Island on the Edge of the World

by Deborah Rodriguez

  “Do you want me to help?” Charlie asked gently.

  “Please.” Lizbeth watched as Charlie emptied the carton, one item at a time: two books, a pair of jeans, a knapsack she remembered from his college days, a crusty pair of sandals, and an old rain poncho. Luke never did believe in having more than you needed. Leaving a small footprint, is what he used to say.

  Charlie stopped when she was near the bottom of the pile. In her hands was a small, carved photo frame, which she turned over and gently handed to Lizbeth. The sight of her son’s face nearly knocked her over. But it was the face next to his that truly threw her for a loop. The girl was not at all what Lizbeth had expected. She was dressed nice and simple, in a sleeveless shift with a string of beads around her neck, her hair braided in neat rows. And she had a beautiful smile, Lizbeth had to admit. The two of them looked happy, seated against a picture-postcard background of a sea so blue it matched the sky. But the girl’s deep, dark eyes were not on the view, they were fixed on Luke, fixed on him in a way that made Lizbeth wonder.

  She slumped back onto the bare mattress, remembering the words from Senzey’s letter: I smell your skin in the pillows. She knew that feeling. She’d caught herself doing it often, after Luke died, sitting in his room holding his sheets up to her nose until the day they’d lost his sweet scent, and the last shred of his being, forever.

  “So what do you want to do with all this?” Charlie asked.

  Lizbeth dismissed the box and its contents with a sudden wave of her hand. “You two take what you like,” she said to Mackenson. “Maybe someone around these parts can use some of these things.”

  “There is a television, too,” Mackenson said.

  “Kervens can keep it, if he wants,” Lizbeth answered.

  “And he says he is taking good care of your son’s cat.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, the photo and the T-shirt still clutched in her hands as the tears began to flow. “What will I do with a cat?”

  Kervens hurriedly spoke to Mackenson.

  “It is fine,” he assured Lizbeth. “The cat is doing a fine job keeping the pests under control.”

  Mackenson handed her a clean handkerchief from his jeans pocket. His kindness made her cry even harder.

  Kervens crossed the room and placed a warm hand on her shoulder. “Kouraj, Maman. Kouraj.”

  10

  Was it too early for a rum punch? Bea wondered as she awoke from a snooze on the veranda, easing her stiff legs off the wicker footrest, using her hands to shift the limbs, one by one, onto the floor below. It was no surprise she’d dozed off, right out here in the open, after having been woken so damn early by Charlie rustling around the room getting ready. The girl was literally up with the roosters, who were making so much racket themselves that it was a miracle Lizbeth had stayed asleep through it all.

  Charlie had helped Bea out of bed and guided her through the huge room they’d upgraded to—one big enough to sleep the three of them surprisingly comfortably—and into the bathroom. Once Bea assured Charlie she’d be fine, the girl was off to find the car and translator she had organized through the hotel. Though the hot water was tepid at best, and the towels as thin as napkins, Bea had managed all right. Thank God for Lizbeth, who finally woke up and insisted on helping her down those rickety stairs that led to the veranda.

  It must be near noon, she thought now, based on how hot and muggy it had become. She peeled her cotton tunic away from her sticky body, fanning it to let in some air. How long had Charlie and Lizbeth been gone, anyway?

  “Pardon me,” Bea asked over her shoulder, when she heard evidence of a human presence at the table behind her. “Could I trouble you to tell me what time it is?”

  “No trouble at all,” a man answered. “It is 11.07, on the dot.”

  “Thank you.” She picked up her crocheting from the table and listened for Stanley’s shuffle. “Must be a long trip here from France,” she said to the man.

  “Ah, my accent?” He laughed. “I try to hide it. I guess I’m not very good at it.”

  The man’s voice was deep, and seasoned. She figured him to be somewhere in his sixties. “I’ll bet you’re here writing a book.”

  “Well done. You must be psychic,” the man teased.

