“What I am saying, Señor, is that as a people, as Trinidadians, we have been forgotten. Perhaps there is a case for self-governance,” Papá said.
“What will happen, do you think? Spanish royalists will disappear and French planters will rule? You think you’ll be freer if French farmers have a say in the future of this colony? They’ll put you all to work for a pittance!”
Papá seldom spoke of being a descendant of one of the first hundred Africans brought to Trinidad. Both his great-grandfather’s and grandfather’s lives were a far cry from the life Papá lived now. The thought of a fine and proper man like his grandfather, whose face had all but faded from Papá’s memory, living such a pained existence rendered Papá’s heart sorrowful. “Well, Señor,” he said. “The revolutionaries may not know what will come of their actions, but respectfully, I must say it also does not help that the French upper class have invited the English here. They could very well put free coloreds and free Negroes into slavery. I have lived as a free man my entire life. I too fear for my family.”
Cordoza crossed his arms over a stomach low set with bulge. He leaned back into Mamá’s kitchen chair. “Yes, ’tis true. Chacon has been the worst governor, pandering to the English, ignoring crimes committed in broad daylight. The country is awash with smugglers. They take riches right from under Chacon’s nose while we pay taxes to the king and live in squalor. Some of these vagabonds have even found gold, I hear!”
Papá laughed a rueful laugh, his mouth unmoving. “That is just rumor,” he said. “There’s no gold in Trinidad.”
Cordoza firmed his back as if recognizing some vulnerability, perhaps even naïveté in Papá. “Ay, Demas, whether gold is here or not, people come to abuse the land in search of it, and the English will find other uses for this place.”
Papá was not flustered by much. Yet with Mamá’s recurring dreams of empty fishing nets and Governor Chacon refusing to stamp the records Papá had recently presented for the purchase of additional lands, he had secretly begun to worry.
“They can take the island within days, and with so little of it cultivated and those mad Frenchmen running amok, I’m certain Spain will readily abdicate.” Cordoza removed his hat, balancing it upon his left knee; his curvy nose shone with sweat.
Even if Papá believed all of what Cordoza said to be possible, what to do with the information was another question. There was no place in all the world where a man like Demas Rendón could own land, earn a living, raise a family, as he had done on that island. Trinidad was the land of opportunity. The only land of opportunity for a man like him.
“Several of us, your friends, have discussed your options.” Cordoza wiped his head and set the hat back upon it. “Of course, you could wait to see what happens, but presuming a new English governor is on the way, we are proposing that you sign over your land and the blacksmith shop, and as your friends, we will keep them until you are able to make proper arrangements. Perhaps we can even help you curry favor.” Cordoza reached for Mamá’s cup, allowing his thumb to linger over its silver rim. “You can’t be sure they will allow Negroes to retain land and businesses, especially prosperous ones. The English have been known to upend such liberal policies in other colonies.”
Papá folded his hands before offering the faintest nod to Cordoza. “That is very kind, Señor. An offer that I shall consider.”
5
Supper was served beneath a cloud of quiet discontent, a fog of despair that, though they would not know for some time, would seep into their dreams and choke off mirth at its inception. After Papá saw Señor Cordoza to his horse, Jeremias and Rosa relayed the exchange to Mamá, who warned them not to speak of what they’d overheard. When they were all seated, Eve set down the shell tureen filled with hake and plantains that’d been boiled in coconut milk gravy, and it was perhaps two minutes later that Jeremias said to Papá, “You knew about Saint-Domingue and never told us? Monsieur DeGannes thinks the world order is collapsing and that the last sovereign nation to abolish slavery will be triumphant, if morally bankrupt.” Jeremias moved his hands about as if he were a schoolteacher with a pointer. “Under the circumstances, I think Señor Cordoza’s offer is a good one.”
Mamá grimaced as she reached for Papá’s bowl. She served him his food, sliced his fish, and Papá waited until she had returned the spoon beside his dish before addressing Jeremias. “Did I ask for your opinion?”
