The New Moon's Arms

by Nalo Hopkinson

  “You didn’t? Why, Officer, you must be under some serious stress. Trees don’t just appear out of nowhere like that.”

  “All right. All right.”

  “You think maybe you should have a glass of water? Maybe you’re dehydrated.”

  “All right. I’m sorry, okay?”

  “Maybe okay. I’m not sure.” I was wearing my tough broad face, but inside I was giddy. He came to see if I was all right.

  “How you knew about the biting force thing?” he asked me. Strips of orangey-green paw-paw skin were accumulating on the kitchen table.

  “How I knew what?”

  He frowned. “You just said it back in the trees. Humans? Bite force?”

  “Oh! That. Chuh. Can’t remember what I said twenty minutes ago, but the project I did on sharks in Fourth Form is still crystal clear in my head.”

  He nodded. “I know the way. You get to be a certain age, you start to find the past make more sense than the present.”

  “Excuse me,” I said half-jokingly, “I don’t think I’m quite at that age yet. And if things in my past didn’t make any sense then, I don’t think they going to start now.”

  “Maybe not.” He glanced at his watch. “I have to catch the next ferry, or I’m going to be late for work.” He stood up. “You have a plastic shopping bag you could give me?”

  “Yeah, man.” I got him one from the basket under the sink.

  As we walked through the living room to the front door, he asked me, “How you learned to fight like that?”

  “Michael taught me. When we were young.”

  “A boyfriend?”

  “Michael was never my boyfriend.” But you came to see if I was okay, I thought. Gene was starting to look more my type after all.

  We went out onto the porch. Most of the mud on the cutlass had dried to a clay-pale colour. Gene picked it up carefully. Bits of dried mud sloughed off in clumps. He wrapped them and the cutlass in the plastic bag.

  “Why you carrying around an old piece of something like that?” I asked him.

  “Found it, just lying around.” He gestured vaguely out over the island. “Somebody could get hurt. I’ll dispose of it.”

  Sweet guy. I waved till his car was out of sight. Went in and took a quick shower, changed into clothes that didn’t have cashew apple smeared on them. Time to get Agway yet? My belly was all butterflies from happy nerves. I looked at my watch. Good. Plenty of time to be on the next waterbus. I grabbed up my handbag and headed out.

  On my way out, I glanced over at the trees. Now that I was watching them from out in the sun again, they looked only unkempt, only goofily short. Last week in the mall I’d spied a woman with a Chihuahua in her handbag. Her handbag, imagine! Suppose it had pissed in there, or shat? So shrunk up, it had looked like a rat. Any self-respecting member of its canine cousins could have had it for dessert. The dog had looked at me and I swear it’d trembled, mortified at what it had been bred to be. The trees looked like that Chihuahua. They were trembling too in the cool morning breeze. Just fermenting fruit on truncated trees. Maybe Agway would like cashews.

  I HEAVED AGWAY UP ONTO MY HIP. I was really getting to take him home! He murmured at me and started playing with my necklace, a string of bright red-and-black jumbie beads. “Don’t let him put those in his mouth,” Evelyn said. “They’re—”

  “Poisonous. I know. Went through that already with Ife. These are fake.” Still, I pulled the beads away from Agway’s hands.

  “Let me walk you to the car.” She held the door to her office open to let me and Agway out.

  “Chastity? Chastity Lambkin?”

  It was Mrs. Winter, limping painfully towards me. Her ankle was wrapped. She was leaning on a cane on her left side, and on the arm of her son Leroy on the other. She eyed Agway in my arms.

  “What happened to you?” I asked.

  She stopped, puffing hard. “You remember, dear. That unfortunate accident. Your poor father’s funeral. I sprained my ankle when I fell. And I bruised my tailbone.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I told her.

  “Yes, well,” said Mrs. Winter. “If people are going to have outdoor events, dear, they really should secure the premises first. Make sure there are no hazards for others to trip on. Your father would have done that.”

  Agway was staring curiously at Mrs. Winter. She frowned at him. “Your grandson?” she asked.

  I wasn’t going to answer that. “I’m sorry you got hurt, Mrs. Winter.”

