The New Moon's Arms

by Nalo Hopkinson

  They looked at me a little uncertainly. “Yes,” said Samuel. “That would be nice. Just a small one for me. Driving, you know.” Gingerly, they both made to sit on the settee. I managed to retrieve a dirty bowl with three half-exploded popcorn kernels in it before Samuel sat in it.

  “I’ll get you your drinks,” I told them. I turned towards the kitchen. Its darkened doorway hunkered at the other end of the living room. The light switch for the kitchen was well inside the doorway, by the fridge. “Evelyn,” I said companionably, “you want to come in the kitchen with me? To powder our noses, or something?”

  She stood up. “Don’t you powder your nose in the bath-

  room?”

  “You, maybe. I like the light better in the kitchen. Natural. Kinder to our aging features, you know.”

  “But it’s nighttime,” she told me. “It’s natural dark, not natural light.”

  I didn’t reply. With my be-towelled hand, I gently pushed her on ahead of me. She stumbled into the dark kitchen. Lord forgive me, I waited about half a second. When I heard no screams of terror, I found the light and switched it on. “Samuel?” I called out. “You still okay out there?”

  “Of course,” he called back. “Mind if I look at your books?”

  “No, man. Go ahead.”

  I opened the doors of the cupboard where I kept the glasses, looking for the crystal ware. “Evelyn, you think you could get the liqueur out from the pantry for me? It’s that door over there.” I couldn’t face another dark room just now. “Look for a big green glass bottle on the shelf just in front of you when you go in.”

  “Sure, man.” She let herself in. “Where the light switch?”

  “You see the pull chain hanging down? Should be right in front of you.”

  She exclaimed. I was at her side before I thought about it. “What, what?” I asked.

  She was standing safely in the doorway, staring amazed at row upon row of jugs, jars, and bottles filling almost every shelf in the ten-foot-high pantry space. Holy. Fuck.

  “Calamity, what is all this?”

  “Well,” I said slowly, “if I remember, the jars have in cashew fruit jelly. The bottles have in cashew liqueur. The jugs is cashew wine.”

  “Your father made all this, or you?”

  “Me? No. Was Dadda.”

  “He kept doing it even while he was sick?”

  “Uh-uh,” I said, staring at the bottles, “the cashew farm went down with Blessée.” Too late, I remembered that the cashew farm had reappeared outside the door. “I mean,” I said, “he was too sick to do plenty. All this is remaining from when he left Blessée. They almost wouldn’t take him with everything he wanted to carry.”

  She smiled. “Remember how nice those roast cashews used to taste? Your father would bring them to school in those little rolled-up cones of newspaper. They used to sell them in the cafeteria.”

  “And is who you think roasted all those cashews with Dadda and rolled them up? That was what I did come the weekend. That and homework. Helped to stretch the paycheque.”

  “Oh. I’m sorr—”

  “Stop it.” I took the bottle of liqueur from her, poured some of it into each of three glasses. I gave her one glass. She followed me as I took the remaining two into the living room.

  Samuel turned from the bookshelf, a book in his hands. “Peter Pan?” he said.

  “Where?”

  He grinned. “The Change really making you forgetful, I see.” He held the book up. “From your own bookshelf.”

  The torn dust jacket—Chastity never could keep those undamaged. It was mine, all right. I gave Samuel his liqueur, took the book from him, handed him my glass as well.

  Old possessions have a life to them. That book felt so much like itself in my hands, so much Chastity’s copy of Peter Pan and Wendy and nobody else’s that I nearly wept. I inspected the bookshelves. “I have The Borrowers too,” I said, “and Return from Last Man Peak.” At least I did now. Or again, or something. More of my rediscovered treasures, come sailing back to me on the seas of a night sweat.

  “Children’s books?” asked Evelyn. Her curious eyes took in Dumpy in his place of pride on the coffee table, and Bare Bear sitting in a corner of the settee. “Oh! Look, Samuel!” Evelyn plumped down onto her knees. From under the coffee table she pulled out an ancient Magic Slate. The grey sheet of plastic was creased and rumpled. Great. Now she thought I was in my second childhood. “So long I haven’t seen one of these! Calamity, where you find these things?”

