He Drown She in the Sea

by Shani Mootoo

  “I know that. I know we can’t stay here. Everything is arranged. It is only for you to agree to. I ready for a fresh start.”

  She puts a hand on his leg and presses it there firmly to quiet him. In this place I am dead, Harry. They had funeral for me today. This is my chance. If they find me now, you know what will happen?”

  Rose regards her hand on his leg and takes time to plead, time as if the world had slowed around them and nothing was pressing. “Harry, I want a simple-simple thing—to be able to look at you, to look at those eyes, and talk about all kinds of things, and I want you to look back at me, and talk with me. That is not a lot to want. It is a person’s right. To give and get love—not mother-and-child love, but the kind two adults share? You remember how happy I was, swimming in the sea in front of your house? You remember how happy we, you and me, were?”

  Plaintively he responds, “But don’t you see? We can’t even go back there now. I spent yesterday with Piyari. She said enough for me to know that if there is a hint of an idea that you are alive, the first place you will be looked for is Elderberry Bay. That side of the world is out of the question.”

  “Well, that was clear to me from the start.”

  She stands up first, covers her head in a scarf, and then tops that with a straw hat. Even so, if it were not immediately evident that she is Rose Bihar, the quality and contemporary pattern of the fabric of the scarf and the stylishness of the hat she wears would have drawn attention had there been anyone else on the beach to notice. She holds out her hand for his and helps him up.

  He walks beside her, stunned, back up the beach.

  Uncle Mako began making the pirogue safe and seaworthy from the time Rose stepped out of the sea in front of their house several days ago. He has relished abetting in adventure that he had never managed to arrange for himself. If Tante Eugenie had agreed, he confided earlier to Rose, he already would have used the pirogue, and all the hope he could have mustered for himself, and he would have gone in search of Africa. But the way things had been going in the country these days, politically, that is, he had no more need for the pirogue. Here was a woman who was ready, he said to Rose, joking that it was too bad he wasn’t a younger man, and nothing was going to stop him from now giving that same pirogue to her and his favorite grandson.

  Tante Eugenie is not as happy as she makes them believe she is. She thinks that a man who is used to waiting—if and when the time and the thing he has long been waiting for were to arrive—must use muscles in his brain and heart, muscles so long dormant that they would not easily be found. She frets, albeit quietly. Her Harry St. George is about to get into a boat, to travel open waters with the intention of reaching not Africa but Honduras. A day has not passed that she does not recall some morsel of it: the nights and days keeping watch with Dolly, they and the wives of the other men awaiting the return of Seudath’s boat, and then waiting for parts of the boat, of the men’s clothing, of their bodies to be washed ashore, if only to confirm and put to rest what they already knew.

  For now they remain inside the house, Harry and Rose well away from the window and door, and they eat: fish, string beans, rice, and peas. Uncle Mako jokes with Rose that he and Tante Eugenie are Harry’s love counselors. That anytime Harry has a lady-related situation, he lands up there for them to help him out. Tante Eugenie, frying several days’ worth of bakes and stuffing them with dried pork hocks, jerk chicken, cheese, and jam fillings, sucks her teeth and asks Uncle Mako if he is trying to cause trouble bringing up Cynthia’s memory in front of Rose. To humor Uncle Mako, Rose feigns curiosity and jealousy and says that at least now, out on the quiet sea, she and Harry have lots to talk about. It surprises Harry that they have remembered Cynthia, and by her name, too. Clearly it pleases them to be involved in his life at crucial times. Tante Eugenie’s lips are pursed as she makes up packages of food and numbers them, so that they will be consumed according to order of perishability.

  When it is dark enough, and likely that the few remaining residents of Raleigh are at least indoors if not asleep, Uncle Mako and Harry, out of the dry sandpit in which it was hidden, pull the boat quietly along wood-plank tracks. Harry climbs in, and Uncle Mako hands him bottles of water that Tante Eugenie has been discreetly filling at the standpipe several days in a row, a car tire, and a thick coil of heavy rope. Harry peers into the cabin, so low that one can enter it only by crouching, to see a mattress, a thin blanket, and next to the mattress, a bundle hidden under a large canvas tarpaulin. Curious, he lifts the tarp to find a bottle of rum and six jelly coconuts, two life jackets, and a pail. A flour sack he opens contains five rolls of toilet paper, a flashlight, a package of candles and matches, and a compass that not only gives north-south-east-west directions but also shows the position of the stars throughout the year. He is speechless; his future has been planned, without his knowledge, to the detail.

