by Cherie Jones
“You coming in to give the boys a last lil piece before you go home, Mrs. Ramkissoon?” taunts Plucka, and Rainford is too incensed, too embarrassed, to do anything but walk ahead of his wife, go into their house, and close the door. Esme tries to get inside but the door is locked, so she stays in the veranda and begs to be let in, the few wildflowers in her wedding bouquet already beginning to wilt and wither worse than the curls in her hair.
“Open this door, Rainford!” Esme hollers. “Open the rasshole door, man!”
Lala has never been told how her mother cursed Rainford, how she threatened to take them both back to the brothel or go somewhere he would never find her. Lala is instead repeatedly told the story of what happened after Rainford opened the door, when he chopped up his new wife with a cutlass before drinking the bottle of weed killer she intended to use to keep the crabgrass from choking her Ixora.
Given the choice, it is not the story Esme would have told her.
Chapter 27
Lala
3 September 1984
On the day that she had begged Adan to take her with him, to let her come and live with him in his little house by the sea, Lala had not been told the story of Wilma’s marriage or Esme’s courtship. She did not understand that for the women of her lineage, a marriage meant a murder in one form or the other. This ignorance was why Lala had asked Adan, had practically begged him, to marry her and take her away when she discovered that she was pregnant with Baby. She tells herself now that she was tired of telling Wilma untruths to get leave to run down the road and meet him under the gnarled and wizened branches of a dunks tree, to listen to him sing beautiful songs made entirely of her name. Lala tells herself it was not the fear of what Wilma would do, what she would say when she found out that Lala was made of the same slack stock her mother was. She tells herself it was not the thought of having to raise a baby in the house with Wilma and Carson and the ghost of her dead mother that made her run. She tells herself it was love, only love that had motivated her then. She could have stayed with Wilma, she supposes, Wilma would perhaps have allowed it. But somehow she can never decide if to stay would have been better, if her suffering would have been any less. If, by staying, she would have doomed Baby to the same life she herself had had. If perhaps, for Baby, that would have been a fate even worse than her eventual death.
Adan had not wanted a baby at first, had not seen himself that way encumbered. But he had watched Lala begging him with the spines of the dunks tree spread behind her, and he had relented. A baby was a blessing, he had reasoned, it said so in the psalms. He had waited under the dunks tree while Lala gave Wilma the news, while she stuffed her things into a stringy market bag and grabbed her mannequin and a few of the dresses Wilma had accepted from Mrs. Kennedy and came back to meet him again. And they had walked together to the little house, where he had cleared a drawer of his things and given her the room to unburden the string bag.
And when she had lain down next to him that first night and spooned her back into his chest and drawn his arms over her stomach, while she had settled and snored, she had felt something, something he appeared to have felt too. This something sent him to Chinky, the ghetto jeweler, the very next day with two pennyweights of stolen gold to be melted and refashioned into a wedding ring.
A few days after the funeral, Lala is looking at this wedding ring when she comes in from braiding at the beach. She has managed to braid only one head, a middle-aged tourist lady too drunk on rum and sunshine to listen to other beach vendors and braiders and steer clear of Lala. One head is not enough, and this is why she is staring at her wedding ring. She is wondering whether she can ask Tone to sell it for her, tell Adan it has been lost at the beach, use it to help buy her ticket. She has been braiding every day, hustling tourist women when they pass her, trying to gather enough money to repay Wilma and leave, but it is not tourist season, and word has spread about her and business is especially slow.
It is already dark by the time Lala pushes open the door to the house and the door finally groans and falls off its hinges, corroded by rain and the resulting rust. She frowns, props the broken door up with her bench, and immediately runs back downstairs in response to a sudden drizzle. When she comes back up she takes a galvanized tub of washing inside with her, balanced on her right hip, as her grandmother might have done. Lala is panting ever so slightly because it has been only a few months since she gave birth and even less time since the baby died and somehow her body is still sluggish, so that the effort required to drag herself up and down the stairs to wash clothing in the galvanized tub leaves her heaving when she returns to the top and the PEPSI sign.
Adan does not look up. He is on the wrought-iron chair by the bed, a chair he once salvaged from the garbage of a rich tourist. The chair is wide, its arms curve inward and are embellished with intricately wrought grapes and leaves. He is deep in his bible, is Adan, and his lips move swiftly and soundlessly over each verse. Adan is saying his psalms. He can spend several hours a day doing this, especially in the daylight hours before a nighttime job for which he requires a special blessing. The vehemence with which he is praying suggests that there is a job tonight, that it is a big one. There is a little backpack by the door, Lala notices, in the same deep black as the shirt and pants that Adan is wearing. The sight of it makes Lala stumble on her way to the sink but she does not say anything, she does not wish to anger him.
He turns the pages of the grubby red-backed book, lifts a satin ribbon stuck to the spine and brings it down between the two new pages he has landed on. Adan does not need the bible to say these psalms – psalms for protection, psalms for prosperity, psalms to fool and foil the police – but he refers to it anyway as he recites them because it is something he has always done, something he learned from his Auntie Preta.
