and hid his face from them. Someone took mercy on him and walked up the road to flag down the first vehicle to pass, a dump truck carrying rock for the construction of the airstrip, and Cassius was taken to the clinic in town. The doctor came once a week, from St. Catherine’s, but this was not his day. There was no novocaine to give the boy either, so while the watchman held him down, a nurse sewed his arm as serenely as a seamstress, ignoring his tears and howls. With no other patients to administer, they let the boy lie on the examining table to recover himself, and in a few minutes his groans had softened into tormented sleep. He was emaciated and filthy, but the nurse did not regard the boy’s condition as so unusual for a working boy on Cotton Island. Later in the morning, at the direction of the constable—a Sergeant Marcus—she shook the boy awake. He immediately cried for water, to feed the inhuman thirst that sleeping for seven years had given him, drinking glass after glass and then, with a wave of agony and poison rushing through him, vomited onto the floor. While his poor mess was being mopped up, he broke the abstinence of his emotions and smiled at the policeman, reaching senselessly to pet the starched cloth of the man’s uniform. The sergeant indulged this simpleness from the boy, smiling back, and asked what had happened to Collymore, his father.
“Angel tek him,” the boy said, which was a proper island euphemism for death, and the boy uttered it without guile. Corporal Marcus had already heard from the fishermen at Norman’s Cove, had the details of the grisly shark-eaten carcass of the loggerhead memorized for this three-line report. That was the end of the inquest. The angels had taken another fisherman, which was a prosaic matter, of minor importance, and Collymore’s death, as well as the boy himself, were forgotten, except as common mysteries.
As for Cassius, he remembered the last day with his father only for its stillness, its extravagant textured expanse of silence that was the sky, the unending field of slickness that was the water, and he would love this memory of peace.
Before the week was out, he had sold his father’s boat and gear for half their value, paid off the debtors that appeared, and arranged to take his supper at Mama Smallhorne’s rumshop. Freedom was an enigma to him though, his escape from hell had not led him to any clearly defined place, and once he had taken care of his basic needs, he was at a loss, and for two more weeks he sat in his shanty, stupefied by the pleasures of idleness, until the day Sergeant Marcus came to check on him, and took the boy’s welfare into his own hands, bringing him clothes—not new but respectable—and comic books, slices of ginger cake and a wind-up clock, and told Cassius he was a pretty boy, a pretty boy, a pretty boy, until the day, six years later, Selwyn Walker came to the island and rescued him.
Chapter 17
In her kitchen on Ballycieux Lane, Sally stood with the front of her sheer nightgown hiked up and pinned under the pendulous weight of her breasts, spooning yogurt between her legs from a pint container. The sun ascended the fist of mountains to the east. Roosters answered one another throughout the hills of upper Queenstown. A lorry rattled down the road, collecting laborers for the public works division. With babies and radios and idiot cocks and the eversweet arcadian breeze of the morning, there were no late sleepers on Ballycieux Lane. In through the window streamed the meaty aroma of pork cracklings frying in coconut oil, sachets of jasmine and of sewage, the shellfish scent of the city that built its original dwellings at the edge of the tide and then flexed backward, the muscle of civilization, into the higher and wilder land, away from the sea and its whispers of return.
Blended with these smells and what was most apparent to Sally was the strong doughy odor of her fingers. Throughout the night they had clawed unconsciously into the damp folds of her crotch, wanting to rake off the flaming itch that chewed with a hundred hot microscopic teeth. To be a woman in the tropics was to feel you were a most inviting if not cooperative part of the food chain. The bacteria came and went as they pleased, thriving inhabitants nourished in the reef of her sex, resisting the best efforts of the pharmacist and the worst efforts of the medic attending to the biological needs of the multinational cadre of volunteers on the island—a runty, soft-looking but shockingly handsome-faced doctor from Ceylon, a Muslim who lingered boldly during the course of his pelvic examination of Sally, his hand inserted into her, to query in birdsong English about where she was from, did she have plenty boyfriends? how the local fellas size up? did her bladder infection make it painful to do it? could he take her to dinner and dance and so on? Inexplicably, the fool diagnosed crab lice and prescribed Gentian Violet and Sally filed a complaint with the regional office, to no effect. For the yeast infection though, what worked soothing wonders was the female-friendly culture of yogurt, a remedy she learned from the mother of one of her students, one day when the woman noticed Sally absently rubbing the binding of a first-grade primer along the center seam of her jeans.