  She peered at me little harder, and her nosehole flared. Her eyes widened. She looked like a marabunta wasp had stung her.

  “That’s my pin!” she said. “You’re wearing my pin!”

  Her pin? I had straightened out my gold pin that she’d been using to hike her drawers up, and I was wearing it on my blouse. “No, it’s mine.”

  “Yours?”

  “Yes, I found it the day of the funeral. I’m so glad to have recovered it. I lost it when I was just a little girl.” Holy crap. At the funeral—the pin! That had been the first magical power surge!

  Mrs. Winter straightened up, gave me her best patronising smile. “No, Chastity. I lost it at your father’s funeral. I’ve had it all these years. I was using it to… I was wearing it that day.”

  She’d been wearing my pin at her panty waist, to hold it together. I tried to keep my lips from twitching. “See what the letters spell, Mrs. Winter?”

  She looked at the pin again. Agway reached to touch it.

  Gently, I pulled his little hand away. It had a sharp point, that pin. “Those aren’t letters,” spluttered Mrs. Winter. “They’re—how you call it—rococo.”

  Evelyn leaned over and looked at the pin. “C, T, L,” she spelled out. “Chastity Theresa Lambkin. Oh, and I recognise it, too! Isn’t that the gold pin your mother gave you for your birthday? The eighth or the ninth, wasn’t it? I remember you bringing it to school and showing it off!”

  Huh. I owed her for that one. Owed her for a lot, right now. Never mind.

  “Yes,” I replied. “It’s mine.” I turned to Mrs. Winter. “I’m so glad you found it and kept it safe for me. All these years. What a generous thing to do.”

  Mrs. Winter’s face was a picture.

  “Well, you know Mummy,” said Leroy, amused. “Too kind-hearted for her own good.”

  Agway burbled at me. He was getting restless.

  “I have to go,” I said. “Time to give Agway his lunch.”

  “Agway?” asked Mrs. Winter.

  “Yes,” answered Evelyn. “Calamity is doing a wonderful charity for us; this poor boy’s family drowned at sea, and she’s fostering him.”

  “She’s fostering him?”

  “So good to see you, Mrs. Winter,” I burbled, heading for the doors to the outside. “See you at work next week?”

  “That woman is a witch,” declared Evelyn once we were outside.

  “True that.” Oh, this next thing was going to hurt. “I need to thank you,” I said, “for helping me just now with Mrs. Winter.” I managed not to choke on the words. “And for letting me look after Agway, too.” I sighed. “And for the car.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  We walked in delicate silence the rest of the way to my car. The mechanic hadn’t patched the flat tyre; instead, he’d replaced all four and the windshield. Evelyn had paid for it. Victoria perched on her spanking new wheels like a dowager in shiny patent pumps.

  I opened the passenger side. A fiery belch came from inside; the car had been sitting in the sun for an hour. So I opened the driver’s side, too, to let some air flow through. Agway stared curiously at Victoria, and at the others in the parking lot. He pointed at it and asked me a question.

  “I’m sorry, babby,” I said. “I don’t understand you.”

  He looked frustrated, repeated himself, this time more irritably. He pointed at the car again.

  “It’s a car,” said Evelyn. She tapped on the roof of the car. “Car. Can you say that?”


  He just frowned at her.

  “Calamity!” came a voice from behind me.

  I turned. Leroy was running up to us.

  “Yes?”

  He stopped, panting a little. “I just want to ask you… Mummy’s too shamed to ask you herself, but I know she wants to know.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t laugh when you hear this, all right? Or I won’t be able to keep my face straight when I go back to her.”

  “What she want?”

  I didn’t have to do a thing. He was chuckling the moment he began to say the words. “She never found her bloomers that she lost that day at the funeral. She been thinking maybe somebody find it and been keeping it for her.”

  Evelyn flashed me a look of mock-horror. I mouthed, I tell you later. “No,” I said. “Nobody did. At least, Parson never told me about anyone finding it.” I’d materialised the plate, too! The one that had dropped in the funeral parlour! Chastity used to have a favourite blue-and-white plate.

