by Shani Mootoo
Getting in behind the wheel Heroman says, “My sister waiting for you. They feed you on the plane? She make food. She say her madam used to say how plane food bad for so, so she cook up a little something.”
The airport grounds give way to endless fields of sweet-smelling sugarcane. Abruptly the sugarcane fields end and the land spreads out in a prairielike flatness. The land on either side of the divided two-lane road forms a hatchwork of rectangular-shaped rice paddies. Lots of green fluorescence is interspersed with water-logged lots from which no rice grows, but where broad-leafed water lilies with waving pink flowers flourish. Workers are bent over in the paddies. Harry and Heroman pass communities of no more than four thatch-roofed bungalows that hug the land close to the road. A stubborn cow belonging to one of these communities stands glassy-eyed in the middle of the road un-perturbed by the vehicle and the horn’s staccato blasts, and Heroman must swerve off the road to avoid it. In a ditch, a buffalo—meager to the bone and covered in dried caking mud—stands statue-like.
They are driving in the middle of the island, at least an hour away from the ocean, yet the brilliant beckoning light, the stifling humidity, and a taste of salt in the air give Harry the keen sense that at any moment, upon rounding a corner or cresting a hill, they will be afforded a glimpse of the Caribbean Sea. The dark skin of the driver of the car in which he travels, of the people they pass, the lanky coconut trees arching here and there to the thin blue sky, the iridescent haze of heat trembling off the spongy asphalt of the road, all have the power of a moon over him, stroking and pulling at the blood in his veins. Now that he is here, there are stops, he decides impetuously that he will make. Once he has seen Rose, he will head straight for the ocean, the tropical ocean that his body is suddenly aching to be submerged in. He will visit Raleigh, too, to see what is left of the plot of land on which he and his mother lived, to see Uncle Mako and Tante Eugenie, and he will go to the house he and his mother lived in in Marion with Bhatt Persad.
The sea is still not visible, yet the air is saturated with its odors. He can smell, almost taste, its washed-up debris. Roadside pedestrians, some transporting pails of water on their head, people sitting in rockers on their front porches, and men riding bicycles, some of whom are barefoot, wave as the Austin passes. A tide of belonging washes over Harry. Elderberry Bay and all that he has accomplished in that part of the world seem in an instant like a dream, a good dream, but very far away.
Soon they arrive in the village where the Bihars’ servant, Piyari, and her taxi-driving brother live. A short, dilapidated billboard with a sun-faded painting of a worker wielding a cutlass above a stand of cane announces WELCOME TO THE HEARTLAND OF THE COUNTRY. DRIVE SAFELY.
A dark-skinned, wiry woman runs toward the car, waving. Heroman has barely brought the car to a halt before Piyari opens the passenger door and reaches a hand out to Harry. He gets out of the car. Overcome, she puts her face in her hands and lets out a sob. Heroman shakes his head as if in pity. Salty sweat runs off Harry’s furrowed forehead. He is noticeably confused and embarrassed, so Piyari catches herself and directs Heroman to park the car and warm the plate of food she had prepared. She leads Harry into the yard. The property—on which sits a small wooden house not unlike the one he lived in with his mother in Raleigh—is outlined by a hedge of the lush benediction plant. They round the house to the back, to a table and a low bench under a pomerac tree. Not a bird is in sight, not a whistle or chirp can be heard. Harry moves slowly in the heat.
Piyari turns to him. “Miss Cassie didn’t tell you nothing in the letter?”
He shakes his head.
“Madam gone, Mr. Harry. Madam ent here no more.” She began to cry. “You understand? She gone.”
He doesn’t understand. He shrugs and frowns. Seeing his confusion, she wrings her hands in frustration. She lets herself bawl. “Madam dead. She dead and gone.”
A cow at the far end of the yard stands motionless, a cattle egret perched on its back. A rooster crouches in the cool beneath the wooden stairs of the house. Piyari is telling him something about someone he doesn’t know, Harry is thinking. Cautiously he utters, all but inaudibly, “Madam? Who are you talking about?”
