This One Sky Day, page 24
‘Some months back,’ said Mixie, ‘Orange Man leave us a letter in the custard apple tree, say if we inclined, he would be delighted. And if we thief the paint from the factory, more to the better.’ The mahogany half-table trembled in the tree. ‘He leave messages when he need me. I never see him yet, although sometimes I stay up late to watch. I don’t always have time to be creeping around, but I real proud of that factory paint-up, though.’
‘It really is good.’
They smiled at each other.
‘I think maybe him is one of our regular customer,’ said Lyla.
‘I think Orange Man have a little more perspicacity than that,’ said Rhita.
‘I wonder if Orange Man know if Miss Pretty contest still keeping tonight, ’sake of everything happening with woman right about now,’ said Mixie. ‘I usually pick up two, three new girl every year when we go.’
‘Them couldn’t put that off, people will rise up,’ said Lyla. ‘We need to get the table out of that custard apple tree.’
Rhita squinted. ‘Lasso it with a rope and pull it down.’
‘Won’t that just make it fall on top of you?’ The butterfly froth on Anise’s tongue made her twitch. Delicious.
‘Depends on the length of the rope.’
‘So you do this before?’
Rhita rolled her eyes. ‘Oh yes, many times.’
‘Throw rocks at it,’ said Mixie.
‘No man, it too big for that.’ Lyla gazed at the tree.
‘Big rocks.’
The afternoon was hot and getting hotter. Lyla went off and came back with an icy jug of carrot juice, a bunch of pepper grapes, an avocado as big as Anise’s head, and some cornbread. They ate hungrily.
‘We could wait for a hurricane.’
‘Or a person who tall.’
Rhita giggled. ‘Think laterally, ladies. It have to come down? It could stay.’
‘And lick some fool in him head? I don’t have no insurance in here.’
‘Kick the tree,’ said Lyla. They all laughed some more.
‘We need a obeah woman with a chicken and a candle.’
‘No obeah woman not coming out for this foolishness,’ said Mixie. ‘You run out of set spell, Anise?’
‘You already mash up one of my spell. But I set your rass tree on fire, if you like.’
Mixie stuck her tongue out at her.
Rhita waved her hand. ‘I know, I know! All we need is some large branches to brace the table, then one of us can climb up and dislodge it and the rest of us here can slowly lower it to the ground.’
‘And you’re sure that will work?’
‘Well, I can see it in my head.’
‘Dynamite,’ said Lyla solemnly.
‘Someone could climb up and push it down,’ said Anise. ‘We would just have to keep clear.’
‘Like who, so?’
‘Blasted Archie need to fix it and give you back a new table,’ grumbled Lyla. ‘I don’t like how a man just get to come in here, break up things, fling people table in a tree and go about his business.’
Mixie burst into tears.
‘Gods,’ muttered Rhita. She sat down in the hammock and began to swing her sister back and forth violently. ‘Hush, hush, hush, hush.’
‘He never going to forgive me,’ said Mixie. ‘Stop, Rhita, that hurts.’
‘Forgive you?’ Lyla rolled her eyes. ‘The man spit in your face.’
‘You have to get rid of him,’ said Rhita firmly.
‘Him luh-huh-love me.’
‘Him have to take the love and lick you in your head with it?’
Anise laced her fingers together. Too long since a man held them gently; put his tongue to these palms, took the time to touch these wrists. She bit her nail; ripped the cuticle, healed it. Her cors was running low.
‘Don’t push her so hard,’ she said. ‘This is not a simple thing.’
‘Is my fault,’ said Mixie.
‘Is not your fault. Violence can look like passion,’ said Anise. ‘Passion is compelling.’
Mixie peered at her. ‘It is my fault.’
‘But why?’
‘I said it.’ Mixie faltered. ‘And he spit.’ She stared forward.
Anise stroked her hand.
Mixie curved herself into a small shape and peered at them. ‘I never said it before.’ They waited. ‘But he was upset because I was fucking Garson in front of him. All these years I never said it and he always want me to.’
