Eden Burning

by Belva Plain

  His name was Francis Virgil Luther.

  Book Two

  COMING HOME

  THREE

  He knew he had been born far across the sea, but he had no recollection of the long voyage back to St. Felice, eighteen days from Marseilles. His mother said, “I didn’t like it over there, Patrick. Too many strangers and too cold. So I brought you home.”

  His mother was Agnes, pronounced, as he later learned, with the accent on the second syllable, in the soft French way. She was strong. Her tongue could be sharp. When she gave him an order, she wanted immediate obedience. Yet, from her dark hands with their pink palms, he received, it would seem to him when he was old enough to think about it, daily and continual blessing: food, bandages for the bruised knees of childhood, and comfort when he was afraid. Sometimes he was very much afraid: of what? Of nameless things, of spirits among sighing trees, of being lost and losing her.

  He was never very far away from her. As soon as he learned to walk, he followed her everywhere, from early morning, when they woke in the cabin, through the day in the big house, where she worked, and back to the little room again, where she gave him his supper and put him to bed.

  The big house was vast and open, with tall doors, verandas, and wide halls through which breezes blew. The house had a shine to it; he had an impression of silver and shine. Even the dark tables and chairs had a silver shine when Maman polished them. It seemed to him that that was what she did all day, rubbing things to a glow: floors, teapots, and mirrors.

  From the first he understood that this was not Maman’s house. She was different there. Shush, she would say when he spoke too loud. In their own room she never said that. There she was loud herself, singing and rocking him. When other women came by in the evenings, they laughed together in high, shrill voices, talking fast, clapping each other on the back, swaying with laughter. And he would stand wondering at their laughter, not understanding it, yet in some nameless way enjoying it.

  Little by little he learned to place himself in the world. The big house belonged to Mr. Kimbrough, a quiet man with a dry, white face and a white linen suit. Mrs. Kimbrough was white too; her hair was like chicken feathers.

  In the kitchen of that house the faces were dark. The kitchen people were not nice. Tia, the cook, sat at the head of the lunch table; Loulou, who did the laundry, and Cicero, who served the Kimbroughs’ meals on that other table in the dining room, sat across from Patrick and Maman.

  “He certainly doesn’t look like you, with that complexion,” Tia would start slyly. She would shake her head while Patrick lowered his face to his rice and peas, away from her stare. “No, he certainly does not.”

  And Maman would answer, “How many times I tell you he is the son of a Frenchman? Born in France, you know that as well as I.”

  “A Frenchman, hey? And rich too, I suppose?”

  “Rich enough, anyway, so I don’t need to worry too much about this boy here.”

  “Why you working in this place then? You have so much money, why don’t you quit?”

  “I just might. I just might open a little shop somewhere, when I find the right place. Not in Covetown, though. The price is too dear.”

  Now would come Loulou ‘s turn. “You boast too much, Agnes. Why didn’t you stay in France, you had it so good there?”

  “Because”—spoken scornfully—“because I came home to show off my boy, my baby you all thought I couldn’t have.”

  Laughter, then. Years later he would recall it, only then comprehending the cruelty of such laughter, the sting of pleasure at someone else’s expense, someone else’s weakness or humiliation.

  “Well, good you had him at last,” Loulou would say. “If a woman never have child she bound to have troubles up here,” and would tap her head significantly.

  Then Tia: “Let’s see how many more you can have, old as you are.” Tia herself has nine children whom she talks about freely and rarely sees; they are cared for by her mother on the other side of the island.

  Then Maman firmly: “I don’t want any more. This one is precious enough. I want to bring him up right. Can’t do that with too many pulling at your skirt.”

  He would remember a feeling which later he understood was confidence and safety. This one is precious enough. I want to bring him up right.

  And he would remember old, disconnected moments, probably not in the right order or in rank of importance, though what was important was not always easy to know.

