The Rhythm of the August Rain

by Gillian Royes

  He looked over Simone’s back and between the louvers. The island was barely visible through the rain, the downpour hiding the secret of their lovemaking the summer before. She’d been bristly when he’d first met her, almost unapproachable, but loneliness had made her need his company, and they’d become friends and finally lovers. She was different this time around, though, a confident, cheerful woman, and he’d worried at first that she wouldn’t want him anymore. Two nights of lovemaking, one on the verandah on a blanket under the full moon, had laid his mind at rest. The fire still raged.

  Looking at the rumpled hair he’d once thought belonged to a goat roaming his island, he was tempted to wake her. He needed to tell her he loved her, tell her he wanted her to stay, tell her that being alone had finally lost its charm.

  As if sensing his need, she turned over. “Who’s that dirty old man staring at my body?” she said as she stretched.

  He reached out for her. “Come to Papa.”

  She scooted over and snuggled into him. “It’s raining, Papa.”

  “I know,” he murmured, kissing her forehead, her cheek, her soft hair. “The August rains have started.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  * * *

  A blindfold?” Shad said, straightening the jacket of the beige suit.

  “So she said,” his friend answered, and took a clean handkerchief out of his dresser drawer.

  “The only time I wear blindfold was when I was a pickney and we playing blindman’s buff. This time it feel like I going to the gallows.” Shad laughed as his friend placed the kerchief over his eyes. “She going to execute me.”

  “Is hanging in the gallows you want, or execution with a gun? Make up your mind.”

  “Either way I is a dead man.” The bartender sucked his teeth. “I don’t know why you won’t tell me where you taking me.”

  It had been the longest, hardest week Shad could remember since he’d gotten out of the Pen. Beth seemed to have enjoyed punishing him all week. He’d left her standing at the altar, her note had said (even though she hadn’t yet arrived at the church when he left). The letter had been handed to him by his eldest child. Still dressed in her pink bridesmaid dress, Joella had been sitting under the verandah’s bare bulb when Lambert had dropped him off at the house that night. She’d stood up and moved to the top of the steps, blocking his entry.

  “Mamma say I must give you this.”

  “You can’t give it to me inside?” Shad had asked wearily, squinting up into his daughter’s face.

  “She say you not to come inside. Read the letter, nuh?”

  He’d sat on the top step and read the sloping script that belied the venom of a woman abandoned.

  Dear Shadrack,

  You were not at the church when I reach and I feel like an idiot in front of everybody. You leave me standing at the altar. I do not want to see your face. Please sleep over at Frank’s house. I talk to him already and he is expecting you. Do NOT come back until I tell you. Do NOT try to contact me.

  From the MOTHER of your CHILDREN.

  Frank was waiting for him with a cold beer, ready to relate what had happened that afternoon at the church. Minutes after Shad had driven off with Lambert and Eric in the Rover, he said, Beth had stepped out of her brother-in-law’s car (waving like a princess, according to Frank), only to be met by Jennifer’s news about the groom’s departure. Beth had sucked her teeth and uttered a curse word loudly enough for the guests inside the church to hear.

  “I know he would try something,” she’d added, and shouted for her brother-in-law not to park the car.

  “She cry?” Shad had asked, biting his cheek.

  “Two black lines from her eyes to her chin.”

  “Is a good thing I not sleeping there tonight, boy.”

  “Next thing she pour hot oil in your ear.”

  “What happen to the food?”

  “We go back to the bar and eat everything, nuh, but we put Solomon’s curry goat in the freezer at the Fishermen’s Cooperative.”

  After describing the adventure with Zadock, Shad had gone to bed, grateful for Frank, grateful for the lumpy love seat. Sleep, however, had evaded him as he scanned his bleak future. He was certain, knowing Beth as he did, that there would be no peace, no going home, without a wedding. But there could be no wedding the next day, Sunday, with Miss Louise’s funeral already planned, and nobody could come to a wedding during the week. The following weekend was out, what with the groundbreaking on Saturday and Pastor off to a church conference in Kingston. Besides, the tuxedo had to be returned and there was no money to rent another.

