The Rhythm of the August Rain

by Gillian Royes

  Gratitude was still on Shad’s mind when he arrived at his house that night after work. In his hand was a bottle of cheap champagne that the boss had insisted he take to celebrate. Warming up to the occasion as he walked home, he’d anticipated waking Beth to tell her about the closing, anticipated hearing again how she’d scorned Horace’s attention in high school, anticipated all manner of romping after the chatting was done. But his fantasies faded as soon as he opened his bedroom door and saw Beth hemming the familiar blue dress.

  “Why you up so late?”

  “I couldn’t get Ashanti to settle down.” Circles of exhaustion were around Beth’s eyes. “She was screaming and going on. You know how she can get.” Behind her, the child lay curled up asleep, a wooden spoon in her hand.

  “She sleeping now.”

  “Yes, but I have to finish Rickia’s dress.”

  “Finish it tomorrow, nuh?”

  “I going with Maisie to Port Antonio tomorrow.”

  “What you have to do in Port Antonio?”

  “Order flowers. I carrying a bouquet and Joella and Rickia, too, three bouquets, and we need flowers for the church.” Beth knotted the thread and bit it off. “You have little money you can give me?”

  “Every time I turn around is more money for this wedding.” Shad sighed. He put the champagne in the fridge and carried Ashanti to her cot in the children’s bedroom. “You never tell me about no flowers before,” he grumbled while he changed into the sleeveless marina he slept in. “You know how much that going to cost?”

  “You ever see a wedding with no flowers?”

  “I come to celebrate the closing with you tonight, and is money you talking about again.”

  “You want me to tell you the truth, so I tell you.” Beth hung the dress in the wardrobe. “I could have make up something, you know.”

  “And while you spending money, is me have to take the basket up to Miss Bertha’s and sell your vegetables. You not thinking about that.”

  Beth put her hands on her hips. “Eh-eh, is not like you the only one making money now, you know.”

  “But you spending it as fast as you make it.”

  “What you think money is for? I take the job at the library so I could help pay for the wedding, you don’t remember?”

  “Then why you asking me for money now?”

  The light stayed on in the bedroom until well after four that morning, and by that time Shad had said three times—shouting at her once—that he was sick of the damn wedding, and that when Beth showed up at the church, he wouldn’t be there, and she had started to cry, her shoulders shaking soundlessly in her tiredness. He’d slept on the love seat in the living room and woken up feeling like a heng-pon-nail, an old shirt that had been hanging from a nail all night.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  * * *

  The beachside parking lot had one empty space and Eric pulled the Jeep in. He’d had to drive slowly because Shannon was nervous about the girls riding in the open back, and he was relieved that any parking was left by the time they got there, as late as it was.

  “I’ll change my clothes in the car, I don’t want to get them sandy,” Shannon said, surprising him with her practicality. She’d always been spontaneous back in the day—but she hadn’t been a mother then either.

  Eve and Casey clambered out of the back with the picnic basket. “Eve’s stomach not used to pepper,” Maisie had reminded him when she handed the basket over. “Make her eat the sandwiches.”

  The idea of a beach trip had come up the night before when Shannon had appeared on Eric’s verandah, a shadow beside his chair on a moonless night. “Shad said I’d find you here.”

  “Nowhere else to hide,” he’d nodded, his teeth gripping the pipe’s stem.

  “He said the closing was today. Shouldn’t you be celebrating?”

  From the bedroom came the Spanish words of Radio Fidel, the show’s host double-rolling the r and stretching the leader’s name to the maximum as he announced an upcoming program. Eric had gone inside and turned it off.

  “Have a seat,” he’d said when he returned, and the two old lovers had sat in the darkness, a dancehall song seeping through the bushes from the bar, turned down by Shad, perhaps thinking of Eric and his visitor.

  “It’s still beautiful here, isn’t it?” Shannon had ventured. “I wondered if it had changed at all, but it’s just like I remember. Except for—you know . . .”

