How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House

by Cherie Jones

  This morning, when she sees the trees, she shuts the window and opens the door and peeps outside. She imagines that her daughter has not died, that this might all be a bad dream, the obeah work of one of the many women who want Adan. She imagines that if she closes her eyes and opens them again she will wake up and Baby will be on the beach in her bassinet, amazed by her own fingers, waiting to accompany her mother to plait heads on the beach.

  But although Lala closes her eyes and counts to ten, although she says a prayer for a peaceful mind and the protection of the angels and enough of a miracle to make this only a nightmare, Baby is still dead when she opens her eyes, when the last of the prayers leave her lips. Baby is still dead, but the trees, still flinging their fruit, are not.

  She resolves, in anger, to cut them down herself. Right now. While they are taking aim at her house, while the wind is whipping their leaves around. Right now.

  She has returned inside to look for the cutlass when the door opens and Adan comes in and with the sight of him, his swollen eyes and the anguish still twisting his lips, comes the knowledge that cutting down the trees will not bring Baby back. Killing Adan will not bring her back. Nothing will bring her back.

  She wants to ask him about her money, about where he’s been hiding, she wants to tell him about the policeman and the questions he asked her, she wants to tell him that they must run, but what comes out instead is her relief at his return, her desire for his comfort, her need to go back to the time before Baby died, to stay there:

  “You still taking the coconuts for Coyote, Adan?”

  Adan hasn’t said a word, but is now stretched out on the wrought-iron chair where he dozes sitting up. This is something he is accustomed to doing when he is angry – not coming to bed, shedding his clothes at the door of the house, and sitting and sleeping in the wrought-iron chair when she is already curled up in their bed.

  “I ain’t see the cart lately,” mumbles Adan. “I don’t think it working.”

  “You could still get a few dollars for the ones outside. You check by the house?”

  Adan’s voice loses the quiet rasp of weeping and hurts her ears.

  “You think Coyote want coconuts if the fucking cart ain’t working?”

  Coyote’s cart is painted red, gold, and green. In an alcove just beneath the handle of the cart he stores a small boom box and a stack of cassette tapes of Culture, Peter Tosh, and Jackie Opel. Coyote plays his tapes when he is waiting for people to order coconuts. His music calms him, says Coyote. He has several diagonal slashes across his inner left forearm to remind him of what happens when he cuts coconuts while agitated. When he is approached for a sale, he presses PAUSE and the little cassette player whirs to a stop. Lala once watched a white tourist, blistered red and blissfully happy, order some Bob Marley with his coconuts.

  “I don’t play no kiss-me-crutch Bob Marley, but anyway, it ain’t music I selling,” Coyote had said then, and he cut the coconut so savagely that the tourist was alarmed and Lala was sure he would finally sever the hand.

  Coyote cannot stand Bob Marley. It is one of the things he argues about in the rumshop, over ESA Field white rum – this fascination with Bob Marley. Coyote often tells the men in the rumshop the tale of the tourist asking for Bob Marley music. Depending on how many drinks he has had, he received one or all of the slashes on his left arm on the day this tourist asked him this question. Bob Marley wasn’t no real reggae star, he spits with a stupse, Peter Tosh was Real Reggae. It is the way of the world that Tosh never get the bligh that Marley did.

  Most often, nobody in the rumshop takes up the other side of the argument, and Coyote drinks himself into a stupor and refuses to engage with anyone on any other topic. For weeks on end after similar episodes, Coyote blasts Peter Tosh from his little transistor as he trundles his cart along. On such occasions he refuses to turn it off while tourists are ordering so that they have to shout “Two coconuts!” at him above “Equal Rights and Justice.” His intolerance for Bob Marley requests is now the sort of legend that even children know.

  Adan sucks his teeth from the chair. The day before Baby was born, he had relieved the tree of some of the coconuts. Then they had planned to use the money they got from Coyote to buy Baby’s layette for the hospital. Now, he can tell that Lala is thinking of ways to pay for her funeral. If he does not take the coconuts to Coyote soon they will dry out and become useless for selling cool drinks to tourists and good only for skinning and grating and making coconut bread and conkies – labor reserved for locals, who have trees of their own. Still, he resents being reminded.