  Leroy nodded, got his face under control. “All right. Thank you.” He left in the direction of where he must have parked his car. I had left that plate in Dadda’s house when I moved in with Auntie Pearl and Uncle Edward.

  “What that was all about?” Evelyn asked.

  “Mrs. Winter is my supervisor at work. Her panties fell off at the graveside during Dadda’s funeral.”

  Evelyn cackled. “You lie! Right in front of everybody?”

  I nodded. “Ee-hee.” I had had a hot flash in the funeral parlour, and my favourite plate had dropped out of the sky and broken. “She tried to kick the panties away so nobody wouldn’t see, but they tangled up her foot, and she fell. That’s why her ankle sprain.” Found, and then lost again.

  Evelyn chuckled. “Man, I wish if I had been there.”

  “You don’t hear the best part yet; it’s my pin she was using to hold the panties up. It was all warped out of shape when I found it on the grass.”

  “Lord Jesus.”

  That was the same look of devilment on young Evelyn’s face the day we were drawing pictures in school of what everyone would look like naked, and passing the pictures back and forth during Biology class. I wanted to tell her: Ev, I’m finding again. She would understand. But I didn’t say anything. Still too much rawness between her and me.

  The car was cool enough now. I deposited Agway into the passenger seat and went round to the driver’s side. “Later, then,” I said to Evelyn.

  She nodded, staring at Agway. “Such an incredible theory you have. About sea people, I mean.”

  “Mm.” Theory, my big black behind.

  “I want to drop in and see him from time to time. Just look him over, you know? Write up some notes for myself.”

  I stiffened. “So, this is how I’m to repay you? By letting you treat him like a research subject?”

  Her face went hard. “Calamity, why you have to be so harsh all the time?”

  “I had good teachers.”

  She sighed. “Well, most likely it’s nothing. These things usually are. I have to tell you, though; for Social Services to let you keep him, I have to confirm that he’s doing well with you.”

  I glared at her, but she had the power to take Agway. Maybe he had, I didn’t know what—sea aunties, or cousins, or something. Fuck, if only he and I could talk! “All right,” I said to Evelyn. “When you want to come and see him?”

  I had forgotten that gloating smile of hers when she got her way. “How about Sunday coming?”

  “Six o’clock do you?”

  “Six is perfect!” she chirruped. “See you then.” She waved, made an infuriatingly dainty Evelyn twirl, and went her ways. I kissed my teeth and got into the car.

  WELL, if clothing was difficult to make Agway get used to, the car’s seatbelt was impossible. It was like trying to chain an eel. When we were both exhausted and he was weeping with frustration and anger, I finally gave up. I drove very carefully to the waterbus docks, just praying he wouldn’t try to climb into my lap. I kept all the windows but mine rolled up. Luckily, with a newly broken leg and a heavy cast, he didn’t seem inclined to move around much. He just gaped through the window glass and pointed, babbling away happily at the wonders he saw out there. From time to time he knotted one fist in his own matted-up hair with the shells in it. He even sucked at the shells.

  If I never found his family, he would have to stay on land, go to school.

  Oh, look; it’s Charity Girl!

  Nobody was going to make this child a laughingstock. Not while I was around to draw breath. “First thing you need, my boy, is a haircut.”

  When we got to the dock, Agway got excited. His first glimpse of the sea in two days. He tried to climb out his window, but only clunked his forehead against the glass. I ran my window up. He complained at me, clearly telling me that he wanted the stupid force field to go away. When that didn’t work, he tried pushing at the glass with his hands, grizzling the whole time. From grizzling he progressed to whining; from whining to something that sounded a lot like cussing; from cussing to a full-blown toddler tantrum of shrieking, bawling, kicking, lashing out. I had to slip the waterbus fare out with one hand through a chink in the top of my window. With the other one, I was trying to keep Agway quiet in his seat.

  The ticket-taker peered into the car to see what all the commotion was about. “That’s the little boy!” she said. “The one you saved!” Cayaba Gossip Cable was clearly in full effect.

  I steered the car one-handed onto the waterbus, found a place on the lower level where there was no view of the sea. Parked and pulled a flailing Agway into my arms. No way I could open the windows the whole way. “Baby boy, baby boy,” I said, “you can’t jump in the water. Not with this cast on your leg.”