  “You can say it—except for the hotel.”

  They were quiet for a minute until he heard her exhale. “I thought you might leave after the hurricane.”

  Eric had pulled his pipe out of his mouth. “And go back to New York?”

  “I don’t know, go somewhere.”

  “There was nowhere to go.” He wouldn’t fall for her hint that he could have come up to Canada. “I wasn’t going to sit in some little apartment and freeze my ass off in the winter. Worse if I had to work up there again, get up in the dark every day.” He’d snorted when he said it, realizing after that she was doing just that, freezing her ass off in the Toronto winter, waking in the dark to get Eve ready for school. It was too late to take it back and they’d lapsed into silence again.

  “Miss Bertha told us about the woman on the island,” she’d said after a minute. “We were sitting in the kitchen talking about the hurricane and she told me that you had a squatter living there last year.” Eric wiggled his toes in his flip-flops, guessing that this must be what she’d come about, a look-see into the Woman, but she didn’t seem interested and veered away. “As sad as the story is—I mean the hurricane and the damage—as sad as it all was, I’m glad you were able to hang on in Largo, with the bar and everything. It’s still an amazingly beautiful place, still peaceful, still friendly.”

  “It was a wreck after the storm, trees down, houses with no roofs, canoes sitting on the road.” He waved the pipe. “You wouldn’t believe what a mess it was.”

  “But they recovered, and you did, too.”

  “I can’t say I recovered, not half of what I had, anyway.”

  “I know, I know, but—I’m not doing this well—I’m glad you never gave up. What I’m trying to say is, I appreciate how you kept sending the payments every month for Eve. There must have been times when you—”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I kept criticizing you—in my head, anyway—for not coming up to visit Eve and me. I had no idea, really, of what you’d gone through.”

  Eric rested the dead pipe on the tiles next to his chair. “Can I get you a drink? I’m just going to fix myself one.”

  “A Red Stripe?”

  Over her beer, Shannon had broached the subject of a beach outing the next day. “I thought I’d introduce Eve to Jamaican jerk pork from the stand where it started. She can boast to her friends when she gets back. What’s the name of that beach?”

  “Boston Beach.” Eric examined her dark profile, the gleam on the end of the upturned nose. “You want me to take you, is that it?”

  “Would you? Shad is helping Miss Mac move, so we won’t be doing any work tomorrow, and Jennifer and Lam have a luncheon or something. Since I only have a couple days off, I thought it would be fun, you know, and we can take Casey along to keep Eve company. They can watch the guys cooking the pigs. She pretends not to care about stuff like that, but she does.”

  “And you don’t want her staying home with you, nagging you to use her iPod and—”

  “Precisely.”

  “By the time Shad gets back with the Jeep, it’ll probably be closer to lunchtime—”

  “No problem.”

  The beach was half-filled with families when they arrived with their food basket and towels, and a few people were standing around a shed at one end.

  “What’s going on over there?” Eve asked.

  “That’s where they jerk the pork,” Casey explained, tossing her hair like her mother. “It was the first place on the island, that’s what Daddy says.”

 
After they’d spread their blanket and Shannon had joined them, all four went to look at the open shed in the center of the smoke. Above a long, smoldering fire, on a barbecue rack of iron bars, rested the carcasses of three pigs split in half. Each half carcass was being lovingly basted by two men naked to the waist. A third man sliced chunks off the carcasses, and a teenage boy was taking money from customers, handing over brown-paper cones of pork and thick slices of hard-dough bread.

  “What’s that they’re putting on it?” Eve pointed to one of the basting men.

  “That’s the jerk sauce,” Shannon said.

  Her father pointed to the pepper seeds sticking to the pork skins. “Don’t even go near those. That’s scotch bonnet pepper, and it makes the sauce superhot. Then they add a whole bunch of stuff, from cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, all kinds of things, and they cook it over branches of a pimento tree. The whole thing gives it that special flavor called jerk.”