  If only he knew how true his words were. She turned around to face him. “Lucky guess,” she said with a laugh. “Actually, it’s those little clicks that computers make when someone is typing. My hearing is superb. My eyes, not so much.” She pushed the bridge of her glasses up to the top of her nose.

  “I thought that maybe you were aware of the hotel motto,” he said.

  “And what would that be?”

  “Check in, write a book.”

  “I hadn’t heard that. Nobody has told me much of anything about this place. All I know is what I hear. And what I feel.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Well, right now I hear the car horns and the motorcycles out there, of course. And the birds—maybe macaws, and grackles. I’m pretty good at birds. By my guess there are a few other folks here, either hotel guests or people here for lunch. Nobody’s eating yet, I can tell that. Earlier I heard someone down at the pool, swimming laps, and I listened while a couple had an argument about whose fault it was that they got lost yesterday.”

  “And what do you feel?”

  Bea sat for a minute, breathing in the air around her. “I feel,” she finally said, “like there are a lot of ghosts in this place. Maybe not literally, but then again, who knows?”

  The two of them remained silent until the man asked, “Do you mind if I join you?”

  Introductions were made. Rum punches ordered. Robert was a professor of cultural anthropology from Lyon, here in Haiti researching a book on “loogarros”, she thought he said.

  “Lugar-whats?”

  “The loup-garou. Werewolf, you would call it.”

  “Oh. They have those down here?” Bea was unable to control her smile.

  “Well, according to most of the people who live here, yes.”

  “Really? Well now, that’s interesting.” She tried to picture the face that went with the man’s wonderful voice.

  “It is. Everyone is brought up on stories of the loup-garou. They say that the loup-garou is a person possessed by a spirit, who can turn into a dog or cat or snake, or any kind of beast, and who steals and eats young children.”

  “Yikes.” Bea pulled a fan from her purse and unfolded it.

  “I am specifically writing about the role of the loup-garou in post-earthquake Haitian culture,” he continued, as if reading out the title of his thesis.

  “You can write a whole book about that?” she asked as she batted at the thick air closing in on her face.

  The man laughed. “Yes. Well, I hope so.”

  “So what do they have to do with the earthquake? Did the broken ground unearth a whole new batch of these creatures or something?”

  “In a way,” he explained. “You see, after the earthquake people were feeling very vulnerable, and very frightened, as you can imagine. They needed to give a name to their fears. There were many reports of loup-garous. And there were things that did happen—children did disappear. But, you see, it was more likely human monsters, rather than mythical beasts.”

  “Human monsters?” Bea, curious, leaned forward in her seat.

  “Sadly, there were many instances of kidnapping and trafficking by local gangs after the earthquake, with so many children left homeless or orphaned.”

  “That’s despicable.”

  “Yes, it is. And sometimes it was foreigners who were the culprits. For example, do you remember the story about those American aid workers who were accused of trying to smuggle homeless children across the border?”

  “I do,” Bea responded. “It was kind of a big deal at the time.” She recalled reading newspaper accounts about the controversy, the members of a church group claiming they thought they had the proper permission for taking the children to an o
rphanage in the Dominican Republic. In the end, the woman leading the group served jail time for it.

  “It was a big deal. Do you know that more than half of those thirty-three children still had parents?”

  “Disgusting! The poor babies.”

  “So, you see, the loup-garou was a way to explain these kinds of atrocities that were too hard to process after living through such a disaster.”

  “I can imagine.” Bea smiled at the man’s enthusiasm for his research. He barely seemed to catch a breath between sentences. She again wondered what he looked like, what he was wearing. She pictured him thin, but not too thin. Tanned, with deep crinkles sprouting from the corners of his eyes, which were maybe blue. His shirt would be white, or perhaps khaki-colored, and crisp, with a collar.

  “But that is enough about the loup-garou,” Robert said. “What brings a lovely woman like you to Haiti?”

