Mr. Abbott glanced up from the horse. “A bit less than half.”
“Would you throw in your mare?”
“Bless thy simplicity! My mare and less than half the price?” He shook his head. “Little girl, I don’t wish for your father to hate you on account of this.”
“If I can keep her for a week, get a good look at her, then we can agree to this, sir?”
“No man leaves his horse. That’s absurd!”
“I’ve a mare that isn’t as lovely but also isn’t as old, sir. You can take her for the week.”
“It’s unheard of.”
“If my father returns and I’ve not had time to learn her and convince him to sell at that ‘unheard of’ price, then there will be no deal, sir.”
“If he comes now I’ll discuss it with him.”
“With only half the asking price and an old mare?” Rosa shrugged and feigned relief. “Very well. I imagine, sir, you know best.”
The Englishman, a Mr. Abbott, looked to his mare once more. She had a light film of perspiration on her legs. He let off a most ostentatious sigh. “Well … as you’ve said, she is quite tired. I’ll permit her to stay so she can rest, but if I change my mind—”
“Just return and you can have her any time, sir. She will be here.”
“I suppose you know what you’re doing?”
Rosa held out her hand as she had seen Papá do many times.
A few hours after lunch, Papá still had not returned from work. When Eve heard the wagon approaching, she angrily set Papá’s now cold lunch onto the table only to realize that it was, in fact, Monsieur DeGannes who’d arrived. Eve accompanied Monsieur to the stable, where Rosa was chastising Maravilloso for his obstinance. Eve pulled Rosa aside and told her she had her hands full with preparing supper, that she needed Rosa to keep Monsieur busy.
“What is he doing here?” Rosa whispered.
Eve shrugged, and Monsieur greeted Rosa with a tight grin as if his thoughts were elsewhere. Rosa was reminded of the deference Papá had always shown Monsieur, though Papá thought Monsieur to be far less than a distinguished gentleman.
“You have no idea how dangerous an overly ambitious, unexceptional man can be,” Papá once said of Monsieur. “But no matter what I speak of in this house, you mustn’t cross him, you understand?”
Rosa turned to Monsieur now. He seemed shorter somehow, and Rosa thought perhaps she had grown, for they were almost eye to eye.
“I hear your père has set quite a price for the stallion.” Monsieur browsed the stable as if he believed it would not be only Maravilloso for sale. “If he doesn’t receive an offer, I would be happy to take le cheval for a fairer price.”
Rosa took note of the way Monsieur examined the now-smaller stalls and Papá’s tools, which were taking up space in the back corner of the stable. “This is not all he has remaining of his shop, is it?” Monsieur seemed alarmed.
“Oui, Monsieur. I thought you would have known. They took everything from Papá. He is only just now beginning to buy the materials to make his tools again.”
“But there must be more.” Monsieur perused the perimeter again, with a frantic determination, looking askew at their one remaining piglet sleeping in a pen. “Demas said there would only be a small delay.”
“A delay for what, Monsieur?”
Monsieur DeGannes inspected all the corners of the stable. He searched behind bales of hay, beneath tacks, inside barrels, then began to ascend the steps of the loft ladder.
“Monsieur!” Rosa called out after him. “If you could wait until Papá returns. I do not think—”
“Aah!” Monsieur held up something round connected to another round something but Rosa could not make out the items from where she stood. Monsieur DeGannes picked up another something much like the first something and put them together so that the clinking of iron against iron pealed like dull chimes. “It is not very much but it seems he has been working.” Relieved, Monsieur dropped the findings and climbed down, his movements careful but spry. He took Rosa’s hand in his and squeezed it as if pleased with her. “Please tell Demas I must speak with him very soon.”
As Monsieur began to leave, Rosa heard Papá’s wagon, his tools sliding across the bed as though Papá had been in too much of a rush to properly secure them. A few moments later, it sounded as if Papá was running toward them.
“Monsieur.” Papá breathed heavily. “I thought we were to meet at your house.”