  “I want to taste it,” Eve said, not to be deterred, chin firm. “I want to see how it really tastes.”

  As an indulgence to his daughter—and his own dripping saliva glands—Eric called out an order for a pound of jerk pork.

  “Behold, from the first jerk stand in the world,” he said, holding out the greasy cone to Eve.

  This was where the story was later to diverge, depending on who was telling it. Shannon claimed that Eric ate almost the whole pound of pork, which Eric himself denied. Casey said she ate the jerk and nothing happened, and Eve boasted that she’d eaten it, too, with no ill effect. Shannon said she’d only had a taste and the sauce alone had burned her lips.

  The four salty beachgoers had barely returned to Largo when Eric’s stomach started heaving. He just managed to park the Jeep and make it to his bathroom in what was the opening salvo to the worst bout of the runs he’d ever had. Not only did he make innumerable trips from the bed to the toilet, but the nausea made him want to throw up at the same time. As he was to tell Lambert later, he was overtaken by a feeling of being close to death and finding death attractive. After a couple hours of agony, a second dose of Pepto-Bismol, and a glass of coconut water, the bar owner managed to doze off, moaning as he dozed. When he opened his eyes, Shannon was turning on the lamp beside him.

  “Miss Maisie called to say you were in a bad way. She has to go home and she didn’t want to leave you alone.”

  “What’s happened to Shad?” he groaned.

  “Busy at the bar.” She pulled a chair up beside the bed and sat down.

  “You got a tan,” he muttered.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  “Maybe I should call the doctor.” She leaned over him, the flesh between her eyebrows drawn into one deep valley. “You look awful.”

  “I’ll be okay.”

  She pulled up one side of her mouth. “You don’t look it.”

  A hot wave of nausea rolled from his bowels up to his chest.“Oh, God,” he moaned, struggling to sit up, willing himself not to vomit in front of her.

  “Can I get you a cup of tea or something?” she said as he staggered past.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  * * *

  Shannon put Eric’s glass in the bar sink and opened the fridge. “May I have a drink?” she asked Shad.

  “Yeah, man. What you want?”

  She surveyed the contents of the fridge: limes and oranges, two bags of ice, neat, vertical rows of soft drinks, a shelf of beers. Its mundaneness brought her back to reality. Seeing the man she’d once idealized looking weak and pathetic had opened a flood gate of sympathy that she needed to suppress. She’d found herself plumping pillows, bringing another glass of coconut water, placing a plastic bowl next to the bed within easy reach. It had been all she could do not to wipe the dribble from his mouth after he retched.

  “How’d Miss Mac’s move go this morning?” she asked.

  “She still have a lot of boxes and things left, but we got all the furniture. She give some to me and some to Frank. She say she can’t pack all of it into Horace’s house, so Beth and I have a new bed.”

  He placed the glass he was drying on a towel. “How’s the boss doing?”

  “Not good.” She took a beer from the fridge. “But he’s not going to admit it.”

  The bartender opened the bottle. “You right, but he getting soft in his old age.”

  “That will be the day.”

  “I telling you, he lost the fire in his belly, ever since the hurricane.” Shannon sat on a barstool and Shad leaned toward her, lowering his voice. “Remember how he used to be so sure of what he wanted, used to argue about every little thing? Well, them days gone. Anything I want him to do now, he usually do it. And Solomon take off plenty time, always suffering from a hangover, and he still let him work here. Days gone by, he wouldn’t have stand for none of that.”

  “Maybe he’s depressed.”

  The bartender pushed back from the counter, horror on his face. “Depressed! He don’t have nothing to depress him. He going to get a new hotel with a nice apartment, and he don’t even have to put up any money. All he have to do is sit back and relax because I going to manage it for him.”

  Shannon took a swig. “Maybe he’s lonely.”

  Shad shook his head hard. “With all of us around him? Nah, man. He even have a nice girl—” He broke off and spun toward the fridge.

