Fingerprints of Previous Owners

by Rebecca Entel

  I couldn’t take in any more right then. My filled-up eyes blurred the words. Mutiny Day. I’d call it something else. Wondered what those enslaved would have called it—what they had called it.

  Once we’d watched satellite images of the eye of a hurricane hanging over our oval, as if the storm were only on a TV screen and not all around us. Water so furious turned the image opaque; we were looking right at ourselves without being able to see anything. How the named people moved in my mind without me hearing any of their voices. All those people sitting on the bench of stones, but I didn’t get to hear their words. So much for them to tell: made my brain sag with exhaustion, just seeing it with no sound. Waiting for the slow, slow eye of the storm to shift someplace else.

  The moonlight was fading, the stars screened behind the clouds. The flashlight dulling. To read it all I’d need to keep the book longer, not just copy the map out. I couldn’t imagine letting the book go out of my hands at all, even to hide it as I knew I should. It was heavy in my lap, didn’t fit there. Uncomfortable. But like it was supposed to feel like that on top of me.

  Still, I knew I needed to hide it to keep at it. Like with the brush and the stones.

  I crept into the bedroom I shared with Mother and slid the book under my pillow. Pressed my head down hard so I could still feel its edges. Too-thin pillow let me. Bringing that book into the house was like inviting in a wild animal: something that could bite, dismantle. If she saw it, what would happen to Mother? She’d already stopped speaking since Troy. If it touched her, would her skin pucker into blisters? Split like haulback snags? Streak dry and raw like hands held too long in the ocean or in the resort’s soapy buckets?

  Closed my eyes even though I knew I wouldn’t sleep. The rush of Mother’s whistly breathing was steady at my right ear. Wall steady at my left. My body felt like it was holding itself up uncomfortably. Like I was on top of the pile of stones that propped me up but also shifted beneath. A pile of stones that called for careful movement not to tumble away. A body finding a way to be still and to speak: that’s what my body was trying to be. A body trapped and a mouth free. Somewhere, couldn’t place it, pictures formed themselves out of shadows. Not in my mind exactly, not on the screens of my eyelids either, but also not in the room, not way out there in the world somewhere.

  A stranger day at work. But I was stranger now, too. The other maids were scarce around, moving through the day with their heads down. I wasn’t the only one with scratches anymore. Everyone looked torn up like the pool deck. I didn’t see Christine, but I didn’t ask anyone if she was at work. No one was talking about anything. As though the whole day were a Jamboree—we didn’t stand still for eight seconds or trade more than a few broken-off words. The book the only thing on my mind anyhow. No word of it being reported missing yet, but I couldn’t have much time.

  At the end of the regular day, stiff from bleach to my wrists, I checked in with Lem about garbage duty. I was supposed to take another load to the landfill to help clear the pool deck so the renovation of the actual pool, which had been drained completely last night, could start.

  He barely looked up from the clipboard when I found him behind the fence.

  “Lionel sent a message he could drive you to the landfill. Picking up an American girl soon anyway. B4, that nanny.” Chuckled, muttering about Lionel’s truck parked outside Thiflae Bar x nights in a row with her, just as I suspected but no longer cared about.

  “I can’t—Why is Lionel going around with her?”

  He shrugged. “What, you pissed he’s hanging out with a white girl? Or you just pissed at everyone lately?”

  I hadn’t talked to any AYS about the gift shop the way I’d said I would, and if Jasmine Manion had told her about the book’s disappearance, she knew I was the one. But if I tried to walk all those bags over and come back for more, it would take all night.

  Lem was still eyeing the clipboard. I looked down, too; saw a tiny constellation of bleach splattered on the toe of my shoe. I told him the litter up by the House had been awful the other day. That I thought I should go tackle that before any of it caught wind and blew down, got in the way of the renovation. That I knew where I’d seen the garbage gather, so I could take care of it quickly. If he would just take care of dumping that load.

  He gestured around, arms and voice flailing. “You see the mess went down here last night? House litter worse than this?” The fragmented images of the banquet mayhem pieced together in my mind. He knew I knew my garbage duty was all about this banquet-turned-renovation. But I just turned away without answering and headed for the truck exit. The stones were pulling me.

