This One Sky Day, page 17
And who considered the life of a whore?
Intiasar, he wrote a letter. Mixie had it.
Do it because I said so.
Across Popisho, Mixie’s whores sit and wait for news. They scan the horizon, strain their ears for shouting. They hold their breath and their foreheads. Some want to go back and stand with Mixielyn Sharon Establishment the Second, but she said no, she said if they try to help, she will never dance with them again, or eat butterflies after shift; she will spit at their feet, they will never get another coin from her purse.
Others are too frightened to offer, but they think of her.
The four women left in the watermelon house look at each other and are surprised to see they agree. It shouldn’t surprise them. Even the quietest woman in Popisho feels inside herself the potential for virago.
‘Damn disgusting and out of order,’ said Rhita. ‘I don’t see no charity inside here. This family only have expensive underneath.’
Anise was aware of her entire body: the backs of her calves tight, her nipples scraping against cotton.
‘Let them come,’ she said. She headed for the stairs.
‘What you doing?’ asked Mixie. She looked both terrified and relieved.
‘Trust me.’ She still had Ingrid’s teaching. She knew how to begin.
It took her no more than a few minutes to find Lyla’s abandoned pum-pum, springy and soft under a crocus plant below the window. The spell would be small; it was only her seventh; Ingrid said to use them sparingly. This spell might complete Lyla’s crochet dress or weave a plait or cut a piece of a lawn crisp with a machete. It wouldn’t hold back swarms or armies. It would hardly fill a jar or your belly if you ate it, nor could it clean a whole house, if asked. But it might be enough.
She walked upstairs, cradling her small prize. Her own vulva cooled against her hip. Might it eventually lose heat and die?
‘I am afraid, Teacher.’ She spoke out loud. The walls rippled in the heat, impassive. She imagined Ingrid’s merriment: two-three pum-pum more than enough for this! She wouldn’t have been scared.
Ingrid had beaten the sheets with her fists and called out in a kind of wordless triumph as she died.
Anise’s chest hitched.
The women followed her instructions as quickly as they could. Rhita and Lyla scrubbed the veranda floor, drying it on their hands and knees, sprinkling salt crystals and green pepper flakes. Each woman removed her thigh cuff. They nestled together in Anise’s hands: red, yellow, brown leather, gold inlay.
Mixie and Lyla dragged the heavy dining table out into the front yard and set chairs around it. It would be helpful if they could get the men to sit down; it was harder to attack once you’d sat down in somebody place. Anise took white yarn from Lyla’s basket and strung it from the eaves, like a washing line. She hung the pum-pums from it, side by side, facing outwards. Her own and Mixie’s. She turned Lyla’s upside down and tapped it. Three red ants scurried out. She fastened it next to the other two. It would have to be enough.
They reminded her of masks.
How might her father and husband feel, watching her prepare to face men? She didn’t know. There was no time to ask them, and it troubled her that she wasn’t sure.
Did a macaenus have the time to consider the life of a whore? He would, surely. The thing she remembered most about Xavier was his kindness.
His beautiful, tired hands.
The sisters joined her on the veranda. Lyla wore the just-finished crocheted frock: like a fisher’s net, weaving around her long, bare throat, long bare waist, down to long bare ankles; orange twine, pink and peach, inlaid with glistening shells. Her skin was moist, her sunflower head, brilliant. Curve-bellied. You might lick her in the sunshine.
Lyla looked up at the swaying line of glorious flesh; she reached up to stroke her contribution and smiled at Anise.
‘Maybe is a good thing to say goodbye in a more useful fashion.’
Mixie sat down on the veranda wall. Her chest looked shrunken. Rhita put an arm around her. ‘I would offer to string up my own, but it fix back tight-tight, like nothing never happen.’
Mixie nodded.
‘Hopefully the same for all of us when we done.’ Anise tried to speak lightly.
‘If they don’t rip them down,’ said Mixie.
Surely no man would harm a healer.