  Shad had worked at the bar all day Sunday without going to church or the funeral, not ready to face Beth. Monday, he returned the suit after ironing it and avoided extra charges. Tuesday, he’d buried himself in his work, mopping the restaurant, doing inventory, and reading his book on wines and spirits. Yet nothing seemed to help the emptiness inside: he missed his family more than he’d thought possible.

  His first time separated from them, it had felt as if one arm and two legs had been removed and only half of him were functioning. He’d wondered about Rickia’s progress in the science class she hated, worried about Joella’s not being supervised around boys, wanted to know if Ashante had started using the toilet, and fretted that Joshua’s next tooth would pop out and he wouldn’t be there to see it. Worst of all, every night when he got back to his friend’s untidy bachelor house, there was no Beth to bed down with. The only blessing was that Frank, a fisherman, slept late, allowing Shad to do the same for a change.

  Sending a message to his loved one hadn’t elicited a response. Maisie had taken his note on Tuesday and would only say that she’d delivered it.

  “Did she say I can come home?”

  “She not ready for you yet.” Maisie had gone on with her dish washing.

  On Tuesday evening Shannon and Eve had come to say good-bye. He and Shannon had gotten tearful when she thanked him for helping her find Zadock and for saving her life. She’d paid him in full for his services and added a tip that he hadn’t expected. Eve said she’d be back next summer, but her mother had said nothing.

  Simone arrived on Wednesday afternoon after Eric’s apartment had been cleaned from top to bottom. Maisie had put the new sheets on the bed and placed a vase of red hibiscus on the little table. It had been almost a year since Simone had left Largo, and when she stepped out of the Rover with Eric, the bartender, remembering the skinny, angry woman he’d first met, wasn’t prepared for her to look so different, so dressed up and—so American. He’d ached to tell Beth about it.

  He’d kept his distance from his baby mother nonetheless, respecting her request, sure now that she was the best woman a man could have. He’d thought of the dread Zadock, who would never have been accepted by Katlyn’s parents, who couldn’t visit his lover in hospital, and who would probably have been charged in her death. Shad had understood very, very clearly the pain that the man had suffered living alone ever since, and he decided that this would not be his fate. He would do right by his woman. One day, if Beth would have him, he would stand before the world and say that they were man and wife. On Thursday, he’d asked Maisie if she would take another note to Beth telling her just that, but Maisie had refused, reminding him that patience was a virtue.

  Jennifer had been dismissive as well. She’d held a meeting, a briefing, she called it, in the bar on the drizzly Friday morning. While the bulldozer flattened the land next door for the groundbreaking, Danny, Eric, and Shad had listened to her describing, yelling over the dozer, the order of events for the big day. Excited about breaking ground on his own hotel, Danny had kept nodding his big, bald head while Eric looked bored. Most of Jennifer’s words had gone in one of Shad’s ear and out the other because he’d kept wondering if Beth and the children were coming to the groundbreaking. When he asked Jennifer, she said she didn’t know, abandoning him like everyone else.

  Saturday morning had dawned hot and sunny with
a breeze that dried the damp ground quickly. Jennifer had thought of everything for the groundbreaking ceremony. The big, white tent that she’d ordered in case of rain had been erected by the time he got there. Under it he set up the folding tables on which Jennifer arranged the hard hats and shovels, and Winston laid out the folding chairs as straight as he could. There was even a microphone, and Shad found a long extension cord and plugged it in behind the bar.

  Lambert and Eric had helped carry a few boxes before retreating to the bar. “We have to try out the champagne Danny brought,” the boss had explained.

  A small crowd began to gather on the folding chairs shortly before ten, when the printed program said they were to start. Half an hour later, the Methodist minister from Port Antonio said the invocation. After Danny poured white rum on the flattened soil to appease the spirits, there were speeches . . . and speeches. The local member of Parliament, Donovan Bailey, gave the shortest speech, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as he praised Danny Caines for the foresight to build a new hotel in Portland. An elated Danny spoke about his childhood dreams and his grandfather, talking too much before sitting down.

