Eden Burning

by Belva Plain

  This was their time of day. Always a stripe of light lay over the place where, naked, she came toward the bed: a light from the hall, or sometimes from the window when the moon was right. A creamy ghost, she materialized out of the darkness, then unghostlike, firm and desiring, lay down beside him….

  The old clock on the landing banged ten metallic strokes. He sat up and switched the lamp on.

  “I’d better start.”

  Kate rose and took a robe from the closet. In flowered cotton and with bare feet she followed him downstairs. When, at the front door, he bent to kiss her, she put her arms around his neck.

  “No, wait! Francis, wait. I have to tell you—I didn’t want to tell you before.”

  Something in her face alarmed him. “What is it?”

  “This was our last time. That’s what I want to say.”

  “What do you mean?” he cried.

  “Our last time to be together.” Her eyes were wet and brilliant.

  “Oh, no!”

  “It has to be. Francis, listen, it has to be. Marjorie will be back the day after tomorrow. In another month you’ll be gone. What’s the use of prolonging things? Another month together won’t matter. It’ll only be that much harder for us both.”

  “It couldn’t be any harder for us than it is right now.”

  “It could. Oh, my dear, make it now! How many times can people be expected to go through this—” She did not finish.

  He held her close. “Brave Kate. So brave.”

  “I don’t know whether I am. You like to think you’d be stalwart and have dignity and all the rest of that stuff if you were told you were dying of cancer. I hope I could be if I had to—”

  “God forbid!”

  “Maybe that would be easier than this.”

  “I’ll come back,” he said desperately. “I’ll come back every year for a while—”

  “No. It wouldn’t be any good that way. It has to be finished, like an amputation, and then one has to teach oneself to live with it.”

  He could only hold her more closely.

  “Oh, it’s worse now, isn’t it? Far worse than when we fought and were so angry at each other. Besides, I’m five years older now. Five years have made changes. In you, too.”

  “I love you, oh I love you, Kate,” he said. Scraps of thought passed through his head, scraps of bright paper torn in a breeze: I love the quilt with the birds and the dishes with the scalloped border, even your two sleeping puppies and the creaking gate; I love your pink slippers under the bed and your tortoise-shell brush on the dresser, the way you sing in the kitchen and your temper and your two separated teeth; I love you playing Brahms, you dancing, your hair blowing in the wind, you, you—He was crying.

  She pulled away and wiped his eyes with her sleeve. She opened the door. Before them the night sky hung white over the black, serrated outline of the trees.

  “Listen, I told you once about the Inca priests and how they used to kiss the rising sun. Remember to kiss it in the morning, Francis. And wherever you go, wherever you are, I’ll know you’re alive and in the morning when I see the sun I’ll think of you.”

  He never knew afterwards how he got to the car or how he drove home and reached his room where, still in his suit and shoes, he threw himself on the bed and lay there, face down, until day.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Through the day’s last light Will made his way downhill toward the Trenches. Below him, the glint of tin rooftops and jumbled derelict cars dazzled the eyes; the silvery shimmer would have been beautiful if one had not known what caused it. Above and to the left across the bay, the settlement at Cap Molyneux, in its wreath of dark and luscious leafage, crowned the mountain. To give Patrick credit, Will mused, he had not succumbed to any such lures. Even if he could have afforded them, he wouldn’t have, of that one was certain. When his term was over, Patrick would simply go back to the old house, now rented out for the duration, on Library Hill.

  Will had refused to move into Government House, refusing also Clarence’s invitation to come stay with him. He just “lived around,” with friends, whenever he could. Anyway, he was often out of the country these days.

  Tonight he was on his way to an important meeting. Walking lightly in sneakers, he had a wonderful sensation of flowing, flowing with time in a purposeful direction. So absorbed was he with this pleasant sensation that he almost failed to notice the man who hailed him now from the cross street. Then he recognized the dark shiny suit and reversed collar of the old priest, Father Baker.

  “Walking my way, Will?”