“It is no problem that I am here, oui?” Monsieur DeGannes set his hands under his braces, stretching them forward, letting them snap against his chest. “You’ve kept the land quite well, considering.”
“Only God knows how long I can hold on to it,” Papá said.
“I’ve told you before to come talk to me. That friend of yours, Cordoza, likes to stir you up. He’s hoping you will sell to him. He’s told everyone this.”
Rosa noticed how the lump in Papá’s throat hardened.
“But, Demas, on another matter, tell me you have more than what I have seen there.” Monsieur nodded toward the hayloft, and Papá uttered a sigh that growled in his chest like a shovel threatening to harvest all the air from him. “I can’t delay any further. Tell me you can still meet our obligations.” Monsieur DeGannes seemed almost to be pleading with Papá when Papá suddenly noticed Rosa there behind him.
“Come,” Papá said to him. “Let us discuss this outside.”
Rosa watched the two men walk toward the mouth of the riding path, their hands and arms like windmills before each other. Papá appeared shamefaced, and until that moment, Rosa did not believe that her father could have had any appreciable secrets, that any one of them, save Jeremias, had ever had any appreciable secrets. As Rosa climbed the ladder to the loft, she remembered how extraordinary Jeremias’s behavior had seemed to her back so many years ago, how outraged she had been at his lies, how she had been the one to out his meetings with Francine, his late-night visits with DeGannes, all his drunkenness, and she wondered now what kind of willful blindness, how much willful silence, was required to keep up the appearance of any one family.
Rosa stumbled over Eve’s dress box. She felt the unrooted surface tremulous beneath her and set herself upon her knees, as though she’d be less likely to die from a fall if she were kneeling. She remembered that when the English had first come, Papá had told Eve he would need to hide away her valuables, her two bits of jewelry and finer dresses. Rosa wondered now, as she looked below at the horses and the wide expanse of the stable doors, what Papá had been thinking. He had to have known that if the English came they would look first to the hayloft. Rosa realized then that she’d never once climbed that ladder, that it had always been Papá who deposited and retrieved the bales.
Rosa found the items Monsieur DeGannes had discovered and held them beneath the weak sunlight. They looked to be ugly bracelets, thick and heavy, tethered to replicas of themselves by a fat, flat bridge. She turned one set over in her hand and felt something slip between her fingers. “Oh yes, wonderful,” she grumbled, “I must now find a needle in a haystack.” She gently patted around in the near darkness, hearing the straw crackle, feeling the thick sharpness of the stalks unyielding at her fingertips, until finally she felt the thing, small and pointed. It was a key the length of a grown man’s thumb. Rosa reached again for the bracelets and again held them out past the floor of the loft to catch sunlight. In the middle of the fat, flat bridge was a keyhole. A bracelet, two bracelets, welded together, requiring a key to open the rings? She felt she should have known this thing, felt that if she thought long enough she’d remember Papá speaking of it, but Rosa realized, as she uncovered two, three, four, almost two dozen pairs buried deep in the hay, that maybe she would never remember, because maybe, indeed, Papá had had an appreciable secret after all.
During that next week Papá did not once look Rosa in the eye and did not once set out the horses with her. He told Rosa he had too much business at the mills, meetings at t
he clerk’s office, and that he needed to see about Mamá, who was again sick.
The doctor came thrice that week and each time prescribed tonics for increased energy. He told Papá that women Mamá’s age sometimes tired, swelled, ached. That “pain is part of being a woman.” Papá was dissatisfied with that answer but the doctor said to call him again if Mamá did not improve within a week or two.
Mr. Abbott arrived seven days to the hour of his previous visit. Papá was chopping wood at the front, constructing a rocker for Mamá that he planned to place beside his. Mamá had told him she didn’t wish for a rocker, but Papá had said he hoped to view the night sky with her seated beside him. Rosa heard Papá greet the man. She’d been meaning to tell Papá, to explain what she’d done. The men exchanged words, and it was not long before Papá came into the stable, his teeth skinned, his face pulsating with ire like a chunk of liver in flames.
