Fingerprints of Previous Owners

by Rebecca Entel

  But I understood differently, when we found my boy and carried him out: what it meant for those stones to contain blood. What it meant when you could see darkness because darkness meant something else when it wasn’t just a concept made up in the crevices of your own brain. Made-up monsters not the thing to fear.

  I became a man whose child was dead. I became a split-up man. I became a man with a bar who comes to work each day, each night, hoping someone would leak and tell me something terrible. That they’d relieve the pressure inside their own heads in a way that would teach me how to do it for myself.

  Haulback get you every time.

  Yes, sir, Mr. Vit. Yes, sir.

  Got to relieve that pressure, else you turn like the minister. Explode from not being able to explain to a child why he had to flee that demon place. Get so you choose blood over telling.

  So it has taken the stones, someone bringing down these stones, to make the leaks happen. Like taking plugs out of a dike across the world. I don’t know how they did it either, whoever did this. And I know what it takes to bring something broken and precious down from the inland. I’m speaking about my boy but about all of us, too. We know what it takes.

  The sign outside my bar says Thiflae Bar: Something Sweet. And anyone who’s asked me why I chose that name instead of sticking with the Broken Oar has got pretty much the same answer: a thiflae flower is something sweet. But that explanation isn’t the true one. I chose thiflae because it’s tiny and red. I chose thiflae because, if you walk into the brush, it’s most likely the only dot of red you’ll see among the green and brown and gray. I chose thiflae because that’s what it was like when we finally figured out how to get Jimmy—Jimmy’s body—down to the road: leaving behind the teeniest splatters of red dots on the stones. All we left behind.

  Stones I hadn’t touched since that day, until today.

  That same night my son’s body was found, which was the night after he died, I became the funereal director on this island. Minister Callaghan himself and Ole Mr. Vit himself both agreed, after consulting Mr. Horace, who was also on the committee, and they passed it on to me. Mr. Vit was getting too old, they said; he was ready to retire from that particular part of his life on this island.

  At the time I thought such a thing went right along with the death of your child: the darkest-struck person on the island doing the darkest things for all of us. But they’d had an entirely different conversation about asking me then. Later I knew they figured I’d be the last one on this island or on earth to want to talk about or throw my eyes or my voice toward the inland and those stones with their pinpoint dots of red, literal and otherwise. This was how it went, one generation to the next. Determining the person whose mouth would be reliably gummed up with their own hurting. To keep the unspeakable unspoken. Callaghan had his own reasons for everything he did, of course, and we knew some of those soon enough, God help him. But Ole Mr. Vit and Mr. Horace and whichever other elders they consulted—making the decision of who would keep death and all its darkness to himself, even in the moments of his own heart’s deepest fissuring, especially then—they chose me.

  Around here we could talk about plenty of historical and geological reasons we use limestone in our burials. Whatever else, it dissolves. Bodies. Even bones and teeth. We could reuse graves every decade if we wanted. It disappears them for us. I knew that putting my son to rest. I didn’t know another choice.

  Some days I was surprised the funeral committee didn’t head inland with that limestone, try it out on the ruins. On the spot my boy was found. On all the red.

  And to this day I’ve been their helper with the dissolution. The kind of bodies that might not even come back to the island, but we pretend to bury them anyway. The kinds of death stories no one tells.

  And then I sit at the bar waiting for a leak that hasn’t come. Until today on these stones.

  Chapter Eight

  By the time I’d walked home, the rubber wishbones of the flip-flops had carved bloody slits between my toes. I should be bloody, after two nights in a row running or walking away from bloody someones. I limped right by Mother on the couch. I put the firing papers down on my bed. The tattered edge of my uniform curled with the wetness falling on it. The blanket was wet where my hands pressed into it. My voice was the soggy sound I hated: getting all low and high at the same time, thin and then thick again with crying. Throat flapping open and closed. I kept talking it over and over, rushing, so I’d be ready with a speech when Mother came to bed.

  What I wouldn’t tell her: blood on my feet, bruises on my arm where their fingers had been, nothing compared to the last two nights on the road and the pool deck and my running away. I couldn’t tell her why.

