A Simple Distance

by K. E. Silva

  Susan stopped by to check in on Uncle George after hearing about his mass effect when everyone was still calling it a stroke. She was the one to correct us, explained to my family that his paralysis was due to the swelling of the tumor pressing against parts of his brain, inhibiting voluntary movement.

  She stopped by Tours my second morning, I was helping in the kitchen.

  The novelty of my arrival had worn off and I had become simply one of the team of women that worked to keep Uncle George fed, dry, and away from any possibility of slipping into a depression.

  Nights were heavy work, literally, when the need for sandwiches and juice temporarily gave way to carrying Uncle George to the toilet two or three times, in the dark. The first night of the paralysis, before Uncle Charles arrived, Uncle Martin got stuck in Bato, leaving only my mom, Auntie Clara, and Granny at the house; Granny in her thin cotton nightshirt worn nearly through from the years, barking directions from her bed across the dining room. Mom and Auntie Clara able to move their brother—his entire left side dead weight—to the bathroom and onto the commode, but unable, for hours after, to move him back. Uncle George, all the while, sitting soiled and naked, pulling into sadness. It took the arrival of Uncle Charles and me, both flying in from North America, to get him into a clean shirt and out next to Granny on the porch, joking about his negligent physician, saying things like, Dr. Munce is a dunce, through heavy, heavy lips.

  Not one to support the usual division of labor by gender at Tours, but not being strong enough to help lift my increasingly small uncle even to arrange his pillows, during the day I did whatever I could for the men who’d had night duty.

  I am normally considered a relatively capable person, not one to shy away from things that require a little grit. But my relatives are not privy to my capable side and, admittedly, I do not shine in a kitchen.

  I was raised in suburban Illinois and for the last fifteen years or so have lived in Northern California, the populated parts, mostly urban. I have always lived in places where, if I wanted fresh juice, I could pick it up at the corner store. Likewise, my fish and chicken always came to me pre-packaged, scaled, plucked, and unbloody. Additionally, I rarely have to cook for ten or twelve people at a time.

  The first obstacle I encountered that morning, during my attempt at preparing a lunch of ham sandwiches for the ten of us, was a dull carving knife, a knife I had to share with Valerie, my grandmother’s maid, as she chopped the chicken for dinner. The bread, thank God, was pre-sliced. There was mayonnaise and mustard, Dijon, in the fridge. The ham itself, my second obstacle, a giant thigh of pig, and I was a vegetarian. The fridge at Tours was probably older than I was and had decided to be weak along with Uncle George. Its main section wasn’t cold enough to keep the meat from going bad overnight, so the ham had been put in the freezer. It was frozen. Solid. There was nothing else for lunch. My healthy uncles had been up all night carrying their brother’s body to and from the toilet, cleaning his soiled skin and night clothes as they laughed with him about almost anything they could think of, so he wouldn’t feel sad, or humiliated. And I, in the kitchen in the middle of the day, couldn’t figure out how to make a ham sandwich. I got them coffee to hold them over, that alone taking me thirty minutes because I had to share the outlet with Valerie.

  I’ll just eat bread and mayonnaise if it takes much longer, Jean, said Uncle Charles, the physician from Canada, who suggested only then that I employ the microwave under the towel in the corner to defrost the meat once the electric socket was free.

  I was able, with the dull knife I told Valerie she could not have back until I finished the sandwiches, to hack off chunks of pig thigh and heat out the ice in the microwave. I had no trouble at all with the microwave, thank you very much. Two by two, I got them sandwiches. The men went first because they were up all night. Susan second, because she was a guest. Then Granny. Then my aunts. It took me an hour and a half. But I had succeeded in giving Uncle George something else to laugh about. And I had succeeded in making a friend of Susan.

  Later, I sat on Uncle George’s good side. He asked me whether I thought he was ready to walk as yet. I told him, maybe soon, maybe just then it was a little too ambitious.

  What evidence do you have for that statement? asked the barrister.

  Well, none. It was a political statement, rather than one based on evidence. I was just trying to make everyone happy.

  And I’d succeeded. Smiling back, he reminded me, You are talking to someone who has been an excellent politician. As he sipped the grapefruit juice I squeezed and strained special for him out of his spill-proof children’s cup, Uncle George told me it was the best juice he’d ever had, and thanked me. He said I would make someone a wonderful wife some day. I was not to listen to the others.