  “I’ll just do it quickly, and then I’ll be back for the other chores.” Tossed a vague promise over my shoulder that I’d do both our jobs the next day, swore to it.

  I didn’t turn back to see which kind of eyes he watched me with this time.

  I didn’t take the resort’s path to the House, though it would have been much quicker. I went all the way around to my path, my machete hiding spot by the stooping vitae—where I’d hidden the book, too, wrapped up in the sheet and covered in branches—and made it back to the kitchen without reopening any wounds on my knees.

  Didn’t look at my watch as I was standing there, in front of this place of fire, of food, of sustenance, of labor. I imagined how big the cauldrons were that could sit inside this fireplace. I imagined how hot the heat of the fire must’ve been. Whether Tildy was allowed to step back from a surging flame. I imagined the smells filling this small area. Working to make food that wasn’t ever yours. I imagined the lines of sight in the room, how to sneak morsels into the folds of an apron.

  What did it feel like to stand so close to the fire, being watched by a man with a switch in his hand? Looking down at your own feet, torn up and cracked against the crispy edges of moldy leaves. Moving just so to keep the blood from your feet off their floor. Fire at your face. Master at your back. Feeling what it felt like to move the side of your body with no arm there. Other side, moving the pot would take flexing the fingers of one hand and pulling in the biceps of one arm. The rush inside as your fingers couldn’t hold it upright, the clang of the pot on the floor, the sear of the water on bare skin. The kind of burn that burned deeper over time. (Like tonight when I’d feel that bleach work itself down inside my hands?) To feel the waiting at your back. I watched my own hand reach toward the vitae beam, finger the air beyond the nail hole that might have held a hook. Imagined taking a poker down that was hot as the fire, swinging around and flinging it behind me at whichever ghost was there.

  I stooped into the fireplace and let the wasps hover near my face while my hands hovered near the diamond. Imagined ducking into the heat to get the boat from your mind into the rock. Let the flame out of your hand, safely covered by the fire. But then get sent in a boat to the capital. To be sold? To a worse prison than the estate?

  Bodies off now to the capital disappeared. Came back to our oval only as ghosts. Sometimes left their artwork behind.

  My feet followed a bed of rock in the ground that had kept the brush from growing in a total wall. I reached a small area where brush didn’t seem to grow. I opened the book and looked around. In front of me, the sun was just beginning to sink on a gorgeous view, I had to admit, of the ocean in the distance, aqua light as a dream. Looking from afar, the green brush below looked soft and decorative, thorns invisible. In front of my feet: an oval crack in the rock, almost a bowl, half filled with rainwater. I moved my toe in an oval. Looked back at the map, traced from the kitchen. This had to be the watering hole. The livestock’s watering hole. All around: more walls running as far as I could see into the surrounding brush.

  Despite those walls and more walls—how free the animals must have felt, watering with a view out to the sea. What they all must have thought: how free those animals must feel right here. View of the land spilling down to the sea. The sky above you and the sea below you just kept buzzing blue like beauty could matter. Once in
a long, long while: ships in the distance.

  My brother used to show me how to trace simple shapes in the sand that turned into boats with just a line here, with the correct angle there. Half-circle base, triangle sails. Frailness of the lines laden with dreams heavy enough to depress into rock.

  Making their bench right here on this spot. Making it out of took-apart walls.

  I walked toward the Big House to get a better sense of direction, figure out which way to slice next. Gravity leading inside and out.

  The diamond cut into the base of the House was clear, even in the running-away sunlight. I could see it and feel it, too. Same shape and size I’d been finding. But inside the diamond: smoothest rock in all the inland. Felt like the pool’s tile edge, a screen in the lobby, a platter at the buffet, a guest room mirror. Sanded to facelessness. Limestone wasn’t the only thing on this island at work dissolving. My hands felt so empty I picked up the book as quickly as I could. The pixelated grain of its cover, the serifed graves of its title.

