“Now, Papa,” I said suddenly, and there was a startled jumping sound behind the door, “now I am going to play!” And my arm fell and the bow dragged, sawed, swayed to and fro — hair on gut, fat fingertips on gut — and the cello and I rolled from side to side together. I kept my eyes on the little black hole in the door, with every ecstatic rhythmic roll crossed and recrossed my legs.
So I played for him, played Brahms while my father must have been loading the pistol, played while he swept an impatient and frightened hand through the gray thinning hair and made fierce eyes to himself behind the door. I played with no thought of him, really, but he must have gagged a little to himself in there, choked like a man coughing up blood for the first time as he tried to decide how best to use the nickel-plated weapon, forced his fingers inside the trigger guard. I suppose the first sounds of the cello must have destroyed the spell of the faucet. So I played on, phantom accomplice to his brutal act, and all the while hoping, I think, for success and pleased with the song.
And then: “Edward!”
Bow in mid-air. Silence, catch in my throat, legs locked. Because his voice was loud. He had gotten down on his knees and had put his mouth to the keyhole: “Edward,” he said firmly, “stop it!”
And then cello, legs, bow, myself, heart, Brahms, all locked together for a moment of immobile frenzy because I heard the lock turn in the lavatory door and thought he was coming out to me.
“Edward! I have opened the door. There is no point in making someone break down the door to get me….”
So the bow swung free and again I was squatting, leaning close to the door: “But, Papa, may I come in then?”
The shot. The tiny acid stink at the keyhole. And the door opened slightly of its own accord, hung ajar so that I saw one twisted foot, trouser cuff jerked above the ankle, and my own release, my cry, my grief, the long shocked moment when I clung to the cello and heard the terrible noise and wondered when it would ever end. He may have spoken to me one last time—“Good-by, Edward”—but I couldn’t be sure. The shot, after all, killed everything.
Everything, that is, except my love. But if my own poor father was Death himself, as I think he was, then certainly I was right to tell Cassandra how familiar I was with the seeds of death. Wasn’t I myself, as a matter of fact, simply that? Simply one of those little black seeds of death? And what else can I say to Father, Mother, Gertrude, Fernandez, Cassandra, except sleep, sleep, sleep?
Land of Spices
High lights of helplessness? Mere trivial record of collapse? Say, rather, that it is the chronicle of recovery, the history of courage, the dead reckoning of my romance, the act of memory, the dance of shadows. And all the earmarks of pageantry, if you will, the glow of Skipper’s serpentine tale.
Cinnamon, I discovered when I was tossed up spent and half-naked on the invisible shore of our wandering island — old Ariel in sneakers, sprite surviving in bald-headed man of fair complexion-cinnamon, I found, comes to the hand like little thin brown pancakes or the small crisp leaves of a midget tobacco plant. And like Big Bertha who calls to me out of the black forest of her great ugly face I too am partial to cinnamon, am always crumpling a few of the brittle dusty leaves in my pockets, rubbing it gently onto the noses of my favorite cows. And what better than cinnamon for my simmering dreams?
Yesterday, if I can trust such calculations in my time of no time, yesterday marked the end of Catalina Kate’s eighth month. Four weeks to go and right on time, and Kate has stretched and swelled and grown magnificently. My Kate with a breadbasket as big as a house, tight as a drum, and the color of old brick and shiny, smooth and shiny, under the gaudy calico of that tattered dress. And wasn’t Sister Josie pleased? “Baby coming in four weeks, Josie,” I told her. And weren’t we all? But yesterday was also the day I knocked up Sweet Phyllis in the shade of the calabash tree. A big day, as I told Sonny, a big day all around.
“Cow’s calling, Skipper. Just hear if she ain’t!”
Dawn. The first moment of windy dawn, and the bright limes were dancing, the naked flesh hung down from the little cocoa trees, and already the ants were swarming. Red-eyed Sonny stood there — metamorphosed, waiting forever — among the broad leaves and shadows framed in my large white rotting casement. Sonny was waiting, yawning, rubbing his eyes in my view of the world.
“Cow’s calling for sure. And ain’t that Sweet Phyllis, Skipper? Sounds like Phyllis to me!”
“All right, Sonny,” leaning forward, scratching myself, smearing the ants, watching the shifting torso in my window, listening, “it’s all right,Sonny. She’ll wait.” I could hear the faint far-off appeal, the dumb strained trumpeting of Sweet Phyllis in heat. She sounded ecstatic, was making a brassy sustained noise of grief. Sonny had a good ear.
“Tell Big Bertha to fix us a lunch, Sonny. We might as well make a day of it. And tell Bertha that she and Kate and Josie may come along if they’d like to. Fair enough?”
“Oh, they’ll want to come along, Skipper,” grinning, shifting softly and erratically in the window with his arms pressed tight to the long thin torso and somehow active, up to something, though in no way suggesting his intention to be off, to be gone about my business, “them girls wouldn’t miss a hot fete for Phyllis if you allows them the privilege and lets them get off from work. Skipper, you knows that!”
The old smashed petty officer’s cap this time, the indecent angle of the cap, the long shrunken torso like a paste of hickory ash and soot, the fixed grin, the unshaved black jaw working. “Well, Sonny,” I said, “how about it? Are you going to tell Big Bertha what I told you?” And then, listening, watching, returning his grin: “Sonny,” I said softly, “Sonny, are you relieving yourself against Plantation House? Under my very window, Sonny? You have no scruples. You have no scruples at all.”
And shaking his head in pretended pain, showing me that long wry black face and contorting his brows, blinking: “That’s right, Skipper,” he said, “I don’t have none of that scruples stuff. No, sir!”
So that’s how yesterday began, with the live sounds of the calling cow and Sonny’s water. It ended after dark with a bath, one of the prolonged infrequent sandy sea-splashing baths for Sonny and myself. And in between, only our little idyl down with the cow. Only the five of us in the shade of the calabash tree with Phyllis. And the girls, as Sonny called them, added their charms to the cows’ and enjoyed our little slow pastoral down in the overgrown field with Phyllis and Alma and Edward and Freddy and Beatrice and Gloria. More water, of course, and a little song and so many soothing hands and a nap on a pile of green calabashes and the taste of guava jam, it couldn’t have been a better time for Phyllis, a better time for us.
“All right,” I said, “everyone here? Now let’s not have a lot of noise. I don’t want you making a lot of noise and frightening that cow. You hear? I don’t want to get kicked.” And then I started off, leading the way. And Sonny in the old chief’s cap and ragged white undershorts followed, and then Big Bertha with our lunch on her head in an iron pot, and then beautiful sway-backed Kate and Sister Josie, who in her mauve hood and cowl, long mauve skirts hiding her little black shoes, loved all the wild cows and mockingbirds and indecent flowers. In a long single file and in that colorful order they followed me through the bush, and I was the Artificial Inseminator of course, and in one hand I carried the little black tettered satchel and in the other hand swung Uncle Billy’s crucifix. A slow languid single-file progress through the bush with the women jabbering and the orchids hanging down from the naked Indian trees and Sonny slapping flies and the sun, the high sun, piercing my old white Navy cap with its invisible rays. And I swayed, I swung myself from side to side, opened up our way along that all-but-obliterated cow path on the saw-toothed ridge among the soft hibiscus and poisoned thorns and, yes, the hummingbirds, the little quick jewels of my destiny. From the frozen and crunchy cow paths of the Atlantic island — my mythic rock in a cold sea — to this soft pageant through leaf, tendril, sun, wind, how far I had come.