  “I turn off at the Bay Road.” He was not in a mood to talk, or to listen, either, to any pious liberal mournings.

  “I’ve just been visiting my old cook on Merrick Road. She’s been ill.”

  Will glanced at him sidewise. “Not afraid to walk alone down there?”

  “No. Should I be?”

  “I wouldn’t think it the safest place in the world for you.”

  “One can’t walk in fear all one’s days. And faith is my substitute for fear.”

  “Faith in God?”

  “Of course,” Father Baker said simply.

  The exchange began now to interest Will. It was like a game.

  “You think God hears your prayers and answers your needs?”

  “He hears, but He does not always heed, for reasons of His own.”

  “Tell me then, why should He have bothered to create us if He was going to be indifferent to us?”

  “I didn’t say He was indifferent. If He were indifferent, He wouldn’t have created the earth at all, or us to live on it.”

  “But I reach a different conclusion. I say no God worthy of the name could have created this mess we’re in. That’s why I’m sure He didn’t create it, that He doesn’t even exist.”

  The old man was silent for a minute. It was probably cruel to bait him this way. And Will was opening his mouth to say something softer, to blunt his jab, when Father Baker spoke.

  “Very well, let me ask, Do you believe in man?”

  “Certainly I believe in man. I see him. He exists.”

  “In the power of man, then, to reason and struggle and achieve?”

  “Sometimes, yes. Very often, yes.”

  “That means you believe in yourself, in your own will to do good. So in the end you will come to faith. For good is God, and God is good.”

  Not choosing to argue further, Will shrugged. The gesture, he knew, conveyed irony and dismissal.

  They walked on. The old man’s tired, panting breath was audible above the sounds of their steps.

  “How is your father, Will? I don’t see much of him these busy days.”

  “All right, I guess. I don’t see much of him, either.”

  “Salt of the earth,” Father Baker said. “We’re lucky to have him. Well, I leave you here. Take care, Will.”

  Recrossing the road, Will took one look back at the old man, who was walking on with his face turned toward the sky, as if he were following a flight of birds or simply inhaling the soft air. Easy meaningless words, he thought, with a certain contempt and yet not without understanding. The priest meant well, but he was totally without knowledge of the world. Spouting his kindly generalizations—Will had heard them often enough—about brotherhood and God and loving! While all the time he’d been sheltered away behind the protective walls of the school and the church, respected and unchallenged because of the cloth he wore. A man of words, a theorizer, an onlooker, not, Will reflected, really very different, except in degree, from Patrick. Well, no, that wasn’t exactly true, for surely Patrick had gone down into the fight, that you couldn’t deny; but even so, there was something too innocent about Patrick, too innocent and therefore, in the last analysis, stupid. Stupid.

  Now in the falling day the last busses from Covetown were passing out to the country, rattling by with people hanging out of the windows and bundles tied to the roofs. In bold orange and pink and blue they announced their names: Pleasan
t Dreams, Grateful Shores, Golden Joy. Now, what in heaven’s name did their occupants have to be grateful or joyous about?

  Halfway down a short lane Will stopped to pick up his friend Clifford, calling in at the door, “Clifford home?”

  “No, he say he be back in a minute. Come in and wait.”

  Will climbed into a house built on stilts and made of corrugated iron. From the front room, furnished with a table, chairs, and a small oil stove, one could see into the only other room, which had a large bed and blankets on the floor where the children slept. The walls were decorated with magazine photographs of movie stars, both black and white, along with Christmas cards of jolly horse-drawn sleighs and snow-covered pines, these last the greetings from various children and grandchildren who had gone north.

  “Sit down,” the grandfather said. “He be back in a minute. He went to get some canned milk for the kids.”

  There were, Will knew, some six or seven “kids” in the house, nieces, nephews, brothers and sisters of Clifford. The grandmother, whose hair was just beginning to go gray, was still vigorous enough to do cleaning at the Lunabelle.

  “You going to a meeting?” and without waiting for Will’s answer, “I go to prayer meeting every week. And Credit Union meeting twice a month. You going to a prayer meeting? Clifford never tells me anything.”