  “Coconuts can’t pay for a funeral,” Adan observes, “so stop harassing me about rasshole coconuts.”

  “If I still had the money in my tin . . .” she starts.

  Adan sighs.

  “Wasn’t no money in that tin – no real rasshole money!”

  “What you do with my money, Adan?”

  “Ooooooh! Your money, your money, Lala? We married, you living in my house but it is your money?”

  “We need that money, Adan,” says Lala quietly, eyes still on the coconuts. “I need my money.”

  She tells him about the dark policeman, the questions he’d asked her, the laugh in his voice that never made it to his lips in a smile. She tells Adan that this policeman asked her where he was, said that he wanted to talk to him. She tells Adan that she is scared. And he listens with his eyes closed, as if he really just wants to go back to sleep.

  “He ain’t gonna figure out you make Baby dead,” says Adan. “The police not that smart.”

  “I make her? Me one?”

  His eyes open and flash warnings of fates so dire that she doesn’t bother to finish, swallows the lump in her throat instead, realizes a moment later that it has settled into a knot at the pit of her stomach.

  “You remember what to say when he ask for me?”

  She nods.

  “I tell them you was away fishing with some friends. I tell them we ain’t manage to contact you yet.”

  He nods because she remembered, because she has said exactly what she was supposed to say.

  “It ain’t safe here, Adan, we have to leave. We have to go. We – ”

  “We ain’t going nowhere, Lala. We just have to be quiet until everything settle down. You too frighten. Too coward.”

  Adan stands, stretches, rubs his fists over his face, as if she is stopping him from sleeping, as if he must now stay awake only because she is bothering him, because she refuses to let a tired man rest. He frowns, as if she has brought him nothing but trouble. Is she not the one who turned up outside the big house on Baxter’s Beach and buzzed the gate? Is she not the reason that white lady remembers him? Is she not the same one who caused Baby to fall? He retrieves his vest from the floor by the door and starts to brush his teeth in the little sink under the window at the front of the room, where a red heliconia that Lala has placed in an enamel teacup on the lip of the window is now as withered and decrepit as the house itself.

  “Besides,” says Adan, and his face flinches with the frustration of remembered spite, “I got business to finish first.”

  “Adan, please, just – ”

  “Shut up, woman!”

  But she can’t shut up.

  “I could go then, if you want to stay here. I . . . I could go and you could come later.”

  “You ain’t going nowhere, Lala. You got money to go somewhere?”

  “I had money, Adan. You know I had money. I want back my money, Adan. What you do with my money?”

  Adan’s laughter erupts without warning, mouth wide open, belching mint-flavored lava. He walks over to her right side, still brushing his white, white teeth with his naked left hand in between his laughter.

  “You want back you money?” he singsongs through cotton, taking her right hand, “you want back you money?”

  Lala refuses to look at him, her left arm has started to tremble, and she gently curls its fist around the side of her skirt. Lala is no
w looking at an airplane through the window, just lifting itself into the sky above the coconut trees, en route to another world entirely. In this other world, Lala imagines, coconut trees do not exist, neither do centipedes, nor men who hold your right hand so tightly you could wet yourself.

  “Gimme back my money, Adan,” Lala insists, in a small voice she does not recognize. Her voice is not the roar it started out as in her head. “Please, Adan – gimme it back, Adan!”

  There is a physical state beyond pain, a sort of numbness that allows Lala to remain standing while the flesh and bones of her right hand are forced upward, so that her wrist looks like it is wrapped in bracelets of warm red. In her mind her bones break with the explosive pop-pop of fireworks. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t, but at first she is screaming, and then she is in such pain that she is not.

  “Bitch,” says Adan, twisting Lala by the palm so that she spins on her heel and begins to fall to her knees by the sink, “tell me what you gonna do if I don’t.”

