Land of Love and Drowning: A Novel (18 page)

“This is our real life beginning,” he said, because as the man he knew he was the one to say it first.

In Freedom City, Eeona saw the extent of Kweku’s back hair on the second morning. After all, during their first storming only she had been naked. The hair swathed most of his back and it disgusted her over breakfast, but then it thrilled her later when they went to the mattress again. That is how it would be with them. During their loving, she would pull on his back hair until he wrapped his hand around her neck, choking her into releasing. But then again at breakfast she would avert her eyes when his back was to her. The rest of his body was deceptively smooth.

Eeona felt that it had all been decided. She would make herself the mistress of this eight-legged house and it would be grander even than Villa by the Sea. Eeona saw the hibiscus growing wild and wonderful in the yard. And then all she had to do was see the rest in her mind. A grand house. A captain as master. Her as madame.

But Kweku was no regular man. He was a rejected man. His chest, and the organ in it, had closed like a seawall and no sweet water would wear it down. He wasn’t a man at all. He was a myth. He could fly a plane. He could trick an obeah woman. He could steal the stories from any lady of the sea.

After a week of Eeona, he began staying away. Some nights he wouldn’t arrive to his arachnid house until after dark and then he would come in smelling of rum and saltfish, which were also the scents of sex.

He was a man of stories. And that was the only way he could live, in other people’s mouths. Down in La Grange he would sit in a rum shop and listen to stories about his other self. “You hear about the Navy man from St. Thomas who leave his obeah woman, run way to Puerto Rico, and get lost in the rain forest?”

“Yes.” He would nod. “I hear he disappear for good, man. But I hear he
used to give it to she good, too. And he only make he self lost because the obeah wife was too nagging, man.”

“But Kweku, where you hear that story? It ain smallie Anegada you from?”

“Even on Anegada we hear things. But watch, no. I ain think you drinking enough.”

In order to stay alive as Kweku Prideux, the Anancy, he needed to hear stories about himself, needed to be the mélee. And in this way he isn’t unlike other humans who find themselves unexpectedly in the Americas.

Kweku also knew that Eeona might reveal him, his pre-spider history. And so he kept her away from other people. He only let her leave for drives in the country with him. She would dress in something nice that he had brought for her. Something earth-colored, no more of her Virgin Mary blues—he wanted to be constantly aroused around her. He made her go barefoot—to keep her from roaming too far, though he told her it was because he loved her feet and always wanted to see them. By then Eeona would have gone naked for him. She was a lady, but she was also in love. When he left, she would sit in her seat waiting for him, legs crossed at the ankle, like a woman of wealth.

Freedom City, St. Croix, was some forty miles from Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas. It was double that from Anegada. But still, it was close enough. After all, Kweku had told Eeona that the atoll was his homeland. After a few weeks of Kweku, Eeona began to think of her father. Her father stepping off the ship. Her own words like a sharp knife at his belly. Her father drowning for love of her.

On St. Croix, Eeona didn’t know a soul. Some Americans lived in the
houses nearby, but there was no occasion to visit them and, besides, she needed to be official to do that. She needed to be Kweku’s wife, not just his live-in concubine. Kweku wasn’t falling easily, after all. And so many other men had! What was taking this man so long? Perhaps she had given too much too quickly. It made her wild to think of it, made her want to jump off the balcony.

The first half of every day became full of thoughts of her father. She had once asked Papa if he had ever put his mouth on Mama like he’d done with her. Now alone in a quiet big house Eeona remembered that Papa had looked at her as though she was a grown woman and had said no. And she had thought, good, his mouth is mine. But then he had kept staring at her and said, “But I have done it. With the one who taught me. Rebekah, the mother of your half brother, Esau.” And it was as if they were not discussing intimacy, but discussing something like sugar or molasses—like business. And Eeona had wanted to kill Owen Arthur right there. For wasn’t it clear that there would be nothing for her? There was a son, even, a son who might get the land and the house and everything due to Eeona. And she wouldn’t even be left with Papa’s love, having to share not only with Mama but with this Rebekah woman, too.

In this Anancy home Eeona obsessed over these sad recollections. Visions, really. Papa walking until there was no more walking, only falling and falling and then sinking to the sand.

