The Sea Grape Tree

by Gillian Royes

  “We don’t have donkeys walking the streets of London, thank you.”

  “Come on,” he said, standing. “Let’s get you a Britney. Maybe we’ll hear a few more donkeys braying or even see one.”

  “But you haven’t finished your painting.”

  “I’ll do that tomorrow. Lambert told me about this place farther up where they serve tea and scones or something, very English. You going to like it.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “Strawberry Hill, I think.”

  When they’d loaded everything back in the car and were well on their way up the winding road, Sarah heard Penny’s voice as if it were coming from the backseat.

  It’s not like you’re going to disappear into the mountains or anything.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  * * *

  You seen Danny?” Janet said, and threw a big handbag on the counter, the gold chains on the front clinking.

  “No,” Shad said. “I just know he play golf yesterday—”

  “I can’t find him nowhere,” the woman said, looking behind her as if she was expecting to find him hiding under a table. “Miss Mac say he gone from early morning, and he didn’t say nothing to me about leaving town.”

  “Maybe he have some work to do in Port Antonio.”

  “On a Friday night?”

  Shad grunted. There was no way he’d mention that he’d seen Danny speeding down the road early that morning, heading toward the east end of the bay. Shad had waved, but the big man hadn’t noticed, which had been fine with the bartender, because he was going in the opposite direction, anyway, and he’d needed more time to think about his last conversation with Beth.

  “They want me to wear a uniform,” she’d announced as soon as he stirred that morning. He’d groaned and she repeated it to make sure he’d heard.

  “That good,” he said, his head half hidden by the pillow. He hoped she would get up the way she usually did, get the children ready for school, and leave him to sleep some more. The bar had been full the evening before with folks who’d abstained over the Ash Wednesday holiday, and they hadn’t left until the first cock was crowing.

  “If it was a nice uniform, yes,” she said, “but this uniform look terrible. The color terrible, the style of it terrible.”

  “It going to save you money,” he said, opening one eye. Between them, the rump of a sleeping Joshua was high in the air, his thumb in his mouth.

  “I prefer to sew it myself, though. I can make it look nice.”

  “Ask them, nuh?” There would be no getting up, he remembered. The children had just started Easter break.

  “I going to ask them on Monday. First thing after they show me what to do, I going to ask them.”

  His best line of defense was not to answer, he’d decided, and rolled over to go back to sleep.

  “If they say yes, you have to fix the sewing machine leg for me,” she said, undaunted. “I need you to fix it, anyway, like how I have to finish the wedding dress.”

  He turned over and squinted at her. “What the date, again?”

  Beth turned toward the curtain, where the sun was already peeping through a gap. “Look how many times I tell you. You tell me last year I was to find a day, not a holiday weekend, not Father’s Day or Mother’s Day, and I tell you Saturday, July twenty-eight. Like you not listening to me.”

  “Why we can’t just live together in peace, the way we living now?” he asked, beating the dead horse one last time.

  Beth sat up violently, making the mattress shake. Joshua raised his head. “How many women and children now with no man, where the man just go off to Kingston or America or go live with another woman? Plenty, right?”

  “I tell you, I not—”

  “That’s what you say now, but you can still leave. If you don’t want to married, maybe I should be the one to leave, like how I have a job now. Is not only man can leave, you know. You ever think of that?” She picked up the whining Joshua and stalked out of the room, her swinging rump in the blue T-shirt chastising Shad in her wake.

  Sleep had been impossible afterward, and he’d eventually taken a cold shower and gone to work early, spotting Danny along the way. He’d blundered through mopping the floor of the bar, kicked over the bucket of dirty water when he finished, and had to mop all over again. After dusting the shelves and bottles, he’d sat down in the kitchen and listened to Maisie complain about Solomon and his drinking. Lunchtime was spent with Miss Mac going over an application for a permit, but her words about the Parish Council’s requirements kept getting mixed up with Beth’s threat to leave. While Miss Mac read, her glasses sliding down her nose, he pictured himself walking around the empty house, tossing and turning in an empty bed.

  Miss Mac’s stew peas did nothing to ease his mood. When he returned to the bar that afternoon, he served drinks to the customers without cracking jokes and took food orders without making recommendations. Even Triumphant Arch and two other locals at the end of the counter hadn’t been able to engage him in their wrangling.

  “You listening to me or what?” Janet said. “I want a Coke, and put little rum in it for me, nuh?” She climbed onto a bar stool, her mouth sour. “I don’t know what get into Danny the last few days. Like he always busy, have to do this and do that.”

  “He working on the hotel.”

  “Something different, I saying.”

  “He getting down to business, man.” He placed a rum and Coke in front of Janet and started wiping down the counter.

  “I don’t know about getting down to business.” The woman bent toward him, her chin brushing the rim of her glass. “The only thing he getting down to is painting.”

  “He painting?”

  “I telling you. Every day he painting—beach and coconut tree, even the bar.” She crowed, a sharp hoot of a sound, and shook her head. “You should see them. They look like a child paint them! He ask me if I want to learn and I say, No, sir. I tell him that big people don’t play with paint like pickney. I tell him I busy, I have to sew people’s clothes.” She cupped her chin with her hands. “If you ask me, is pure foolishness.” The word came out with such venom that Shad didn’t tell her how he’d watched Jennifer painting the fish mural at the old hotel and thought it would be a joy to paint on a wall and get paid for it.