“Oh, I see,” Jeremias said. “With Cordoza, behind back is dog, before face is Mr. Dog.”
“Eh-eh, what did I tell you about tu boca?” Mamá said to Jeremias.
Papá spit a delicate white bone into his cupped hand and examined it. “You know about Sandy?”
Mamá shook her head as if to warn Papá. “No, Demas, they don’t need to hear this story again.”
“Again? I never tell them,” Papá said, turning to the children, certain he would remember if he had. “It was November of 1770,” Papá began. “The English had come to rule Tobago and the conditions were horrible for the African man. More terrible than anyt’ing we seen here. This man Sandy, they called him, has a name they won’t use. He’s a big, African-born man, muscled, and rightfully angry to be living like an animal. He convinces his people to take up arms and kill the English. The Africans terrorize them English boys for six weeks, ticking them off one by one, at night in their beds, at their posts, any place they can find them. It’s so bad the English must call for help from Grenada, Saint Vincent, and Barbados. The men come from them other islands by the scores, and after some time and after so many dead, they quell the uprising. Then the governor lies. Says only twenty or so Englishmen were injured. That more Africans than Englishmen were killed. But they couldn’t lie about Sandy. He up and disappear. They got no head, no body, to prove he’s no longer a threat. In fact, the idea of Sandy still haunts them. But we here on this island know the truth. Sandy and a few others crossed the sea into Trinidad. Into Toco. Where men fished out them tired bodies and give them a place to rest, give them a piece of land, and give them a good horse. Now let me tell you … they will be ready when the time come again. All this right beneath the Spaniards’ noses and within arm’s length of them English.” Papá set the bone into the back of his mouth, grinding it fine, not taking his eyes off Jeremias until the bone was like dust. He washed it down with water. “This is what we do for ourselves. You t’ink I need a lil weasely man like Cordoza to protect what’s mine? You gointa see.”
Mamá picked up Papá’s bowl, thankful, it seemed, that the Sandy story had been cut short. “And if we hear of you at that DeGannes house again, I’ll come with the switch to collect you myself,” she said. “Every day the bucket goes in the well, but one day it’s gointa stick.”
Wheel and axle.
That night, as Jeremias and Eve slept, Rosa, who had been forced to finish plaiting her own hair, overheard her parents. She had been waiting for weeks to learn of the plans they had for Jeremias, but now Rosa regretted being awake, for little else had the effect on Rosa as her parents’ quarrels. The tightening of her belly and the quickening of her breaths often took her by surprise. When they were like this, she found herself caught between wanting and not wanting to hear what ugliness they would say to each other.
“So much rope I does give you and now you hangin’ me with it?” Papá said to Mamá. “Your family’s not getting my land. I’ll leave it to one of my girls before I does let Byron have it.”
“Demas, I’ve got nothing to do with why you’re upset.”
“Tell me you ent know he was with that gal, that … that Francine.”
“They’re cousins,” she said. “I didn’t think anything of it. Why would I?”
“Because I warned you to keep your family away from my chil’ren.”
“The children have no one but us. They’re holed up here night and day, year after year. Look at how Jeremias sneaks off to be with that man. Who has power over that boy? Not you. You think I could keep him from his cousin if that’
s what he wanted?”
“You shoulda seen this comin’.”
“Me?”
“Byron has wanted my land and my horses ever since we married, and now he’s trying to use my son to get them.” Papá slapped something hard against the wall, causing Rosa to start. “I fightin’ one too many devils, and one of them devils is you.”
6
1797
It was early in the new year when Eve added more to the story of the obeah woman and Señor Cordoza. Cordoza’s wife had arrived at the obeah woman’s door on Christmas Eve morning. There was a loud quarrel, and the wife drove her way inside to find Cordoza dressed only in stockings. “Here I find you with your package shriveled like a man with no shame! Let her keep you!” The wife shredded his trousers, picked up the scraps from the obeah woman’s dusty floor, took them out to the road, and tossed them in a pile of runny dung. The neighbors said she then drove over the shreds with her wagon, as her pet pig bounced atop the wooden bed. The obeah woman, having missed this confrontation in her predictions, had no choice but to remove the pantaloons from the cadaver lying two years on her table so Cordoza would have something to wear in his race home. As he rode off, she ran into the street, yelling at him to “bring back de trousers when de wifey finish wi you!”
