The Angels' Share

by Garfield Ellis

A little old man sitting off to the side catches my eye and smiles.

  “I am not giving you one dollar more than a hundred,” Father counters, trying to intimidate the child. “What is your name?”

  “Garfield, sir. And how you feel your pretty young daughter goin’ think, sir?” The child motions at Angela. “Plus, take some for you grandchildren.”

  “You think I eat common mango at my yard?” Father reaches into his pocket to pay the child his $150 and have him throw the whole bucket into the back of my van.

  My only concern is whether they have been washed. But he ignores me, rubs the head of the child, congratulates him on being a good businessman, then demands his brawta. The child, flushed with victory, beckons to another, who reaches into the bushes for a large mango that can hardly fit into his palm, and gives it to Angela with a smile. “The brawta is for you.” So Father threatens him with a smile and comments on how old men never get anything.

  We are off again toward the green hills of northern St. Elizabeth. They are eating mangoes in the car. There is juice on the upholstery. But I find I am not complaining. Neither about the mango juice nor the long stories my father is telling nor the noise they make when the mood shifts to singing country music and we discover that she loves the old Marty Robbins ballads I used to frown on. Soon I am eating a mango and singing along as well.

  Maybe it is because it is his day. Maybe it is something else.

  This side of St. Elizabeth is greener, and as we cruise along, I realize there is a hint of Hampshire here. For the pastures are big and wide, and the sugar cane finally appears, along with bamboos and gigantic mango trees. There are coconuts too, and large poinciana trees spread and dot the bushes with their flowers. Their arm-length pods litter the roadsides in places. The river is long and winding and bamboo lines its banks where the grass is lush and green. Father points to an occasional wild pink queen-of-flower flashing by. And everything sweeps back, back onto the massive range of Cockpit Country.

  I catch her eyes in the rearview mirror as the two of them move through the Marty Robbins catalog and find the old favorite, “Out in the West Texas town of El Paso, I fell in love with a Mexican girl.” And the magic in her eyes makes me join in at the end of the line when Robbins whirls the tune to a breathtaking high. Angela keeps her eyes there in the mirror till the song ends and winks at me when Father roars something about a big iron on his hips. This too is a song I like, about a marshal walking into town to get a famous outlaw with his big iron. But her wink, I am sure, is loaded with more than just the innocence of the lyrics, and I feel my insides churn. Then she turns mischievously and gives all her attention to my father.

  And that is what I am talking about, for I am not sure of the feelings I am having when she stares at me, nor how I feel when she lavishes attention on my father.

  So we come to Appleton. And she is a child rushing from the vehicle as it stops to find a water pipe near a massive rum bottle in the center of a perfect green lawn. The pipe is off to the side and we wash the mango juice from our hands and dry them on a large red towel my father pulls from his bag. He leans on the massive bottle and savors the scent of rotting and boiling cane being turned to rum.

  “You can’t wait, eh?” I ask him.

  “Wait on what? Why wait? I am here.”

  So we take the cobblestoned walkway and enter a building painted in orange, pink, and green. Here the reception area opens up to a sprawling bar. Father’s face lights up. He heads straight for the bar and orders a sip of everything.

  The bartender smiles and tells him he will have to pay for the tour first, and even then, all he will get is one complimentary rum punch made with a sampling of the rums made by Appleton.

  “No sampling across the board?” Father shouts.

  “After the tour,” the bartender grins.

  “Oh, so there is a full sampling.”

  “Yes, there is,” says a portly, smiling guide who appears at our side. “There is a sampling of everything we make at the end of the tour.”

  Father immediately begins quizzing the guide, questioning his credentials as if he were interviewing him for a job. After a while, satisfied that the guide knows his business, Father drops in that he himself is a brewer of sorts. “Of wines, pimento wines . . . but of course,” he winks, “the methods and formulae are top secret.”

  The guide winks back and they are at once old friends.

  So it is his day.

