And the work itself? Artificial insemination. Cows. In my flapping tennis shoes and naval cap and long puffy sun-bleached trousers, and accompanied by my assistant. Sonny, I am much esteemed as the man who inseminates the cows and causes these enormous soft animals to bring forth calves. Children and old people crowd around to see Sonny and me in action. And I am brown from walking to the cows in the sun, so brown that the green name tattooed on my breast has all but disappeared in a tangle of hair and in my darkening skin. An appealing sort of work, a happy life. The mere lowing of a herd, you see, has become my triumph.
Yes, my triumph now. And how different from my morbid father’s. And haven’t I redeemed his profession, his occupation, with my own? I think so. But here, now, this morning, with the broad white window sill full in my view — it is old, thickly painted, cool, something like the bleached bulwark of a ransacked sailing ship — and with the lime tree gleaming beyond the window frame and dangling under every leaf a small ripe lime, here with the hammock a swaying garden in the darkness behind me and the wind stirring my papers, stirring my old naval cap where it hangs from an upright of a nearby black mahogany chair, here I mention my triumph, here reveal myself and choose to Step from behind the scenes of my naked history, resorting to this strategy from need but also with a certain obvious pride, self-satisfaction, since now I anticipate prolonged consideration of Miranda. I would be unable to think of her for very long unless I made it clear that my triumph is over Miranda most of all, and that I survive her into this very moment when I float timelessly in my baby-blue sea and lick the little yellow candied limes of my bright green tree. Seven years are none too many when it comes to Miranda, or comes, for that matter, to remembering the death of Cassandra or my final glimpse of Pixie when I left her with Gertrude’s cousin in New Jersey. So now I gather around me the evidence, the proof, the exhilarating images of my present life. And now Miranda will never know how many slick frisky calves have been conceived in her name or, on her scum-washed black island in the Atlantic, will never know what a voracious and contented adversary I have become out on mine, on this my sun-dipped wandering island in a vast baby-blue and coral-colored sea. But Catalina Kate, I think, is my best evidence. And having summoned my evidence and stated my position, sensitive to the wind, to the green and golden contours of a country reflected in the trembling and in the fullness of my own hips, sensitive also to the time of cows, I can afford to recount even the smallest buried detail of my life with Miranda. Because I know and have stated here, that behind every frozen episode of that other island — and I am convinced that in its way it too was enchanted, no matter the rocks and salt and fixed position in the cold black waters of the Atlantic — there lies the golden wheel of my hot sun; behind every black rock a tropical rose and behind every cruel wind-driven snowstorm a filmy sheet, a transparency, of golden fleas. No matter how stark the scene, no matter how black the gale or sinister the violence of Miranda, still the light of my triumph must shine through. And behind the interminable dead clanking of some salt-and seaweed-encrusted three-ton bell buoy should be heard the soft outdoor lowing of this island’s cows, our gigantic cows with moody harlequin faces and rumps like enormous upturned wooden packing crates.
But the evidence. Earlier this morning she appeared outside my window — Catalina Kate accompanied by little Sister Josie, who attends all our births and who remains faithful to some order that has long since departed our wandering island — appeared outside my window to tell me she was three months gone with child and to give us, Sonny and myself, a present with which to celebrate the happy news, a pound of American hot dogs wrapped up in a moldy and dog-eared sheet of soggy newspaper. Catalina Kate’s own child! Her charcoal eyes, her hair plaited in a single braid as thick as my wrist and hanging over one lovely breast; her skin some subtle tincture of eggplant and pink rose, one hand already curved and resting on her belly where it will stay until labor commences, the other hand outstretched with her gift of hot dogs; here this girl, this mauve puff of powder who still retains her aboriginal sweaty armpits and lice eggs in the pores of her bare dusty feet, here this Catalina Kate and beside her the little black-faced nun who vicariously shares the joys of pregnancy and who smiles and who, despite her own youth and her little heavy robes of the order, reveals suddenly a splendid big mouthful of golden teeth. So the two of them stood there, flesh and innocence, until we had expressed our pleasure and Sonny had accepted the package of hot dogs — USA. — on behalf of both of us and I had completed their ritual, their girlish game, by reaching out the window where they stood in the deep sun and lime fragrance and with my fingertips gently touched her where she assured me the treasured life lay growing.