  Chapter 15

  Adan

  7 November 1970

  To tell the story of Adan Primus you’d have to tell the story of a Burger Bee snack-box on a Friday afternoon. Adan is ten at the time of this story, and he is already growing into someone a friend should be afraid of just the same as a stranger. He is not only growing tall but wide, and the short khaki pants of his school uniform look comical on him, like someone stuffed a man into a schoolboy’s uniform. It is however not just the fact of Adan’s impressive physical build that is worthy of caution, it is the sinister undertone to his actions that would worry anyone who takes the time to watch him. Adan is a child for whom the suffering of a foe he beats in a fight is a mere fascination. He does not need to be provoked to use his prowess to do harm, this Adan, he often uses it just to see what will happen. When Adan pelts the neighborhood cats with rocks until they shriek and go running, when he seeks to reassure those same cats as they avoid him for weeks at a time after, when he plies them with bits of moldy cheese and drops of stolen milk so that they come closer to him, only to hold them and squeeze their necks until they choke, when he laughs and bobs and weaves to avoid the ire of their unsheathed claws, it is hard for any onlooker to view his actions as just a child’s natural curiosity.

  “You stop that shite right now, Adan Primus!” shrieks Ms. Nancy, from the safety of her kitchen window, when the yowls of the cats make her leave her lunch and look outside. Ms. Nancy shakes her head and reminds herself not to let her children fraternize with this Adan, no matter how many times he broaches her front yard, loudly bouncing a ball or exclaiming as he pitches marbles on the smooth concrete of her front yard, baiting her children just like the blasted cats. Ms. Nancy has tried to warn people about this Adan, especially her neighbor Preta, under whose doting attention Adan’s flaws of character take root and multiply. It was Ms. Nancy who threw open the doors of her little blue house so everybody on the street could come to celebrate Preta’s new baby that she didn’t birth herself. Ms. Nancy was the first in line with a blue box with a bow to welcome him. But now Ms. Nancy lies in her one-bedroom at night with her children around her, in her little box in the wren built by the government for poor people just like her, and worries that one or more of them will someday turn out like Adan, that someone could similarly be praying to God that their little one doesn’t turn out like one of hers. As a consequence, Ms. Nancy beats her children for every little infraction, for the simple reason that she has observed that Preta does not do likewise and this sparing of the rod, she decides, is the source of Adan’s failings.

  Every Friday evening, Adan Primus walks to the clinic of the goodly Dr. Thompson. He starts walking the moment the last bell is rung at Baxter’s Comprehensive Primary School to signal the end of the school day, the throngs of schoolchildren swarming the street parting like the Red Sea before Adan as he strides to meet his Auntie Preta. At Dr. Thompson’s little clinic on the corner of a busy street in Tatler’s Farm, Adan will wait for his Auntie Preta to finish her work so they can go home. Dr. Thompson’s clinic is at the side of his house, which is a big stone building surrounded by a large yard with a hardscrabble garden from which Auntie Preta has been gently coaxing okra, carrots, pumpkins, and sweet potatoes. Auntie Preta works for Dr. Thompson, cleaning and washing and making puddings and golden apple juice.

  Every Friday evening when the last patient has left Dr. Thompson’s clinic, he turns off the light and walks to his car and Auntie Preta and Adan open the back door of his silver Subaru and are carried home, because Dr. Thompson is a good man with a soft heart and on Fridays he closes the clinic early and pays Auntie Preta and takes her and her nephew home. Most Friday evenings Dr. Thompson’s daughter, Janey, joins them. There is no Mrs. Thompson to watch her at home and she is only eight years old. Mrs. Thompson decided that she did not admire a man who would waste a perfectly good medical degree on patients from a poor neighborhood. Mrs. Thompson had no desire to understand the plights of patients who often begged off her husband’s modest fees and left huge hands of bananas and plantains and sacks of sweet potatoes at the back door instead. As it happens, Dr. Thompson accepts these potatoes, these okras, so much sugarcane with the same good-natured benevolence with which he faced his wife divorcing him because of them.

  Every Friday evening Dr. Thompson drives, with Janey in the front and Auntie Preta and Adan in the back, into the parking lot at Burger Bee to buy his Janey dinner. Poor Janey has a funny stomach and must have her meals on time. This is the reason that Dr. Thompson steers the Subaru into the Burger Bee parking lot at five minutes to six every Friday and little Janey starts jumping. She will have fries, she tells Dr. Thompson, and a burger. No, she will have a roti, a beef-and-potato roti and a banana split. No, she will have a snack-box and a milkshake. Her choices meander, always, back to a snack-box and a milkshake.

