During the hours they waited, Papá taught Rosa how to strategize her shots, reminding her that broadside was the goal, the aim four or so inches behind the shoulder, and demanding that there be no head shots, no heart shots; imparting the importance of patience, persistence, and “Breath,” he said. “Listen for it, capture it, fight to control it; direct Breath, and the heart and mind, and all your actions will follow its slow and steady lead.”
Papá taught her a call, short and urgent, that he said should rise from the chest in a breathy vibrato. “With your young voice, the doe bleat will work best.” Rosa practiced it again and again, with Papá correcting. “Suave,” he said. “Now a bit louder.”
The sun was on the backside of morning when the trees opened like hand fans to the sky. Some, Rosa noted, had browned into golden crisps as though they’d been fried, while the soft spikes of wild red bottlebrush blooms twitched like pony tails in the kind lift of the breeze. Rosa had eaten only two golden apples and a zaboca, for Papá had rationed their provisions, but now her hunger swelled into fatigue, and her body began to slacken.
“You wanta story to go along with that sleep?” Papá pulled the blanket onto her legs and moved himself closer, not seeming to care whether she wished to hear a story or not. “There was a man, Papa Bois, an old man he was, who could wrestle the fiercest snakes and who kept tarantulas next to his pillow. Papa Bois loved teaching chil’ren about the marvelous birds of Trinidad, and when the chil’ren working in the fields grew tired, he’d take them up on his shoulders and let them suck sugarcane while he did his work and theirs. After he died, he became a great legend of the forest,” Papá said. “People believe now that he protects the trees and the animals and turns people into swine when they treat the eart’ poorly.” Papá touched her bonnet. “Your Mamá likes knowing that there is a hairy ole man carrying a bamboo horn who’ll come and turn me into a wild hog if I misbehave.” Papá moved her head to his chest. “Take some rest so Papa Bois can come and give you sugarcane.”
Rosa heard his sighs beneath his breath, plentiful, bottomless, as though it was Papá who most needed rest.
When Papá nudged her awake, the late-afternoon sun had already sliced through branches and landed on the paler insides of Papá’s hands, making it seem to Rosa’s sleep-heavy eyes as if he were carrying a ball of light meant to direct her sight to a buck and three does.
“Your calls worked,” Papá whispered, before smiling the smile he saved only for her.
They felled three of the four that afternoon. Rosa clipped the lung of one with her arrow, and Papá finished the two others.
Along the three miles home, Rosa practiced her bleating, happy to make Papá smile. “You’re quite a bit of fun,” he said, his face soft around the cheeks.
“Oh, you fill me eyes!” Rosa batted her lashes as she looked up into Papá’s lovely face. He laughed the kind of laugh that threatened to grow bigger inside him, inside her. She loved that kind of laughter.
“Bueno. Try this one, Quite a Bit of Fun.” He tried several times to teach her the buck grunt. Some of her attempts were too shrill, others had too much pulsation. “Your voice isn’t old enough yet,” he said. “Your Mamá can do a good one.”
They were nearing home, the last bend of the grassy path within a hundred yards, and the mention of Mamá made Rosa dread their return. The sludgy silence between her parents felt like a slow, unrelenting suffocation. The day out with Papá had offered relief, but Rosa was familiar with the long-suffering nature of her parents’ quarrels. “Will you stay vexed with Mamá forever?”
“Does that worry you?”
She wondered why elders thought their burdens mattered only to them. “It makes you sad,” she said, only then realizing she did not have the power to keep Papá happy. “I don’t like for you to be this way.”
“Mamá needs hearts, livers, and a good brocket deer broth to heal. She’ll get better now that we have this.” Papá gestured toward the sacks they dragged behind them.
“You did this for her?”
“You hunt them and then you hunt for them.” Papá looked to Rosa, who must have appeared confused. “Love has no quarrel. Love sits high, like we sat today, watching anger and disappointment from afar,” he said. “Of course, this love t’ing is a burden too. A very big one.” He laughed. “Once it lights, the torch is carried forever, even when wrongs are committed, even when your heart aches because it is so open. How to love and not break is a question that won’t be answered in my lifetime, for sure.”