  By the time Shad got back from serving whiskey to three foreigners at a table, Janet’s drink was nearly finished and she was feeling better.

  “I have a plan, though,” she said with a smirk.

  “What kind of plan?”

  “I going to the obeah doctor.”

  “What you talking?” Shad breathed, eyes wide, thinking of the obeah man, an intelligent man, who’d worn a white suit to his daughter’s wedding in the bar.

  “You going to work obeah on Danny? You joking, right?”

  “I telling you, I going to get some Oil-of-Never-Stray.”

  Shad leaned across the counter with a fierce frown. “You don’t know is devil business that? Danny is a modern man. You can’t work no obeah on him!”

  Janet emptied her glass and sucked a cube of ice into her mouth. “I just going to sprinkle little bit on him,” she said, like she was gargling.

  “If he ever find out, you know what would happen?” No hotel, no partnership.

  She crunched down on the ice and chewed it. “If he find out, I will know who tell him.” She pushed away from the counter. “Mistah Daniel Caines not going to get away just so. He a big fish, but I a bigger fisherman.”

  “You mean you want to married to him.” The public secret from the minute she stepped into the welcome party in the tight, white dress, the bridal omen.

  “What you think?” she said with a smile that set the gold tooth leering. “He a good-looking man and he have money. He tell me he own all kind of business, hairdressing parlor and mall. And,” she
added with a wink, “he like a tiger in bed. He know where to put it and love a pum-pum. Watch me, he not going to get away. Miss Janet going to put some oil on Mistah Danny, and he going to put a ring on her finger.”

  At the end of the bar, Tri called for another shot of white rum and two Red Stripes. The bartender nodded to Janet. “Don’t go nowhere.”

  When he returned, the seamstress had disappeared. Her glass sat empty, all the ice cubes eaten.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  * * *

  I’m being lazy tonight,” Sonja declared as the party of four pulled out chairs. “Our helper is off and I don’t feel like cooking.”

  “Glad to have you,” Eric said, smiling at the two attractive women, pleased that he’d slicked his hair back in a neat ponytail and had on a new cotton shirt. He raised his arm to signal Shad, but the barman was already on his way to the table.

  Roper gave his drink order in a monotone, unusual for him, and complained of his tiring drive from Kingston that day. Their guest, the Englishwoman, looked pretty tonight in a blue dress with straps, her face and arms pinker than Eric remembered. On the group’s last visit to the bar, she’d been silent and sad looking, despite the fiery hair, her eyes constantly circling, observing. Beside her sat the tall African-­American man, the trumpeter, who’d been with them the last time. A couple, maybe?

  “What’s on the menu tonight?” Sonja asked.

  “I think jerk chicken,” Eric said. “Shad will tell you.” He slapped at a mosquito on his arm and walked back to the refrigerator. Shad returned to the bar after taking the order and tuned the radio to a soca song, something with a fast beat and a man shouting, Jump, jump.

  “Do you have to play that?” Eric complained, pulling the top off a ginger ale bottle.

  “It make the crowd happy.”

  “You don’t look too happy.”

  The younger man stroked his chin. “Boss, I have something to ask you.”

  Eric took a sip of his ginger ale. “Go on.” And while Shad poured Merlot into a wineglass and three Red Stripes into beer glasses, he told him about Beth’s threat to leave.

  “I wouldn’t take her seriously,” Eric said, and rounded the counter. “Women have a way of saying things to. . . . Bet it blows over in a couple days.”

  “No, Beth don’t blow over. She want to get married, and she going to move mountain and river to do it. Her father was a preacher and her parents married, you know. You would think that, like how they dead now, she would forget about it. But no, we living in sin, and the older she get, the worse she get. All she thinking about is marriage.”

  “Marriage!” Eric blew out of the side of his mouth. “You know my opinion on that subject. So what d’you want to ask me?”

  Shad placed the drinks on a round wooden tray and folded four napkins. “I asking you, boss, about your mother and father. You say they was married a long time. You think they had a good marriage?”

  Eric sat down on a bar stool. “And you want to know this because . . .”

  “I was just thinking—hold on, I coming back.” Shad rushed off with the drinks to Roper’s table, but he was back in five minutes, after handing in their food orders to the kitchen. “As I was saying—maybe, if your parents was miserable, that is why you so against marriage. Maybe if they had a good marriage, you would more favor it, you know. I notice that people from families with happy parents, those people want to get married, like Beth. I was wondering if it go the other way—when the parents miserable, the children don’t like marriage.”

  It was an awkward moment for Eric, who knew that, as a white foreigner, he occupied a rare status in Largo. Although he was gossiped about and sometimes laughed at (even to his face), he was also considered a man of the world with an American passport, on par with the preacher and the obeah man. Advice from him was taken seriously and he was careful about giving it.

  Eric shifted his buttocks on the stool, trying to get comfortable. “Well, no marriage is a hundred percent happy.”