But now wasn’t Kweku Prideux better, best? He was Eeona’s alone. In the mornings, she would sit to write with the paper and pens Prideux brought her. This was her transition time. Each day she wrote a letter to her sister, explaining where she was. Explaining that she was happy. That she had a house, despite the cobwebs that kept reappearing. Soon everything would come, she wrote, soon all would return to her. She reminded Anette to avoid that Esau, that fellow from the newspaper. Despite the sea between them, Eeona was still watching over Anette, still keeping her safe.

Eeona would give the letters to her Prideux to mail, but Anette never wrote in return. Did Anette just not miss her at all? Perhaps Anette had figured out that it was Eeona’s own fault that they were orphans. Eeona’s own fault that they’d lost everything. Eeona thought on this blame for the first time in her life. But then, because she is still Eeona, she didn’t think on it too much.

Eeona spent the second part of each day readying for Prideux. She swept the floor and the cobwebbed ceilings. She wiped the cans and counters clean. Then she began readying herself. Bathing in a bath of bay rum leaves. Lotioning her body with avocado pear and rainwater. Conditioning her hair with the mash of coconut jelly. Eating honey with bits of mint leaves. All of this growing wild right outside the house. The readying would take hours. Which was good because sometimes Kweku didn’t come home for hours and hours. All this she did for him out of her own free will. If she was lucky, Kweku would honk the horn when he arrived, making it bray like an animal, and she would walk out to him—bare feet and all. They would go on drives. They would go to the edges of the island. They would go to cliffs. They would go to the Rain Forest, where he’d first come to his senses when his wife had cast him away. They would make love in the car, he pressing so hard against her chest that she almost passed out. From the love of it, she supposed. They never visited other people. Never needed to, he said. They had each other. The rest would come. Was coming any minute now.

Besides, Kweku kept bringing her notepaper for her Anette letters. “One day we’ll put all your writings in a book and sell it.” But it was just something he said. Something to make her feel treasured and therefore vulnerable. She stared at the page of whiteness with hope, as if it were a frothy ocean. With the black-ink pen he gave her, she wrote epistle after epistle to the unresponsive Anette.

“But you must forget your sister,” Prideux said one day. “You need to write bigger things. About we V.I. people. Write about me flying beyond
the blue horizon, why not. Not no stupid letter again. Even your sister ain care about that.”

Eeona was sensitive, as women from the class she was born into were raised to be: Anticipate when an elder would like more tea. Anticipate when a young man would like to speak with you. But this meant that Eeona could also detect even the mildest disgust and disfavor. This man was one who didn’t land at her feet like every other man had done. And this was so confusing, so painful, so human that Eeona felt it must be love, the real thing.

She knew, by now, that she was going to have a child for this man—her man. And wouldn’t their child adore the stories Mama Antoinette had told? Eeona started writing the Duene. She began with the Anegada women, those of great beauty with backward-facing feet. It was not long, however, before . . .

“My darling Prideux. Have you seen my writing?” For days she asked Kweku Prideux, three and four times an hour, where the story she had written just moments before had disappeared to. Sometimes she was angry and firm, like her old self. Sometimes she was very sweet, begging if he knew.

“No, baby. You know I don’t read plenty.”

“My story has just disappeared.”

“Stories about important things, baby girl? Tell me what they name?”

She had renamed it so no one would suspect it was really just a childish fable, so Kweku would not suspect she was really just a child herself. “Drowning,” she whispered, as if the walls might hear.

“That there sound like it ain appropriate for a lady,” he said. “Maybe is good it gone. Maybe I shouldn’t have buy all that paper. You ain ready. We need the real St. Croix stories. Like Anancy or Cowfoot Woman. But modern, for now times. So people know we real.”

By now even he knew that she was pregnant, even though they did not speak about it. She was slowly nesting into the small room off the foyer. She kept it clean. She ripped rags into nappies and kept them in the closet.
She thought on how she would ask her Prideux to purchase her a needle and thread to start the layette. In this small room there was a small desk and a small chair and from that position Eeona could study any person coming before they even knocked on the front door. But no one ever came. Her man sat now at the little child’s desk he had hauled home for her, a gift. His body was still, only his eyes darting around.

She looked up to him from the floor where she sat, tugging episodically at her hair. “Please help me find it.”

“I don’t know where it is, baby girl,” he said. “Maybe it fly away like me.” And with a hand he mimicked a flapping.