  Spoken like a true Frenchman, Bea thought, smoothing back some stray tendrils of gray hair, tucking them under her turban. “It’s my granddaughter,” she explained. “Well, actually, it’s my daughter.”

  “You have family here?”

  “We think she’s here.”

  “You do not know?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Ah. I understand.”

  “Well, I’m not so sure I do. All I know is that I’ve got to get my granddaughter—Charlie’s her name—to gather up her courage to go see her mother. That’s the only way the girl’s ever going to find any peace in her life.” Bea went on to explain April’s situation, about how Charlie hadn’t heard from her mother in ten years. How Bea had tried, over and over, to contact her daughter, only to have her letters returned, unopened. How Charlie had seen through Bea’s lame attempts at sending birthday cards and Christmas gifts to Charlie, forging April’s name surrounded by x’s and o’s. How Charlie was now avoiding a reunion with her mother—the fear of rejection holding her back like a magnetic force.

  “It sounds like your granddaughter needs to have more faith in the situation, and in herself.”

  “You’ve got that right.”

  “Well then, you must teach Charlie this Haitian saying: ‘M ap degaje mwen kon Mèt Jean-Jacques.’”

  “And what does that mean?”

  “It means ‘I will handle myself like Mr. Jean-Jacques.’ Jean-Jacques Dessalines was one of the founding fathers of Haiti, the man who led the Haitian people to victory in the first successful slave revolt in the world.”

  “So Charlie is supposed to start a revolution?” Bea raised one eyebrow.

  Robert laughed. “No, no. All it means is I will do my best to handle a situation. I will find a way, no matter what.”

  He paused, and Bea heard him take a sip of his drink. She wondered if he had that head of thick, gray, pushed-back hair so many elegant older French guys had. She wondered if he still had any hair.

  “It is quite an astounding story, Dessalines and the slaves defeating Napoleon’s army to start a new country.”

  “That is impressive,” Bea agreed, her voice oozing with flattery intended for him as much as for the Haitian revolutionaries. “So what happened? It sounds like this place got off to such a good start, and all I ever hear about now is how it’s the poorest country in the western hemisphere.”

  “Well, that truly is a complicated story, one that is tangled by a series of unfortunate events. Unfortunate for the Haitians, that is, though not always for others. But I’m sure you do not want to hear all of this.”

  “But I do!” she answered, urging him on. She could listen to this man talk forever. Bea heard Robert’s chair scrape across the tile as he pulled it in closer to the table between them. I’ll bet he’s a Taurus, she thought. Strong, creative, dependable … sensual.

  “So,” he began, “as you can imagine, the white slave owners deliberately left their Haitian slaves uneducated. As brave as the revolutionaries were, what did they know about politics and government? All they were familiar with was how things worked on the plantation or in the tribe. So they rebelled against slavery and replaced it with nothing.”

  As he spoke, Bea could just imagine him pacing back and forth at the front of a lecture hall, with thick, solid arms that waved around to help make some point or another. Those French co-eds must be lining up to get into his courses.

  “But some people say the problem after the revolution was that people didn’t want to continue working the plantations,” he continued, “so the money from export crops declined, and the government went broke. Whether that is true or not, what also happened was that the rest of the world—your country and mine in particular—feared that the revolution would threaten the future of slavery elsewhere. So they refused to recognize the new country, in effect cutting Haiti off.”

  “Shameful,” she responded absently, and she did think it was terrible, even if she was somewhat distracted by the purr of Robert’s voice.

  “Yes, it was. And if you take that, and add in invasions, political corruption, outside interference, profiteering, disease, earthquakes, drought, famine, hurricanes, and overpopulation, that is the short version of how we got to where we are today, why people look at this country with only pity, and look at its people only as victims.”

  “I think I need another rum punch,” Bea said when he finally stopped.

  “I understand. It can be overwhelming. Even all these other things I’ve mentioned are complicated. I have probably told you more than you wanted to know.”