  “Oh, you know. You’d be surprised where things turn up.” I took my glass from Samuel. “To you and yours,” I toasted them. Then I knocked back my drink in two burning swallows. Evelyn and Samuel sipped theirs.

  “This liqueur is nice,” Samuel told me. He and Evelyn sat on the settee.

  “Yes, Dadda was good at making it. You want some more?”

  He raised one eyebrow, but only replied, “I’m still working on mine for the moment, thank you.”

  Evelyn peered down the corridors leading to the rest of the house. “How long it takes you to get to work from here?”

  “Forty-five minutes in rush hour; an hour if the waterbus late again.”

  “I see you have running water—”

  “Jesus, Evelyn. It’s not the Dark Ages out here, you know.” But I couldn’t be boasty like that. “Cell phone service not too good sometimes. And the electricity could be sometime-ish.”

  “But the land line works?”

  “Yeah, man. Why?”

  “And how many bedrooms you have?”

  “Ev!” Samuel said. “Why you fasting up yourself in Calamity’s business?”

  “Three,” I replied. What was she after? I wanted to play the game out. “Mine, Dadda’s old room, and the guest bedroom.”

  “You have plenty activities outside of work? You come home late in the evenings?”

  “No, I’m home a lot. Couldn’t take on anything much while Dadda was dying. Cut back to part time at the library.”

  She nodded, took another sip of her drink, then swallowed the rest of it almost as briskly as I’d done. She stood up. “Samuel, you ready to go?”

  He gave her a surprised look. But he put his mostly full glass down and stood.

  “Dolorosse has a day care?” Evelyn asked.

  Oh, fuck me sideways. Was this cruel Evelyn, or repentant Evelyn? “No,” I said, “but Mrs. Soledad from over the way used to stay with Dadda for me when I was at work.”

  “She know how to look after children? You trust her?”

  “She and her husband ran an artisan salt farm and raised three boys and a girl, and none of them in jail, and none on the street. She cared for Dadda like he was her own. Why?”

  “Come into the hospital tomorrow and apply to be a foster parent. I’ll give my recommendation for the little boy to come and stay with you in the mean time.”

  “You will?”

  “Provisionally, you understand. If it doesn’t work out, they might still find him another home.”

  I was stunned. “How come you changed your mind? This isn’t more of your guilt, is it?”

  “Not a bit of it. Not where a child is concerned.” She looked around. “You have the time, and the experience, and the space. You have toys and books for him to play with. He trusts you. And I have a feeling he might like to be close to the sea.”

  All I could do was gape at her. She smiled. “And this way, I can come and visit him and you both. Make sure you getting on okay.” She grinned at the look on my face. “Maybe talk about fairy tales coming true,” she said.

  Samuel looked baffled. “I don’t know what going on with the two of you, Calamity, but I’ve learned never to come between Evelyn and her schemes. I’d advise you not to even try.” He took her hand. “Come on, darling. Let me take you home from a long day of playing the rescuing angel. Calamity, my dear, thank you for your hospitality.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  As I walked them to their car
, Evelyn said, “Tomorrow I’ll send Martin around from the mechanic’s to the hotel to get your car and fix that flat tyre.”

  “But I—”

  “You’re going to need a functioning car now that you have a child to look after all the way out here. If you can’t pay for it now, I’ll tell Martin to run you a tab. There’s a stipend that comes with being a foster parent, you know?”

  “There is?”

  “You can pay Martin out of your first government cheque. I’ll vouch for you.”

  I was too dazed to even wave as they drove away. The Beamer disappeared down the path, leaving me in the whispering dark with the cashew grove.

  And the jumbies. It took me a while to get up the courage to go back inside.

  “Keep your part of the bargain now,” said the devil girl. “Pull me up out of this hole.”

