“Got to go a little faster now,” I said, and raised the dripping satchel so they could see it, “must hurry it up a little, Sonny and young ladies, or the ice will melt.”
And from the other side of the ridge and on the floating air she was calling us, Sweet Phyllis, was holding her quarters rigid and sticking her nose through the calabash leaves and blaring at us, blaring forth the message of her poor baffled fertility. It was a signal of distress, a low-register fire horn, and I recognized more than Sweet Phyllis’s voice drifting over the ridge.
“You hear it, Big Bertha?” I said, “hear it, Kate? And you, Sister Josie, do you hear it too? They’re all calling now. Alma and Beatrice and Gloria and Edward and Freddy — hear them calling? They’ve gotten the idea from Phyllis, eh? All of them think it is time for a hot fete, even the steers. Isn’t that so, Josie?”
Little black Josie, old Bertha with the pot on her head, my dusty rouge-colored pregnant Kate with her club of dark hair hanging down to her breast and her belly slung down and forward near the end of her time — they giggled, each one of them, and pointed at the wet shirt clinging to my enormous back, pointed at the dripping satchel. I smelled them — little nun, old cook, mother-to-be — and knew that they were in a processional, after all, and that each one of them was capable of love in her own way.
“The way things is going, Skipper, old Sonny’s about to start a little calling of his own any minute now. I just feels a big call catching right here in this skinny throat of mine. Got to bellow it out any minute, Skipper, damn if I don’t.”
“You want to call too, Sonny,” I said. “Why not? A little calling wouldn’t hurt you. It’s the hammock that’s bad for you, Sonny. Too much time in the hammock is bad.”
And I laughed, glanced over my shoulder — Sonny flopping along in his unbuckled combat boots, Sonny pulling up his drawers — and the three dark women were watching us and listening. Love at last, I thought, and I thrashed out onto a small golden promontory above the field. Blue sky, bright pale blue of a baby’s eye, our golden vantage point, the field below; and in the center of the field the dark low sprawling shape of our deep green tree, and under the tree the cows — two steers, four heifers, six young beauties in all — and in the branches of the tree, which were tied together, knotted together like tangled ribbons in a careless head of hair, the birds, a screeching and wandering tribe of birds that were drawn to Phyllis’s song like ourselves and now swarmed in the tree. Love at last. I smiled over my shoulder and we started down.
To the last we held our single file. To the last we maintained our evenly spaced formation, our gentle steps, delicate order, significant line. Tennis shoes filled with burrs, white trousers tom, old rakish and rotting white cap, shreds of once-white shirt plastered to my mahogany breast and back, and except for these I was naked. Sniffing the sweet air and keeping my chin lifted, and swaying, riding slowly forward at a heavy contented angle I, Skipper, led the way. I knew the way, was the man in charge — the AI — and there was no mistaking me for anything but the leader now, and they were faithful followers, my entourage. Down we went, and the tennis shoes and combat boots and little black pointed shoes from the missionary’s museum and two other lovely pairs of naked feet hardly touched the earth, hardly made a sound, surely left no prints in the soft wild surface of the empty field. It was a long slow day with the cows, a picnic under the calabash tree, a gentle moment, a pastoral in my time of no time.
We maintained our places in line up to the very tree itself, and then one by one and without breaking file we stopped and folded aside the tender branches, one by one entered the shade, joined the loud animals in the din of the birds. The spot I chose for entering was not an arm’s length from Sweet Phyllis’s dripping nose which was thrust through the leaves and sniffing us. giving the sound of desire to our approach. But she was not frightened. And as soon as I entered that grove of shade I rested my hand on her shoulder, thrust my own nose through the leaves, was just in time to watch Kate take the last twenty or thirty steps of our amorous way.
She was like a child, like a young girl, because despite her weight and swayed back, despite sore muscles and the rank sweat on her exotic brow, she was taking those last steps with her hands held behind her back — backs of her hands nesting in the small of her back — and with her elbows held out like wings, and she was waggling her elbows, tossing her head, taking light happy strides on her naked toes. It was a sinuous slow-motion seductive cantering, the heavy oblivious dance of my young Kate. Despite the water under her skin. Despite the big precious baby inside the sac.
“Come along, Catalina Kate,” I cried, “I’m watching you!” And then we were all together and the bellowing stopped, the birds simmered down, Bertha wedged the iron pot into the above-ground roots of the tree, and I — humming, musing, stripping off the rags of my shirt — I squatted and opened my official black satchel and removed the little sad chunk of ice, deposited the little smooth half-melted piece of ice in the lip of the spring that was a black puddle among the lesser roots at the far edge of the tree. And carefully — down on my knees, smiling — I took the little glass bottle from the satchel and weighed it in my hand — a mere nothing in the hand, but life, the seeds of life — and stood it carefully on the chunk of ice. Safe now. No worry now. I could take my time.
“See there, Kate? That’s Oscar. Oscar in the little bottle, Kate! For Sweet Phyllis, do you understand?”
And smiling, glancing at the bottle, glancing at me, fixing the shiny black club of plaited hair between her young breasts and indifferent to the sweat that trickled down her bare throat and down her arms, down the sides of her young face and even into the comers of her dark eyes, she said softly: “Oh, yes, sir, Kate know what you mean.”
“Good girl,” I said, “I’m glad.” And then: “Well, what about it, Bertha, time to eat? Poor Sonny looks pretty hungry to me!”
So while the spring kept Oscar cool, the five of us sprawled close together and held out our hands to the fat black arm that disappeared inside the pot and came up dripping. Calypso herself couldn’t have done better. Sweet guavas and fat meat that slid into the fingers, made the fingers breathe, and crushed leaves of cinnamon on the tongue and sweet shreds of coconut. We ate together under the dark speckled covering of the tree, sprawled together, composed, with no need for wine, and the cows stood about and nosed us and a blackbird flew down and sat on Sonny’s cap. We ate together among the smooth green oval calabashes that were as large as footballs, and lay among the calabashes and licked our fingers. I told Josie to take off her shoes—“Take them off, Josie,” I said, “you have my permission.” And while she was trying to unfasten the little knotted strings Edward took it into his head to jump up on Sweet Phyllis and the bird hopped wildly about on Sonny’s cap. And my namesake — reluctantly I say that name, reluctantly admit that name — left bright thick gouts of mud on each of Sweet Phyllis’s soft yellow flanks.