‘Said what, though?’ Rhita looked puzzled. Lyla hushed her.
‘I never said it to any man.’
Anise’s hands hummed; skin humming.
‘Lay up in the bed with me all these years, and he begging me to say it. Say he can be OK with me and the clients, if I can just say it. Take all his worries away. But is my last thing left, and I’m thinking there is no money for that, what is the price for that?’ She was fighting tears, but she also seemed confused, chopping the air with a single hand, punctuating her explanation. ‘And I couldn’t think of a price for it, and so I never. Because if I tell him, what else I have? That is the last thing I have and he can’t get it for free! But he crying and we here and you all making so much noise. So I just said it.’ She pointed to the broken floor. Bewildered. ‘Right there. Iloveyou.’ The words sounded foreign and ripe in her mouth, as if she were speaking some dead language.
‘And that’s when he … spat …’ Lyla sucked her breath in.
They all leaned back and contemplated the secret, fizzing like a hot newborn, entangled in the weft of Mixie’s white hammock. Anise tried to pick it up, but her head was too full and soft: three butterfly was quite enough on a day like this.
The secret whirred away from her, like an unidentifiable insect, turning over and over in the boiling sunshine. When it brushed past the custard apple tree, the half-table came crashing down so hard that the neighbours came over that evening to ask if everything was just fine and dandy.
‘Is just now you come?’ Mixie asked them. ‘You don’t see a man spit in my face today?’
*
Secrets. No one knew that the sound of Xavier Redchoose had stayed with her for years. Once or twice she swore she heard that chuckle and looked up thinking: well, you finally going to see him again, but Xavier wasn’t there, it was someone else and that was just fine, probably for the better.
Well, it had to be, didn’t it, you a married woman.
She knew where to find him of course, everyone did, but it was out of the question. So tall: she thought of him as bumping into ceilings, although she’d never seen him do it. He had to duck to enter her house. She imagined him leaving trails of his hair on her ceiling, and the faint odour of his smile. He’d walked like a big shy animal, one foot in a circle of grace and the other skittish. So kind! He’d showed her how to boil, beat, bake; told her the history of herbs and about the insides of things. She was a bad student. She didn’t remember burning or curdling anything, but the food was wrong, and she could see his puzzlement. He asked her to crack the joints of a chicken carcass so she could connect with the bird, but the chicken fat made her retch.
Gods, you bad at this, he said, his brow creased, and nudged her with his elbow.
Secret smiles.
She hadn’t eaten properly until Xavier showed her how. He took the class outside and sat them on the grass and told them they ate too fast. The day was murky, the sun sitting in a cloud soup.
Our ancestors ate slow, and that is how macaenus are taught to eat. Slow and—
Long? piped up one female student, smoothing her hair. The night before, she’d confided her intention to have a macaenus baby by the end of that year.
Xavier smiled at her as if she’d said something clever.
Yes, and with concentration. I going teach you.
The woman preened. Anise wanted to slap her.
Xavier indicated a tray loaded with their day’s work. She felt miserable, looking at her chicken skewers, dressed in too much garlic and pepper, rubbery and salty.
First, greet the food.
Tittering and muttering from the students, but she saw how important this was to him.
Smell it. He took a breath. Imagine where it came from. The men and women who laboured to bring it to you. The animal that gave its life for your nourishment.
He said to let the food sit on the tongue for as long as they could bear, then roll it around the mouth. Chew slowly, keeping the teeth close together, so the taste stayed on the tongue.
Block your ears so you can hear yourself eating. Think again of where the food came from. Give thanks.
Why? asked one man.
Xavier looked surprised. Considered. To see what happens to you.
He would say no more. He asked them to do it for one meal a day and she had tried. She’d wanted to please him. She was sure he was wise and correct. Certainly her bowels were clearer and more regular, her skin more glowing than usual. But her mind wandered. Ingrid had always complained about her lack of concentration.