Mamá and Jeremias laughed so hard at Eve’s recounting that Mamá gripped her stomach as if to keep it from severing. Papá, not finding the story funny at all, rose from his rocker and made his way to the stable with Rosa not far behind him.
“Your mudda is there laughin’ it up as if not a t’ing in the world is wrong. She’s accusing me of not taking seriously this situation with Jeremias?” Papá spoke roughly, as if he did not remember Rosa was still only a child. “She pushing me too far.” He turned to inspect Maravilloso, for the stallion had not been well. “If the English come, this horse might be the only t’ing to keep us from starving. If he is sick, we is sick.”
Rosa had never seen her father worried in this way, so she remained by his side until well after Papá discovered the abscess on the stallion’s left hind hoof. “I’m happy you’re here. I needed another pair of hands.” Papá went on to instruct Rosa on how to be mindful of the center, the frog, which had already begun to show signs of heat. He taught her how to distract Maravilloso with a feeding of guineos while soaking his hoof in a bath. “T’ree times a day this has to be freshly bandaged,” he said. “He wants to get better and you’ll show him how.” They snuck malodorous ointments made of coupie and soursop from Mamá’s medicine jars—“horse medicine,” Papá called it—and he told Rosa it would be her job to keep it evenly applied. He demonstrated how she was to knot the old cloth scraps around Maravilloso’s hoof—“Pull it tight, tight, tight”—warning Rosa that the stubborn stallion would likely resist and grow more irritable with each day he was penned. “He could develop colic since he can’t be turned out until this heals.” Rosa would have to ensure he was fed just the right amount of hay, given enough water to ease his digestion, and kept, until further notice, away from the other horses. “This is the most important job in this family, you understand?”
At day three the abscess burst, and though it was runny and foul smelling, Maravilloso was immensely relieved. Papá was delighted and impressed by Rosa’s steady commitment and the following Sunday made a big to-do about her work. “She’s an outstanding assistant, a natural!”
Jeremias, looking up at Papá, stabbed at the boiled cassava on his plate; the strings unraveled like thick white thread. Papá had not spoken more than eighteen words to Jeremias in the month since Tío’s visit. Jeremias had counted each and complained to Eve that his life was at a standstill while he waited for Papá to act, to react, to do something.
“Rosa is no natural,” Jeremias said. “You take the time to teach her, is all.”
Papá smiled, and it seemed to Rosa then that Papá might have baited Jeremias.
“You have me at the shop, pounding horseshoes, making nails, and then you send me home before the end of the day to do woman’s work.” Jeremias’s voice grew louder though it shook still. “I should be in the stable. With Maravilloso.”
“Now you wish to help?” Rosa didn’t know if she meant to burst in but found herself relieved by doing so. “‘It’s too hot’; ‘Papá should send me to the schoolhouse’; ‘Who wants to live like this?’” Rosa realized only after she’d begun that she had shifted her voice into a whiny falsetto and lolled her head from side to side like Jeremias was apt to do. “All you ever do is complain!” Rosa took a quick gulp of water—water she, not Jeremias, had carried from the stream that morning. “You’re only jealous that—”
“Ferme ta gueule, Rosa!” Jeremias turned to Papá. “You don’t believe me about Francine, do you?”
“Now is not the time,” Mamá said to Jeremias.
“When is the time? When Tío returns again with Francine and her big belly?”
“Your Papá will speak when he’s ready.” Mamá said this, though she herself had stopped speaking to Papá for this very reason.
“That’s not my child Francine’s carrying.”
Papá waved his hand to stop Jeremias.
“You see, Mamá, he never believes me,” Jeremias said.