She tries not to look at him while he stutters over the old English of the King James version, while he closes his eyes and crosses himself and kisses the cover of the book in his hand. Something about it causes her such fury that she bites her lip until she draws blood. Adan will not discover the fat, soft craters on the inside of her lower lip, because Adan no longer tries to kiss her.
“You eating, Adan?”
Adan’s eyes stay on the psalms. The waves crash and bellow on the beach. The rain starts to drum above.
She puts down the tub, picks up one of his bright white shirts to fold it, puts it back, walks ten feet to the kitchen, picks up a knife to peel a potato, remembers that she does not trust herself with knives, puts the potato back, picks up an enamel cup, opens the cupboard below, drags out a sack of rice, and swirls the cup through it. This is the sack of rice she bought months before, when she was heavily pregnant, on a day when Adan was not at home and a friendly fisherman stopped mending a net to lift the sack to the top of the stairs for her. This sack of rice is still almost full.
“You eating, Adan?” she repeats.
Adan looks at her, there with the enamel cup in her hand, the cup brimful of rice. He stares at the cup in her hand, and his lips keep moving over psalm 51. Lala can tell, even though he makes no sound. He does not like to be interrupted when he is saying his psalms. He does not want to be jinxed on the eve of a job by her interrupting the psalms he is saying, so he does not answer her.
Lala sighs without thinking. She makes a loud sound that reminds her of tearing paper. She watches Adan’s lips stop their caress of David’s words and she sighs loudly again, for a different reason. She watches her hand jerk, sees the cup fall, the rice scatter, watches the pages of the bible flutter, sees the psalms of David submerged.
This time Lala is sure she is dying. It is not like before – she doesn’t hear her bones break, nothing snaps or tears, there is no slow leak of life in little red rivers of blood. This time he simply holds her neck and squeezes it. Not talking, not quarreling, just concentrating all his energy on the curve of his palms at her throat. Eventually she can no longer speak, and she finds that the loss of a voice is a lot like drowni
ng. He squeezes so hard that the whites of his eyes grow larger and bulge, and little red veins pop and bleed inside them, and this, more than anything, is what would make her scream if she could.
She is trapped. Like an animal. So that the ten small paces to the door and the steps and the sanctuary of the wide-open beach, even these ten small paces are impossible. Ten paces that were taken for granted yesterday as she went to buy beads or bread or to beg the forgiveness of a man perched on a boulder, forehead in his hand so that his scar was hidden.
He squeezes, and her eyes grow dark, fog over like the surface of the sea on a rainy day, a sea beneath which she sinks further into silence. Dying, finds Lala, is something like surfing a rainbow with very bright colors in all shapes and forms, dancing out of a point that is perpetually spilling them so that you are forever traveling forward on swaths of billowing reds and blues but never really getting anywhere, just forever traveling toward a tiny hole where all the color originates and where it ends. She wonders whether this is how her daughter must have felt when she was dying – the glorious, giddy kaleidoscope hurtling toward a hole that inexplicably remains the same distance away. Lala thinks that if, perhaps, to die means the eternal roller coaster of color, the giddy dance on blues and greens and reds and purples, then – possibly – to kill could be a kindness.
And on seeing that fact made plain on the face before him, Adan frees her throat and lets her go.
Lala is still on the floor coughing when Sergeant Beckles steps into the doorway. Sergeant Beckles wants to talk to Adan. He is smiling when Adan steps into that small space at the top of the stairs. This smile has everything to do with his new theory that Tone and Lala conspired to murder Baby. That Adan is an innocent man. Watching them kiss on the steps was the first clue and the calm of his full belly supports it.
This morning, Mrs. Beckles made him roasted sweet potatoes in garlic and thyme, dusted with cinnamon and a puff of cayenne powder – enough to awaken his salivary glands but not enough to irritate them. The wife boiled and pounded lentils with tarragon and coconut milk, she soaked a few tender beet leaves in brine and then poached them with small silver onions she grew herself. When she presented the meal to him, he ate with the guilt of the tasting slave, sure that he was afforded this luxury solely by virtue of his household position and not because of any genuine intention to feed him the gold of his wife’s patch of ground. She watched him eat silently, as she always did, not allowing herself his leftovers until he had cleared his plate and had seconds, and then she ate her cooling peas without pleasure, spooning them hurriedly into her mouth so that she could wash the dishes quickly enough to catch the sun before the threatening rain could ruin the wash loads waiting to be hung and dried. The policeman had been struck by the sight of her there, sitting in a corner of the kitchen on an odd half-bench he had built in the early days of their marriage, when he had still thought that type of industry was required of him. His wife held onto that bench, despite its progressive decay, each day since he had come to understand that it was not.
“Come,” he had said to her, “come and sit at the table.”
And she had, holding her empty bowl with the muddy streaks of lentil sullying her conscience every time she looked at them. She looked at them often while he spoke, while he thanked her for a meal she had barely tasted. She nodded when he said he thought they should get a washing machine. She sighed when he mentioned that a colleague’s mother had died. She seemed relieved when he finished eating, when he said that she could go.