“Come.” Papá snatched Rosa by the arm. He’d never before done this. She found herself pushing back tears.
“I had to sell him to someone who’d care for him.” Rosa wedged her fingers beneath her father’s, for he was pinching her skin.
“You put me in a position of having to sell my stallion for less than half what I can get for him! What have you done to us? You’re too old for such stunts!” Papá released her arm and gave it a small shove. “Imagine if I tell this Abbott fella that the deal is off. He’ll have Governor Hislop’s men here within a day and them English will do me again like they did before. I got nutting left for them to take, Rosa!”
Rosa did not often think of before, but now she was reminded that Papá had never stopped thinking of before.
“But I’m getting this mare in exchange.” Rosa nodded toward the Englishman’s horse and Papá considered the mare for only a moment before sneering as if he’d smelled bad fish.
“This prune?” Papá said.
“She’s more than—”
“Silly gyal! No te enseñe nada?” Papá was shouting now, spittle forming at the corners of his mouth. It was not only the horse; it seemed to Rosa to be everything: the absence of Jeremias, the before, Lamec’s proposal, Mamá’s incapacity. And it seemed Rosa had had her hand in all of it.
“Papá, you don’t understand. I have—”
“Shush and let me t’ink!”
Papá left the stable with the Englishman’s mare on a lead. Rosa heard Papá offer to return Mr. Abbott’s horse, explaining to Mr. Abbott that Rosa had no right to strike the bargain. “The next foal we have will be yours for half the price you’ve offered for Maravilloso.”
“She and I shook on it,” Mr. Abbott said.
“I’m the owner, sir, not this chile,” Papá said.
“You people are really something. You’re quite forgetting your place.” Mr. Abbott took out his pipe, wiped the bowl. “If I’d offered her the full amount, you’d have accepted it, yes?”
Papá, forced to concede, brought Maravilloso to Mr. Abbott.
That night, while Papá sat brooding, Rosa again climbed the steps to the loft. She found only Eve’s dresses stored in a wooden box.
3
Mamá recovered, relapsed, then recovered again. She’d had Eve traipsing about the bush, picking roots for a bush bath, boiling what was left for teas and soups, crystallizing some into jellies and crèmes. Mamá was fond of saying that she had more than once “fixed herself up” and “done what that crop of unlicensed doctors on the island could not.”
While still ill, Mamá had wielded her Catholic sword of guilt to remind Jeremias of the penance he’d have to proffer for not coming to visit his sick mother. As such, Jeremias began attending Sunday lunches again. And Mamá had demanded that he bring his entire family.
“Mamá, you’re looking much better.” Jeremias said this each time he arrived, whether true or not. He complimented Mamá, always, on the food, spoke with her about the latest cliff-hangers in the magazines and part issues he’d borrowed from Monsieur DeGannes, while Francine, with her “long face,” sat always with Pierre on her lap, refusing to eat what was tendered, seeming to regard her lack of hunger as a hindrance to adult conversation.
After lunch one Sunday, as the sword-sharp grass began to wilt under the sun, Mamá suggested they take tea outside. Mamá and Papá sat on their rockers, Eve and Jeremias along the dusty rail of the verandah, while Rosa and Francine shared the top step with Pierre. The ladies hand-fanned warm air while Papá told the story of Jeremias as a young boy, temporarily blinded by a colony of stinging wasps, finding his way home without sight. Pierre was captivated, glancing back and forth between his grandfather and father with large, glowing eyes.
After Papá’s story, Eve brought them up on local gossip—the woman flogged by her newly married son for speaking out of turn to his wife and the obeah man who had thus managed, with cucumbers and a candle, to rid an old man with a half dozen children of his young wife’s lover.
“I hear Monsieur DeGannes found himself a dog-faced Englishwoman to marry,” Eve finished.
“That’s not polite,” Mamá said.
“I hear the same,” Jeremias said.
“That she’s dog faced?” Mamá laughed.