  * * *

  The tour is long and filled with people of every sort, from college students working on their chemistry paper to tourists from Britain and North America, walking in the hot day with jugs of rum punch, half-naked and burnt from the sun. Fifteen minutes in and I am getting bored, but Father is like a pig in mud. He is ably assisting the guide in his tour, walking beside him, in front of him, or moving over to the side to expand a point to a group that may have strayed too near the periphery.

  I am thinking more and more of the little tavern I saw off to the right of the perfect lawn at the front. It seems like a good place to wait on my father. I make my way through the throng to tell him where I’ll be. He sees me coming and holds up his hand to make me pause, then puts an index finger across his lips as he nods toward the tour guide who is in the middle of some explanation.

  “You mean someone steals the rum at night?” This from a bearded white man at the front.

  “No,” the tour guide replies, “we like to think the angels take it.”

  “The angels?”

  “Yes, once we leave the rum to age,” he points to the massive copper casks that store the liquor, “no matter how we fill it, when we get back years later, 10 or 15 percent is missing from the top.”

  “Really!”

  “Yes. The angels take it. We call it the angels’ share.”

  “The angels’ share?”

  “Yes!”

  “It seems part of the natural process of evaporation and fermentation.” The man insists on spoiling a good story.

  “No, the angels take it!” Father shouts at him, rolls his eyes, shakes his head, and winks at me.

  The crowd chuckles at the exchange.

  I point toward the lawn away from the tour. Tired, I mouth at him. But he is still absorbed in the brewery talk around him. He is in a world of his own and nothing I do now will diminish the tour for him. He is happy, he is in his element.

  * * *

  So here I am, sitting in an old tavern that could have been a Henry Morgan drinking hole. Inside, all the furniture is made of the dark wooden casks in which the rum is aged. The tables are casks with rounded tops, and the chairs are casks with half the top cut away and the cover pushed down to make the seat.

  As I sit, a large turkey, with its body a million glistening feathers, prances past to jump clumsily across a small pond where an old water wheel is turning.

  It is Angela who has chased it. She stands there in the space where there could have been a wooden door, but there is none. Laughing gaily, she skips to plop into the dark barrel seat beside me. She sits on her down-turned palms and sprawls her feet so that the round of her legs is pronounced.

  “Hey,” she says. “Lord, you father can talk, eeh? Him know everything.”

  “That’s my father, that’s my old man.”

  “You tired?”

  “Yes.”

  We talk a bit of things I do not expect. And the time passes and the wind is soft from off the fields. I ask her if she has told her mother about what she does for a living.

  She blinks at me and asks why I am still thinking about that at a time like this.

  And I do not want to tell her it was only conversation. She may feel I am taking her feelings lightly. So I tell her I had imagined it was what she is on her way to do.

  That makes her pause for a while, then she asks what good it would do. “And anyway, she probably senses it already.”

  “How is that?” I ask her.

  “Well, I think she know I wasn’t no waiter o
r hospitality worker. Plus I don’t hide it. I just don’t tell her everything. It matter though?”

  And that is the question I keep asking myself: whether or not it matters what she is and what she does or did with her life. Or what it is that I would have expected her to do in the face of her circumstances—conditions that I can hardly imagine, however graphic her descriptions may be.

  There is no music in the old tavern, there is no intimacy. It is an old dingy place and there is a film of dust on everything; yet somehow I get the feeling that we are closing in on each other. And I don’t know how much I want this. Though my feelings tell me one thing, my mind tells me that she is a woman who needs more than I can promise her.

  After a while we leave the dimness of the ancient tavern to stroll the grounds in a sort of easy silence. The beautiful lawns are dotted with relics of older times: metal pots in which the sugar was boiled a hundred years ago; old buses and trolleys that may have carried cane and people before I was born. Then, at the edge of the estate, where the immediate factory adjoins the vast spread of sugar land now spurting young green cane, we see the large coach of an old train now painted in the Appleton colors. We climb aboard and from there we can look out at the extent of the Appleton estate as it spreads eastward, taking up the whole Nassau Valley. It hogs the rain-shadowed expanse of the valley like an oversized child lying casually in the lap of the Mocho mountain range. All that is left for other habitation is only on the periphery.