What a stupid thing to think. You not important. Man hold down child and granny and you know the amount of bad-lucky woman you meet every week: broke heart, broke face, spirit in the mud. The whole of them come to you for healing, so don’t go on like you don’t know. When man behave bad them take it serious, like is a work of art, and the government don’t care.
She couldn’t listen to her fear, or she would run.
She focused on Lyla’s amazing frock. It was as if the woman was still weaving, her fingers in motion. She didn’t seem to need her pum-pum to feel her own power. She didn’t seem to need anything. Could she be just as self-contained as Lyla, and wear pretty frocks?
‘See them coming, there,’ said Mixie.
Yes, they were. Dark and smiling men, slipping through the gate.
The women held hands.
15
Romanza watched Xavier, sitting at the front of the long, smooth canoe, scooping double handfuls of sea water and pouring it over his head. Droplets nestled in his dreadlocks like translucent insects. He was pleased to see the macaenus looking so relaxed.
He could hardly believe he was taking Xavier Redchoose to the Dead Islands, to neck-back! He had it all planned out. First, they would go to the Jehjeh Gardens in the west for herbs and fruit the macaenus probably never heard of, then to meet real people, cooking on the bare ground. He’d never expected to buck-up the macaenus on walkround today; you always wanted to see him, of course, in that way you wanted to see something rare and fascinating, but you never thought it would happen. He was relieved at his luck; who could have known his father made Xavier so angry he was liable to throw up his hands and serve Sonteine a cup of sea water? Break her heart!
That wasn’t going to happen in here, today. He knew he could inspire Xavier into cooking something spectacular, walking out the Dead Islands, and breathing right. Cooking an indigent feast was a master stroke. His sister would love it; Intiasar would be furious. And so much could be learned. And taught. Which, as Pilar always said, was just another way of learning. Macaenus come! Yes indeed, the indigent were ready for this macaenus, for this quiet, earnest, angry man. Pilar said they’d never taken to Des’ree. Too loud.
And maybe by the end of the day a little something might just be revealed and painted up all-about, in orange. Some whirling cook-man truth. You never knew when that kind of thing might arise.
The canoe was manned by two older indigent men. As soon as he and Xavier crested the dune on Carenage beach, the vessel had slipped around the headland, as if it had been waiting. There were so many things Romanza loved about the indigent; this uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time was just extra style. Their instinct for each other was unparalleled.
Sunshine beat a pattern on their backs. The ocean seemed light green, the seabed empty and rippled.
He knew one of the oarsmen well. Berel, son of Art had three granddaughters and a wife with a cylindrical body and her eyes on her back and he was staring at Xavier as he rowed, his brow brilliant with sweat. Xavier turned to meet the stare. Romanza watched the two men hover in tension. Eventually Berel looked down and bent back to his task. His arms were threaded with veins under the black, sand-encrusted skin. Wah. It was some man, to outstare an indigent elder.
Xavier Redchoose was an entirely impressive somebody, and all the more because he didn’t seem to know it. So handsome of course, but something else that felt substantial in the bone. You heard about him all your life, about all the macaenus and their kind, but it was only in person you could appreciate the sweep of this body, the weight that suited him, those kind and worried eyes. He was ethereal and grounded at the same time, and it was strange to see. Like when you woke up in the morning to a ghost loping through the trees and accepted that this was the way some people were meant to spend their time.
Romanza had taken the third set of oars for a time, but soon gave up, sweating and grinning. Not so easy, baba! Berel teased, slapping him on the shoulder. He’d resumed starboard, and trailed his hand through the water, creating a foamy wake. Xavier was doing the same thing, one huge hand breaking the water.
Romanza thought about the so-few lies the macaenus told, and the biggest lie, looped around his neck. Moth eater, thinking no one would notice.
Whoo-oo, said the oars through the lime water. Romanza coughed.
