The singing today is sirenlike, and the wind doesn’t oppose it. I don’t either, I carry it along with me, I dart from tree to tree down the beach as if they are a clef and me the music, I stand Fridayless, on a Sunday, in the lee of the song and look in.
Three rows of flowered chests swell chastely across from a row of white-dress-shirt-chested men. The missionary — I hardly know him without his helmet — climbs into the pulpit and blesses everyone, and me too, since my standing outside is not blocked by a window or screen but just waist-high pressboard over a row of cinder blocks.
I am the usual statue the congregation turns to look at when he blesses me.
I smile my smile that says, Go on.
The missionary clears his throat, he talks a long time about what the world will be like after it ends, but he mixes all of that with now. In my current state, I can’t sort it out, Who are the angels after? What’s the difference between this ending and the other?
Mr. Harry, is what he stops with, will you please advance?
Harry’s three men in, and the others have to turn their knees to the side after he says, Oh, yes in puzzlement. He walks to the church front where the missionary’s moving his big book around on his pulpit and resettling it.
The sight of Harry facing me, facing all of us, stops my scratching. I lean into the window, my jagged nails pressing into the pressboard. Other women lean into their pews, a woman waves from the back as if it is All right or as if it is Honey, and Harry is up to it: the castaway’s castaway, wearing the island’s starched shirt and dark pants, with a beard covering his most white features, with the rest of his skin dark and darker, but puzzled in the angle of his head, his body shifting.
You have heard the story of the apocalypse, Mr. Harry? Our text for today?
Your reverence, he says and bows his head.
The missionary sighs with satisfaction. In the apocalypse there is a reckoning, he says. More than one. And here, when some time passes, we too reckon.
Yes? says Harry.
You have come to stay with us. We are grateful for that, he says. You have come to stir the soil for us. But, he says before Harry can nod again, you must follow the Lord’s laws, even the one that says a man must not know a woman other than his wife.
Harry can’t find his face — the one he has is laughing, is incredulous, dismayed. I see, he says.
I am sorry, says the missionary. There is a fine.
Fine, Harry says after him. Fine?
Do you need someone to testify the truth? Do you need a witness? asks the missionary.
The congregation has some ideas about that, they murmur.
The missionary turns to Barclay before Harry can answer. Can’t you hush them?
Barclay is not up to hushing them. After his son does not return, I see Barclay on the beach, even my beach, and he looks out the way I do, but the boat he wants is different. Now Barclay stares at his hands as if the missionary’s quieting is cupped in them and only after that starts to rise.
But Harry says, No, no, he will pay, he does not wish the good people of this island to be scandalized further.
Not in front of your wife, says the preacher.
This is when they all turn to me. I take a step back from the window, their actual turning is such a surprise. Me? I say.
You have slept the night through with him, is this not correct? asks the small man up in the pulpit.
I begin to scratch my head hard. I knew it, I knew it.
Yes, says Harry. She says yes. Just tell me how much.
The missionary pretends to consult Barclay, who is looking out the window again to the sea, who is looking at his wife and then all around, then back to the sea. Who is nodding.
It will be five hundred dollars, says the missionary, but no interest for all the time that has gone by.
This sum shocks even the women leaning forward, this sum changes Harry from a castaway doing his duty to a citizen in outrage. What about prurient interest? asks Harry. What about greed? Harry turns to me where I am rooted. I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you, he says to me. That’s the way the Arabs do it. Will that do? he says to the missionary up in his pulpit. Can’t there just be fornication now? Or is that punishable too?
Barclay? says the missionary.
What? says Barclay.
As long as they are not pregnant you must pay, says the missionary. A kind of tax, he says. Render unto Caesar, he says. When one is pregnant, you can stop. That’s how it is. We require it.
Harry begins laughing. Well, you’ll be sorry to learn that if I had five hundred dollars, I wouldn’t pay it. The ladies will all come to me for free.
But the congregation, especially the ladies’ side of the congregation, the flowered side, makes no noise, no flurry of assent and sighs.
Two days later, I am looking for the coconuts that sometimes fall on a field where they kick balls when they have them, when I see Harry picking up rocks to make a row that stretches around the goal and on around both sides. I sit down to watch him. It’s worth doing: his furred torso all muscled from picking up rocks, his arms and their flexing from putting them down. He’s alone for once.
That’s it, he says after he sets down another ten feet of rock. I’m fried, he says. He stirs the sand beside me to get rid of the beach crabs that swarm here and on me, some kind of crab that is too small to eat, or too successful in the sand’s heat, and he sits.
I shake the hair from my face as a divorcee should, and I say, Is all this in payment?
Penance, not payment. Five hundred dollars is a lot more rocks. He draws a circle in the sand. He draws another circle.
Is this two nothings or two islands? I wonder. Or the beginning of male and female?
They don’t get pregnant easily here, do they? is all I say.
Look, I can’t really talk to you. Somebody checks up on me. One of the girls. They send down the very young ones now, the ones most likely to get pregnant, to try to speed things up.
I suppose my being here will increase the number of rocks you have to haul.
They come at night and put them back. He looks at me. You? You were just an excuse. You don’t count. Anyone can tell you’re not here. You’re not here at all. You’re a ghost. He holds his nose. A stinky ghost but a ghost nonetheless.
I run away, I scuttle two trees over and search for coconuts under fallen palm fronds.
Harry rises and stretches. You’ll get fined too, he shouts in my direction. All those belong to somebody, you know.
I’m smacking a green one against a rock, I’m shaking it.
He repeats, You’ll get fined.
Nobody owns these, I yell. But I drop this one anyway.
Just because the trees don’t look planted by anybody doesn’t mean they aren’t anybody’s property. He comes over to me, he holds me by the shoulders where I shake without the coconut.
Even the coconuts are hot, I say.
Is that what you think? says Harry. He takes his hands off me and goes over to the circles he made and brushes sand over them. You know, you sound sane, he says, just loudly enough.
I sound sane. I giggle and crab-sidle over. The way you say that with just a touch of a question, I say. How sane would you be if just breathing made you sick?
I would be crazy, he says, turning away from me. I would breathe, he says. Have babies.
Jelly babies, I say. You jerk, I say.
He goes back to his rocks. I don’t know, he says, grunting and straining.
I sit in his way, on the next rock, on the next. My boat hasn’t come. That’s all I care about. I dig my toes into the sand so I don’t fall over, so he can’t move the rock, but he does. I’m dizzy, moving from rock to rock, I’m dizzy all the time now. It comes from not eating right and not too much sleep and weeping. Barclay’s probably told the captain not to come back until they’re all pregnant, I say.