  On our particular Friday, the man-boy Adan sits in the back of Dr. Thompson’s car with Auntie Preta and watches Janey fidget. Adan thinks that Janey looks like a spider. He longs to pinch those long, long limbs, to pull that lank, dark hair, but he doesn’t dare in the eyesight of Auntie Preta. All arms and legs, Janey is, a skinny torso and a sheet of long brown hair that hangs on each side of a little heart-shaped face and limpid hazel eyes. Dr. Thompson lifts her from the car when he gets out. He comes around to her side and Janey’s long, long arms wrap themselves around her father’s neck in a way that makes Adan think of the snakes in the science book at school. Janey is carried toward the white-lit windows of the Burger Bee. Dr. Thompson has stopped asking Auntie Preta whether she wants anything by this time, or whether she wants a snack-box for Adan, or a roti. Auntie Preta always says no but on Fridays Auntie Preta does not cook for the Thompson family. On Fridays, by agreement with her boss, Auntie Preta focuses on the washing and the ironing of Janey’s school uniforms and Dr. Thompson’s shirt-jacs and the washing of the house linens so on Fridays Dr. Thompson buys Janey her favorite fast food on the way to drop Auntie Preta home.

  So Adan twists around and clambers to his knees in the back seat of the square Subaru and presses his big face right up to the back windshield so he can watch Dr. Thompson and Janey walk past the big, wide windows and the beveled-glass door opening and closing below a flashing Brobdingnagian bee. Adan watches Dr. Thompson enter, remove Janey, gently, from his arms and lift her under her armpits to face the wide smile of the cashier, to tell her what she wants. At these moments Adan feels like he is suffocating in the back seat of Dr. Thompson’s car, as if he will find himself unable to breathe if he does not reach for the chrome handle slotted into the gray velvet paneling of the door, and open it and run. Adan knows better than to beg Auntie Preta to buy him a snack-box of his own. He knows that Auntie Preta is not really unkind, she merely believes it best to bring up her boy to know his place, to understand that weekly excursions to Burger Bee are beyond him and his kin and should remain that way until they can buy their own snack-box every Friday, should they ever be able to. Auntie Pr
eta believes it is good training to help Adan to understand that the chicken she will cook on Sunday would have been raised, fed, slaughtered, wholesomely prepared, and placed before him without costing the price of a single snack-box. But Adan does not understand this and he simpers, he simmers, he sighs. When Dr. Thompson comes back to the car with Janey she returns to the front passenger seat and starts to devour her snack-box, putting aside one-eyed Mr. Teddy to lick her fingers, wiggling in delight and kicking her shoes against the dashboard.

  What happens next occurs at the top of the hill where the road starts to descend into the rough architecture of Baxter’s Village. Janey is nibbling the crunchy skin of one of the two pieces of chicken that nestle in her snack-box when Adan reaches his long left arm through the space between the front passenger seat and the door and, neatly, retrieves the other piece of chicken. It is so quiet and unexpected a movement that at first Janey does not believe what has happened. Then she protests, loudly, that Adan has stolen her chicken. Adan, meanwhile, is happily eating the golden-brown thigh, as if he is oblivious to Janey’s protests.

  Dr. Thompson chuckles. Says it is okay, a kindness that Adan later attributes to the fact that Dr. Thompson is a doctor, as if his benevolence is a by-product of his profession. Auntie Preta shrieks apologies at Dr. Thompson, at Janey, retrieves the meat from Adan’s grasp and proffers it to Janey, who of course no longer wants it and looks at the bitten thigh in her hand as if she was the one caught stealing. Janey looks close to tears.

  On this particular Friday afternoon, when the Subaru sighs to a stop outside their house, Auntie Preta alights from the car with the bitten chicken still in her grasp and says thank you to Dr. Thompson. She says she will see him on Monday unless he wants any help with Janey over the weekend, in which case he should call her straightaway. She does not mind, says Auntie Preta, babysitting Janey on a weekend, she is such a dear child, no trouble at all, not like her Adan. Dr. Thompson reiterates that it is okay, children will do these things, Janey will get over it, next time he will buy Adan something as well, he should have done that because his mind had told him to even when she said no. And then Dr. Thompson honks goodbye with Janey still sobbing in the front seat and refusing to wave.