  What I had to tell her:

  Mother, I’ve been fired.

  I’m sorry, Mother. I’m so sorry. I’ll figure something out. I’ll beg Miss Patrice to take me on. I’ll ask Mr. Ken if he’ll pay me to clean the bar after closing. With Serena most likely going off to study in the States, he’ll need someone. Christine needs someone to watch little Jamal some, now that she’s working more nights, and maybe sometimes she’d be able to pay. Maybe—if she’s willing to speak to me at all. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Lionel will help us. Bayard, Uncle Q. Uncle Q’s always saying we could move in his place if we need. If we need anything. He’s always saying that: anything, anything at all.

  Sorry, sorry, sorry. I know that’s not what you want, but...

  I know it seems like too much to recover from, too much to bear. But I will take over all the moneymaking ways you do all day, and maybe they will hire you to work in the laundry or in the kitchen. Or, or, or, or...

  I just couldn’t help it, just needed to go up there and see. You know how Dad would say: Seek out the source. I was being so careful, went up there so many times without anyone ever knowing. Not even you. For over a year about. And then all of a sudden they came across me, up on the estate, my manager, and there was nothing I could do. She had it in for me for some other things they—It doesn’t matter, I guess, they caught me up there inland. “Trespassing.” And they might say “stealing,” but that’s not how it sounds—that’s not—that’s a different story. Stories.

  They fired me, but I will figure out something. There must be something, some way to...

  I will write to everyone I know in the capital if I need to and find work there. And if I have to go I promise once I’m there to—just so you know that—

  I was still practicing when I heard a shuffling in the hall outside the bedroom door. Not a shuffling of a body coming down the hall but a shuffling of a body that’d been standing there and couldn’t take any more standing and listening. The door opened slowly. The papers rose.

  Mother looked at me a spell that wasn’t long or short. Eyes cold brown in the low light. I stayed put: perched on the edge of the bed with my feet dangling like a child’s. Then she stepped farther in, pointed me out of the room, and closed the door behind me. With all the doors closed to it, the hallway sat dark as midnight.

  Mother and I had not always shared a room. Before Dad died, even when he was away from the island, I slept on the loveseat in the living room. Troy had a room made up in what was meant to be a closet at the end of the hall. I felt along the walls to make my way to it now. I opened the door and sat down on the bed. The room was big enough only for a cot and a nightstand made out of a crate on its side. Inside the crate a clutch of art supplies Lionel had fished for him out of the dump. We used to sit together at the table, Troy teaching me how to draw the shadows in so my pictures wouldn’t look like they were floating in nowhere. (So exacting, my brother’s fingers around brushes and pencils! Opposite his too-tight hold on the machete, his useless perpendicular hack that left the patch behind the house unchanged and him panting. The death grip, the wrong angle: getting him—us—nowhere.) Mother had left this room exactly the way it was when Troy first left. The only thing that had changed was that sometimes we came in to get a candle from his
pile, taking them one by one as we needed them. I lay on my side on the cot, then at some point, still far from morning, I jiggled the key four times without letting it rattle before turning it all the way; slowly, silently turned it back just a tick; pulled the doorknob just so to make the key uncatch; skipped the broken step that would make its twitching sound underfoot.

  So many stars out the sky looked dusty. Looked like the sea dried to a crust of its own salt. Looked littered with lint tufted almost imperceptibly into the reaching arms of the Milky Way, pointing us elsewhere. So many stars out the sky looked spangled with broken glass, like pieces of what had been a life.

  And then the lights came to make it all look smoky, impossible to see. Constellations blurred to nonsense. Wind all around, but not real wind. Batty, swooping sounds from above sounding like war. And I knew it was the emergency airlift, finally, for Jasmine Manion, B3, the American woman with the white husband. Off to the capital in a helicopter. In whatever shape she was in.