  Shad stood up and said he was glad about the hotel because it would mean a new life for Largo. In this first speech in his life—he hadn’t expected to say anything—he found the words came easily. But Beth wasn’t there to hear them. When Eric spoke, he asked Danny and Shad to come up, and a little drunk, he raised their hands high in the air, calling for three cheers, and the gathering had hip-hip-hoorayed the hotel.

  The shovels came next, and Shad, the brand-new partner, had found himself in a line with the preacher, the MP, Eric, Danny, and Lambert. It felt like a dream, a bittersweet dream. Everyone in Largo seemed to be there but his family, and his heart was heavy but happy when Jennifer handed him his yellow hard hat and when the reporter from the Gleaner took a photograph of them holding the shovels. Feeling like an impostor as he dug into the soil, hearing Granny over his shoulder saying he was going to be a busha one day, Shad had kept looking for Beth, hoping she’d show up to make him feel better, maybe coming in a taxi so she wouldn’t perspire.

  They’d turned over the soil on the count of three, and after the clapping had died down, Jennifer invited everyone to the bar for champagne and beer. Danny had insisted that, as a new partner, Shad shouldn’t be behind the bar, so he’d had a glass of champagne with his new partners (feeling like a fraud inside, he wanted to tell Beth), trudged back to Frank’s cottage afterward, and fallen asleep on the love seat.

  Awakened by Frank’s clanking around in the kitchen, Shad had glanced at his watch and sat up. “You should have woke me, man. I have to go to work.”

  “No more work today.” Frank had taken eggs out of the fridge.

  “Mistah Eric expecting me for late shift.”

  “Not this afternoon.” Frank had broken three eggs and scrambled them, refusing to say anything more, except that, since Shad hadn’t had lunch, he needed to eat. While Shad was finishing his scrambled eggs, Frank had gone inside the bedroom and produced his beige suit, which was now too small for him, he said, and told a bewildered Shad to put it on. It had fit perfectly.

  “But you have to take a bath first, star. You smelling fresh.”

  Bathed, dressed, and blindfolded, Shad was now led by the elbow onto the verandah and down the steps. He could hear a car driving toward them on the dirt road, stopping in front of the house.

  He heard, in an English accent, “Your chauffeur is here!” It was Danny Caines’s girlfriend, Sarah. Shad pictured her, with her bright red hair and pretty mouth, calling out.

  Frank guided him into the backseat and got in beside him.

  “Where you taking me?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough,” Danny said from the front.

  The car drove to the left when they got to the main road, away from the church.

  “Something going on at the bar, I know,” Shad guessed, cocking his head to one side. He only got a hmmm from Sarah.

  The sound of waves hitting the cliff beneath the bar came and went. Seconds later, the vehicle bumped over rough ground and came to a stop. Frank pulled on Shad’s elbow again, and he felt his way out of the car, the smell of fresh-turned earth telling him exactly where he was.

  “I can take it off now?” Frank asked someone.

  The blindfold was removed and Shad rubbed his hand over his eyes. He was on the very spot where they’d held the groundbreaking that morning, but the tent and the chairs were gone. Frank turned him around to face a wall of people, a grinning firing squad between him and the sea. They were all dressed up: Danny in a casual suit, Sarah wearing a green gown, Jennifer in a wide hat, Lambert in a safari suit. Eric was in his good pants again, this time with a long-sleeved shirt and holding the guitar, his arm around Simone in a blue dress. Beside the petite woman sat a little dog, guarding her. It was Cammy, the little brown mutt everyone in the village (except Eric) knew belonged to the obeah man, the dog that the doctor had sent over to the island to protect Simone.

  “What going on?” Shad protested.

  “You ready to do this, bud?” Eric asked.

  “Don’t give him a choice, Eric,” Jennifer upbraided him, “not after all my work.”