Perhaps he and Mamá were more than just wheel and axle.
“You’ll understand all this better one day,” he said.
“No, I won’t. I’m never loving anyone but you.”
3
Payments had been made for the fattening and slaughtering of pigs; thirty and five white-feather fowls born in January would not see the rainy season; holds had been placed on the neighbors’ extra ground provisions; the aging of cheese had been rushed. And two of the brocket deer Papá had smoked at the backside of the stable were to be brought to Tío Byron’s.
Padre José of the Cathedral of Saint Joseph wished to set a date for the wedding sometime after he returned in May from Venezuela, across the Golfo de la Ballena. Tío Byron, however, contended that the delay would cause great troubles for the traveling families, who had already been told the wedding would occur before Easter.
“A fast marriage has plenty teeth,” Padre José reportedly said.
Nonetheless, he agreed to delay his travels and set the wedding for the sixth of February 1797, believing it to be the most auspicious date for the young couple.
Mamá and Eve prepared for weeks. They sewed dresses with false sleeves, fitted Rosa twice for a frock with piping she swore she would never don. They made tamarind balls, black cake, chow, and toolum thick and sticky with molasses. Mamá and Eve were molding coconut bread into heart shapes the afternoon Monsieur DeGannes met Rosa at the bend in the riding path that abutted his land.
Monsieur sat hunched on a frisky horse and held forth something Rosa could not make out until she stopped beside him.
“Good afternoon, Monsieur,” she said.
“Would you be kind enough to offer these to Jeremias as a gift from me? I’d like for him to study the binding.”
Rosa accepted the books and set them inside her saddlebag.
“Demas and Myra must be delighted at the upcoming nuptials. I’m sorry I cannot attend.”
The few times Rosa had spoken to Monsieur, he’d been warm, often speaking longer than she wished. Now Rosa offered him a half smile so as not to encourage him to chat longer.
“They are a fine couple,” Monsieur said before riding off.
When Rosa arrived home, she removed her work gloves and extended the three leather-bound books to Mamá. “Monsieur DeGannes gave me these for Jeremias.”
Mamá wiped her hands along her apron and looked through the window at Papá, who stood sanding the backsides of new chairs. She had been on the mend since Padre set the wedding date, her skin again dewy, though her eyes remained like old yolks.
Mamá passed the books to Eve. “Go and hide these somewhere.”
Mamá and Eve seemed now—maybe it had been forever—to have their own language, a woman’s language Rosa did not share. There were eye flits and mouth intimations, sighs and nods and humphs that seemed to capture every necessary feeling and expression between women. Rosa remembered the day in the barn when Mamá had come to quarrel with Papá. How Mamá had sought her support and how Rosa had refused her with silence, the one act of that woman’s language Rosa knew, the one act that now kept her on the outside of it.
“I can hide them,” Rosa offered.
Mamá shook her head as if Rosa could not be considered for such a task.
“He sent his regrets,” Rosa added. “Said he wouldn’t be able to make it to the wedding.”
“I’m certain,” Mamá said, and Eve clucked her tongue behind her.
&
nbsp; “Can I send my regrets too? Like Papá and Monsieur DeGannes?”
Mamá glared as though she knew how much pleasure Rosa had taken in speaking those words. “Who said Papá’s not going to that wedding?”
Rosa knew better than to say it was Papá himself, but still Eve scowled at her while Mamá made her way outside.
It was a breezy day. Clouds hung like dirty parasols in the sky. The gnats, fighting against the wind, were less obtrusive than in the weeks prior, though the flies swarmed every blooming poinsettia and wild orchid bush Mamá had ever planted. The greens—the many greens of Trinidad—were most vivid as they shook in the breeze, displaying their fairer undersides, while Mamá marched to their wild rhythms toward an unsuspecting Papá who hummed and sanded as dust from the purpleheart collected in the coily waves of his beard.