  I felt all the dirt that my hands had picked up as I climbed up a trail that I was making as I used it. And I felt all the places I had touched with my hands, streaking dirt wherever I touched: myself or stones or anything. Kept grubbing through the brambles for stones—stones the ghosts had quarried from the clay earth—like how I’d seen Dad coax out stubborn wisdom teeth (slowly, only sign of force the veins leaping from his arm).

  No one was with me, but if someone were, we wouldn’t speak. I pictured various people walking with me, helping me lift: Lionel or Bayard or Miss Philene or even Lem. By now they’d all heard—must have—about the American woman and the airlift. And heard, too, about me getting fired for trespassing inland. Maybe they thought I was just escaping the banquet ruckus going up there; maybe they’d figured me out with my maps and secret trails and haulback-ravaged skin. Maybe no one was even talking about it, because it would make them talk about the inland, the post, these stones in my arms.

  I let my mind go looser and imagined Troy, Dad, or Mother as the one helping me carry the stones. We would not speak, but we would catch the whites of each other’s eyes in the dark so we could coordinate our steps, walk smoothly, one of us forward and one of us backward.

  Just me, I found ways, after many tries, to be more efficient than I’d been just carrying one stone at a time pressed against my belly.

  The wind got harsher, and my eyes adjusted to the settled blackness of the night. I didn’t know why I still had on my uniform, but now it wasn’t a uniform. Just something on my body that took on streaks of maroon from my skin, rubbed-in dirt, yellowing sweat, scars in its fabric that told where I’d been. I took off the apron, bundled it like a sack I could swing over my shoulder. Even with only three stones in the bundle, all that would fit, I couldn’t walk without a stripe of pain from my ears down either way on my neck. And then the apron tore, spilling stones on my back and my stripped feet. Their shapes that were neither square nor round; their rough edges that were neither all smooth or all knife blade. I told myself over and over that there was no hurting, no tired, no too-heavy for me.

  By morning I could see crosshatching etched in the palms of my hands, written over my lifelines. By morning I could see the mosaic of the gravel in my legs and knees. Hadn’t even realized—between the darkness and the wind and the struggle to get it all done before the first light—hadn’t even realized I’d started crawling.

  Uncle Q had sent a note that he’d come by later to see about everything he’d heard. See about: I knew what he meant, that he expected we’d move in with him. Lose our house since I’d lost my job. More lines on the list of lost things. His writing showed the shakiness of the hand that had inscribed it. The note itself looked so fragile: his own brittleness seeped into the paper, as if it’d washed up on Junkful Beach from another time. Reminded me of how Uncle Q himself looked these days, like a walking stick carved out of an old, old branch. He and Mother like two old pieces of furniture I had to worry I might break but had to sit on just the same.

  See about: the phrase Mother’s generation always used when they definitely wouldn’t talk about. Mother pretended she hadn’t seen his note, gestured for me to get ready to go with her to search for shells. Didn’t see the mess I was, head to toe. Or didn’t look.

  We stepped outside into the light. Rattled the key four times before turning it all the way to lock the door; turned it back just a tick; pulled the doorknob just so to make the key uncatch; skipped the broken step. But instead of heading to her first stretch of beach, I took Mother by the hand, and we began the walk toward the resort’s gate. The long way there she walked with me. Didn’t try to pull me in a different direction or gesture to ask where we were going. Maybe at first she thought I’d come up with a plan, something more than selling flowers by the snack bar.

  I didn’t look at Mother as we walked, but I spoke and spoke and spoke, her quiet thickening my own voice. Almost everything bobbed up from my throat: the inland, the book, the map, the whipping post. I knew she wouldn’t say a word in response, but I didn’t know whether she might turn away from me, walk in the clear other direction. Say no to listening as well as speaking. Hail a passing car to pick her up so she could slip the bogeyman that had burrowed in her daughter’s stomach and was now coming out her daughter’s mouth.

  Didn’t tell her Andre was back on the island. Did tell her what had happened to the American woman at the resort. She held up her fingers: One or two or three? I wrapped my hand around hers so that three fingers had to stay up.