“Non, that he’s getting married.” Jeremias looked to Francine, as if to apologize for not mentioning it sooner. “If he marries this woman, he’s deemed English. Fit to do as he wishes. Putting together old English money and new French money is bloody brilliant business.”
“It’s all the same dirty business, all the same slave money,” Eve mumbled.
Mamá glared at Eve. “People don’t make love on a hungry belly,” she said before turning again to Jeremias. “Has DeGannes met her as yet or is this all prearranged?”
“The arrangements were made in England, but she’s arrived and is staying with family friends until they can get a ‘real man of God to perform the ceremony, not a demagogue like Padre José,’ she was heard saying.”
“Oh yes, we are all devil worshippers here, aren’t we? You should see how those Protestants stare when we go to Mass!” Mamá set her hand on her stomach as if to soothe it. She adjusted the top of her dress, which had slackened since her illness. “Sounds like she’ll keep him on his toes. I should send holy water for him just in case.” She chuckled. “But I guess every bread does have its piece of cheese. I imagine he’s very sad living there all alone.”
“He does just fine.” Francine hadn’t spoken at all until that moment. Not even a proper “dog” or “cat” or “good day” had fallen from her lips. But now she was taking issue with what Mamá supposed was a reasonable assumption? Mamá did not appreciate back chat.
“Oui, that’s right,” Mamá said. “I quite forgot that you know him much better than I.”
Eve and Rosa looked to Mamá whose eyes were steadfast on Francine.
“How could you forget?” Francine said. “I heard you mention it only last week to Daddy when you paid us a visit.”
Mamá glanced at Papá. His expression bordered on pleasant, and Rosa knew that Papá would never give Francine the satisfaction of knowing she’d caused a rift between he and Mamá. But Rosa also knew that later would come with an angry face.
“Rosa, come and help me with the tea and sweets.” Mamá followed Rosa into the house, taking deep breaths before bracing herself on the edge of the table. She talked to her pain, coaxed it back beneath the thin veil where it was to wait. “You believe what that—what that girl just said to me? What a bad mind she has!”
Rosa nodded, finally able to offer Mamá the solidarity she often sought from Eve. “She’s never happy to be here. Jeremias forces her to come.”
“I’m her tante! She must remember to show me respect, oui?”
“Oui, Mamá.”
“I don’t bite … do I?” Mamá offered a half smile. “Well, maybe I’ll bite her!” Mamá checked the teapot for warmth before setting it on the tray. “She’s gonna have to stay for as long as I want. Jeremias won’t leave until I’m ready to let them go.”
Mamá placed the coconut roll, covered in dried white flakes, next to the pot. She let out another long sigh. “It’d be nice to have that fiddle now, eh?”
Rosa had pouted for months after Mamá told her girls were not to play.
“It would be perfect to listen to while the sun sets,” Mamá added.
Rosa sliced and arranged the coconut roll upon the platter, while Mamá stood quiet, studying her, before saying, “I know you think I’m very hard on you, Rosa. Maybe even that I don’t always do right by you.”
“What silliness are you talking, Mamá?” This was the response Rosa knew Mamá expected, even if it was not an honest one.
“It’s true, I don’t always know how to love you the way it seems you wish to be loved, but when you know somebody loves you, even if they’re not doing it the way you wish, you must try to meet them halfway. Tu comprends?”
Rosa did not understand. Mamá wanted her to work harder for love? How much was she to give to this endeavor? And what if the person she wished to love her knew how she wished to be loved but simply refused to do it in that way? Was that forgivable? Those were the questions Rosa would have asked Mamá if she had not been in the wrong body or had the wrong mind for her body. Another era would have made no difference, for it seemed no mother in the span of humanity could accept responsibility for inflicting harm on her child when she believed her intent was honorable.
“I know, Mamá,” Rosa said.
To Rosa, it felt as if Mamá had always been stingy with her love. Had Rosa not been in that wrong body, she would have been able to tell Mamá that hiding her love away made Rosa feel dirty, made Rosa wish to snatch it from wherever she could find it.
Book of the Little Axe Page 18