  “I hear you, boss, but were your parents irie, you know, cool? They like one another?”

  “Why you asking me this now?”

  “Miss Mac was saying that sometimes a person have an opinion that form from when they was growing up, and it influence everything they do when they big. She said her mother used to tell her all the time that a woman is better off living alone, and that make her live without a man. So I was thinking, maybe the reason you don’t like marriage was because of your parents’ marriage, you know.” He looked over his shoulder toward the partition. “Stick a pin.”

  While Shad was in the kitchen checking on his orders, Eric looked out at the black vastness beyond the cliff. It was a moonless night, the waves beneath breaking the darkness. The memory of the brown belt—once his immigrant grandfather’s—was so etched in his mind he could even remember the dent on the silver buckle, remember his father’s hand reaching under his brother’s bed to haul him out, remember every lash the old man had given him. And if he closed his eyes, he could hear the man slamming through the house in the middle of the night, drunk as a skunk, calling for his dinner, and hear his mother’s complaining footsteps as she rolled down the corridor to the kitchen, hear it like it happened yesterday.

  When Shad returned, Eric put his elbows on the counter. “My mother only stayed because she’d been a housewife all her life and didn’t have a choice. I never knew how she stuck it out, though. They quarreled all the time, about everything. Why you think I left home so early and moved to New York?”

  After draining his glass, Eric walked to Roper’s table. “Enjoying the stew?”

  “Delicious,” the Englishwoman said with a nod.

  “Have a seat,” Roper said, and the bar owner sat down, enjoying the delighted moans from the table about Solomon’s dishes.

  “I’m glad you joined us,” the trumpeter said, his voice like Brooklyn and the South mixed up.

  Sonja put down her fork. “Ford wants to ask you something.”

  “Shoot,” Eric said. A night of questions, it seemed.

  “Would you like some music in the place?” Ford asked. “I notice you have a radio, but I was wondering if you’d be interested in some live music.”

  “I couldn’t pay anybody,” Eric said quickly.

  Ford’s nostrils flared, the diamond sparkling in his nose. “I wouldn’t charge you anything, man. I just thought if you wanted to have a party or something, I could blow my horn, you know.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “That I am.”

  Roper leaned toward Eric. “He’s terrific, I’m telling you. You can hardly get into his gigs in Manhattan.”

  “Why do you want to play here?” Eric asked. His bar was a dive; no decent musician would want to play in a place with a thatch roof and concrete floor. And chances were that Largoites might not appreciate a foreign musician playing foreign music. All they wanted was reggae and calypso. It could be a quiet night like tonight, no breeze, just mosquitoes buzzing around and only a few customers. It could be embarrassing.

  “I’m getting anxious to play again, I guess, but I’m not ready to go back home,” Ford replied. “It would be my way of giving something back.”

  “You can’t pass this up, Eric,” Sonja urged. “It would cost you thousands if you were in the States.”

  “Just a minute,” Eric said, holding up his hand, signaling toward the bar. When Shad approached the table, he recounted the offer.

  “What you going to need?” Shad queried Ford.

  “I’m going to need somebody to play drums.”

  “And guitar? My cousin play guitar in Ocho Rios. He’ll know a drummer.” And before the dinner was digested, it had been arranged that Ford and a pickup band would perform in Eric’s humble venue, date and time to be decided.

  While they were all beaming with the new plan (Eric alrea
dy calculating money out, money in), two customers entered the bar. The large man looked serious and calm, his date jubilant and wearing a dress with a waist so tight she looked ready to explode out of both ends.

  “Danny!” Roper called.

  The couple turned toward them. Danny’s face clouded over for a second before he smiled. He seemed uncertain about whether to join them until the woman tugged at his arm. There was no doubt in Eric’s mind about the reason for the man’s hesitation. He was still unhappy about the trip to Simone Island that afternoon.

  From his arrival, Danny had been curious about the island. He wasn’t the only one. Almost every visitor who passed through the village wondered what the moldy buildings had been, wondered who would have taken a boat a quarter mile out to sea to occupy those buildings. Many asked at the bar while sipping a beer and Shad or Eric would recount the tale of the broken peninsula and marooned hotel.

  When Danny’s curiosity had reached its peak, he’d told Eric he wanted to examine the future campsite and, rowing an old canoe rented from Minion, a retired fisherman, Eric had taken Danny over before lunch, his first visit since Simone had left. That midday, the water had been as choppy as usual and the trip unremarkable. When they got to the island’s small beach, Danny had leaped over the side of the canoe and hauled the boat onto the beach. Then he’d looked up at the fifteen-foot cliff in front of them.

  “Is that how you usually get up, by climbing that steep path?”

  Eric had nodded; Danny had frowned. He said nothing more until they’d ascended the path, their bare feet slipping back every few steps. At the top, they walked between the lemongrass to the almond tree in the center of the island. There they had stood examining the two long, roofless buildings. The southern one, Eric pointed out, had housed the registration area, the bar, and the guest rooms, and the northern one—at a right angle to the other—had served as dining room, housekeeping, and maintenance offices.