  He kicked and shrieked. His hand got me a good one in the jaw. Then his elbow connected with the horn. It blatted, and he jumped. He went utterly still. He stared at the horn. He leaned over and hit it again. He chortled at the sound. The people in the cars around us glared at me. It was going to be a long ride home.

  WHEN I FINALLY PULLED UP in front of Dadda’s house, there was a small crowd outside the resurrected cashew grove. Lord, give me strength; what to tell all those people?

  I turned off the ignition and thankfully opened the window. It had been blasted hot, having the windows up for the whole trip. Agway’s first cheque was going to put air conditioning in my car. Keep both of us more comfortable.

  Over by the orchard gate, Mr. Lessing asked Mrs. Lessing, “What kind of trees they are?” The Lessings were my closest neighbours, a good mile away.

  “Like you don’t have eyes?” she said. “Anybody could see arac apples growing on them.”

  Two teenaged boys were swinging on the low fence. “So climb over and go inside then, nuh?” one of them dared the other. His friend just kissed his teeth, trying to look cool.

  “Those not no blasted arac apples,” snapped Mr. Lessing. “And besides, how a whole orchard just spring up like that overnight?”

  The two young men started lobbing pebbles towards the

  cashew trees. Mrs. Lessing made them stop.

  Maybe I could sneak past them all and get inside the house. I opened my door and pulled Agway towards me. I got him as far as the driver’s seat when I heard: “Mummy, I could go and play in there?” My heart lurched. The little boy who’d asked the question was tugging at his mother’s hem and pointing at the trees.

  She stooped down till they were eye to eye. “You not going in there unless I give permission. You hear me?”

  He pouted. “Yes, Mummy.”

  That’s when Agway did his trick again. He leaned on the car horn, grinning. Shit. He giggled as I pulled him out of the car and up onto my hip. My left lower back twinged at the motion.

  I turned to face the crowd. Everybody was staring at us. “You see what you did?” I muttered to Agway. He reached towards the beloved car horn, nearly overbalancing the two of us. I stepped away from Victoria, kicked her d
oor shut.

  “Calamity; you reach?” It was Mrs. Soledad, coming towards us out of the crowd. I took Agway to meet his new babysitter.

  “So this is the boy?” she asked. Today the hat was a snappy purple fedora.

  “I’m calling him Agway.” Shy, Agway buried his face in my bosom.

  Mrs. Soledad’s topper kept drawing my eye. Attached to the hat band, a jungle of cloth flowers fought for space with plastic fruit whose real counterparts had no climate zones in common: bright red hibiscuses elbowed dewy purple grapes aside; bougainvilleas in every colour tickled the cheeks of plump maroon American cherries.

  “Who let his hair get like that?”

  “I guess his parents.” There was even a snake lily in the hat band. And three loquats.

  She kissed her teeth. “Have the child looking wild like that.”

  Wild. She didn’t know the half of it.

  “You going to want to get him some hats,” she said. She pointed at the sky. “The cancers, you know.”

  Agway started to fuss. “He been cooped up in the car for too long,” I said. “Come inside with me, nuh?”

  The Lessings were heading our way, the rest of our neighbours not far behind. I groaned.

  Mrs. Lessing asked her husband, “If it’s not arac apples, then what?”

  “Arac apples have their seed inside,” he replied. “You don’t see those have the seed on the outside? I don’t know why you won’t wear your glasses. Chastity; like you take up farming, or what?”

  Mrs. Lessing added, “And who is this you have with you?”

  “Don’t tell me he and all spring up overnight,” grumbled Mr. Lessing.

  “He got lost at sea in the storm the other night,” I answered.

  Murmurs of pity came from the crowd. “I read about him in the papers,” someone said. “It’s Chastity who find him.”

  “He’s staying with me for a little bit.” Agway looked up at me, tried to reach for a nubbin of my hair.

  “What’s your name, baby?” Mrs. Soledad asked Agway. He ignored her.

  “He’s deaf?” asked Mrs. Lessing.

  “Mannerless,” her husband said. “All the youths mannerless nowadays.” He glared at the two boys who’d been throwing stones.