  “Well, sort of, you might call it that.”

  The woman looked at him closely. “I hope you don’t get in no trouble. Don’t pull Clifford into none. We never had no trouble in our family. A good name, Drummond. Came from Drummond Hall, way back.”

  He was about to reassure her when Clifford came in. His appearance was always a kind of astonishment: he was the palest tan, with kinky hair of the same shade as his skin—a bleached African.

  He put the milk down on the table.

  “Ready?”

  Will got up and they went down a few alleys to the meeting place. Some fifty or sixty youths had already collected in a courtyard, where chairs and a small podium had been set up behind a dance pavilion, open to the sky. The whole affair was open, there being now no need to hide. You had to give Patrick credit, he had kept his word about free speech.

  Candles, flickering in bottles, illuminated the faces of the expectant audience: black faces, working-class faces, except for the presence of several young white women, pallid and earnest. Holdouts from the sixties, Will thought, glancing at their stringy hair; trying to prove something, trying to feel as if they belonged here. His glance swept away. Well, let them. Let them have their great adventure.

  The speaker came to the podium to be introduced. Will had heard him before, in other countries, and knew what he was going to say, yet was impressed again by his easy dignity and the music of his Oxford speech.

  “Who are you?” He began speaking so softly that a forward movement of the shoulders rippled through the audience. “From where do you come? Why are you here? I’m told that most of you don’t know your own history, though it’s not your fault that you don’t. Listen to me, I have traveled. I’ve been in Africa and seen the forts along the coasts where our great-grandfathers were collected, torn from their forests and their tribes and brought in chains There’s where they started the long voyage to places like this one where we are tonight.

  “In the course of the three centuries some fifteen million men and women made that voyage. This you must have heard, how for eight weeks or more they lay manacled in their forests and their tribes and brought in chains. There’s how, maddened and desperate, manacled as they were, so many jumped overboard, dragging each other to death. Surely you have heard that!”

  Indeed, they had heard it many times, but they were fascinated nevertheless. Without stirring, with open mouths, they waited for more. The speaker took from the podium a sheet of paper, which he waved in the air.

  “Listen! I have here some quotations from a historical document which I found in the Covetown library, I took it from the last will and testament of a planter who lived here when the island belonged to the French. It lists the value of his possessions, among them his slaves. Listen! Pierre, twenty-eight years old, worth four thousand livres. A strong young man, you see. Next, Georgette, seventeen years old, also four thousand livres. A strong young girl, you see. Next, Mamie, aged sixty-eight, an old woman; she was only worth two hundred livres, because she wasn’t fit for much, there weren’t many years’ work left in her. Naturally, you don’t know what that money was worth in that time. Well, I’ll tell you. You couldn’t get a silver dish in Da Cunha’s today for the price of that old woman, and you couldn’t have done so at that time, either.” He held his hand out, as if weighing things on a scale. “A woman. A silver dish.”

  Steaming them up, Will knew. All these facts were true, but so far removed in time that they had become irrelevant. The only value in them was shock value, to make these people angry—which had its purpose, to be sure. The real tasks of the movement were done quietly behind the scenes, not by orators like this one, shrewd and eloquent as he was, but by anonymous, cool men doing their assignments in small, tight groups, working in and out of Cuba and throughout the region. And Will had a feeling of proud exhilaration to be trusted, at his age, by men like Cortada, overseer of guerrilla affairs for the Communist party in Latin America and the Caribbean. To be trusted with great things!

  No one moved, not a chair squeaked, as the speaker’s voice rose. “But how much better off are you today? Are you not still strangers in this land? Look up onto the hills where the glass-walled houses stand so proudly and the hotels tower, or look at the estates where for centuries the owners have sat in luxury among the cane fields….

  “Ah, but now you have your own government, they tell you! Yes, a lot of mealymouthed incompetents who, aping the European, have merely substituted themselves for your former masters. Nothing at all has changed except the color of the skin, nothing at all.”