  Bea dabbed at the beads of sweat that had cropped up on her forehead. “Not at all. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed listening to you. But it is a lot to digest in one sitting.”

  “Well then, perhaps we can continue another day, if you’d like.”

  “I’d like that very much. But before you go, Robert, would you mind writing down that thing about being like Mr. Jacques? I want to give it to my Charlie. It’ll be our new battle cry.”

  “Of course.”

  Bea waited while he found a pen.

  “It has been a pleasure meeting you,” he said as he placed a slip of paper in her hand. “There is another saying they have here in Haiti: ‘Fanm se akajou: plis li vye, plis li bon.’”

  “And what does that one mean, may I ask?”

  “A woman is like mahogany: the older, the better.”

  11

  Charlie couldn’t remember the last time she’d been in a proper church. Thanks to her stepfather, religion had become such a source of confusion for her that it seemed easiest to avoid it altogether. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe in anything. On the contrary, sometimes she felt as though there were too many options when it came to explaining the universe. She just didn’t feel it necessary to pigeonhole herself into a single doctrine. And she definitely didn’t feel it necessary to proselytize anything to anyone else.

  Outside the car window, the low stone building beckoned like an ogre in a fairy tale. Come, little girl, take a look inside. Have no fear, no harm will come to you. She half wished she had agreed to Lizbeth’s offer of accompanying her to the church. But the woman had been through enough for one day. Instead, Charlie had driven her back to the hotel, asking her to please check in on Bea. She’d said goodbye to Mackenson for the day as well, confident that someone at the church would be able to speak English.

  She ran her fingers through her tangled curls and stepped out of the car. Ahead, a row of classroom doors adjacent to the church were open to any promise of a breeze. Charlie smiled at the sweet sound of a children’s choir, and proceeded toward the church entrance, only to come to a halt before the solid double doors, her ripped jeans and flip flops giving her pause.

  “Bonjou,” came a voice from behind her.

  She turned to see a serious-looking man, probably around her own age, with a clipboard under one arm. “Bonjou,” she answered back. “English?”

  The man nodded.

  “Are you the pastor?”

  Now he shook his head. “No. I am the head of discipline
for the school. Do you need to see Pastè Samuel?”

  Charlie felt his disapproving eyes upon her apparel. “Yes, if it’s possible.”

  The man opened the door to the church and gestured for her to enter. “Then I will go find him for you.”

  Inside the church it was slightly cooler, and dark—the only light came from behind orange curtains covering the windows that flanked two sides of the room. Charlie could imagine the churchwomen busy at their sewing machines, whipping up the fringed valances that made the place look more like an Old West saloon than a house of worship. The ceiling was high, making the room almost as tall as it was wide, its beams supporting huge sheets of corrugated tin.

  But it was the flowers that truly got her attention. Huge bunches of faded silk flowers—in bundles that were wired to the walls between each window, spilling out of boxes lining the raised stage at the front of the church, in vases atop the two pedestals flanking the pulpit, a centerpiece atop the piano—a massive quantity of synthetic bouquets that someone had obviously arranged with great pride. Charlie had just bent down to blow some dust off a tired-looking peony when the pastor entered.

  “Good afternoon,” he said, holding out a hand that was cool and dry in hers. “I am Pastor Samuel. How can I help you today?”

  Charlie looked at the man before her, in his crisp, dark slacks and boxy short-sleeved shirt buttoned up to the neck. His eyes seemed to sparkle behind a pair of dark-framed glasses. The man exuded a serenity she could only wish to attain. She couldn’t remember possessing that type of calm since she was a sleepy child resting at her mother’s side, counting the stars in the black jungle sky.

  “My name is Charlie. Charlie Clark,” she added, using the name she’d been given before changing it back to Barnaby, the one she shared with Bea. “April Clark’s daughter.”

  Pastor Samuel seemed to stiffen a little, his gentle smile freezing in place. “Pastor Jim is your father?”