You been meditating since you was five, Ingrid.
Well, that is true.
She could hear the su-su; she wasn’t stupid. She, an engaged woman, spending all those late-night hours with a macaenus! Everybody know them is ram-goats! But she’d decided Xavier needed company – someone with whom there was no o macaenus this and that.
Eat, he said, when it was plain even he couldn’t teach her. Cooking don’t matter if you know how to eat.
But what the rass, Xavier. I should know how.
Why waste time on something if you don’t love it?
Something heavy in his voice with that, and she tried not to think on it. It was their penultimate night and she was definitely, finally going to tell him about Tan-Tan, because after all, wouldn’t that make everything clear between them?
Lord, girl, you never want it to be clear.
When Xavier had asked about her family and food, she told him about the trays and packages left at the church door at Easter and Christmas, and her scornful family picking through them. Most of it was repackaged and sent to the indigent, which was quite right, but she still remembered the departure of a sumptuous coconut cake, sent off to the bellies of potential Christians. She’d wanted a piece of that cake.
You know indigent don’t eat cake, right?
But … Papa sent them everything!
I guarantee they not eating no sugar, unless is fresh cane. He’d shifted closer to her, the night air warm and perfumed around them. So what you think of the eating-slow thing?
She giggled, closed her eyes and opened her mouth, like a baby bird, parodying him, never expecting the gentle hand under her chin. She stayed very still as he tilted her face up. Her mind worked a million miles a minute; if she moved, she’d fall over.
I going to kiss a macaenus.
He didn’t kiss her. He fed her whole prawns, poached in lime shavings and thyme. A roasted purple onion, sweet as fruit. Oranges he fetched from the refrigerator; the cold flesh, then the peel, doused in rum and set on fire, charred and bitter. Soft grilled cloves of garlic. She realised how quickly she still chewed and gulped; discovered she didn’t like aubergine when she slowed to taste it. He made her open her eyes to greet a yam salad, to finger the textures and the colours like a child. She could almost feel the food rolling down her throat: a sensation so delicious it was alarming.
It was only when he used his thumb to push her robe a single, brimming inch away from her collarbone that she stopped what was happening at the edge of itself.
Xavier.
He looked into her face.
Everybody knew about macaenus. All whores. Big appetites in everything. The women joked after class: how big you think he is? The threat of that excess troubled her. What profit her, this madman, hacking at meat and singing out orders in the kitchen, popping guineps open, sucking them ferociously? Taste, adjust, pass, squeeze, using his hands like a spice rack. The women tittered at his happy groaning over the stove. What profit her, this hot thing from deep in the earth and from up in the air, inching closer?
Is so they stay, people said. ’Sake of the god-blessing.
He attracted sycophants like flies. She knew that kind of person: so many teeth, pulling at her father’s raiment. Pastor Latibeaudearre, a word, a word with you … There seemed a haze of something unpleasant around them, and around her father in their company: the set of his cheeks, as if he scorned and pitied them in equal measure. Mamma Lati, comforting the disappointed as he turned back to the pulpit and the incense, drenched in his robes. She didn’t want that in her life. The obsequiousness.
Up off the chair she was, away from Xavier and his gentle touch and delicious food, thanking him for his time, as if they were strangers, trying not to see the confusion – maybe even hurt? – in his face. She couldn’t hurt a man blessed by the gods, surely. And she wouldn’t be one of his devotees. If she bowed to him a single time, she would be lost, and never find her way back.
He would eat her, slowly.
Wouldn’t it sweet you, to see him, after all this time? See if he still tall?
Of course he still tall.
When she had heard his wife died, and the rumours that she did it to her own self, Anise had taken her altar onto the veranda and spent a whole evening praying with the cicadas, for his sadness.
If she wanted her body all whole again, it was just so she could find a little corner and think all-softly on Xavier Redchoose.
21
Romanza stood in Cannonball’s back yard, eyes closed. Head up. Sniffing through the raindrops.
