I awoke with my lust unslaked. Caroline wasn’t in bed. I dressed and went looking for her. Neither she nor the Montarazes had waited for me. They’d gone down to the bay for an early swim. Their voices—or, at least, RuthClaire’s and Caroline’s—piped cheerfully on the balmy morning breeze. My resentment increased. Last night, Caroline had refused to stop work to accompany me to the water’s edge, but rising an hour or so ahead of me—after retiring an hour or so later—was apparently no obstacle to her enjoyment of the beach. I banged into the L-shaped porch overlooking the inlet and made an eyeshield of my hands. Pressing them against the screen, I peered down at the revelers.
Adam, as a concession to the gals’ southern sensibilities, wore a black monokini, while both his wife and mine had outfitted in modest one-piece maillot suits, Caroline’s turquoise-and-navy, RuthClaire’s blood-orange. Arm in arm, they danced into, and scampered away from, the lacy charges of the surf. The hilarity of this game had them struggling to stay upright.
“Shit,” I murmured.
Something on the porch moved. I nearly jumped out of my sandals. One hand went to my heart, the other groped for a support to which to cling. I found the nearest wooden stud bracing the screen and held on to that.
Looking at me from the far end of the porch was a wizened creature wearing a pastel-blue chemise and a grubby white head scarf. She sat on an upturned box with her gnarled hands between her legs and her bare toes playing the planks like so many soundless piano keys. I assumed her female only because of her clothing. For a moment, in fact, I had thought this person might be Adam in drag, joking with me. But Adam was cavorting with RuthClaire and Caroline beside Caicos Bay, and my visitor seemed years older than the habiline. A habiline too, she scrutinized me with beady, alien eyes.
“Good morning,” I said. “I’m Paul Loyd, a friend of Adam’s.” I jerked a thumb in the direction of the surf-teasing trio.
Her eyes remained on me, more watchful than curious.
“Why not tell me your name?” I said.
“Ga gapag,” she said.
This expression meant nothing to me, but I was surprised she had spoken at all. Until his operation at Emory, Adam had been incapable of speech. True, he had never lacked the ability to vocalize, but uttering recognizable phonemes had had to wait for surgery. This woman’s “Ga gapag,” by contrast, represented something vaguely like intelligible human speech: a Creole habiline dialect, a primitive patois.
“Gaga pag,” I tried to echo her. “Is that your name?”
She shook her head.
“You’re part of the Rutherford Remnant, aren’t you?”
Contemptuously, she everted her bottom lip. The pink flesh curled back on her receding chin like a fan. Chimpanzees perform a similar trick when bored or irritated. Then her face returned to normal, and she looked away as if I had committed an asinine social blunder.
“Wait here,” I said, angry. “Just wait here.”
My command to the haughty gnome was superfluous; she sat stolidly on her upturned crate, “obeying” me only because she had already decided to remain where she was. I yanked open the screen door, descended a set of treated wooden stairs, and put my foot on the first island in a miniature archipelago of stepping stones. Then I floundered through a cut between two shapeless dunes and stumbled down the beach to my wife and our hosts.
Caroline, seeing me, broke free of RuthClaire and Adam. With a gait at once coltlike and feminine, she ran toward me on tiptoes. “Paul!” Her smile wiped out every other lovely natural sight on my horizon—diamond-blue water, glittering sand, even a gliding formation of brown pelicans at the mouth of the bay. She put her cool hands on my shoulders and kissed the bridge of my nose. I returned only a miserly peck.
“Why the hell didn’t you get me up, too?”
“Sleeping, you looked about five years old. How could I wake up a tuckered five-year-old?”
I made an irritated head gesture at the cottage. “There’s a rude little enana negra up there. One of Adam’s kind. You left me the rude little biddy to wake up to.”
Adam appeared at Caroline’s shoulder, RuthClaire behind him. “I did not expect her so early. You were alone in the house when we came down here. Not for anything, Mister Paul, would I have caused you discomfort.”
“She scared the bejesus out of me.”
“I’ll bet you frightened her, too,” Caroline said.
“A platoon of marines with a howitzer might frighten her. Me, she found about as scary as a sick ladybug.”
“That’s Erzulie,” Adam said. “My grandmother on my father’s side.”
“Erzulie?”
“Her vaudun name. I do not remember how we called her when I was a boy with no ego. Probably, we had no spoken name for her at all.”
“She speaks. She said, ‘Gaga pag.’ Something like that.”
“She meant, ‘Pa capab.’ That’s Creole for ‘Pas capable.’ It means ‘No can do.’ That’s about all the language she has. She says it seldom because, besides speak, there is not too much she cannot do. Unlike me, she has never grown an ego. And so she avoids identifying what she does not possess with the imperfect label of her vaudun name.”
“If you can follow that,” RuthClaire said, laughing. “What’s she doing here?”
“She is an artist,” Adam said. “Also, she wished to act as our guide. Now you’re awake—and now Erzulie is here—we can eat our breakfasts and go.”
We returned to the cottage. Although Caroline kept her hand in mine, I felt subtly betrayed and so declined to answer her friendly squeezes with squeezes of my own. By the time we reached the cottage, then, she was casting me puzzled looks, squinting for a sign of affection or thaw. I liked that. It served her right. Who the hell enjoyed being told that he resembled a tuckered five-year-old? I had had adult games in mind, but Caroline burnt my hedonistic ambition on the altar of the Protestant work ethic.
We had fresh eggs from the market in Rutherford’s Port. Although I cooked a reproachfully splendid breakfast, Erzulie spurned my platter of fried eggs. Standing at a counter in the kitchen, she drank her eggs raw from a ceramic cup. For a chaser, she downed a jelly jar of native clairin, or crude rum. When we left the cottage in the rented Jeep, she carried in the back seat a Tupperware container of rapadou, a coarse brown sugar that many Haitians use as a sweetener and a staple food item. Like a mountain woman taking snuff, she put pinches of this sugar between her gums and her rotted teeth and sucked at them as we followed the coastal road around the island’s middle finger.
Everyone else had put on jeans and rugged shoes, but Adam wore the same frock coat and top hat he’d worn to the double funeral at Paradise Farm. Horn-rimmed glasses with no lenses adorned his dark face. (Once, Adam had worn real glasses to read with, but since his operation at Emory, he relied on contacts, and today he was wearing them beneath the phony horn-rimmed glasses.) Sitting beside RuthClaire in the front seat, he had a walking stick between his legs and an unlit cigar in one hand. He clutched the brim of his top hat to keep it from blowing off. Occasionally, though not often, we passed a straw-hatted laborer or a child-toting mother, who, startled, gaped at the Jeep—but especially at Adam—as if seeing a disquieting revenant from the island’s past.
“Why the getup?” I shouted from the back seat. (Erzulie was between Caroline and me, sucking her rapadou.)