  So Granny did that. The devil girl was slippery. Her skin was a deep blue, like the water in Blue Pit, the bottomless lagoon. And she was heavy for so! Granny managed, though. But before Granny could stop her, the devil girl shimmied up onto Granny’s shoulders, wrapped her legs around Granny’s neck, and tangled her long blue nails in Granny’s hair. “Carry me to where you living, Granny; beg you do,” said the devil girl.

  And she squeezed her legs tighter around Granny’s neck.

  IN THE BRIGHT SUNSHINE OF THE NEXT MORNING, fears of Dadda’s jumbie coming back to haunt me faded. There was something bigger to deal with; something real, waiting just outside my front door.

  I put it off a little longer by scrambling eggs for my breakfast. Through the window, I watched Sir Grandad, the resident mongoose, slinking through my tomato plants. He’d better not damage a one. I turned my eggs onto a plate and took them to the kitchen table. I wasn’t good at putting off the inevitable. I wolfed down breakfast and left the dirty dishes right there so, hoping that Sir Grandad wouldn’t smell them and break into the kitchen while I was gone.

  In the hallway, I scuffed my feet into my tennis shoes and took a deep breath. What Ife used to call a “calming breath” when she was in her yoga phase. After she sprained her back tying her body up into knots, I didn’t hear anything more about chakras and kundalini energy again. She’d taken up t’ai chi after that, and then food combining. For two months, she would have only fruit and three pints of water for breakfast, then spend the next two hours running to pee every twenty minutes.

  I went out onto the porch.

  Cashew fruit. Family: Anacardiaceae. Genus: Anacardium. Species: humile. Variety: Precocious Dwarf. Other Names: Cashew, Cashew Apple. Part Used: False Fruit.

  The dwarf-cashew grove was still out there, solid, real, and in full riot. The trees stretched their branches up, making alleluia to the first taste they’d had of the sun in over three decades. Something else must have been nourishing them down beneath the waters. The leaves were healthy and green, and each tree was bowed down with the red and yellow weight of cashew fruit. Overripe cashew apples had already started dropping to the ground.

  I found myself at the gate of the fence to the grove. Then I was undoing the latch, my fingers remembering how the tooth of it always caught and you had to give it a little extra push for it to open with a click-crunch sound that only one thing on this broad Earth made: the gate to Dadda’s cashew grove. I pushed. It opened. I glanced at the latch; no rust. Mumma used to be forever oiling it.

  I stepped inside. The ground was dry, not soaked with brine. There was the same little patch of scrub before you hit the scrum of trees. Little after Mumma was gone, Dadda ceased to care them. The fallen apples had sprouted trees which had grown to fill the rows in.

  I stopped at the first line of trees. They were bowed down with red and yellow pear-shaped fruit, each with a shiny grey shell hanging below it. A few of the branches dipped so low that they touched the ground. I’d have to prune those back; they could root and sprout whole new trees that would compete with the others for soil and light. But watch at me! Thinking like I was going to take this straggly copse of cashews seriously.

  I went a little way in amongst the trees. It was dark in there, spotted in places with shifting sunlight.

  The smell. I had forgotten it; the cloying sweet smell of hundreds of fallen cashew apples. The reason I hated cashew juice, though I could drink distilled cashew liquor; the smell of the alcohol was quite different than the smell of the fruit. And now I was mashing overripe cashews beneath my feet with every step, releasing that overpowering odour into the air.

  I squeezed through a few more trees, pulled a cashew apple off a low branch, remembered how the smooth, shiny scarletness used to feel in my hands.

  A shadow moved at the corner of my vision. When I looked, nothing was there. I went still, held my breath to hear better. Was that a rustling noise? I threw the cashew apple I was holding in the direction of the sound I thought I’d heard. The apple flicked leaves and twigs in its trajectory, landed with a thump. There was another small rustle. The sound of feet moving out of the way?

  “Hello?” I said. My voice broke. It was fucking dark in here. Maybe jumbies didn’t need nighttime; maybe they only needed darkness. I was surrounded by trees, their branches interlaced like fingers. My scalp prickled. I took a step backwards. Right into someone’s arms. I yelled. He wrapped them tighter around me. I pulled his thumb up to my face and bit into it. The arms released me one time, and I spun around to fight.