  There was a house on a hill at the end of a long drive. They had been riding in cars and busses, riding and walking all day, looking for a shop to buy, Maman said. His legs ached.

  “What place is this now?” he wanted to know.

  “It’s called Eleuthera.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a name, that’s all.”

  Eleuthera. He liked the sound of it. Words were pretty. On Sundays the preacher talked too long with a kind of dull roaring, so that he usually fell asleep, but sometimes proud words woke him up: celestial, eternity, paradise. Now: Eleuthera.

  A tall thin man stood on the veranda.

  “I was passing,” Maman said. “I thought you might want to have a look at this boy.”

  The man didn’t speak. He was silent for so long that Patrick looked up at him, questioning.

  After a while the man said softly, “You shouldn’t have brought him, Agnes.”

  “You’ve nothing to worry about, you know that,” Maman said. “I won’t bring him again.”

  The man put his hand on Patrick’s head. “You’d like some cake and milk, wouldn’t you?”

  “No,” Maman said, “he doesn’t want any.” But he did want some.

  “Well then, some money for toys when you get back to town?”

  He would remember of that day that she did buy him some toys, but he forgot what they were.

  One day she said, “I’m going to open the shop now, at last.”

  “Like Da Cunha’s, will it be?” For he had already remarked on the shops along Wharf Street: the bakery where you bought sweet rolls; the candy shop with whistles and balloons; then, at the far end near the hotel, Da Cunha’s, where, peering in, you saw in the cool dimness, under the slowly whirling fans, tall shelves of bottles, clocks, glass, and china, all the gleaming things that reminded him of the Kimbroughs’ house.

  Maman laughed. “No, of course not. Those things are not for us. No, I mean to sell shirts and dresses to our own folks. And I can alter free of charge. That’s one thing I learned when I was growing up. I can handle a needle.”

  “Will it be on Wharf Street?”

  “No, not in Covetown. In Sweet Apple. It’s a fishing village, and we’ll be living right across from the beach where they pull the boats in. You’ll like it there.”

  She had bought a good house, the best in the village. The owner had labored in America, had come home to build it and there died. It had a foundation, not stilts like the other houses; it had two bedrooms, its own well in the yard and running water inside. In the front room Maman put a counter and shelves. This was to be the store, their livelihood, the place where she was to spend her years.

  Now he could venture out into the life surrounding. On certain days he saw the farmers bring their mangoes and bananas from the hills to market. He stood at the green to watch the older boys play cricket with palm-branch bats. Down on the beach he saw how nets were mended, how a circle of boats was drawn to trap a school of lobsters. Schooners came and went from Grenada and St. Lucia; he wondered what those places were like, whether the trees were the same there or the sky the same…. Sometimes a new boat was launched and that was a whole day’s excitement, the men tugging the boat inch by inch on great logs across the sand, while a steel band played and somebody got to break a bottle of rum and people danced.

  Sometimes, when his mother gave him a penny, he liked to go to Ah Sing’s grocery store, the Chinaman’s store. There were rows of canned goods with bright labels
and a shelf of candy in jars. Soon he was aware that Ah Sing gave him more than his penny’s worth. He had a nice smile and sometimes took a walk far up the beach with Patrick, talking with an accent that made Patrick miss every other word. Ah Sing taught him how to open a conch shell, how to watch out for the claw that can be hiding there even though you think the creature’s dead; how to pull the body out of the shell, cut off the sickle, and clean it.

  “Take it home to your mother and remind her to mix half sea water with the fresh when she makes the stew.”

  He remembered that. And Ah Sing taught him to swim and how to raise a pig, which he kept with the chickens in the yard behind the house.

  But mostly, as befitted his age, he played, and his days passed sweetly, circling through unchanging seasons without aim, except as a plant stretches toward the sun or butterflies circle in the afternoon.

  Then one day he was no longer a baby. He started school. Not everybody started school; you didn’t have to go if you didn’t want to, if your mother complained that she didn’t have the money for uniforms, or if you were needed to help on the sugar estate in crop time. But Patrick had a supply of dark blue shorts and white shirts; his mother wanted him to go.