  It is here that she holds me.

  I am leaning against the rail with her beside me. And as we lean out the window, I feel her body shift as it searches to find the space where I am angled from the side of the train. She slips in like a wedge and I ease back to let her come. Now she is firmly into me and reaches behind to wrap a hand around my neck. I am not sure what to do with my own hands. I have one on the windowsill but the other is loose at my side. She pulls it against her, finding the pocket of her jeans, and slips it in to rest, warm, against her legs.

  As she settles into me, I grow hard against her. The harder I get the more she seems to press against me. Time passes, I am sure, though I cannot tell how much. Nor do I know how many words have passed between us because they are few and do not need to be many more. I wish she were naked or wore a skirt so I could extend my fantasies to their natural conclusion. For it all seems so natural that we should stand here locked together, looking out at the vast estates, and there is nothing about us now that could ever be out of place.

  It is close to twilight when Father comes, drunk from testing rum, to tell us it is time to go.

  She has been invited for dinner and I am not surprised. “Everton will take you home,” is the extent of the invitation.

  He is in the best mood that I can recall.

  It seems the tour and the liquor have brought a new man to us. I have seen him mischievous and wild, but I have never really seen him like this. He is like a man in a new suit who suddenly remembers there is a proud way to stand.

  No sooner are we back than he wants to go to the beach. He wants to take a short swim before we go to Tara for dinner. I am exhausted from the trip and I do not feel like the beach right now. But Angela is just as excited as he is. She says yes to everything he wishes. So I have to rummage through the cabin to find clothing for her. There are no shorts that will fit, but we find a large T-shirt. She changes into it, rolls her jeans past her knees, and walks away with him, carrying a folding chair that appears out of nowhere, to the black sand beach beyond the fence.

  He takes her hand and pulls her to join him as he lies back on the chair. She sits and leans her head against the thigh of his outstretched leg. He pours from the crusted bottle of pimento wine and when the cups are filled he drops the bottle to the sand beside them. Before he drinks, he tips his glass and drops a bit of liquid on the sand. The angels’ share, I think. My marketing mind freezes the picture of them sitting there framed by the wire fence with the open gate in the middle, a few wild weeds at the edge. It could be an ad for his pimento wine.

  But there is also a strange tingling in me—hotness behind my eyes, a burning in my chest, and confusion in my head. It is not possible. I refuse to believe that what I feel is jealousy over a massager as she leans into the loose embrace of my sixty-seven-year-old father.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  There is a hammering at my door. It seems I will not have much sleep tonight. I do not want to get up; I burrow my head into the pillows in an effort to get back to the exact spot in my dreams where I lay down in a waterfall whose cascades are so soft they roll like balls of feathers against my skin . . . and my head is resting on the breast of an angel.

  But the knock is incessant. I throw the pillow aside and am surprised to see that the light of morning is flooding the room. I must have slept like a lamb. But still I wish for more.

  He is standing there, framed in the doorway, with a wicked grin on his face and his little book of poetry in his hand.

  “Yes?” I ignore the buddy-buddy smirk. “You are dressed already?”

  “It is daylight. You climbed the mountain last night, man. You need to be fit for these things.”

  “What time is it?’

  “Does it matter? Come walk with me.”

  “Now?”

  “You see any other time?” There is a hint of self-consciousness in his eyes.

  “How all of a sudden you want me to walk with you? I never see anyone walk with you before.”

  “I want to tell you about your mother.”

  “I see.”

  I dress in a daze of sorts. For this has come straight out of nowhere and it throws me. But I find a pair of shorts from somewhere and all I need now is a T-shirt and there are many in the drawers. In less than two minutes I join him silently on the veranda.

  “Why do you always walk with that book?” I ask him as we head for the beach.