  I once pulled Ife out of the way of a car before my brain had time to understand that my eyes were seeing a red Volvo bearing down on her. Same way so it was now: I was already cocking my elbow to drive into the man’s belly when it began to dawn on me that he had been speaking. And that the words had been: “Ow! Calamity, it’s Gene! Don’t—”

  Momentum. Hell of a thing. Was a good 189 pounds of Calamity moving at speed behind that elbow. The blow was already in progress, and I couldn’t stop it.

  Gene took a little step backwards and pushed on my arm. Not quite quickly enough; I gave him a glancing strike across his body. The air whuffed out of him as he fell. My elbow caught air. I overbalanced, and went right down beside Gene onto my bad knee. The pain made me shout. Gene was on his back, gasping a little for air, one hand on his solar plexus. He was sucking the bitten thumb of the other hand, watching me warily.

  “What the fuck you doing in here?” I asked.

  He scowled. “Getting my hand bit off by a crazy woman. Every second word with you have to be a swear word?”

  “You didn’t have no right sneaking up on me like that!” I pushed myself up to my feet. My knee made a popping sound. “Ow.”

  Groaning, Gene rolled to his knees. I offered him a hand up. He ignored it. I shrugged. “Fine by me,” I told him.

  I held onto a tree trunk, shook my leg out to straighten it. The pulp of a cashew apple I’d landed on came detached from my knee and plopped to the ground.

  Gene managed to stand up. Grimacing, he slowly straightened his back, one fist pressing against the small of it.

  “I hurt your thumb bad?” I asked him.

  “Jesus Christ, woman! You know how much bite force a human being can produce?”

  “About sixty-eight pounds of pressure per square inch, on the back teeth?”

  “No, that’s only for regular chewing. If you bite down deliberately, it can be up to twelve hundred pou… How you know that?”

  “You’re fast on your feet,” I said. “Didn’t know you could move like that.” But actually, I’d experienced how agile he could be. “Come to think of it, I shouldn’t be surprised.” My face flushed.

  He twisted his torso, making joints in his back pop. “I getting too long in the tooth for this kinda fighting, though. Going to pay for it tomorrow.”

  “And your hand’s bleeding. Come into the house. I’ll throw some white rum on that cut.”

  He grumbled, then said, “All right. But bring that thing with you.” He pointed with his chin.

  In the dark, it took me a little while to see what he was talking a
bout. It was a rusty cutlass, lying at the foot of one of the trees. I picked it up. “You…came with this? To see me?”

  He kissed his teeth. “Don’t flatter yourself.” He stomped out of the grove, headed for the house. I followed him.

  “You coming to put that alcohol on?” said Gene from my front door. “I don’t want to catch anything from you, you know.”

  “It’s like they say.” My knee crunched and ached up all five steps. “Don’t trouble trouble or trouble will trouble you.”

  “WHERE YOU LEFT THE CUTLASS?”

  Where had I put it? “I think it’s out on the porch. It had mud caked all over it.” Menopause memory loss, I guess. I smoothed the Band-Aid onto Gene’s thumb. “So, you want to tell me why you were sneaking around in my cashews? Help yourself to some paw-paw.” I indicated the orange slices of paw-paw I’d put on the kitchen table.

  “Thank you.” He reached to pull a chair out from under the table, then stopped. “May I?”

  “Awoah. Now you asking permission. All right, sit down.” He did. I sat in one of the other chairs, got myself a slice of paw-paw. The faint, soapy smell always made me want to blow bubbles.

  “I just wanted to make sure you were all right,” Gene said. “The last few days must have put you through some changes.”

  That surprised the laugh out of me. “If you only knew. Fuck.”

  He grimaced at the word. Too bad if he didn’t like my potty mouth. He helped himself to a slice of paw-paw, cupped his hand under his chin so he wouldn’t get its orange juice on his uniform. Then, uncertainly, he said, “Those trees. Where they came… I mean, I didn’t see them the last two times I was here.”