Eden Burning

by Belva Plain

  “What do you propose to do?”

  “Make the changes peacefully and fairly. We need schooling. Light industry and jobs. Housing. A decent hospital. I’ve tried to persuade Lionel to head a drive. He’s got money enough, investments in hotels in Jamaica and Barbados. He could do it.”

  “But he won’t?”

  “He makes halfhearted promises and does nothing. Like the government.”

  “So you feel frustrated.”

  “Yes, I do. That’s why I’ve got involved with family welfare. I feel I’m doing something. Teaching people how to feed their children. Handling problem children. They call them ‘bad,’ but it’s really that they have no fathers to lead them.”

  Her eyes were prisms. As the light shifted through the leaves, they turned from violet to brown, then to a dark and austere blue.

  “We also,” she said, looking directly at Francis, “we also show them how not to have more children.”

  “Birth control?”

  “Yes. You don’t approve?”

  “If people don’t want children, they shouldn’t have them. For the children’s sake, if nothing else.”

  “Some people, black and white both, are outraged. They say I do this because I can’t have children of my own.”

  “That’s not only malicious, it’s stupid.”

  “It’s a terrible thing to want a child and not have one,” she said softly, “but worse to have six you can’t clothe or feed.” She stood up. “You’re finished? You’ve got things to do and so have I.”

  He walked with her to his car.

  “Do you know,” he said, with his hand already on the door, “do you know I have been having the strangest feeling? As if I had been here before.”

  “Déjà vu. It’s common.”

  “I’ve always been sensitive to place: rooms, houses, streets. And not because they have beauty or grandeur or status. I’ve been in beautiful places that were cold to me, in which I’ve known I would be miserable. And I’ve walked down a street in some ordinary little town and thought I would be happy there.”

  “You feel that way here? That you would be happy?”

  “Yes. Absurd, isn’t it, considering that I don’t know anything about it? And yet I feel like Brigham Young coming to Salt Lake City. There’s a monument there where he halted the wagon train, looked over the valley, and said, ‘This is the place.’”

  “This particular place can be ignorant and cruel. You have to love it a lot to put up with all that.”

  “That’s not what you said when you were telling about carnival and music and the rest.”

  “Every coin has two sides,” she countered.

  Yes, it is absurd of me, he was thinking.

  “I don’t believe Marjorie would like it,” Kate said. “I see her as completely urban.”

  He came to. “Of course. I’m only fantasizing. Thank you for having lunch with me.”

  He did not say Remember me to Lionel. She gave him a little wave as he drove away.

  That was impossible, so he married me. He would have given anything to know more.

  Damn! So much stupid, unnecessary waste in the world!

  Two weeks went by as they waited for word from the prospective buyer. Marjorie played tennis and went swimming. Francis, although there was no necessity to do so, went back to Eleuthera. Alone, he sat on the veranda steps, watching green lizards scurry up the columns. His eyes wandered out over fields and hills. Bananas on the hill, Kate Tarbox said. Fruit orchards. Cattle in the meadows by the river.

  “I have founded a kingdom of my own,” the first François had written in that diary which had so enthralled the child Francis, “where a pure river runs and the air is salubrious, far removed from the noisome crowding of towns.”

  A kingdom of my own! The old peasant, turned pirate, turned planter, had possessed a streak of poetry as well.

  He leaned his head against the railing. Let’s not get foolish, Francis, with that “streak of poetry.” Poetry doesn’t feed anyone. Yet he could feel again that old dread of the city, of the office on a shelf, the telephones and ledgers, counting money. It was all right if you were made for it, but he was not.

  What, then, was he made for?

  He thought, There’s nothing to go back to. I should have to make a new start. Why not make it here? Why not?

  And he sat up, excitement pouring like wine. Take charge. Create something. As a painter stands before a vacant canvas, or a sculptor contemplates a lump of stone, so might a man feel here before this wasted land. He would have been ashamed, reserved as was his nature, to put these feelings into words; they would seem puerile, vague, without value in the telling, although he felt, he knew, they were neither puerile nor vague.

  So he marshaled arguments. Surely it could not be all that difficult! Surely he could learn as well as Herbert or Lionel had learned, enough to make this pay and enough for his parents while they needed it. He would do more; he would provide a better living for the people who worked the soil, build that hospital, show what intelligence and good will can create….

  So his mind ran, all that week and the next.

  “You can’t be serious,” Marjorie said. “You can’t be.”

  They were getting ready for bed. She sank back against the pillows.

  “I really am. At first it seemed a wild idea, but I’ve been thinking it over for days. I’ve spoken to the bank about a mortgage, for cash to get started. They think, with hard work, I can do it. They’ve even put me in touch with a good manager, a fellow named Osborne, who managed a large estate in Jamaica.”

  Sweat came out on Marjorie’s forehead.

  “To my amazement, Julia has agreed to cosign a note so my parents will be taken care of until my father can get on his feet. Shows you never know about people.”

  “No, you don’t,” she said bitterly.

  “Let me try, Marjorie. Please? I can make it work. I believe in my bones I can.”

