This One Sky Day, page 1
LEONE ROSS
This One Sky Day
In memory of Shaka
For Marjorie
Because of Joan
Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.
AUDRE LORDE
Old fire-stick easy fi ketch
JAMAICAN PROVERB
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraphs
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright
1
On the first anniversary of his wife’s death, Xavier Redchoose got up before light and went downstairs to salt the cod. He sat in his kitchen, green notebook in hand, rubbing his left thumb along the stained pages, waiting for delivery. Through the restaurant window, he could see the golden stalk of a fading moon. Around him, the Torn Poem was silent, except for the morning wind, making the front doors shiver.
It was going to be a trying day, of that he was sure.
The local fisherman arrived promptly, his adolescent son trailing behind him, father genuflecting, son’s eyes downcast and fixed on the backs of their silver-blue catch. It was this same boy who had found Xavier’s wife floating in the sea, limbs tentacled, and carried her corpse onto the beach. He said Nya’s dead voice sounded like rotting pineapple: sweet and grating as she tapped his chest.
You can put me down now, boy. It gone bad, already.
The fisherman’s son watched her walk down the sand until he couldn’t see her anymore.
Why you never hold her there? snapped Xavier. Call for me? Something.
I never know how, the boy whined.
Take me two day to get him up here to tell you, macaenus! the father said. Damn fool go hide in a bush!
When people died alone, without proper burial rites, the carcass wandered for years, rudderless, rotting and shrinking. They had all seen these ghosts, rebuilding their bodies with bits of rubbish, hanging on, half-maddened. People who died alone: heart attack, stroke, old age, sleep-and-dream-and-dead. Fall and lick your head on a rock. Poverty. Murder. Suicide. Drowning. People whispered behind their hands. All of them dead of the same thing, you know. Loneliness.
It hurt Xavier, to think of his fierce wife, so.
Xavier paid for the fish – two thick bellies and a sack of velvety cod livers – and watched the youth’s trembling mouth as he hoisted it onto the kitchen table. He didn’t forgive the boy. How hard was it to restrain a dead woman, when so much was at stake?
‘Blessings, macaenus,’ said the fisherman. He patted the cod. ‘Walk good today, you hear?’
Xavier nodded.
He leaned against the kitchen door, listening to them make their way back through his cliff-top garden, imagining every plant they passed: his pearly bougainvillea; the night-blooming cereus clambering up the mango tree; his pawpaws and twin almond trees; his hot pepper, pumpkins and white roses. He liked flowering plants between the herbs; they attracted the right kind of insect. Down the sheer steps they went, calling softly to each other: mind how you go. He liked the fisherman’s voice. It reminded him of being young. Before you got so very speaky-spokey, macaenus, his brother Io liked to say, grinning all over his face. Xavier sucked his teeth. He wasn’t too fancy, whatever his elder brother said. He still knew how to curse a man in the language of their ancestors.
He rubbed his palm-heel across his jaw. His beard needed trimming.
Chse, Io’s seven-year-old daughter, would be in here soon, demanding breakfast from him. She was an early riser, too. In the months just after Nya died, Chse was the only person who dared come to his room without invitation, jumping into his hammock and swinging her legs. She told him he looked far too tall, and why didn’t he do something about it, and when the room smelled – ooh, so bad! – she’d stretched her arm to open the window and turned his face towards the sunshine.
You going out today, Uncle?
Not today, Chse.
She pulled his nose until he gave in and tossed her, giggling, into the air.
Don’t drop me, Uncle Speaky-Spokey!
*
Xavier took a deep breath and stepped out into his yard. The dark garden poured out in front of him, and beyond that, the islands of Popisho. The Torn Poem was perfectly located on Battisient: right inside the capital Pretty Town but still private, on the cliff above the harbour. Up here, he could see his diners snaking across the sand towards him, then away afterwards, a silvery line of nourished people stretching back to the sea, like foam.
After he fed them, some swam, some danced.
An orange sliver climbed the horizon, no more than the peeping eye of an egg. He closed his eyes and began turning a single, slow circle, back straight, arms out and palms up. Beaches east and west, at the end of his fingertips; the old-gold bay and its harnessed fishing boats splintered across the soft water; the tall, thin schoolhouse; Bend Down Market; the solemn chiming Temple – why, his finger might just touch it; one of the toy factories, painted ugly green, like something you found up your nose after a bad cold; squat, creamy cottages spiralling into the hills, lit by front-yard cook-fires at night. Sometimes he visited the owners and offered them fire-dye in particular colours, so that his diners could admire the light. Yes, macaenus, they said, smiling at his quiet face. Of course, for you, and the gods that chose you.
He stopped circling and opened his eyes. Battisient’s sister island, Dukuyaie, glimmered in the distance, its thick hide grainy in the dawn. You could see the Dead Islands if you looked north and squinted: like a spray of wet, blue pebbles. It had been so long since he’d walked them.