Mamá began her recitation with her hands upon her hips. It seemed to Rosa that she was always in this defiant pose, and Rosa wondered if life for a wife and mother wasn’t a never-ending quest to be seen and heard. A life hardly noted between hands-upon-hips moments.
“Demas, you will not bring more shame upon this family.”
The patch of dirt beneath Papá had become a small dune, and with every six strokes against the grain, he ground the tip of his right boot into it.
“Jeremias will not be able to make a living for his wife and child if people believe this an unholy marriage. You will lose business, and he will never be able to earn the respect of others. The only reason we have what we have is because people know you to be an honorable man.” Mamá often went too long. Four sentences when one would do. “You must attend this wedding. You must do what’s best for our son.”
Papá sanded and blew, sanded and blew. He seemed to remember, though it appeared Mamá did not, that silence was the beating heart of their marriage.
“Demas, are you hearing me?”
“You gointa tell them I’m ill.”
“No. I’ll not lie.”
“You want me to tell them she’s already with child? How will your priest-man feel about that?” Papá wiped the sawdust from his nose with his calloused hands. They were large, his hands—the hands of a man who had been born into labor.
“Demas.” Mamá said his name softly now.
“Don’t Demas me.” He cheupsed, and it appeared he was suddenly struck by the absurdity of this all. “You can lie to a holy man about somet’ing as sacred as a chile, you can pretend that two first cousins marrying is sanctioned by their parents, you can close your eyes to your brudda owning people who look no different than his own mudda, but you cannot tell another lie? Your family spent the last fourteen years lying. Telling anybody who’d listen that I stole their special Martinique cacao beans and made riches from them. That I owe them everyt’ing I does have, that I’d be nada if it wasn’t for them. You ent know what it does to a man to see his only son in such a predicament with them kinda people.”
Papá looked to Rosa and Eve. His rhetoric softened, if only a little. “You and I both have been on our knees in prayer, hoping the boy would turn out all right. That all our work wouldn’t be wasted. He wished to read books, yes, let’s give him books. He wished not to toil in the heat, then no, let’s let him get a bit bigger before we put such demands on him. His whole life, we tiptoed around our needs so he could have his desires, and this is what he go and do?”
“I don’t know that he’s done it,” Mamá said.
“But you not arguing that point with your brudda, eh? You’ll see your son be eaten up because you scared of your own family. What kinda mudda are you?”
Mamá removed her apron and set it down into the grass like a woman who thought she needed to unwoman herself for a man’s fight. “What kind of mother am I? I’m the sort who consoles a boy whose Papá won’t mind him. The sort who tries but fails every time to explain your indifference toward him. Rosa, you give all your words to. Eve and Jeremias and I must fight for what little is left. Must I remind you that Rosa is not un garçon? She will blossom soon enough into a girl whose body will turn on her, make her into a woman who will have to marry and leave you and this place. What and who will you have then?”
Papá dusted his hands. His marked dune was now crushed. Rosa felt much the same. “I’m making chairs for your family so they can sit and watch my son’s life be destroyed by one of their own. I t’ink it’s suficiente.”
4
The guests said Francine was a most angelic bride. The not-so-white lace dress covered her neck, framing her fetching face, the long gloves revealing a touch of warm-colored skin at her elbows. “Plump and blushing,” the children whispered, pleased with the pageantry, though many of the adults in the front pews had been certain Francine did not recite the Lord’s Prayer at the outset of the ceremony and even more certain she hadn’t once looked toward Jeremias. Such musings were largely confirmed when Padre José stopped his recitation of Corinthians 13, leaned into Francine with his bushy white beard, and said, “Why the long face?”
The women and men who were not already sleeping sat forward, gasps locked in their gullets. All the babies were quieted.