According to his father’s municipal records, nobody lived in the ninety-nine tiny cays that made up the Dead Islands. In practice, everybody knew hundreds of indigent were scattered there on any given one-sky day, although most were uninhabited: stale, unyielding rock, toilets for petulant birds and pockets of undiscovered strangeness where no one dared go. Uncle Leo kept his warehouse on the largest cay, where the off-island ships slipped in for the toys, and the most ordinary-looking Popisho citizens were hired to be sure there was no chance of foreigners sighting magic.
Berel began to sing in time with the oar strokes, and the second man joined him. A common funeral dirge.
start a journey
oh my gods
start a journey
my brother gone down the road
you know that he
start a journey
‘Which soup your people eat on Temple days, Romanza?’ called Xavier.
One of the oarsmen broke song to call out pumpkin, and they all laughed. Red bean people were said to be hot-tempered and pig-tailed, just like the recipe, while pumpkin soup lovers had delicacy of spirit and thought too much.
‘Pumpkin deep, like meat,’ Romanza nodded. ‘If you get the right one, it season food like blood and fat.’
Xavier turned away from the water to look at him.
‘Yeah man, but red bean is subtle. Years I trying to cook my Auntie Yaya’s red bean soup. I ask her, I watch her do it, but all she do is ’quint her eye and show me a clenched hand for measurement.’
‘And you know is not even a hand, so they lie!’ said Romanza.
They all shook their heads at the vagaries of woman cooks who pretend to share tips.
The oarsmen sang on.
flying with birds
oh my gods
flying with birds
my sister gone down the road
you know she gone
flying with birds
‘And you like pudding,’ said Xavier.
Ah, that macaenus instinct he’d heard so much about.
‘My mother make the best pudding. Bread pudding! Cornmeal pudding! Vanilla. Sweet potato. Edges crispy, soft centre.’
He let himself feel sadness. He missed her. He missed having a mongoose. He’d left a yard full of tame ones at the family compound. They’d converged on him, whining and snuffling, that time he went back to visit his mother, a few months after he left. He’d torn his hand climbing a rock face and the wound was going septic. He’d wanted pudding and to forgive her. She looked faint when he walked into the house. He held his damaged hand out, palm up, wordless.
You still my little boy. She sounded frightened but happy. You know I never could do the right thing by you.
She bandaged him. He wouldn’t go there again. It made her tremble.
‘I going make you pudding, when you come and eat from me,’ said Xavier.
‘And when would that be?’ Romanza smiled. ‘You don’t come cooking out here.’
‘Sometimes my invitations get brought back by relatives, say their cousin walking bush years now and nobody don’t know them anymore.’ Xavier paused. ‘You wouldn’t come Torn Poem if I ask you?’
‘I don’t know,’ murmured Romanza.
He didn’t, truly. The idea of sitting inside, of being fed in that way … it had been too long, now. Roofs, they were too high, too flat, pretending to be skies. It might be too strange.
He wondered if he had become strange.
Xavier lowered his voice. ‘How long you living out here?’
‘I was sixteen.’
‘Young.’
‘Mmm.’
Romanza coughed and shifted.
‘You eat poison, Romanza?’
‘Eat some just this morning.’
Xavier looked fascinated. ‘It good?’
‘Not so much good, as interesting.’ Like moth, he thought.
‘What it taste like?’
‘Rice.’
Xavier chuckled. ‘All poison taste like rice?’
‘Some of them. And it sting your mouth. Like macca bush.’
‘Then why not just eat macca?’
‘We do. But the effect of a different but similar ingredient is not the same, macaenus, you know that.’
The oarsman who wasn’t Berel glanced up at the word, then dipped his head when Romanza shot him a look. He didn’t want anyone to fawn over Xavier; the man was so clearly private.
Xavier nodded at the oarsman. ‘Is alright, brother. Don’t mind, Romanza just protecting me.’
Romanza winced, faintly embarrassed. Perhaps he was being presumptive.
‘Romanza, can you tell a lie?’
He shrugged. ‘For sure.’