  “Poetry, son, poetry is the music of the soul.”

  “But why do you walk with it? How can you read while you walk? I never see you read while you walk.”

  “You’ve never seen me walk.”

  “I have seen you walk.”

  “Well if you ever see me read and walk, then that is when you see me walk.”

  “All right, old man, you are in a mood for parables today.”

  The sun is already on the sand, though the last of the morning breeze is still here, and some of the predawn gray lingers way over to the left where the sea curves away from the craggy hills in the distance.

  As we stroll along the beach, the light is gold upon his head. He is silent for a while. I figure he is working out an entry into the topic. I wait. I walk with him and I wait. I will not help. He does not need me to. And eventually he starts speaking.

  “You know how I meet your mother? In church. There were four sisters. They used to call them Johnson’s four flowers. Four of them and all of them use to dress like beauty queens to go to church every Sunday. All the while in the back of my mind I always wanted a church girl. My father drilled that into my head till I must have seen it as a natural thing to be. Get a church girl, boy—a nice country church girl. They are faithful, they can cook, and they don’t ask too much questions. Aahh.”

  I let his memory and the morning work on him. For this story is not a light one, and it seems it is taking an effort from him.

  “She was the second-oldest one. You see . . .” He pauses again. “You see, ahh, boy.” Now he turns to me. “You know, last night I was sitting on the veranda looking out and I say to myself, I must talk to Everton about this. And I worked it out in my head what and what I would tell you. How we would walk the beach and by the time the walk is done, the story would be finished. But it not easy. You think it easy to tell you about your mother? A whole heap of it is feelings. Just feelings—and some of it is hard.”

  “Maybe you are trying to tell too much. I don’t need to hear everything. Just a short version. Why you treated her like that? I don’t think she ever understood why y
ou never wanted her. I could see it in her. She never understood that.”

  “All right, you know why I married Una?” he tries again.

  “That is obvious.”

  “No, it is not what you think. I married her because she did not need me.”

  “She never needed you.”

  “Yes. She never needed me. When a man wants to take chances in life, he wants to know that he can fail. And if you have a woman who depend on you for everything, then you can’t fail, because you have nobody to support you if you fall. You understand?”

  “My mother was not a burden. She was independent.”

  “But she was,” he blurts. “Listen, Everton, you realize that your mother is the greatest cook in the family and she has the least education. The two youngest ones have education but can’t cook at all. In those days parents used to make definite decisions about their children. They decided early who would go to school, who must clean house and take care of them, who must get good husband. That is what parents do. Your mother, from very early, was chosen to clean house and cook. She was never given the opportunity to go to school. Her parents chose the two youngest ones to go to school. They decided who they would spend money on.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I am saying that your mother represented a tradition that sees a man in only two lights: feed him and give him work to do. I am not that kind of man. I can take care of myself. I don’t need a woman to do that. And that made her feel out of place.”

  “But you left her at the beauty contest. You deserted her. That is why she left you.”

  “Well . . .” He seems sad. “I did leave her and I am ashamed. But I am trying to tell you that we were never going to make it. She would have needed me too much and I could not have handled it.”

  “What kind of person leaves someone who needs them? Isn’t that the time when you bind closer?”

  “I saw what it did to my father. Every time he came home from work, my mother was just sitting there wanting money. And when his salary was not enough, half our needs had still not been met. So he spent half his time away from us. Because we needed him, he was our only source, and he knew he was not enough. We sucked every drop of blood from him and it was not enough. If only my mother had had a job, half a job, we would have been a better family. But she sat there and wanted more money, even when he had none. Forcing him to do stupid things to get money, to compromise himself. Borrow, worked several jobs, humiliate himself, while she sat there doing nothing but waiting for him to come home. I knew that sometimes he came home because he just couldn’t do any better. He wanted to be musician, but his music died in him, he withered as a man, he could not venture after his dreams because we needed him too much. One person should not need another so, Everton.