The world was stirring awake again, and he had a list of things to do today in his green notebook.
Fish delivery
Fuckery
*
They didn’t have Nya’s body to bathe or bind, so he had prepared a ceremony by the ocean. He stood, linking arms with his mother-in-law, their family and friends crowded around them, silent obeah women in golden robes scattering herbs and making rum libation in the water. Tragic, people muttered, too loud for his liking. She was never a strong swimmer.
She going come to you Xav, Mamma Suth said, standing composed in his day room, patting his shoulder. You know they haunt the one they love the most. He kissed her forehead. Her eyes were dry. She’d screamed when she heard her one-child was dead, and pitched herself backward, only caught by her husband, who wrapped his arms around her waist, clutched her belly and shook it fiercely.
She will want her mother, Xavier murmured. But they both knew she was right. Nya would come back to him, looking freedom. And the only way to free a ghost was to … dispense with whatever was left.
He was ready to do what was necessary. What the fisherman’s son couldn’t do.
After the funeral he’d changed into work clothes and begun preparations for evening service. He hadn’t neglected a single one. Even in those early months when he slept whole days, his back to Nya’s empty hammock, he had still gotten up and staggered into the kitchen when the sun went down, eyes slitted, hoisting slabs of goat and coney on his shoulder, eating crusts and vegetable ends, needing to break bone and use his knives.
His sous-chef Moue came into the kitchen in her funeral whites to ask what he was doing.
Xavier paused over the sputtering pans, noticing absently that his hands were shaking.
It wouldn’t surprise Nya, he said.
No, macaenus. Moue didn’t blink. But I not talking surprise. I talking decency. She was a reticent woman, but she’d been very fond of his wife.
Xavier sucked his teeth and turned back to his stove. Moue sucked hers right back and turned on her heel. He’d tried out eleven cooks before he found her, with her sensitive nose and her crochet-bump hair – such a little-girl hairstyle! The way she skimmed the stockpot was like conducting a choir. But she didn’t come back that evening, and he was left with the pot-washer and one of the waitresses, roped in to brush mushrooms and slide the cakes out, to follow behind him wiping plates and moving wrong. The waitress burnt herself twice and actually complained about it. Did she not know that chefs’ backs were worn and flayed things? His hands were criss-crossed with scars from twisting sinew and boiling syrup and someone in the kitchen walking into him with scalding gravy; scars from pig bristles and fish scales; from being tired; from picking up a hot pan, roaring: What, nobody never hear me when I said dust down the handles with flour so everybody can see they hot, raaaaaaaaaass!
The memory of Moue’s disapproval still irritated him. He expected his second to understand her duty. He had a scant twenty years to cook a meal for every single adult man and woman on Popisho. To delight a whole nation with his food. It was an entire life’s work, training for it, then doing it. Finding his own replacement, his acolyte, and training th
Nya’s death reminded him that nothing was promised.
As the weeks passed, he became consumed with the idea that he’d be out when Nya returned. At market when she came looking for him in the shelter of their bedroom; in Temple with Chse while Nya waited in the garden. Out, out, out, while she rotted and searched for him. Asleep when she arrived; that seemed the cruellest possibility of all.
Did ghosts cry? No matter. He had to stay inside and wait.
Flex his hands and shoulders.
Do it quick, I beg you, Mamma Suth had said.
Months then, not a toe outside the Torn Poem, not even to soothe the garden. Sitting in his bedroom all day or circling through the building late at night, he’d felt his own potential madness. He found old notes she’d left for him before she died, slipped down the back of the stove, unread and oily, or caught under a plant: meet me here, Xav, and why don’t we go …? and he stood holding them, whispering: wife, wife. The word turned into a crimson shadow and blew through a crack in the wall, down the sea-cliff and into a neighbour’s house, where it made the children gag and paw at their mouths.
But in all of a year, Nya never find her way back home.
*
Io arrived at the front door two weeks after the funeral, all his corroches stuffed into three battered valises and a yellow chicken under each arm. He had his own calamities: an accident on a building site the year before had left him twisted and limping; the convalescence ruined his marriage.
Xavier grunted, let him in and went back to his room to wait for Nya.
Io declared himself Grand Concierge, in charge of all comings and goings at the Torn Poem, and promptly began a lunch-hour catering business. Simple chicken dumplings and coconut water. He nailed a sign at the bottom of the cliff.
You only get macaenus food
once a lifetime
But you can buy dumpling here every day!
The venture was an immediate success: three days of neat, warm packages passed briskly through the kitchen window; scrupulous cleanliness; extra work for the Torn Poem staff; union wages; everything cleaned up tight, so the macaenus didn’t have to stress when he came downstairs.
Every day!
Xavier didn’t notice the brazen campaign until Moue pointed out the large and outraged group of citizens arriving with a petition for the removal of the sign. Irritably, he sent a message for them not to be so sensitive and watched the crowd dispersing from his bedroom window, all lip-biting and head-hanging. He understood their loyalty to him; he also understood Io’s sense of humour – his brother was a true egalitarian. Xavier suspected Io didn’t believe in any god, much less the idea his baby brother had been chosen by them. What Io knew how to do was work hard and go on long, halting walks.