“My madam. Mrs. Bihar. He drown she in the sea.”
Heroman has brought out a clear glass plate with a triangle of roti and a serving of curried chataigne. Between his sister and the visitor from abroad is a coarse, stunned silence. Awkwardly he cuts through, apologizing for the heat, saying that they had bought an air-conditioning unit from a stranger who came to their door with it in his hand, but it worked for a day and then quit. Harry stares at Heroman, thinking, There has got to be some mistake. She can’t be dead. Why didn’t Cassie tell me this? I didn’t come all this way for that. What does she mean, “he drowned she”?
PIYARI’S MOUTH RUNNETH
“Oh Lord, Mr. Harry. Where to start from?” Piyari moans. She dips her hand into a pocket of her dress and pulls out a gold-plated chain from which hangs a cross.
“You know, when Madam return back from Canada, she make a trip—she self drive the car—to Raleigh, to buy fish. She come back with a necklace—she say a woman who was like a relative to you give she it. Madam wear that necklace from that day on, and it surprise me, because why a woman in her position would wear plate around her neck? But she wear it, and when Boss ask she what is that around she neck, she say is a good-luck necklace a lady in the market give she as a present. He twist up his face, but he never ask about it again.
“But the morning I want to tell you about, she had removed it. Day before she had went in the sea wearing it, so why, I want to know, that morning she remove it? I ask her. She say how the water was looking real rough and she didn’t want to lose it. She tell me keep it safe for her. Well, when the police declare she drown, I go quiet-quiet and I take the chain from the kitchen drawer where I had put it, and I hide it. Why I do that is a mystery, because it have no value to me. I say is God who make me pick it up and hide it away, until I was to meet you.”
Harry accepts the chain weakly. His desire to speak with Cassie has weakened. He has the fervent will of the newly bereaved, that the ending of the story he is about to hear will have changed in the telling of it, and there would be no inclusion of a drowning. That, in the telling, a mistake indeed will be seen to have been made.
He listens to Piyari as he fingers the chain. He wants to be taken directly to Raleigh. There seems no reason to linger at this house in the stifling country heat any longer. But Piyari, relentless in her need to impart, continues.
“When you doing this kind of work, you see more than you want to see. I leave the job, you know. I leave before Boss fire me. He know I see everything, because it happen right in front my eyes. But he confident that nobody will ever think to inquire of the servant what she might and might not know. Miss Cassie, like she can’t believe what happened. She ask me plenty times what happened. But Mr. Harry, why I will tell she? To spoil the rest of her life? In any case, when you do this kind of work, you are nobody. In a way, nobody see nothing.”
In the simmering heat he trembles.
“I work with them nine years, Mr. Harry. But I not going back. Just because a man is attorney general does not mean he is exempt from manlike behavior, or that he is just. He put food on the table and clothes on their back and give Madam monthly house allowance. But that don’t mean nothing. It have a woman used to phone the house boldface and ask to speak with Boss. If Madam answer the phone, she would hang up, but if I answer, she would ask for him. You can believe that?
“Now, Miss Cassie independent and strong-willed. She tell Madam: separate for a little while. Let Boss feel what it is to come home to a empty house. But is not a good thing for the attorney general wife to pick up herself and leave her husband. Then, sudden so, Madam start talking all kind of nonsense about how life not worth living, how she repeating her own mother life, that this late in life a person should finally be experiencing a little happiness, not more head
- and heartache. Is then Boss decide to take Madam to Canada and leave her with Miss Cassie for a little holiday.
“Now, as I say, Madam didn’t spare me details of what went on up there. But you know everything. You was there. I don’t have to tell you. When she returned, Madam had changed. She tell me that up there she reacquaint with a childhood friend—that is you—who had immigrated some years before. She say she get a glimpse of herself, and of the happiness she miss out on. She say it was like this man in Canada—you, eh?—she say you see she. Really see she. Not with your eyes, you understand, but with your heart. You see deep inside of she. I never see Madam so bright, so talkative, own-way, and hopeful before.