Papá closed the same hand into a fleshy knot and put it to his mouth, bouncing it off and onto his lips, as though it were a leather ball. “I have never spoken an ill word of anyone in this world other than that tío of yours,” he started. “Your entire life, I let people live as they pleased. The one t’ing I asked was to leave your mudda’s bloody family be.”
Jeremias pointed his finger. “You never said that. Those words were in your head.”
“That is your Papá you’re speaking to,” Mamá warned.
Wheel and axle.
“Gran hombre is about to have his own family. Let him speak his mind, nah,” Papá said.
“I am not having a family.”
Papá stood. The table shifted. The world seemed to follow. “How will you prove the chile is not yours?”
“You’ll believe a puta over your own son?” Jeremias said.
The quiet became more still. Rosa felt the beat of her own pulse in the bottoms of her feet, could hear air seep into her ears and the scratch of a chick on the roof. She spotted a pearl-colored spider making its way across the table. Its undeterred effort seemed to unstill the quiet in Rosa’s head and she suddenly grew angry. She had spent nights in the stable while Jeremias slept and was now tired of his grumbling, his self-pity. All day, every day, he moped and sighed, and she and Eve and Mamá had kept silent in an effort to protect his feelings. But she remembered how much effort it’d taken for Mamá to make Christmas feel special. How Mamá, despite the weight of the situation with Francine, had marked the season with tradition, with revelry and parang music; how her table had been opened to everyone, every inch covered with fresh breads and cakes and Martinique teacups and saucers. And Rosa couldn’t stop thinking of that day, early in December, when Tío Byron had come, when Papá held Jeremias’s hand even as it became clear what he had done to Francine. The aggravation Jeremias caused was like a darkness that poisoned, that persisted. Rosa was done with it all.
“I saw them,” Rosa said. “I saw his lips pressed against hers. I saw his hands.”
“Take that back!”
“I told you Papá would be vexed and you told me to hush up, as always.” Rosa stared at Papá, who now, for the first time she remembered, looked as if he wished her to be a liar. And suddenly Rosa felt quite sorry. But it was all too late. “They were at the guava tree between our fields and Monsieur DeGannes’s. I was setting out Espina. I hadn’t seen Francine since long ago and didn’t know it was her until I saw the blue birthmark on the shoulder he was kissing.”
“We were walking. Only walking!” Jeremias said.
Papá pulled the table toward him, took up his spoon again, and looked down into his plate as if he didn’t recognize the food any longer. The spider slithered across h
is knife. “I will continue to teach you my trade and you can work at my shop for as long as you do as I say. But you will marry Francine and you will build a life outside of my house.”
Jeremias shook his head as though this act alone could make Papá change course. “But they’re not selling land now. Governor Chacon is holding on to everything. How will I tend to a woman and child with no land?”
“Eh-eh, you should t’ink to get a cage before you catch a bird.” Papá reached for Mamá’s hand, not so much to comfort as to insist, and the spider made its way down the table’s leg.
III
West of Apsáalooke Territory of North America
1
1797
They had been traveling for four days at a creeping pace, the wear of their saddles the only comfort, for the afternoons were cold and the nights colder, and the descent down the mountain and over Bighorn River and into a ridge of pines, while snowflakes fell like prodigious blossoms from well-brewed clouds, proved more precarious than expected.
Victor was brooding. Ma had told him they were going to see a man she once knew. That this man would give them a good story or two and a place to rest. When Victor asked why they had left under the cover of night, Ma told him only that she’d had a dream and in the dream she’d seen Bluegrass with two faces.
On the fourth afternoon they ate a lynx that Victor captured with beaver castoreum as bait. The white flesh made for a tangy roast, and they sat shrouded by a forest roof of pines. After supper, Victor searched the hardened earth—the raccoon trail alongside them and the old cinder gardens—for any sense of who’d passed through before, for any clue that would goad his memory of a time traveled there.
“Have we been here before?”
“Yes, but you wouldn’t remember.” Ma met his eyes, then looked up as if to check the sky for a more appropriate answer.
Book of the Little Axe Page 7