  “Girlfriend?” Shannon finished, hearing the other shoe fall. The shabby bar was the first surprise, now this.

  Shad turned around to face her, pulling his lips wide. “Well, they not exactly—”

  “I’m a big girl, Shad. Is she a local?” The bartender shook his head. “Who is she then?”

  Shad squared his shoulders. “Best I tell you than someone else. Is the woman who was living on the island.”

  “The squatter?”

  “She wasn’t no ordinary, poor squatter, you know. She was a nice woman who just want to get away from everything.”

  Shannon sipped hard at the beer while the bartender rushed away to fill an order at a distant table. “Tell me about her,” she said when he returned.

  He raised both shoulders high and dropped them. “What kind of thing you want to know?”

  “Her name.”

  “Simone.”

  “Is she, I don’t know, big, tall, ugly . . . pretty?”

  “Little bigger than Beth, not as big as you.” He got busy tuning the radio to a new station. Shannon raised her eyebrows when he turned around, urging him on. “She pretty, yes, a brown-skinned woman from Jamaica. When she was five, her family move to England, then later to America.”

  “Why was she on the island?”

  “She was grieving, grieving everything in her life. She was a big businesswoman, but you know how you reach a place sometimes when you want to stop and let the sadness catch up with you? That was where she was. The sadness catch up with her, so she come back to Jamaica to find some kind of peace. She say she was riding around in a taxi and saw the island, and she decide that was where she want to stay.”

  “Was she—you know, unstable?”

  “Crazy? No, I wouldn’t say so. She talk calm and make plenty sense. She talk the boss into renting her the island, even though it wasn’t legal, like how the hotel mash up. She live there for two months like a free woman, just do whatever she feel like doing. After a while, she didn’t feel like wearing clothes and she walk around the island naked.”

  Shannon let out a reluctant crow and raised the bottle. “Now that’s a fantasy I’ve always had.”

  “And another time”—Shad chuckled—“when some guys row out one night to rape her, she shoot a gun after them and they run away. They almost drown coming back in the canoe because they didn’t know how to row good. The whole village laugh after them.”

  Shannon took a slow sip, wanting to hate the woman and failing. “I hadn’t thought of that, that someone would try to—to attack her. She must have been scared shitless.”

  “You know Jamaica
ns. They see a woman by herself . . .”

  “I’m glad she knew how to defend herself.”

  “She a strong woman.”

  “Has she—has Eric seen her since then?”

  “No, but she’s coming in two weeks’ time—for the groundbreaking.”

  “Two weeks?” Shannon ran a hand through her hair, untangling an unruly lock, her heart beating fast. Any remnant of sympathy she’d felt for Eric had vanished. There’d be no wiping of body fluids after this, of that she was sure.

  “What day is she coming?”

  “August first, Wednesday, so the boss say.”

  Shannon puffed out her cheeks and released them. “And I wonder when he was planning to tell me.”

  “Everything happening so fast at the end of the month, you know, he probably forget. The groundbreaking coming, then Danny, the investor guy, coming down with his girlfriend, and—”

  “He should have told me.”

  Shad examined something invisible on his arm. “Is just a little visit, not like he going to get married.”

  “We know that,” the Canadian woman snarled. “He’s not exactly the marrying kind.”

  Shad picked up the glass he’d wiped before and wiped it again. “You know,” he said slowly, “if it was up to any man, I don’t feel there would be any wedding business. Marriage is something created by women, I sure of it. I don’t think any man is the marrying kind.”

  “What do you mean? You’re on the way up the aisle yourself.”

  The glass being wiped was replaced with another. “Maybe not.”

  “Spit it out, Shad. What’s bothering you?”

  Bracing himself against the counter, he gazed at the sink. “The way a woman can tie you up for the rest of your life, and she have to do it in front of a hundred people, and she have to impress the people with fancy dress and shoes. Then, guess who have to pay so the hundred people can eat and drink after to celebrate your downfall?”