  I stood on the veranda and studied the map. Just off from the House, toward the shoreline, a small line like a hash mark. The map told me: Wh. Post. My feet plodded, one in front of the other, the path to the lookout. The path to the hash mark. One finger holding open to the page with the diagram labeled NEW BETTER FOR WHIP. POST. And then I looked back at the drawing of the post and realized why it was familiar.

  I stared and stared before sunset threatened the sky bloody, not sure, looking to and from the map to the pillar of penned-in stones in front of me. Remembered Jasmine Manion standing on this very spot, comparing to the book just as I was and sinking into herself. It was clear from where the plantation border dropped off, where the water was drawn along the edge in simple little waves as if a kid had drawn them. Lovers’ Lookout: right there on the map as Wh. Post.

  Stared and stared. Tasted like bile in my mouth. Feet sparked from numbness, and my fingers around the book’s cover felt like hardened clay.

  I knelt, felt the stones against my knees. Let my hands move slowly around the pillar’s back. In a space between the pillar and the cliff’s edge, a wedge only a child could crouch in, my fingers found the grooves of a tiny diamond. The shallower etches of a piece of a sail.

  Post octoroon myself. Tie to post all day.

  Divvy.

  Felt my feet finding nooks to stand on, propped myself up until I was draped over the top of the post. Proceed with caution, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. Could feel it pressing the air out of me. Too dark now to make out the nearby harbor below. The bundle of my sheet disappeared into the opaque water. Seemed so easy just to slide over. Become a ghost of the inland myself.

  When I was a little girl and my brother would create art that was strange to me, I’d try to see it as if I were him. Stare at it for hours trying to make my eyes his eyes. Is this what he saw staring at the ocean for the last time? His own scent covered by salted air and fear? Loitering Boy. Felt a post against his chest?

  When the voices were close enough for me to identify them as Claudia and Max, it was too late: I turned around and faced them.

  Bench Story No. 12: Mr. Vitman Whylly

  I the oldest person on this isle, male or female or what have you, white or black or anything. I left only a few times in my life, so I have seen all the changes and all the sameness for going on ninety-four years now, come November. You meet someone on this isle doesn’t know Ole Mr. Vit? That person not from this isle, don’t know his nose from his bum, says I. I outlive my two wives and one-third of my children. The other two-thirds make sure I taken care of. That’s how we do on a small isle, everyone knows everyone. See in one another’s windows a good and bad thing, my great-gran used to say.

  I hear from my elders what it was like just after emancipation. Can still say that word—emancipation—without creepy-crawling on someone’s skin. Say its opposite, and people leave the room. Maybe even leave the isle. That’s the way it is in a place like this. Every summer celebrate independence festival from the old Brit motherland with music and beer and such, but don’t talk too much about what it all means. (Even some of the people younger than I am, many of you surely old enough to remember when we were all Brits, of some sort, even way long after emancipation. What a thing!) Talk maybe about what it used to be like when everyone kept pigs or when water started coming inside the houses, or maybe, maybe, some words your great-great-great-gran say, like: he know about slavery time or that was daughter of Africa born. But tread lightly in the isle of your mind. Don’t get too far inland, you know, where it all overgrown and painful to dig out. Haulback get you every time.

  So I going to say things go creepy-crawly on some people’s skins. If you one of those people can’t take it, I invite you just take a walk, come back for the next storyteller. But maybe, just maybe, you stay and listen to Mr. Vit. ’Cause you want those resort staff to stay and listen, thinks I, even if they have to and they holding badges against the listening. You want they ears opened up. Can’t get the mollusk so’s you can enjoy that fritter till the shell get opened up.

  Miss Daphanie, Miss Patrice, Mr. Harper, Miss Minnie, Miss Vernie, Mr. Q, Miss Philene, Mr. Kenneth, all you others not as old as me but getting to be the elders on this isle, I sorry. I know your lips tight for reasons. Ears, too. But now I speak.

  Speak what it’s like when the resort come, build on the Cruffey estate. The estate. Inland. The ruins. The plantation—there, I’ll say it—we’ve all not talked about to our children or nieces or nephews or neighbor children. But that’s what it is: the plantation. What we mean is the place where the people almost every one of us was born from was enslaved before emancipation.