Tío Byron was half raised from his corner seat in the front pew, sweating like a jooked piglet, his new white hat resting upon his wife’s thighs. “You know how young people are these days!” He turned and winked at the crowd, the guests laughed, and Padre continued.
After the ceremony, Rosa overheard Mamá speaking to Tío Byron. “Why would Padre ask such a thing unless he was suspicious?” They directed Tío Byron’s new girl—a dark-skinned gal with one cockeye and one sad eye—on how to prep the flatware for guests who were waiting to be served lunch in Tío Byron’s yard.
“It’s done. It can’t be undone now.” Tío Byron said this of the marriage as if he were speaking of burnt cake.
Despite the fetid heat, it was a most picturesque day: leaves aflutter, bird feathers in blurs of red and white and black, grasses glossy like emeralds dipped in hot wax. Chairs and tables from every near and dear neighbor had been lent for Francine’s mother to adorn with tablecloths in a dye of sapphire blue. Children wore their Palm Sunday pinks and played beneath the row of palm trees that shaded the front of the five-acre plot. Tío Byron’s home had been in a state of unfinish since Francine’s birth. Half the house remained a hard-packed dung, while the other half had been refurbished with timber that looked to have been freshly painted in a sunny eggshell white. The one change remarked upon by everyone, however, was the replacement of the house’s wooden three-step staircase which was a not-so-exact replica of the Rendón stone steps. There, Jeremias now stood in a new coat, the measurements of which were perfect across his barrel chest. Jeremias smiled generously at the guests who bestowed compliments upon his fair bride, as if he’d earned Francine by way of a righteous courtship, allowing his gleeful expression to fade only for Eve, who brought him a mug of pain-bush juice to cool his sweat.
The wedding feast seemed endless, compensation perhaps for Francine’s “long face.” There were bowls of downy rice and boiled plantains; callaloo bush bathed in coconut milk, fresh ginger, and cracked crab; pickled pork souse in a sea of lemony cucumbers; slices of roast pork, sizzling hot off the spit; tender pigeon peas seasoned with salt and garlic; roast corn so sweet and juicy one would have thought it laced with sugar water; pitchers of lime juice adorned with cane sticks meant to be chewed and sucked until wrung of their sweet serum.
Padre José, in a white cassock, ate at a round table with Francine’s parents and the newlyweds. To Tío Byron’s great irritation, the cockeye/sad-eye girl offered Padre the thickest cut of charred pork atop a bed of roasted onions, and Padre ate such pork with his white tab collar jouncing at the base of his perspiring neck, while openly admiring the beauty of the Robespierre family, their skins, he said, like a blend of alabaster and copper, their hazel eyes wide, their curled lashes long like baby fingers, their dimples deep like the sea, and their mouths bursting with teeth white like lilies. It was remarked more
than once that Francine, who was as fair-skinned as Jeremias, could have been Myra’s daughter and that her babies might turn out to be the whitest of the family yet. Francine’s mother, a runtish redbone with a weak chin and chubby hands, took offense to such comments, only to be reminded that Myra was her husband’s sister (or cousin, if Padre was within hearing distance, for Padre disfavored marriages between first cousins), and thus it only made sense that the children would favor the Robespierres.
“Yes, but Myra ent the one who push that gyal out for eighteen hours,” she said.
“You should be happy your chil’ren take after their fadda.”
Trinidadians didn’t believe in truth veiling.
Of course, stories of long labors and commentary about parental fatigue quieted Mamá long enough for her to spot Papá holding court with a drink she was certain he’d procured from some ragged neighbor determined to turn a sanctimonious occasion into a drunken fête.
“At least he waited until after the rites,” Eve whispered to Mamá.
Rosa knew Mamá and Eve had spent the better part of the week worried Papá would not show. He had told Rosa he would be sure to attend, if only to keep Rosa company, but within minutes of Mamá carving the roast pork atop his plate, Papá had taken refuge with his drink, while everyone pretended not to notice the groom’s father sulking beneath a chenet tree.
Book of the Little Axe Page 10