‘Well, now. I assumed you was a truth-teller as well.’
‘Most people assume it. But it would be a harder life if I couldn’t lie.’
Xavier seemed to consider this.
‘It helps me forgive a lot of the lies, knowing I need them myself.’
‘Tell me why the indigent eat poison.’
He was amused. How could a macaenus not know?
‘Same reason we do everything else. To show the land we love it. Accept all of it.’
Xavier nodded.
‘And how many different kinds?’
‘Three hundred and seventeen ways to poison yourself and dead, last time I check.’
‘What? Taino was the seventh macaenus, and he had the widest knowledge of poisons and coagulants. He only identified thirty-three poisonous plants in the whole of Popisho.’
‘Then you have some ways to go.’ Romanza grinned. ‘You want to know more?’
‘Tell me!’
Romanza talked for a while: about the preparation of poison, more complex than people imagined, with much grinding, roasting and burying in hot earth and careful measuring necessary. The indigent ate a live, mostly raw diet, but the rejection of meat was a myth and the consumption of fermented and malodorous things was central. Xavier wrote fast in his little notebook: a prickly fruit called a stinking toe, that smelled like the gods had cursed it; a complicated feasting ritual involving carrion, claws and horns, but only if the animal had died naturally – of old age, or other animals attacking. Ritual was important to the point of impracticality, he explained, delighted to be giving Xavier so much that was new: the intricate carving of large quantities of fruit and vegetables; a ceremony involving jubilant regurgitation to honour parrot mating practices.
Xavier slapped his thighs delightedly. ‘But you sound like a cook-man!’
‘I not too dusty.’ The praise felt good. ‘But indigent can be very contrary. One born-day feast, some friends served nothing else but so-so plantain. Fried, boiled, mashed with pepper, salted, with tamarind to make plantain cakes, green-roasted, crispchipped, and plantain soup topped with avocado. All because the man we was celebrating hated plantain.’
All four men hooted over the ocean tide.
The oarsmen had stopped singing; the canoe was slowing, anchor falling through the warm, diaphanous water. There was a soft thud as it trailed the sand floor and caught. They drifted. The sun on the water felt almost hypnotic.
‘Why we anchoring?’ asked Xavier.
Romanza climbed to his feet. In the distance he could see twisted skeletal trees and bushes he knew would be scarlet, but that was still some way off.
Perfect.
He walked up the canoe, swaying, and talking low with the oarsmen, listening to the water. Here was where concentration was absolutely necessary. He crouched as the oarsmen examined the ocean surface. Put his hand in the warm ocean again and thought of Pilar: his hair, his erection against his belly, his hard mouth, the love.
‘What we doing?’ asked Xavier. He looked a little worried.
Romanza patted his shoulder.
This was going to be so much fun.
16
Xavier inched up the anchored vessel carefully; he’d toppled more than a few whole-tree canoes in his time. The oarsmen adjusted to the rocking, like pieces of song that belonged together.
‘Why we stop?’
‘We walking,’ said Romanza.
‘What that mean?’
He was enjoying Romanza. The boy was mountain-thin: stripped to the bone. Not nearly as renk as he’d first seemed. He had knowledge, and he was thoughtful. It was surprising to take so much pleasure in his energy and merriment. To hear Des’ree tell it, the indigent were habitually sullen and close-mouthed, but Romanza had an imagination.
Eventually, he’d put his notebook back into the satchel with the ice-thorns, and just listened to Romanza speak and the men sing, melting into the space and the silences, when they came. The heat, making him sleepy. The moth pouch swinging, near forgotten.
Now, the warm sea stretched before them, their canoe like a single brown seed pod, floating in the expanse. There was nothing to walk on and nowhere to walk to.
‘Come,’ the boy said and stepped out of the canoe into the ocean.
Except that he didn’t step into it. He stepped out onto it, as if it were a wet floor.
Xavier stared.
Romanza was walking on water.
Flip-clap, his bare feet. Flip-slap-clap and that grin.