  “Learn,” she commanded, with her hands on his shoulders. “Learn, so you won’t grow up and have to work on a sugar estate. Listen to the teacher and behave yourself, hear?”

  That was strange, because sometimes she said, “You won’t have to work on a sugar estate, thank God for that.” Anyway, he didn’t know what was so wrong about working there. The men in the village, those who didn’t fish for a living, all worked on Estate Sweet Apple, the plantation from which the village took its name. So he left for school with a certain confusion, a feeling that he was being sent off to do something hard, that he would naturally hate.

  Instead, it turned out to be delight. The whistle of the schoolmistress, bringing the class to attention, became in those first years a summons to a new kind of pleasure. On the long bench under the trees he plowed obediently through arithmetic so as to get it over with quickly, waiting for the big books with their stories of knights who fought with swords and rode their horses in places with strange names. All those things happened a long time ago, he wasn’t sure when, probably before he had been born.

  Sometimes the teacher held up pictures. There was a stone church much bigger than the one in Covetown.

  “An abbey,” she said. “Westminster Abbey.”

  “What is an abbey?” Patrick asked, but she didn’t answer.

  Then there was a long car called a railroad and this, too, was in England. There was a picture of a man with a pointed long face and large, pale, bulging eyes; he was the king, George the Sixth, and you were his subject, you belonged to him.

  “That means you are English,” said Mistress Ogilvie.

  “We are English, did you know?” he asked his mother.

  “Why, who told you that?”

  “The mistress.”

  “Ah, well. We were slaves of the English. Did she tell you that too?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You didn’t know we were slaves?”

  “I think somebody told me. But there aren’t any more now, are there?”

  “No slaves? They make the laws, they’ve got the jails! And so, what are we? I ask you, what are we?”

  He stood there, feeling the knotted frown on his forehead, uncomfortable in the face of her strange anger.

  “Ah,” she said abruptly. “I shouldn’t talk like that! There’s nothing I can do about it, and it only gives me a headache, anyway.”

  She could say such odd things, things to make you think she hated the people who owned the estates; then, at other times, she would admire some white lady they might see on a trip to Covetown.

  “Ah, but there’s quality! So well dressed, such fine manners!”

  It was confusing. So much, it seemed, depended upon skin: what people thought of you and said about you. He knew, for instance, that people whispered in the village about his mother and about their house. She never told him, and he understood that she never would, yet here and there he overheard enough to bring him some vague understanding that her little money had come from a white man, the man who had fathered him.

  Over the dresser in his mother’s room there was a mirror. Standing on a chair, he could see how light he was compared with the people he knew, excepting, of course, people like the Kimbroughs. None of the children in school was as light.

  So he wondered about color and faces, Ah Sing’s, for instance, with his peculiar, narrow eyes.

  “That’s because he’s Chinese,” Maman said, which was no explanation at all. It was confusing.

  One evening she told him a story. He had been lying, for hours, it seemed, too hot to sleep. Lightning flared; the air was heavy and he felt the melancholy of oncoming storm. At the window where his bed stood he could see the yellow, flashing sky. Yellow is always angry, he thought. It was not the sort of thought he would express aloud; it would seem a stupid thing to say. Still, he always thought that colors were saying something: orange, for instance, looked surprised, as though something nice had happened unexpectedly. It was amazing what you could do with words.

  Thunder rolled and cracked; rain pounded the tin roof; a terrible crash shook the house. Maman came over and sat on Patrick’s bed. He moved nearer to her, ashamed of being scared.