  Back inside the house, Uncle Mako hands Rose rolled navigation charts. He explains to Harry that Rose, before she “drowned,” had made contact with a man who fixed up documents to help people leave the island and enter a foreign country without the intervention of Immigration. Harry has the odd sensation of watching himself descend into a deep whirlpool. He considers Rose. The Rose he once knew and would have done everything for has turned into a confident, take-charge kind of woman. She feels foreign to him. Uncle Mako is telling him that the man has arranged passage for them to Honduras in Central America. The man came to the house some nights ago, Uncle Mako is recounting, and showed Rose how to read the maps using the compass in the day and the sky at night. She should, with maps, compass, and the blessings of a star-studded sky, be able to guide them on the three-day journey to a cove on a small uninhabited island. There they must drop anchor and wait.

  Abruptly Uncle Mako jerks his chin in the direction of Rose and interjects proudly, “Don’t make joke with this one, you hear, she is a bright-bright lady.” Harry remembers his own mother, recalling how quickly and unexpectedly she took up Mr. Persad’s business.

  On the third day, continues Uncle Mako, weather and God above permitting, a shrimp trawler will meet and deliver them to the mainland. They will get a ride inland.

  They sit and wait in awkward quiet until Uncle Mako gets up and says wearily, “Is time.” They gather at the pirogue, and Uncle Mako shows Harry how to start up the engine. The four of them shove the laden vessel to the water’s edge. Uncle Mako, taking a good look at the sky, declares the weather—from where they stand—to be as good as one might hope for. They help Rose into the boat, and the three of them send it farther into the warm water. While Uncle Mako digs his feet into the sand and grips the boat with all of his strength, which is still considerable for a man of his age, Tante Eugenie holds Harry’s face in her wet hands and kisses his lips. He wraps his arms around her and lets go only when she pushes him away, saying with an air of finality that they will not meet again but in heaven. Uncle Mako helps Harry hoist himself into the boat. His fears are all too immediately alerted by the boat lurching from side to side in that section of the sea where incoming and outgoing waves vie with each other. Harry reaches for the engine’s cord and pulls until it catches several tries later. The boat swerves erratically from side to side. Rose dares not look at Harry. They are drenched in sea spray even before Harry can aim the boat directly at the breaking waves ahead. When he looks back to wave, Tante Eugenie and Uncle Mako are wading quickly toward the shore. The pirogue leaps over small waves, then medium-sized ones, and as it goes out farther, over larger ones that break just ahead of it, each time it lands with a hard firm slap.

  Uncle Mako and Tante Eugenie, gripping each other’s hands, stay on the damp nighttime beach well past the time the boat has vanished, waiting until they hear the engine’s chug no more.

  AIR

  He is holding her hand and leading her into the bright turquoise sea. The beach is littered with reclining sunbathers. The air sizzles with heat and buoys the wild, carefree sounds of families and friends play
ing volleyball on one section of the beach, cricket on another. Children in the shallow waters squeal with delight, and seagulls shriek overhead. She follows him easily. They wade into the warm water as far as the breakers, where they are cradled and the water reaches them comfortably at their waist. This far out, the shouting and laughter of people are reassuring. A ribbon of cold water lashes about his loins, but in a flash, it warms. They face each other, holding each other’s hands. They are smiling with shyness at their hope that here they are finally free. She slips a hand out of his to lower a shoulder strap of her bathing suit and expose her breast to him. The water weighs on his hand as he tries to lift it so that he might touch her. Suddenly the sky darkens; the water has turned from turquoise to lifeless gray, and when he turns, he sees that a wave in the distance, several times their height, is blocking the light of the sun and is fast approaching them. He turns again, to look for the shore this time, intending to calculate its distance so that he might know whether they ought to swim swiftly to the safety of the shore or, not having enough time to do that, to dive beneath the base of the approaching wall of wave. But he sees instead yet another wave, equally high, coming from the opposite direction, and he realizes that he is unsure which direction the shore lies. It is abundantly clear that the distended bellies of both tidal waves, moving toward each other with equal grace and purpose, will clash at the precise place where she and he stand. He looks at the sky and then at her breast, at the dark purple nipple. He longs to touch it. The two waves, like opposing armies, advance more rapidly. There is time only to tell her to hold on to him, to instruct her to do only as he does. He waits until the uppermost curves of both waves, towering and stretching higher yet, form the two sides of a roof that is closing in above them. He shuts his eyes, tightens his grip on her hand, and draws her under the water to lie on the bottommost layer of the sea. With one hand, he grasps at the coarse, shifting sand, and miraculously he is braced. But the waves seem only to hover, to dance above them, refusing to slam together just yet, and he is running out of breath. She, too, so she tries to pull her hand out of his, intending to swim back to the surface. He suspects, however, that the instant she breaks the surface will be the very one when the waves collide, and they, split apart, will be pulverized.