Where was the story? The same place as the letters to Anette. Not in the attic, for there are no attics in the houses here. Not in the bottom drawer, because there are no sets of drawers in the octagon house. He did what buccaneers had done a generation before. Used the mother earth as a safety deposit. Buried all the writing like treasure. But as they were not in a chest or a sealed jar, the leaves of paper would disintegrate and become part of the earth and then the earth would erode and sift into the sea. Kweku didn’t intend to kill the story. He wanted it to live. But he wanted it only for himself. He didn’t realize that one does not allow for the other.

For Eeona, the impact was erosive. She stopped with the story writing. She didn’t sew or stitch or make hats of palm leaves. She eased into this new lack of control. This must be the longed-for freedom. She began to live inside her episodes. Walking the house as if she were on a pilgrimage. She let the cobwebs collect, though the spiders never appeared to claim their creations. She picked bay leaves and avocado pears. The grounds were a kind of Eden that way. “This is what I wanted,” she explained to the listening walls. She knew she could escape so easily. She could jump into the cistern and drown. She could tip over the balcony and drown. She could walk into the sea and keep walking until she drowned. And wasn’t that the greatest freedom?

With the child in her, Eeona would never be a child again. Kweku was not her father. Her father was dead. The child in her was not yet a child and so not worth staying alive for. Drown. But then Eeona finally felt the baby inside her swim. Clearly a stroke, not gas or one’s mind getting the best of one. There was a living thing splashing inside her. Yes, yes. Of course she wanted this. She must double her efforts. Work on her beauty. Convince Prideux that loving her for all his life was the thing he needed. That was the story she wanted in the end. She was an adult now and could see that even freedom came with its own binds.

With this clarity came renewed thoughts of little sister Anette, and how Anette was newly unwed and might yet find herself faced with the danger that was Esau. It was Eeona’s first conscientious moment in months. And she resented it completely.

But that very night Kweku lowered his mouth to her, because he was the worst kind of man, the kind who knows just what a woman wants and uses it against her. He whispered into her silver, “You’re my diamond little girl.” She felt his words vibrate on her as if she were a wind instrument and he were playing her into the horizon. And who would not want to be wanted this way? Besides, it was a sign that her efforts were having an effect. And so it was easy to forget about a sister in need of being unfreed.

Kweku held Eeona in the bed as though she were his skin. She hadn’t felt so loved and so drowned since she was a girl. In the morning her beauty flooded the room.

Eeona gone for months now. It ain that I forget about she. Is just that I been an orphan all my life. I always getting left. Eeona been wanting to leave. I figure her time just come. Yes, I worry that she ain write and I even worry that maybe she dead, but I ain really worry ’bout she at all. Eeona good. She take care of she self always. Even if she there in heaven, she likely seducing St. Peter and running the heavenly show. Besides, I now have Jacob. He done tell me that he ain never going to leave me. And I believe he.

You see, is a perfect time to be alive. In the middle of the century, in safety. No apocalypse. Two great wars behind, plenty smaller wars ahead. But in these islands—not quite American, not all Caribbean—we living in the eye of the storm and know only the peace. I leave Ronalda with Ronnie mother and I lie, tell she I gone looking extra work to help pay the rent. But I gone gallivanting.

The car we was in had not a door. The roads was loosely paved—mostly gravel and pound-up dust. Me and Jay in the backseat. A group of we driving up to the Muhlenfeldt Point lighthouse. Trying to lime there for the view. Dirt and rocks was flying all around us. The turns spring out of nowhere at all and on every bend we almost fly out.

Gertie and some American fellow in the front. The American is our ticket to the lighthouse, since me and Gertie have try to get there before but get runaway by a military Yankee. This American fellow say he know the lighthouse keeper and could get us to the lighthouse and even inside the lighthouse, where we could watch the sea. Gertie ain have a regular beau but her American man seem like he like a little lick of the tar brush. Now he shifting gears as if he know what he doing. “Americans know how
to drive,” he keep saying loud-loud. Every few minutes the car seem to go faster than before. It like a Carnival ride.

In the backseat with Jacob, I holding on to him as my stomach tighten and my mouth open wide. Damn it to hell, I felt like braying, like that awful donkey that we don’t have no more. But my noises just fly back in my mouth with the speeding air. The piece of trash car careening about.

Jacob focus on guarding me. He arms all about my shoulders and legs as if he alone could have protect me from flying through the space that should have held a windshield. That how he was then. Always touching and protecting. Always claiming me hard.