“Madam say the night you show up at Miss Cassie apartment, you look handsome for so, and that if she had stopped to talk with you in the kitchen, everybody would of see her blushing. She and Boss would of surely had words that night. You see, the two children used to tease her when you used to bring eggs by the back gate, and at first it was a joke in the house. But then Boss find you was coming too often, and he start getting vexed …”
THE WINE TASTER
The beginning of that summer past.
Harry had heard the phone in his house ringing as he was getting out of the truck. Overcome by fatigue, he made no effort to reach it. Later, he lay with his back flat on the rug in the living room, a glass of Scotch perched on his stomach, contemplating the following day’s task: reviving a neglected water garden. He drifted off to sleep. When the phone rang again, Harry bolted upright, toppling the unfinished drink. He grunted into the mouthpiece of the receiver. There was for a second no response, and the moment the female voice on the other end said, “Hello? Um, I wonder if I have the right number?” despite the years that had elapsed, her voice was unmistakable. She and Shem, Rose said, were in the city for a few days only. She had gotten his number from directory assistance.
In recent years he had thought of her only occasionally, but he was ready to get into his car instantly. Forget the water garden, he thought, invigorated. He offered to meet them the following day. He would take Rose and Shem—for there would be no chance of leaving Shem behind—to see some of Vancouver’s sights, and of course, he would bring them to Elderberry Bay for a drink. They agreed that Rose would telephone him the following morning to arrange a meeting time.
That night Harry hardly slept. He scrubbed the toilet and bathtub, which he had not attended to in some weeks, washed the kitchen floor—and was shocked at how dirty it had become without his notice—and wiped with a wet cloth every horizontal surface in the house. Finally, at about four o’clock, he drifted off to sleep, but he awoke an hour later and rushed outside to prepare for the Bihars’ visit. After washing the windows of the front of the house, he tackled the yard. He pruned and dead-headed the rosebushes, weeded and shored up the bed around four yakusimanim rhododendrons.
The following morning Rose telephoned him. Unknown to her, plans for the day had been made. A friend of Cassie’s was taking them out, and later in the evening Cassie had invited a number of her friends to come to her apartment to meet them. Their day was entirely booked. But they were available the day after, when they would be alone, as Cassie had to work that day. They wanted to do some sightseeing and a bit of shopping, she informed him, and asked if he would have the time to drive them around. The Once a Taxi Driver Club was having their monthly meeting that night. He could ferry Rose and Shem around and still make the meeting, which was in Vancouver. He took Cassie’s address and agreed to meet them the next day around noon.
So, his spirits dampened by the change of plans, he set off, exhausted from the lack of sleep and dashed hopes, to the water-garden project, where his employees were already at work. He and one of his workers set off to the hardware and building supply outlet in Squamish. They returned with the truck cab full of sheets of steel netting and lengths of PVC piping. He worked hard and long, as if Shem and Rose would surely visit the site. Were they to see this water garden completed as he—with them in mind—imagined it, a dazzling knit of stepping stones between which mosses sprang, ornamental grasses and lilies on the pond’s banks, dashes of dragonfly iridescence above, orange koi brilliance beneath, tadpoles, lemon-yellow frogs grunting on velvety lily pads, were they to see all of this, much more would be revealed to them about him than he would ever speak about himself.
By the end of the day, after many hours of hard work with hardly any breaks, nothing of his skills showed. An untrained eye would see only an unremarkable lined crater off to one end of the yard. Harry returned to Elderberry Bay to have a quiet evening. He would bake a package of chicken legs, infuse the house with the aromas of home cooking, and while the chicken was cooking, he would neaten up the yard, pack a little topsoil around the stand of Alice Artindale delphiniums. A fistful of the tall wands would brighten his staid living room. He would spend the evening with a Scotch on the rocks and a newspaper.
He took the package of legs out of the refrigerator. He held it in his hands. He could think of nothing other than the fact that Shem Bihar and Rose were currently in his country. Rose, a car drive away, not an hour from him, and he was about to cook and eat alone. Just down the road she was, so to speak.