  We all practical minded here. Got to be when life about making do, scrounging ’cause the soil won’t grow no more, taking care of old ones and young ones. See clearly why the government opens up so much for foreign companies, wants to welcome tourism. Seems like the only thing we have that people will pay for is warm land, beauty in the views. Yes, we do have that. We have more, yes, but I mean what from-afar people think they come here for and willing to pay more money than any of us on this isle ever see in a life—even a life long as mine.

  So no doomsday talk from me when the resort coming. Seen it before, sometimes companies come and go. Sometimes say they going to build, instead tear up and run away. All kinds of things. We lived through it. Not all good, not all bad, but that’s what we do. I never get to ninety-four years next November without being a forgiving man. No, can’t be here this long without that.

  I forgive three things:

  One, you say you hire all people of this isle for all of your waitressing jobs and security and front desk jobs. Strike a tax deal with government saying that. Then make them all maids in silly costumes and maintenance working to the bone and fly in your own people from elsewhere to do those other jobs pay more and talk to customers. We know why, none of them dark at all. Say you worried about staff speaking “perfect English” for tourists’ sake. But this isle a former British colony and certainly speaking English for the ninety-four years I been on it, so: two, I forgive ignorance. And that related to three. That nonsense you think you can change names, let alone the time of the earth. Don’t matter to me you think that. What is is.

  Here what I worried about for you. Here what I having trouble forgive. Here what makes no sense to me, old wise man as I am, lying in bed at night worryin’ it in my ole mind. Showing up here, clear you know what you looking at, what land you claim: slave plantation. That’s what isle is ever since Columbus wash up here, kill or work them out of being and set the way for hundreds of years of slave ships. Slavery time until too, too recent history. Lot of trouble to bring all them people all that way to this little dot on a crease in the map—sprinkle of dots we call our country. Isle be so small and plantation be so big only one on this whole isle, that why so many of us got the same name, the name of the owner. Owner of the plantation. (No one owns people, says I, no matter what they say.) Not
lucrative, you know, since they just kept ruining the soil worse than it already was, whoever wash up here. Couldn’t make a good buck or even handful of coins after a while. Owner and family gone to capital long before emancipation, and folks already set up here got a little land and then finally, when couldn’t take no more of their own memory, descend to outskirts of island, brave more storms, the almighty ocean, in exchange for a road to get to one another easy now, and letting all that memory get all covered over.

  So why I can’t forgive you when no one want to look anyway? Why I can’t forgive you when no one using that land, no one even want it? Here is number one of no forgiveness. Whole list: one thing, says Ole Vit.

  Only part of plantation left in a way you could see what it is, not just piles of rocks and such, is the Big House. Two stories, some walls standing as you know. Plantation set up with owner’s house next to whipping post. You got land deeds tell you what that whipping post is? Ground around it full of nicest plants and flowers on the isle. Fertilized by blood. Best view on the isle, that post, so everyone could see who being made example of, thinks I. Made that post your lookout point, your lovers’ lane, your Columbus storytelling gobbledygook, your spot for happy people to go get happier and sad people to go get minds full of beauty and peacefulness and feeling like they on top of the whole damn-and-heaven world. Not everything is to be walked on, even with shoes willing to pay.

  Here’s what I do day I hear what’s been done. Heard what’s been done with my own ears from so many people not usually willing to even mention thing like post—that I know it must be true! Painful for them to tell me, like the words glass shards in their mouths. Here’s what I do. I tell my granddaughter Serena who with me that day, little as she was, take me over to the cemetery where my ma and pa and their ma and pa and their ma and pa buried. And we just sit there all day long till the sun go down, her picking up trash blow up from somewhere, put it in her purse to dump at landfill later. While I just sit. Feel older that day. Feel like maybe I won’t make it to the next birthday. Feel like maybe my granddaughter should go far ’cross world to somewhere else, find someplace in this wide, wide world where whipping post don’t make people fall in love.