  “You think a storm like this is anything? I remember when Mount Pelée blew up. That was in 1902, the eighth of May, and that boom was bigger than any thunder you’ll ever hear! People thought it was Judgment Day. They even felt the ground shake here on St. Felice, can you imagine that? No, you can’t, nobody could imagine what it was like. A cloud came out of the mountain; first it looked like smoke from a burning house, but it kept on coming, until it filled the sky”—in the three-quarter dark Patrick could see that she was leaning forward and gesturing with her arm—“filled the sky all purple and red as blood, a fearful, ugly thing. It made you think of hell…. Then the ash came, falling hard as rain. It smelled like rotten eggs. Sulfur, they said. We closed the shutters tight, but the ash got in anyway and covered the floors. And centipedes got into the house, a foot long some of them, trying to get away from the ash upriver. We poured boiling water on them. I was a maid at the Mauriers’ then, my first position. I was hardly more than a child, but it was good working there, better than being a porteuse, I can tell you.”

  “What’s a porteuse?”

  “You know, the girls who load the ships, carrying the coal or rum or sugar on their heads. They worked twelve hours a day, then, got four dollars a month…. So I was well off at the Mauriers’. We kept right on working, everyone did in St. Pierre. The mountain stopped rumbling after a few more days and so we thought the ash would soon stop falling. But the country people kept coming in. They thought St. Pierre would be safe. Farther up the mountain, they said, the hot mud was rolling still, choking the rivers, and the ash so thick on everything that the birds were dying in the trees. Then suddenly in our yard the birds began to die, too.”

  “Why didn’t you go away?” He sat up now, so interested that he had forgotten the storm.

  “Well, Mr. Maurier took his wife to Fort-de-France, but the servants had to stay and guard the house. The city was full of thieves, people sleeping in the streets, stealing from the shops and fighting. It was terrible, terrible.” She paused. “Then came La Veretta, the smallpox. So many died, they ran out of coffins. It’s funny,” Agnes reflected, “how people think that nothing can ever happen to them. Not brave, I think, only stupid. Leon, the butler, had such a nice room in the Mauriers’ house, he didn’t want to leave! Just sat there with a bottle of the best wine from the cellar. ‘Sit tight,’ he said. ‘It’ll pass.’ But I wasn’t so sure. Fires were breaking out all over town. Leon sent me in to buy things; he wouldn’t go on account of La Veretta! It’s good he sent me, otherwise I wouldn’t have seen the mud coming. I saw it sliding down the mountain a
nd I knew as well as I know my name that that was the end of St. Pierre. So I found a man with a fishing boat and I gave him the five dollars Leon had given me. I told him to get me away, anyplace, I didn’t care where, but get away.

  “We were just out of the harbor when the mud wall hit the sugar factory. You would have to see it to believe it, Patrick! It covered the factory—and that was a big place, let me tell you—covered it up. It was gone in a minute, gone with all the people in it. Oh, God! And the mud kept rolling into the harbor, driving the sea away. When the water came rushing back, it lifted the ships in the harbor like chips of wood and drowned them, drowned the whole city before it pulled back into the bay. Behind the city the cane fields burned and I knew the Mauriers’ house was gone, too, with Leon drinking wine in his nice room. The sky was black as night. I never saw St. Pierre again,” she finished, very quietly.

  “Don’t you ever want to?”

  “I could go. I’ve got a piece of land there, family land that was given to us when the slaves were freed. My cousins live on it, but I’ve got the right to go back any time I want, of course—I’m family. I don’t want to, though.”

  “Why? Was it a bad place?” Patrick liked this talk. It was grown-up talk and he wished it would go on.

  “Oh, they say it was a wicked city, the theater and dancing and all that. They say it was like Paris. But that’s not true. I’ve been in both places and I know. Ah, but it was a grand life! Sundays when the family went calling, Madame Maurier wore her diamond bracelets over her kid gloves, and they’d ride in the coach with their fine horses and the coachman with his gilt buttons—”

  “Did you ride in the coach, too?”

  “Who, I!” She laughed. “Of course not! I worked my feet off for the Mauriers! I had the job because my maman had been parlor maid there and when she died, they gave me a position. My maman died with her fifth baby, you know.”