It was true that he had not been invited to Cassie’s party. But if he were to show up—well after dinner, of course (he would buy a hamburger and a soft drink from a fast-food restaurant on his way into the city)—his eagerness to welcome them to the city was all that could be inferred, and how could anyone fault him for that? Especially since they had asked him to chauffeur them around the following day.
In no time he was driving to the city, on the backseat of his vehicle a bottle of red wine, recommended by the nice lady at the liquor store for the club meeting.
Cassie called her mother to the door when he arrived. His instinct was to embrace Rose, but she took his hand, and though she held it warmly, she maintained a distance. She had put on a little size around her waist, but her skin was as flawless and her hair as perfectly coiffed as he remembered.
“So, it’s true: the cold really preserves people,” she said.
Harry, holding on to her hand even as he could feel her already taking it back, retorted hoarsely, “Well, the warm weather doesn’t hurt, either. It’s been over ten years? And you look not a day different.”
She asked if he happened to be in the area. He answered truthfully that he was eager to see her. She turned to look for Shem. Relaying an anecdote rather loudly above the crisp sounds of recorded classical guitar music, his voice was unmistakable. Rose, hesitating noticeably, invited Harry into the apartment. The odor of burned coals and barbecued meat saturated the air. Harry handed her the paper bag with the bottle in it. She asked what it was. When he said it was a bottle of wine, she twisted the paper around the bottle’s neck and slid it to the far back of the kitchen counter, well away from where the other drinks were displayed. Although still a beautiful woman who kept herself well groomed and heeled, she seemed more subdued than he had remembered her.
Shem stood to greet Harry, vigorously shaking his hand. He clapped Harry’s back and ushered him deeper into the living room. He introduced Harry, explaining their relationship, with equivocation that did not go unnoticed by Harry. “We are from the same town—well, you came to live in my town when you were quite young, eh? And we went to the same high school. Marion is a small city, and in a small place everybody knows everybody. Goodness, man, we even liked the same girl when we were teenagers, not so?” At this Shem thumped Harry’s back again and laughed deeply as he repeated, “Not so, man, St. George?” Harry smiled awkwardly and made sure not to look in Rose’s direction. Avoiding a request from one of Cassie’s friends to tell all, he uttered quietly, “Oh, those were ancient times. With a memory like mine, I would have to make up more than half of what I might tell about those days.” He turned back to Shem. “What about Busby? Do you remember him? He had left Guanagaspar right after high school, hadn’t he?”
Shem brushe
d off the question, saying, “Childhood acquaintances. We wrote each other a couple of times, then we lost touch.” Shem and Harry avoided mention of their knowledge of each other as adults, Shem preferring to rejoin conversation with Cassie’s friends, who were mesmerized by the loquacious and commanding attorney general of the Caribbean island of Guanagaspar.
Cassie apologized to Harry that they had finished eating dinner, but complained that there was still much too much food remaining, enough to feed everyone who lived in her apartment building, she exaggerated, and insisted on preparing a plate for him. Myriad aromas permeated the air, tantalizing him, but not wanting to appear to have invited himself for dinner, he profusely declined.
Rose remained for most of the evening in the kitchen, washing up glasses and wiping counters, shelving dishes from the dishwasher and packing and putting away leftover food. He wanted to go into the kitchen, to uncork the bottle he had brought and at the same time to chat with her, but he suspected his closeness in front of Cassie, her friends, and Shem might make Rose uncomfortable.
Shem had provided the evening’s alcohol, rum, whiskey, and a few bottles of wine, sweet German Rieslings that he had been pleased to recognize in a Vancouver liquor store, as they were what was available and considered quality wines at Guanagaspar’s high-society gatherings.
Harry went into the kitchen. Neither the bag nor the bottle he brought was on the counter. He asked Rose for it. She said as there was more than enough alcohol for the occasion, she had put it away.
Harry, trying to bridge time and distance, asked if she liked what she had seen of the city so far. He invited her to try and fit time into their tight schedules to see the lovely seaside area where he lived. Their exchange was amicable if not noteworthy, and then she excused herself. She turned off the kitchen light and went down the corridor to the room she and Shem were staying in.