The policeman notices now that Adan does not stand in front of his wife at the top of the stairs. He does not draw her to his side when Sergeant Beckles scales the last step and is face-to-face with them, there on the little stone landing from which the eyes can sweep down a dizzying depth before landing on sand and sea. He notices that there is no banister that a woman could hold onto while walking down with washing or up with bags of the building blocks of family meals. For the first time he feels sorry for Lala.
Sorry, however, does not excuse a murder.
“I did just want to ask a few questions, a few last questions,” he explains, when Adan ignores the discomfort of the three of them squeezed into a small landing at the top of a treacherous flight of stairs, when he does not suggest that the policeman come inside and speak to him or that he can follow him down the steps and talk, man-to-man, on the sand.
Adan waits for the questions without nodding to signal that he welcomes them.
“Your wife did tell me you was away the night she had the baby, where was you?”
It is a question neither Adan nor Lala expects, it catches them off guard and they both teeter, there on that small landing.
“The night Baby come?” echoes Adan, perplexed enough to seek a repetition.
The policeman smiles, steadied by lentils and coconut milk and enough potatoes to keep him full until after he goes home for his second meal of the day. Lala looks around wildly, she is sure that she did not tell this policeman that Adan was not there with her, pacing the floors at Baxter’s General when Baby was born. She is desperate for him to somehow confirm that his question is an error, that he is more concerned with the baby’s last breath than her first. But the policeman is sure. The question popped into his head at the bidding of his theory of the crime, ushered in by the sage direction of his happy belly. When he solves the case, he resolves, when they make him a station sergeant (instead of just a sergeant) and give him a station to supervise, he will thank his wife for supporting him and she will wring her hands and try to avoid attention and deny that her coconut-pounded lentils have cracked each case his career has ever presented. He will have forgotten about Sheba by then, resolves Sergeant Beckles.
“The night Baby come,” he repeats, “where you was?”
And Adan adopts the look Sergeant Beckles has seen so many times before in his career of twenty years: the look of the criminal reminded that his humanity, and not his criminality, is the source of his logic, which is why even a noncriminal can follow it.
Adan stutters, “I was in de hospital when she start have baby, I had to leave was to do something for a friend of mine.”
The policeman writes, painstakingly forming each word, repeating to be sure his is a verbatim record of Adan’s account.
“So you wasn’t on the fishing trip yet?” asks the policeman.
“Not yet,” says Adan.
“She say she left home to find you,” says the policeman, “before wanna reach hospital. She say it was early in the morning, where was you?”
“You know how it is,” explains Adan, apologetically, ushering Lala back inside with his eyes. When she is gone and the door closes behind her, he says, “I wasn’t on the fishing trip yet, I was by my outside woman.”
Sergeant Beckles’s thoughts turn to his Sheba and her continuing reluctance to court him. An outside woman is something every man in Paradise understands, so Sergeant Beckles nods and continues scribbling.
“What about the night Baby died?”
“I was doing a lil work on a fishing boat,” explains Adan. “Me and my cousin went out fishing. I didn’t even know Baby did dead.”
The sergeant nods. “Your wife did tell me. Very sorry for your loss.”
Adan nods, drops his head.
“The gentleman that find the baby on the beach,” Sergeant Beckles continues, “what more you could tell me about him?”
Inside the house, Lala’s eyes are running over the outline of everything. She is searching for corners – sharp edges and pointed implements. A knife is shoved beneath the mattress and the bit of plywood that Adan had slid over the springs to help her back when she was pregnant with Baby. The ice pick she had used to carve ice for Adan’s drink the night before is chucked atop the wardrobe. The corner of a side table is covered in a cloth she’d intended to finish for Baby’s bedding. The heavy tawa pan is put at the bottom of the broom closet and covered with rags used for cleaning, the obtuse angle of the television antenna
is removed swiftly and shoved into a garbage bag, the television powered off so that Adan will not be further angered by the snow on the screen. She can hear him talking in low tones, the halting cadence of his speech suggesting that he is thinking carefully.
It is the way of the world, she believes, that her innocent observation that nothing stood out to her as strange before Baby disappeared (the very night of her birth she had walked the beach without worry) could have led to this line of questioning. Her observation that day Sergeant Beckles had questioned her had led him to question why a woman so heavily pregnant had been left home alone. She’d thought nothing of it then – nothing at all. But now . . .
The enamel cup would sting if the lip caught her head at an angle, but the metal would cool the heat of a blow and the bruise could be easily explained away because for a marking it would likely be unremarkable. She removes the vase with the wilting heliconia from the window and scrambles to find a way to cover the little star-shaped tap installed in a corner. It is a small sink, no more than a foot and a quarter square, that Adan had salvaged from one of the big homes on Baxter’s Beach. It is why he didn’t feel any guilt about robbing these people, Adan had explained, one night when he was talking, the things they threw away. Anybody who would throw away things like that deserved to get things taken.
It is when the door closes behind her husband and she hears Sergeant Beckles descending the steps that her eyes fall on the umbrella she forgot to hide. It is the way of the world that that is the first thing he reaches for.