Want to walk, Xav?
No, he wasn’t ready.
Macaenus better wear red drawers. He’d overheard the waitresses. ’Case she come back for him dicky.
After service, when the night was deep and their backs were raw and Chse put to bed, the brothers sat together on the veranda and Io knew when to be quiet and when to talk, swapping low, funny, outrageous stories of the day, each absentmindedly trying to outdo the other. If you passed by, you’d have heard nothing more than grunts and half-sentences, in that way of people who have known each other for years.
Except recently, Xavier saw the restlessness in his brother’s eyes.
*
Everything but Nya had arrived that year: fresh milk from the goat-man; pomegranate season; a woman trying to sell him hand-carved buttons for his robes; another with one breast bigger than the other who wept at the door to think of him widowed, Moue shooing her with a dish-rag; Chse’s constant band of playmates; and the Governor’s letter, nearly three months ago, printed on thick, expensive, imported paper.
It was that letter started off the particular fuckery scribbled down in Xavier’s green notebook. Sent from the home of Governor Bertrand Intiasar and His Wife, the letter informed Xavier Laurence Redchoose – four hundred and thirteenth macaenus – of the recent and glorious engagement of their one-daughter, Sonteine Melody Ignoble Intiasar, to Dandu Abraham Brenteninton.
It also said the Governor would be delighted to welcome the macaenus into their home to cook a traditional wedding-night meal for the newlyweds.
Xavier snorted and ripped the thing in half. Wedding-night feasts were a common thing, said to confer good fortune and sweet life on happy couples, along with various other long and complicated steps and blessings. But Bertie Intiasar knew better than to ask him to do it. Send a letter indeed!
He hated letters.
*
His first meeting with the Governor had been in this same kitchen, ten years ago, Ascension Day, the day he took up his title, the garden stuffed with people for the ceremony. He and Nya had been in residence for less than a week; the restaurant didn’t even have a name yet.
Xavier hovered in the kitchen, waiting for an obeah woman to come and present him formally to local dignitaries, and make him do something – wave? – at the crowds packing the beach below. He had been expecting the Governor of course, as guest of honour, but he didn’t like the way the man bounced in. Intiasar was surprisingly sweet-faced; everybody knew he’d spent time in foreign, off-island; it charmed far too many.
Don’t bleed me dry and don’t cause no scandal, that was the first thing Intiasar said, leaning against the good-good stove and eyeing the garlic bulbs. Not even a good afternoon, to rass. And when time come to cheat on that pretty wife, keep it quiet. The men will appreciate it, but the women won’t.
Xavier regarded him patiently. Things had become slack with macaenus in recent years. Bad reputations. Too many parties for attention and clout. It wasted time, lacked dignity and made poor people nervous to come and eat, ’sake they never have the right party frock. His place was going to be different, but only a fool told a powerful fool he was a fool.
I only have one thing I want, Xavier said.
And what is that?
A randomised guest list. No one skips my line. No special treatment.
The Governor looked amused.
Aren’t you a self-righteous creature.
Not even you.
Intiasar put a hand on his own cheek, a curiously feminine gesture. You mean I going have to wait my turn to eat from your hand? My beating heart.
He knew the Governor would need dishes bursting with vegetables when his time came, and moisture: gravy, goat’s milk, syrup, ice water, sap, marrow, rum.
Alright. I have to respect any man who fucked Des’ree De Bernard-Mas and lived.
His master-teacher. First woman macaenus. Sitting outside with the other guests of honour, her nipples visible through her soft green robe. Incorrigible woman. Nya had looked sour, ushered in next to Des’ree. They had met before. He had hoped it was nothing more than the sunshine slamming into her face.
Des’ree would have told him to punch this fool, quick o’clock.
And ascend, boy. Hurry up.
She wouldn’t have liked sitting next to Nya, either.
*
Three days after he threw away the Governor’s letter, Xavier was making bread in the kitchen when Salmonie Adolphus Barnes burst in, Io one rickety step behind him. Salmonie was a well-preserved man in his late seventies, with a huge red nose like a half-capsicum. He identified himself as Governor Intiasar’s houseboy and began to read from a series of papers in a loud and self-important voice.
Xavier attended to his bread. He needed to add pimento berries and goat’s cheese at the right time and in the right amount, which was an act of love, and therefore concentration.
What a blessed duty, bleated Salmonie. To speak of the most romantic meal in the world! Seven dishes, as predicted auspicious for the couple. I am sure we could find Temple tales foretelling this special meal, macaenus!
Xavier ignored him.
Naturally, explained Salmonie, the macaenus would be paid well, much in excess of his annual stipend. Someone going come and take your measurements, sah, so luxurious robes can be made for the occasion.