The yogurt was like the cool tongue of some large arctic animal—a seal, perhaps, or a polar bear, licking the swampy fires. She put the teaspoon and container down on the kitchen counter, hummi
ng with relief, and leaned back against the refrigerator, massaging the culture lovingly into her labia, alleviating the stab and ruttish throb. The yogurt drooled down her thighs, splattered on the floor in a pair of thick drops. This squirming, so much like teenage desperation, made her roll her eyes—who was she to complain, with her claim on Saconi and his penis like a great black bassoon. She had never really envied anything about a male’s body until she came to this place, and then she yearned for the male’s dry exposed outwardness that couldn’t be so readily invaded. In contrast, she was an oven, a hothouse for all manner of cultivations. When she danced, when she walked home up the hills in the afternoons, when she made love, when her pants rode up into her, there it was, so much a part of her now, the itch. Or else cystitis swelled her bladder with false pressure, or the flesh under the curve of her breasts chafed with an irritation akin to athlete’s foot, when the weather turned humid during the rainy season. Her body paid a daily price for its presence on St. Catherine, if not one way then another, yet something almost magical happened to it too, in the languorous heat, in the ubiquitous fecundity, something extravagant, as if it might be true a woman could be transformed into a luscious, glistening flower in certain latitudes, under the right tendering care. Understandably she wouldn’t talk about it, big-boned and broad-faced as she was, but she had never felt more voluptuous in her life.
There evolved a second order of heat, deeper and wider sensations, glowing rings warming by degrees toward another level of therapy altogether, and she hesitated, eyeing the wind-up clock on the kitchen table, then turned her head for an out-of-focus look through the back window, below to the sunny green lushness of a stand of bananas dancing with the wisps from cookfires. The land, its images, were so shockingly licentious—it seemed of a piece, even correct in some vaguely mystical way, to be gazing into it as if it were her lover, as if she were broadcasting her orgasm out into its depth. As if the land had found a home in her, though the real question was, had she found a home in it? She would have gone on, released the tension she had stirred, but someone began to knock at the door on the street side of the house and call—Miss Sally, Miss Sally ... Miss Sally—and she grabbed a sheaf of paper napkins from their grass basket and wiped herself—Miss Big Sally—and let the hem of her pink gown fall back below her knees. Miss Sally. She washed her hands in the sink, annoyed to be taken away from such dreamy, cozy minutes—Big Sally—and God, there was no escape from the world because people in the neighborhood would root on her doorstep calling loudly or just whispering in bashful voices until she responded.
The doors of her bungalow were cut in half, Dutch style, so dogs and children were kept out but the air could come ahead. She unlatched the upper panel and swung it back to its hook on the wall. In the brilliant square of sunlight she recognized Joseph, one of the boys who worked aboard the interisland ferry. The sleeves were torn off the shoulders of his yellow workshirt, the front buttonless and the two tails knotted over the iron pan of muscles of his abdomen. Sun and saltwater had tinted his hair orange; a lopsided ridge of it foamed out from under his baseball cap. The boy never showed up at her door unless Saconi was away, performing on one of the nearby islands. He never smiled and he never communicated more to her than what Saconi had told him to say. Beyond this service he seemed to Sally to have been created by God to disappear into the harsh rhythm of whatever menial task was required of him. It was no use inviting him inside for coffee, juice, a glass of cold water. He would refuse—he always did; shy or afraid, she couldn’t tell.
“Good morning,” Sally said, folding her arms atop the bottom half of the door. “What’s the news?”
Joseph reported his message. He had a sober mouth full of strong teeth, and looked, it seemed, at her ear when he spoke as though he were counting the words as they flew in. He was polite and careful but painfully formal, an uneducated gentleman, and she often wondered where someone like Joseph placed her in his view of the world. Don’t touch? If that were the case, he was one of the few exceptions on the island. It made her skin crawl, the deference. That he might elevate her into the imaginary ranks of some royal court of whiteness. And yet, better that, perhaps, than being a target, a punching bag, a she-goat.
“Saconi say come down, Miss Sally.” For Friday night—tonight. A goat roast and fete. She could bring whomever she wanted.
“Saconi tell me please to ask Big Sally bring a next set of guitar string. Bring him white shirt, eh?” Joseph shifted his weight and stared hawk-eyed down the lane. “Okay den, Miss Sally, I gone now,” he told her but she knew he would not move until he was released. It was a long steep walk up the hill from the ferry landing. She went back to the kitchen and returned with a chilled bottle of beer. If she had asked if he wanted it he’d say no but Joseph would never decline what was simply given.