  He holds her tightly there, and interminable minutes later, the ocean begins to heave, to sway back and forth and sideways. He opens his eyes, but in the swirl of sand and salt, he is unable to see her, so he grips her hand, perhaps too tightly, but he will not risk losing hold of her. He opens his mouth to whisper to her, his words pushing through and against the water, telling her to cling to the ground, to lay her stomach flat against it, to press her face to the sand. When he has finished speaking to her, his mouth is full of the taste of salt and the grit of sand, and his eyes sting. He knows beyond any doubt that if she does precisely as he tells her, they will survive. Then there is silence. A cold hard silence, and it all begins. There is a tremendous sway of water, followed by insistent thrusting and pushing. The surges and upheavals threaten to dislodge and rip them off the floor. Long strands of uprooted seaweed wash by them, brush against them, and wrap fronds menacingly about their legs and stomachs, but they concentrate on holding on to the ground, and so manage to remain firmly planted there.

  Several minutes pass, and finally the weeds, salt, and sand have settled and the water has stilled about them. Hesitantly they raise themselves and find that the sea is calm again, that the sun shines as brazenly as before, and the sounds of the people continue, as if uninterrupted, and they, he and she, have broken the water’s surface.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The writing of this novel occurred in a variety of landscapes. I began working on it in Vancouver. I would like to thank Margaret Watts and Kelsey Gerbrandt for gallivanting with me as I mapped out Harry’s adult world in the inspiring terrain of the Sea to Sky Highway.

  Acknowledgment is due to the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade in Canada and to the Canadian High Commission in Australia for generously affording me the privilege of a residency to work on this book at the Varuna Writers’ House in the Blue Mountains.

  As part of its Visiting Scholars Program, I worked on the manuscript at Mills College in California and am grateful to Edna Mitchell, then head of the Women’s Leadership Institute, for inviting me. I am also happily indebted to Carol Flake, a fellow scholar at Mills College, who exercised leadership in tomfoolery during arduous wine-tasting research conducted in various valleys of California.

  The manuscript began to take shape during the year I spent in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta. I wish to acknowledge Doug Barbour, in charge of the program there, for providing that invaluable space and time. Kris Calhoun and the office staff of the English department made possible and smooth the concentrated effort needed at that stage of the writing.

  My dear friends Isabel Hoving, Gamal Abdel-Shehid, Brenda Middagh, Ted Bishop, and my brother-in-law Shekhar Mahabir read various drafts of the manuscript, offering brilliant insights and critiques, and conversation to match about the process and nature of fiction writing. Many thanks to you all.

  As the reality of a book finally loomed, my confidence often waned. Aline Brault’s encouragingly firm grasp of my intent, coupled with astute readings of the manuscript, reminded me of the how and the what, of my love for language and stories. Her perennial enthusiasm spurred me on to the finish. Deepest thanks, Aline.

  I am fortunate to have had this work edited by Grove/Atlantic’s Elisabeth Schmitz, who instantly understood and, from start to finish, supported my larger vision. I would also like to thank Morgan Entrekin, Dara Hyde, and Michael Hornburg at Grove/Atlantic, Inc., and Ellen Seligman and Jennifer Lambert at McClelland & Stewart.

  Finally, a most special and very loud thank-you is due to my trusted agent, Maria Massie of Lippincott Massie McQuilkin.