  “Do what?” Shad squeaked.

  “Get married,” Frank said. “Is your last chance to run.”

  “I can’t get married.”

  “Why not?” Jennifer said.

  “The church lock up and Pastor gone—”

  “You don’t have to worry about that,” Danny put in.

  “—and Beth—”

  “Taken care of,” Jennifer said.

  “—and I don’t have the ring with me.”

  Simone stepped forward. She held out a small, black box and opened it. “What about these?”

  Shad examined the contents and looked up at her, the look they exchanged carrying the memory of last summer, when he’d rowed her groceries out to the island every week and heaved them up the cliff, and when he’d saved her from the clutches of Tiger and Sharpie. “Is your wedding rings?”

  “I’m not using them.” She laughed, all her pretty teeth showing. “And any man who wants to marry me will buy me a new set, anyway.” Behind her, the boss’s black eyebrows rose and fell in a flash.

  Shad took the box from her and ran his finger around the square diamond of the engagement ring, over the gold band with its tiny scratches. “I can’t pay you for this, you know.”

  “You paid me already, Shad.”

  “Come on, sport, let’s get this show on the road,” Eric said.

  “Yes,” the groom said, taking a deep breath, “I ready.”

  The wall parted to make way for him. Below them, the large white tent now sat on the beach, the silver balloons from the party blowing from its posts.

  “But Beth, she know—?”

  “We’ve been working on this since Monday,” Jennifer said, linking arms with him, making sure he wouldn’t run away. “She’s part of the plot.”

  Frank put his arm around his shoulder. “Is hell to pay for us men in Largo, but if you going to do it, best to get it over.”

  The tent’s roof flapped a welcome as they descended to the beach. Inside were rows of chairs, the same folding chairs from the groundbreaking. The people in the chairs looked up at him, everyone smiling, and he could make out a red carpet at one end, and on it the hem of Beth’s white wedding dress and the shoes her sister had loaned her. Rickia popped out of the tent in her blue bridesmaid dress, waving him inside with her bouquet.

  Shad clapped his hands. “Well, boy, you give me a shock now. How come nobody say nothing all week?”

  “Because Jennifer would have killed them if they had,” Lambert answered, and guffawed.

  As they walked down to the beach on the slope of earth stripped and waiting for construction to start on Monday for the Largo Bay Grand, Shad felt a chill run down his spine. He remembered how God liked to spin people around and watch the
m after, and he walked as straight as he could, with a cool smile. He walked as if he weren’t surprised by anything—that he was going to be a partner in a hotel, going to be a busha, going to be a married man. When they got to the beach, he took his time, trying not to get sand in his shoes, touching the ring box in his pocket next to his good-luck charm, the bag with Granny’s grave dirt.

  His woman, his Beth, was waiting for him, and she wasn’t vexed with him, but looking beautiful in the long dress she’d been sewing all year, sheer lace covering the strapless top, right up to her neck and wrists. From her head flowed a veil that fell behind her to her waist, and in her hands she held a bouquet of the purple orchids that Lambert grew in his greenhouse. She was wearing the mischievous smile she kept for their special times, her eyes sparkling with happiness. Next to her, Joella was holding her own orchids, and between them was the pastor from Port Antonio who had prayed over the groundbreaking, this time in a long, black robe.

  Almost all the folding chairs were filled, some people sitting in the restaurant’s chairs at the back. Lambert and the others walked to the few empty seats left—except for Eric, who took up his position at the front, a teenage grin on his face, ready to play something on the guitar. Sitting in the front row were Beth’s sister, eyebrows raised, and her husband and family. Miss Mac (Ashante holding on to her skirt), Tri and his woman, Solomon and Maisie (Joshua in her arms), and Old Man Job were in the second row. Carlton and Winston sat behind them, along with half of Largo, everybody happy, sharing their weeklong secret.

  “Who did all this?” Shad whispered to Jennifer under her big hat.

  “The people who love you,” she whispered back, before handing him over to Beth.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  * * *