“Okay then, Joseph,” she said, fitting the sweaty bottle into his callused hand. She remained in the opened and closed door—her idea of a perfect door—and followed him down the street with her curiosity. What she once considered oppressive about Joseph, his cold style and impenetrable attitude, now earned her respect. Too many men here were shameless, grabbers and rubbers and worse, the motto of their manhood Screw them all, bwoy, you might miss a good one. Even the little boys polished their groins when she clipped by on the sidewalk. Where did the ones like Joseph, like Saconi, loyal and trustworthy, considerate, come from? But the thought had a bad spot of confusion in it and made her uneasy—what exactly was she admiring about Joseph other than the formidable impassivity, his impersonality, which was that of a servant’s? You men, she sighed, unable to either acquit or condemn them, and went to the bedroom to dress for work. Men were other planets, regardless of detail, wherever you found them. Why fuss about the island variety? Some dangerous, most intellectually barren and tiresome—there was enough to hate, enough! A few were magnificent, life-supporting, and you could look around and visit but still you couldn’t live there. Like Saconi, who made her wash off her American perfumes before he would sleep with her. Smell honest, is what he said, not unkindly.
With the help of a few desperate mothers, and after months of lip service from the Ministry of Health and Public Welfare, she had created a school—a breakthrough that left a lasting impression on her apprehension of power. At the ministry she smiled until the muscles in her face seemed carved out of wax, and then in frustration she changed tack and began to yell and vilify, unsuccessfully, the civil service staffers until tales of her brash conduct overflowed out onto the grapevine and she became a topic. Her supervisor called her in and sat her down.
“Didn’t you ever think it might be a cultural thing?” he suggested, irritating her still further with his fatherly tone. “That you might not know how to communicate with these people.”
“Did you ever think these shits at the ministry might not know how to communicate with a woman from Kansas?” she replied, gritting her teeth.
She had come to wage peace, only to discover she was equally willing to engage in warfare. The ensuing ideological crisis she experienced kept her in bed for two days, the door locked and the curtains drawn. She gorged herself with starches, those ubiquitous island roots, boiled down to a tasteless but comforting mush, and could feel herself gaining weight by the hour. Sometimes she wept because she knew she didn’t belong there and there was a conspiracy to drive her out. She couldn’t say how long she would have kept prostrate in her room if the mothers hadn’t come, six or seven of them standing outside her window, their round faces like gloomy chocolate moons pressed one by one against the screen, like a confessional, to petition her help in doing something for the children. On her knees, leaning against the sill, she whimpered, ashamed of her weakness. “I’m trying to help,” she said, her voice catching, “but they’re not letting me.”
It was one of those serendipitous accidents: her supervisor at a cocktail party of coalition notables, joking with a Banks appointee, the brilliant and never-tiring minister of education, a mere twe
nty-five years old, still schoolboyish enough to be convinced that everything was possible if a person showed enthusiasm and obedience. The supervisor related, in an amusing way, the anecdote of his Special Ed. volunteer stonewalled by the minister of health, one of the elite power-hoarders who had been retained in office thanks to Joshua Kingsley, and the volunteer’s rather testy and insistent response to the situation. The young minister took an immediate interest in her plight, pretending the supervisor had slighted him. “But why you give her to the Ministry of Status Quo?” he protested good-naturedly. “Education is where she belong. Send her to me, mahn.”
“It seems like only one half of the government can get things done around here,” sympathized the American.
“Change is comin, my friend.”
Sally’s elevation was complete before the week was out and left her shaking her head, amazed; for once, she felt all there, eligible, illustrious, a part of the enlivening force that had seized the island. The minister of education found her an old building on the waterfront for her school and, more than that, he seemed to want to be her friend. He invited her to his office to hear her progress reports and even introduced her to one of the island’s new generation of folk heroes, the musician Saconi, one of his boyhood chums, who raised her slumbering political consciousness into the light of day, though she still argued that if the United States was an empire, at least it was an empire of hope and reason and principle—Saconi of course would snicker.
The months of futility ended without looking back. Her dread of her own worthlessness vanished; she started eating right again, started a social life that seemed richly ored with meaning and, on its own terms, glamor (though she would never say as much), and she went to work in the mornings telling herself she had arrived, finally, at home.
Swimming in the Volcano Page 31