The gravel kicking up. Clanking into the bottom of the car. Slapping my calves when it force its way through the holes; flying at us in a steam of dust. I close my eyes but that make my stomach sway. We come to a big ditch and the American fellow ain brake but instead shift and shift and slam right in and out of the dip. Woy! The fellow go flying into the hood of the junkyard Dodge; not
onto
the hood because his elbows and head was forced through the holes. His legs jut back into the seats and one of his ankles crash onto my shoulder, knocking hard against my head. Through a fresh rip in his pants, I stared right into the poor boy’s exposed white backside.

Gertie start up a screaming of the man name, “Ham! Hamilton! Ham!” and it sound like she demanding food. But the American fellow just there laughing. Laughing! I crawl out from beneath him as my man guide me away. “Let’s get from here,” Jacob say. “That fellow is drunk.” Gertie look up to the sky and suck she teeth.

“We can’t just leave,” I protest. “We ain even reach the lighthouse.”

Jacob argue back. “You shouldn’t be dealing with any rough driving. Is too much for you.” He put his palm on the small of my back. I know what that is. Is something he does do when other man is around. Is an announcement. Like to prove that I is his. Now there don’t have no man around who
care to notice. And so I know his hand on me is secret speak. I have you, it saying. You go where I go.

That work on me like a charm, but I still digging my nails into Jacob wrist so he could know I ain happy with his direction.

“Nettie,” he say, when he guide me a bit away. He always call me that. “You must take care.”

“I ain a doll, Jay,” I say, even though I loving the way he talking, like he going to take care of me. “I ain a baby.”

“Yes, yes, you is.” I see his chest rise up. He make it sound like I precious. I turn to Gertie and she wave me away. She going to stay with the American. Ham now standing on his own and leaning against the car, smoking a cig and chuckling like he ain almost dead. So I let my man walk me back down the way until we see a car and hitch a ride.

Jacob only take me halfway down the street to Ronnie’s door because I ain ready for Ronnie’s mother talk or anybody’s talk. When I pick up Ronalda, her baby eyes them big like the saucers and have bowls beneath. Is like she been awake looking for me all day without a bit of shut-eye.

For the most part, I been paying for the flat in Savan on my own. But Jacob helping a little. He stay with me sometimes, but with his mother more often. We waiting to wed. I waiting to see if Eeona returning. And he waiting for his mother to come around, because it turn out that Rebekah don’t like me just by the sound of my name. I know is ’cause I a divorcée. Them McKenzies was big Catholics, my child. Knights of Columbus. Catholic Daughters. The whole horse and carriage. I ain what no McKenzies thinking for one of their own.

But is okay. It only been a few months. Jacob and me, we know we for each other. We don’t have to rush-rush and ruin the thing. When time come, our love going to be clear like water for all to see.

I put Ronalda to bed and I lay there beside her. Sometimes when Jacob don’t sleep over, he does come to my window and push his hands in my
hair. That night I dream of fish and then newborn lizards. I wake up in the twilight, not to Jacob hands on me, but to the knowledge that I pregnant again. And there, in the moonlight, like something staking its claim, is my belly rounded. Claimed overnight, like the Europeans pulling to this shore of peaceful Arawaks. As if Jacob saying “Yes, yes, you is” make it so.

I still breast-feeding Ronalda and is Ronnie mother she self tell me that that suppose to prevent pregnancy. So I know that who inside me must be powerful. I had make this sandman fall in love with me by speaking some bolero words at a dance, now he give us a baby by saying so.

The rest of the night I toss between dreams and I deep in the feeling of arrival. Something coming. But the feeling don’t seem like seven or eight months. It feeling like just now. Like I more pregnant than I even looking. In the morning I look to get out of the bed and figure out what the ass I going to do now that we have a baby coming too soon to make it look decent. But there in the bed beside me is the thing that now arrive and is my very sister. Motherscunt!

I start breathing short and heavy because I just know that this is my dead sister lying in bed, haunting me for not staying married and respectable as she had command. But then this Eeona open she eyes and I scream. She jump on me like a witch on a broom and say, “You will wake the child.” And even though I know she meaning Ronalda, who scrunch up like a worm at our feet, it come as if Eeona mean the one in my belly, too.

When she release her palm from my mouth, I pounce away and go stand by where Ronalda sleeping. Ready to grab up the child and scrape out. “You real?” I ask my sister or the ghost of my sister.

“I do believe so.”