He’d smelled the sweet tremor in the earth as soon as they stepped off that stingray onto the black-and-white beach, but he’d thought it came from him. He’d mixed it up with the sweetness of the blood in his throat, the same taste as the cough he’d been coughing for weeks, the blood and smell rising and rising and then it had been too late to think of anything at all.
He felt embarrassed to have been so dependent on the macaenus. Scooped up into his arms. What had he looked like, helpless, a child who couldn’t take care of himself? And crying over a tamarind ball!
Now that the bleeding had stopped, he could tell that he wasn’t the source of the sweet oddness. He could feel a quiver in the house wall, see it in a poor-me-one bird’s furious brown wings and on the surfaces of puddles left by the rain. The smell was getting stronger.
Was this what Pilar had warned him about? And could it actually be what he thought it was?
He barely recalled stories from school, there had been so many, but he did remember the teacher telling his class the tale of the emancipated.
A long time ago, she said, in 1838 to be exact, 203 emancipated slaves had sailed here from very far away, arriving in all the beautiful shades of black that were possible. Their leader, a man who called himself Papa Indigo, presented the indigenous people of the archipelago with a piece of paper called a deed, gifted to him by the white father who had enslaved him then been forced to free him. Papa Indigo said the land belonged to him, now. The islands had been in his father’s family for a very long time, even though no one had ever actually been here, ascording-to-how it was so far away from anything civilised.
The red and original people handed the paper back. Such a thing was not possible, they explained, as the earth didn’t belong to anybody except itself, and it didn’t even have a name. The emancipated retorted that after centuries of bad people and very bad experiences, it was time for them to prosper. Fights broke out, said the teacher. The emancipated were few, and they had absolutely no magic, but they had new weapons, new diseases, an inordinate faith in a singular god, and an enormous resolve, which seemed to be a by-product of surviving all the bad experiences.
We not going back, said Papa Indigo. Slavery days done.
People on both sides did more bad things, although everybody agreed, years later after the peace was won, that the emancipated started it all by shooting off a man’s arm then getting vex when it grew back like a lizard’s tail.
Eventually, when civil war had raged for far too many years to be sensible, the earth and the sky, whipped up into vexation by the always-mischievous gods, took action. Together they produced a furious and very sudden hurricane, which came down on everybody at 3.07 p.m. one clear-sky day. And what a storm, with sweet rain and raging red wind! Former enemies took refuge together for three whole weeks while it danced outside, ripping up the land so nobody could have it. Very different people were forced to listen to each other, and to work to survive.
Some people even made babies, said the teacher, and the class giggled.
When the hurricane was done, everyone agreed that the whole war had been a foolishness – a veritable poppy show, was the phrase the emancipated used. And they should know, after hundreds of years of slavery, which was the ultimate in ridiculousness.
And that was beginning of you, the smiling teacher said to the rapt children. Out of many, come one.
Six-year-old Romanza had been quite happy with the story until another child put up his hand and asked what they should do if a sweet hurricane came back. He’d expected the teacher to say it was all so long ago, and not to worry, but instead she said it was a very good question, because sweet hurricanes were real and the obeah women said there would be more. Ordinary hurricanes were dangerous enough, but a sweet hurricane meant the world was going wrong. Still, the most important thing to remember was to take shelter and trust that you were absolutely in the right company. That was what sweet hurricanes were for: to teach you something.
Romanza jiggled in his seat. The teacher asked if he wanted to say something. He did, but there were too many ideas in his head. What if he was locked in with the boy who used to be his best friend, who punched him in the face because he said he liked the lavender flowers best? What if he was locked in with his mother’s best friend Mamma Bryer who smelled like stale fish and wanted to put mustard plasters on him to build fortitude? And later, when the children were talking under the schoolyard trees, one boy said he never want to lock in with his father at-all-at-all, and he put his head down low when he said it. Romanza felt a lurch in his belly when the boy’s father came to pick him up in the afternoons, because what could possibly be so bad?