  “It’s that Kate who’s talked you into this! All that stuff about fruit and cattle! If it’s so easy, why hasn’t someone else done it?”

  “I didn’t say it was easy. I said it was possible. And Kate had nothing to do with it.”

  He had not mentioned the lunch in town. It had seemed to him that would be giving it too much importance. Marjorie might not see it as the chance encounter it had been. When, on the following day, he had decided there was after all no reason why he should not have mentioned it, then it had seemed too late; she would think it odd that he had not mentioned it before.

  She began to cry. He felt deeply sorry for her and put an arm around her shoulders.

  “You know,” he said gently, “you know, I never really liked what I was doing. I realize now how little I liked it.”

  “You never told me you didn’t!”

  “I guess I didn’t really know it until now.”

  “That’s ridiculous! You know how many young men would give their eyeteeth to have that job?”

  “But they’re not me and I’m not them.” He looked out past the window; he could hear a rustle of leaves. “It was like being in prison, with good food and all the comforts, but still a prison.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” Marjorie said again.

  She wept and he put his arms around her.

  “You’re forgetting, I haven’t got the job anymore.”

  “You could get another. Don’t tell me you couldn’t.”

  “Marjorie, darling, here’s something I think I can do well. Call it an emotional decision, but aren’t all big decisions emotional, when you think about them? The really big ones, like marrying you, for instance? Listen, Marjorie, listen, it’s a challenge, an adventure. We’re young enough to try anything. If we don’t like it, we can always sell out. What difference if we sell now or a year from now?”

  The argument went on for most of the night and the next day and the next. In the end, by dint of his promise that the experiment would be just that, an experiment and no commitment,
by dint of that, with combined reluctance and valiant sportsmanship, Marjorie gave in, and Francis won.

  NINE

  The fragrance of raw wood was strong and sweet under a sultry sky. The heat in the lumberyard was stifling.

  “Likely to pour any minute,” Francis said.

  The other man looked up. Clouds were speeding in over the roiling bay; the clouds were iron gray, rimmed with silver.

  “October. We’ll have had our two hundred inches of rain before the year’s out. No hurricane warning yet, anyway.”

  “You’ll deliver that stuff by the end of the week? I particularly want to finish the post-and-rail fence so we can let the horses out.”

  “You’ll have it. We were saying, Mr. Luther, what a change! It’s not much more than a year since you took the place over.”

  “Almost two.”

  “Well, if anybody had asked me, I’d have said it couldn’t be done.”

  He felt gay as he headed out of town. The man’s praise had been earned. No one had believed, neither Lionel nor he himself, how fast he would be able to pull shape and order out of chaos.

  What a bombshell he had dropped! His father, at the time, had been numbly accepting of any new blow, but his mother had been shocked. When he and Marjorie had gone back to New York to arrange their move, she had implored, Why, why, when his future was before him, settle for a backwater? Was it fair to Marjorie? Did he want to rear a family on that speck of an island? Yes, he really did want to; was she not herself a product of the island? In the end he had temporized, as he had done with his wife: It need not, after all, be permanent; few things in life were, and he would very likely come back home eventually.

  Ultimately his father’s affairs had been straightened out. Friends had found a place for him at another brokerage house, and as his mother had declared, last week’s scandal faded for some other to take its place in the news.

  They had sold the country place and sent its furnishings on to Eleuthera, to Marjorie’s great joy.

  “We could never have hoped to collect all these things, wouldn’t have had time or money enough,” she said, as one after the other the cargo containers were opened upon carved beds and Oriental runners, Hepplewhite chairs, and Queen Anne silver.

  Richard had not wanted to part with the Anatole Da Cunha island paintings, but Teresa had insisted that they rightly belonged in the setting of Eleuthera, and he had had to agree. So now, when Francis sat at his dining table, he could look behind him and see Morne Bleue in a gilded frame; when he looked before him, Morne Bleue itself, framed by the windows, rose into an arch of cloud.

  Eleuthera being a large house, Marjorie had found it necessary to add to the furnishings. She was extravagant. The porcelain lamps, ordered through Da Cunha’s, were the finest, as were the draperies and the old Venetian mirrors.

  “You can’t put cheap things next to what we already have,” she argued, which was doubtless aesthetically sound, but costly. They were skating on thin ice, very thin, Francis told her, with debts to the bank, a banana crop barely taking hold, and some yearling beef sold at a profit, nothing more as yet. “Very thin ice,” he kept repeating.

  But in the main she had accepted the enormous change in her life, a change which she could never have anticipated, with great dignity. She liked to say that thoroughbreds didn’t complain.

  “Mrs. Luther has a head for practical affairs,” said Osborne, who was himself a capable man, honest, respectful, and cold.

  Francis had wanted to get busy at once on good living quarters for the full-time help, some sturdy cottages with proper sanitation. Going with Osborne into the villages to recruit labor, he had been horrified by what he saw. Some of the worst dwellings were made of beaten kerosene tins. Parents and children slept together in one bed, and sometimes on the floor.