So in six months and on the Night of All Saints Catalina Kate will bear her child — our child — and I shall complete my history, my evocation through a golden glass, my hymn to the invisible changing serpents of the wind, complete this the confession of my triumph, this my diary of an artificial inseminator. At the very moment Catalina Kate comes due my crabbed handwriting shall explode into a concluding flourish, and I will be satisfied. I will be fifty-nine years old and father to innumerable bright living dreams and vanquished memories. It should be clear that I have triumphed over Cassandra too, since there are many people who wish nothing more than to kiss me when the midday heat occasionally sends me to the hammock or when the moon is full, stealing, gliding into the warmth and stillness of Plantation House, or in long silvery lines following me to the edge of a moonlit sea. For a kiss. For a shadowy kiss from me.
I receive the sweet ghostly touch of their lips, I kiss them in return. I stand glancing out over that endless ripple of ocean where we have wandered and will continue to wander, softly I call out a name — Sonny! Catalina Kate! — and watch the endless ribbon of our ocean road and smile. I hear the moving shadows and hear those long-lost words—“I have soon to journey to a lonely island in a distant part of my kingdom”—and I can only smile.
Poor Prince Paris.
The Gentle Island
And so, fresh from the wartime capital of the world, we became her unwitting lodgers, Cassandra and I, Cassandra with her pretended mothering of Pixie, I with my recent and terrifying secret knowledge about Fernandez. Already the fall winds were gathering and every morning from my bedroom window I watched a single hungry bird hang itself on the wet rising wind and, battered and crescent-shaped and angry, submit itself endlessly to the first raw gloom of day in the hopes of spying from on high some flash of food in the dirty undulating trough of a wave. And every morning I stood blowing on my fingers and watching the tom and ragged bird until it flapped away on the ragged wings of its discouragement, blowing, shivering, smiling to think that here even the birds were mere prowlers in the mist and wind, mere vagrants in the empty back lots of that low sky.
Briefly then our new home. White clapboard house, peeling paint, abandoned wasp’s nest under the eaves, loose shingles, fungus-like green sludge scattered across the roof. Widow’s house, needy but respectable. In front a veranda — the old green settee filled with mice, heap of rotted canvas and rusted springs — and a naked chestnut tree with incurable disease and also two fat black Labrador retrievers chained to a little peeling kennel. Protection for the poor widow, culprits who heaped the bare front yard with the black fingers of their manure. And in the rear the widow’s little untended victory garden — a few dead vines, a few small humps in the frost — and, barely upright and half-leaning against a weed-grown shed, the long-abandoned wreck of a hot rod — orange, blue, white, no tires, no glass in the windows, big number five on the crumpled hood — the kind of hopeless incongruity to be found behind the houses of young island widows. Our new home then, and with its cracked masonry, warped beams, sway-backed floors and tiny old fusty fireplaces packed with the rank odor of urine and white ash, it was just as I had dreamed it, was exactly as I had seen it and even smelled and tasted it during all my exotic hot nights at sea when I suffered each separate moment of my personal contribution to the obscene annals of naval history. This house then, and every bit the old freezing white skeleton I had been hoping for. So on my rickety pine bureau I propped my photograph of the U.S.S. Starfish and flung the flight bag in the bottom drawer and hung my uniform in the closet which contained three little seagoing chests made of bone and brass and dried-out cracked turkey skin. Propped up the picture, hung away the spotted uniform, admired the way I looked in a black and white checked shirt and dark blue thick woolen trousers. Ready for gales, ready for black rocks. Everything in order and as I had expected, even to the identical white bowls and pitchers and washstands in Cassandra’s room and mine, even to the marble sink, lion claws on the tub and long metal flush chain in the john. Of course I could not have anticipated the black brassiere that dangled as large and stark as an albatross from the tin shower curtain pole. I stared at it a long moment— this first sign of the enemy — and then shut the old heavily varnished ill-fitting door. There was a tap leaking on the other side.