  Anyone we passed on our way kept his or her distance. Gave us a half-wave but didn’t stop to talk, ask after Mother through me. Wasn’t the firing. They knew I’d been tainted by the inland. Could see it in the turn away of their shoulders, the seal of all their lips. Maybe they saw my mouth moving and didn’t want to risk hearing anything I might say about what I’d seen and touched. Mother didn’t try to go toward them.

  Unlike the stones I’d taken from the inland, the bench I’d made from them was not on resort-owned property. Near the gate, near the gravelly snack bar and parking area, but technically just on the side of the road. In the same spot where Mother would sell her flowers. Tourists: Buy Native Island Wildflowers for 50 cents a bunch. U.S. coins and other OK. I swished my foot in the dust as if to rub out her words written down for tourists and not for me. I looked at my own feet: barely strung-on sandals that didn’t belong to me.

  We both stood in front of the bench. I told her about the book’s description of the enslaved sitting on a pile of rocks, telling. But Master Cruffey didn’t write down what they’d told.

  “Mother,” I said. “Sit.”

  She wasn’t used to me telling her to do something. I think I surprised her so much that she went right ahead and sat down on the stones without waving me away. She and the stones shifted just so, then found a staying place. I stood close, tall over her, her deep, pond-like eyes looking up at me, waiting for what I was going to say.

  It was Mother’s long green skirt, and it was Dad’s white shirt she liked to wear in the sun. But I’d never seen my mother sitting on a bench by the side of the road.

  “Go on,” I said. The word beneath my skin somehow crawled up into my mouth, pushed out from under my tongue, until there it was. “Tell.”

  The word lassoed her head and made her nod. Her own feet shushed through the sand, one against the other. Crabs scuttled out from under the stones, feeling her weight, my voice, our waiting for her movement. Still she looked up at me, and I looked down. Expression hardening to how it always was.

  The wind dusted up the ground, blocking my view of my own feet. The wind brought the linen scent of her as she walked away. By mid-day Mother had not come back, but I was not standing alone by the bench of stones.

  When Claudia heard I was out by the gate, and that there was something afoot out there, she sent some staff—as security, it seemed. The resort was already partly shut down with the airlift and all, and they made it known this was a temporary wall of st
affers while they waited for international management to arrive. With what and for what, we couldn’t know and wouldn’t be told. They stood at intervals of about three feet. They slumped in their positions with a strange mix of resignation and resolve. Before I might’ve been looking out for them to be more threatening, but I guessed they knew with everything that’d happened, we’d all be looking out for that. Standing there, I noticed for the first time that day that someone had scratched Cruffey into the sun of the insignia on the gate, right in between Furnace and Island. It was hard to read. Not its own color but chewed out of the sun’s yellow paint. The way the y had a little loopy tail, looked like Lem’s handwriting. The way he used to write the y in my name. The island y. The sneer.

  I’d been standing around long enough to have complaining feet, crusted with dried blood; the staff people Claudia had sent just standing around, too, not knowing what we should do with one another—and then something else happened. About half of everyone I knew on this island, probably more, started showing up in the gravelly space outside the gate. No matter the sun was at its highest standing of the day. The story of what happened to the American woman at the resort had spread among the maids and the garbage crew and all around the oval, and seemed worse, I guessed, after the banquet. I hadn’t even known everything that’d happened. All around me the maids were almost as scratched up as I was. Christine in particular: usually standing so tall and yakking away, now all ducking behind her sunglasses.

  “Didn’t even go to work today,” I heard Hebbie say, bewildered without her uniform.

  Young and old and in-between: so many were there. The elders who’d been strong and silent all my life. Even Mr. Harper in his wheelchair and Ole Mr. Vit, the eldest on the island. Even Miss Patrice, with the store supposed to be open this time of day. (Hand still to her cheek after all these days since Mother mutely named her pain.) Even that Wayida Callaghan, owlish behind her glasses, so rarely, rarely seen outside her own church. Miss Minnie and Miss Vernie and Miss Philene and Mr. Ken and Bayard—Bayard always so busy, strange to see him standing still. And he wasn’t teaching at the school if he was standing here, holding Manny’s and Gussie’s hands.