  “They don’t know any better. They don’t look at it the way you do, Mr. Luther,” Osborne said.

  “If they don’t know any better, which I doubt, they ought to be taught. When they can afford it, they do live better.”

  “You can’t do it now,” Marjorie argued, as they went over figures with Osborne, who agreed.

  “When you get on your feet financially, then you can think about indulging other people. Until then let them stay in their villages as they are.”

  He supposed that this made sense, but only for the present. He had made a mental list of the things he wanted to do, and housing had high priority on it.

  To the left now lay the country club, deserted, for the sky had just released a drenching rain. He could see the turquoise pool ringed with white umbrellas. Marjorie spent a good deal of time at the club, as did most of the planter wives. Right after breakfast she’d get into the car and drive three quarters of an hour to spend the day at golf or tennis. Happily, she had been making friends here, more than he had made, and that not only because she had more time, but because she possessed qualities which he did not, an independence which attracted people, which they respected. She knew when to talk and what to say. Even her silences were confident.

  He swung the car onto the mountain road and let his mind roam. It was not often these days that he had a solitary hour in which to do just that.

  It will be better when we have a child, he thought. Children. Surely something must happen soon? And then: What did I mean by “better”? Just as surely, there is nothing wrong! Oh, Marjorie. Lovely, loyal Marjorie.

  He ought to spend more time with her. But he was out at dawn, when the workers came trudging up the lane. With them he made the rounds from cattle barns to chicken pens, uphill to the new banana groves and back down to oversee new fences for the fodder corn. Later in the day there were the books to be gone over. A constant round.

  He thought suddenly, We never see much of Lionel and Kate. Lionel is a good sort in his way, at least as far as I’m concerned. He’s been cordial and helpful with advice. Sometimes in the evenings he would drive alone over the beastly mountain road to visit. “Kate’s busy,” he would say, although naturally no one had asked where she was. When he had gone, Marjorie would talk about Kate.

  “Everyone knows she married him for his money. She didn’t have a cent. You remember, she said the Tarboxes even bought her wedding dress.”

  “That’s nasty gossip!”

  “Don’t be so holy, Francis.”

  He wondered what chemistry had produced such dislike between the two women. Marjorie was usually fair-minded. Yet a little thing like a voice, for instance, could set your teeth on edge, couldn’t it? Or it could draw you near, as it had drawn him to Marjorie. Nor was jealousy a part of Marjorie. She wouldn’t stoop to it, she always said; it was humiliating to be that insecure.

  “She’s really very odd. Not that the projects aren’t well intentioned, but they won’t work and she overdoes them. No wonder he’s impatient with her.”

  He didn’t want to talk about Kate. Well, she is a bit “odd,” he thought, different from the mold, and probably that’s why the women pick on her. He hadn’t had a word alone with her since their lunch. There had been a Christmas party for the family, a farewell when Julia and Herbert left for England, and four, no six—he depressed his fingers for the count—other parties where they had met. Eight times in all. It would have been interesting to see her more often, just because she was different. Sitting there with her farmer’s hat and her emerald, talking about music and tractors and clinics! Sitting there with the pluck and the spirit on the surface, the melancholy underneath. There was a lot more to her story than she had told, he was certain.

  He had never repeated a word about Lionel’s other woman, although Kate had made no secret of it. But it was no business of his. He wondered whether there was someone else in her own life. Again, it was no business of his.

  The rain was coming so furiously that the wiper was unable to clear the windshield, and he bent forward to peer. Deep ditches flanked the road on either side, making it impossible to turn and go back to town. He had never seen such savage ra
in. It assaulted the car. He was afraid and ashamed of his fear.

  After a while he knew that he had somewhere taken a wrong turn. The road didn’t feel right; it was climbing more steeply than it did on the way home, and there were great boulders in its middle. This must be one of those branches that come to a dead end in some mountain village before trailing off into a mule track. The rain was as solid now as a curtain; the world reeled beneath the awesome power of the wind.

  Then through the side window he caught sight of life: a banana station, a thatched shed about the size of a city bus shelter, where bananas were piled to await the pickup trucks. Two men were huddled in it.

  He stopped the car and leaned from the window, calling over the roar of wind and rain, “Can you tell me where I am?”

  A man answered, but Francis did not understand him. “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you! Can you tell me what place this is? Is there a village here?”

  The man answered, and again he did not understand. The language was not English.

  “Can you speak English?” he called.

  The answer was a shake of the head, so he rolled the window up and went on, the car laboring now through a river of red mud. A few minutes later he came to a village, a short double row of huts with a schoolhouse at the far end. It was the usual rough board building on stilts, with a wide roof overhang that kept the rain from coming through the unglassed windows. With enormous relief he stopped the car and raced up the path.

  The benches were empty, since it was already late afternoon. At his desk the teacher sat before a pile of papers.

  “May I?” Francis called. “I’ve lost my way.” He was out of breath and soaked. “I have no idea where I am.”

  “Come in, surely. Hang your wet jacket on a peg.” He was an extraordinarily pale Negro with a thin aquiline face.