  At the back of the assemblage two men, who had been standing there, met Will’s eyes and nodded. He looked at his watch. It was time to leave; walking along the beach, he would be taking a different route from theirs and ought to start. Unobtrusively, followed by Clifford, he stepped outside.

  “Great man! Great speech!” Clifford whispered.

  “Yes,” Will said. Clifford was clinging; it would be hard to shake him. And this night’s business was no business for Clifford.

  “Where’re you going now, Will?”

  “To my grandfather’s. I promised the old man.”

  “You have to? Sure you don’t want to get a girl?”

  They were passing the barroom where the girls sat around waiting. The jukebox blared past the swinging doors.

  “I can’t, I told you.” He wouldn’t have, anyway. He wasn’t interested in girls right now. There was simply no time. No time.

  “Well, guess I’ll go home, then.”

  They walked back toward Clifford’s house. The sky held only a curve of moon, narrow as a machete, and clouds were hurrying to cover even that. It was a good night, well chosen.

  Clifford mused, “I was just thinking how you told me once you set fire to that place, Eleuthera. You know, I didn’t believe you then, I thought you were boasting. But I believe you now.” There was awe in his voice. “Don’t worry. You know you can trust me.”

  It had been a mistake to tell Clifford, even though he really was trustworthy and a friend. It was a mistake to talk at all. You could never regret anything you had kept to yourself.

  “A dumb thing to do. Childish. But I was only a kid. What did it accomplish, after all? I’ve learned better now.” He said no more.

  When he had left Clifford at his house, Will went as far as the corner; then, out of sight, he doubled back toward the shore. From a board shack came the sound of hymns. Prayer meeting, he thought scornfully. Waiting for heaven. He passed another bar and a smoky yard where crouching men watched a cockfight. Rotten amusement! Rotten life, he thought, as he came out onto the beach.

  He had three
miles to go, around the farthest visible curve of shore to the lonely cove where tall cane marched almost to the edge of the sand. There they would meet the boat and unload the rifles and grenades. The beach was deserted now, because the seas between Christmas and March were too rough for all but harbor fishing. This was the resting season for the fishing trade, another point in favor of the night’s work.

  The sand reflected the dun sky. Across the inlet he could barely see the strip of beach on which hotel guests baked themselves while beggars hawked straw hats, baskets, and worthless shell trinkets. He almost tripped over a pile of cane trash. Clarence had shown him how this trash, floating, attracts garfish in schools, and for a moment, recollecting this, he had a feeling of nostalgia for the lore and homely wisdom of old Clarence.

  A lone man was mending a boat on the sand as Will rounded another curve. The whole side of the boat had been staved in.

  Will stopped. “What happened to it?”

  The man looked up. “Oh, just grudging.”

  “Grudging?” He wasn’t quite sure what that meant.

  “You know, like when somebody’s jealous you got a better boat, or some good luck or something, they cuts your nets, you know?”

  “Oh,” Will said. “Sorry.”

  And he walked on. So the poor destroyed each other. This was what poverty did to people.

  The rising tide lapped at his sneakers. He took them off and trudged on. Clams clicked on the flats, making a syncopated rhythm. Not far out a small yacht floated by, returning to the yacht club after a cruise, no doubt. It was so close that he could see a table set on the deck and people eating; he could hear their voices drifting inshore. Having wine with their lobster, I suppose, Will thought. Ought to be blown up!

  Go on, haggle over elections, unions, legislation, and arbitration! Instead of getting out there and grabbing like men. People like Patrick, with their talk, talk, endless talk!

  People like Patrick. And he had a flash of memory, with the very taste in his mouth of chocolate and bananas. The kind hands. No, I don’t beat my children. The earnest face, bent over a book or explaining and teaching and admonishing. Sad, in a way, to have lost him! For they’d lost whatever there had been between them, as far back as—yes, the day Patrick had asked him about the fire at Eleuthera, and he’d denied having anything to do with it, and known all the time that Patrick never wholly believed him. Sad.