  Susan returned several hours later. We piled into Uncle Martin’s Four-Runner at a quarter past 6:00, just the five of us: Susan, my mom, Uncle Charles, Uncle Martin, and myself. Still time for a quick sea bath before dark, Tours Beach so close, its red clay path just across the street and down a couple hundred feet from Granny’s.

  Uncle Martin climbed into the driver’s seat wearing slacks, said he’d swim in his briefs. It would give the women a much-awaited chance to laugh at him, he said. A pleasure far exceeding any embarrassment he could possibly experience.

  He was joking. A trial lawyer, Uncle Martin had long been untroubled by personal feelings of embarrassment, his daily subjugation to the wrath and ridicule of judges having dulled the most unnecessary layers of his self-respect, leaving him with only those closest to the nerve.

  Martin! Don’t drive through Mama’s garden! Uncle Martin drove out Granny’s yard, crossing against some imaginary boundary between driveway and garden Granny thought proper, but which was really just a big space, plenty wide enough for a truck to drive through and leave no trace of its passage.

  On the street, tall palms blocked our view of the ocean, parting magically at the entrance to the road that led to the family beach. Uncle Martin let out a war cry. Shifted down.

  The ruts in the clay road swallowed the tires halfway, rain water splashing out of them as we plunged forward. You have to keep moving not to get stuck in the holes.

  To tarish the road with gravel would have made the beach too accessible to others, who would certainly damage this family tradition, Tours Beach, if invited by the paving. But Uncle Martin had already dug the drainage paths along each side, so when the time came, he could pave the road in a single day by bringing in the tarish at dawn. They would only pave this road when they developed the area for tourists.

  Uncle Martin had recently sold a portion of the family’s land—to pay off some of Uncle George’s mounting medical bills—to the Socialist government, just before Archibald Hill, Susan’s uncle, passed away. The government promptly discovered a rich tarish reserve on the property and began a multimillion-dollar excavating operation to benefit the people of Baobique. But no sense in second guessing one’s self. When the time had come to make the decision, Uncle Martin had made it. He had pulled the family out of a hole and was satisfied with that.

  Grampy used to say a good sea bath would heal any wound. But Granny was frightened of our going to the beach, because some squatters had threatened to chop us up into tiny bits if we went there after Uncle Martin had the police tear down their thatched leaf shelters. The squatters had tried to reason; they told Uncle Martin, if he made them leave, they’d tell everyone he was not a nice man. My uncle was perplexed, asked them, Why would I want anyone to think I was a nice man?!

  When we reached the water, Uncle Martin and Uncle Charles stripped: Uncle Martin down to his briefs; Uncle Charles, prepared, to his Speedo. We entered with varying degrees of tolerance. Uncle Martin’s briefs turned translucent and we all began to float. On our backs in the warm sea, eyes on the changing shades of blue as the sun receded from the rest of our day, a few half-erased clouds here and there, Uncle Martin explained things to us. He explained that the dark areas in
the water were schools of small silverfish, good to eat but hard to catch enough for a meal. When the moon was right, whenever that was, people came down with white sheets and scooped the silverfish up by the sheetfull and they twinkled like stars in the night. He explained why it was necessary to send his brother, Uncle George, to Martinique one last time for an MRI, to check the progression of his tumors. Certain family members could then be shown the true extent of the cancer, begin to let go of their denial. He explained that George’s law practice, the best on the island, was in jeopardy of being out-balanced by the other partner’s family, since Gerald’s son had just joined the firm. He explained it would only take a year or two for me, already an attorney under the U.S. system, to gain my license in the West Indies and promised me, if I worked hard, a respectable living should I ever choose to move to Baobique. I should think about it. Consider it.

  Shifting, Uncle Martin explained to us the difficulties he was having with his wife, how his desire to slow down his work pace was incompatible with her desire for more and more money. He explained to us we should never marry a woman, grinning widely at his joke, explaining to my shocked mother that woman and man are the same thing in law.

  He looked over at us, annoyed. Susan and I engaged in easy conversation, half-listening to him to be polite, attention fixed on each other instead.

  Just then a school of the small fish swam directly into my floating body, dozens upon dozens jumping out of the sea, onto my chest, my face, my flailing arms as I tried to move. Elevated tone, Uncle Martin explained that we should move away quickly. It meant the silverfish were being chased by a bigger one.

  Lessons learned, we drove home in the warm breeze of the growing darkness. My hands sunk underneath my legs in the passenger seat, fingers trembling and my breath coming shallow and fast, shallow and fast.

  Dinner, I took out to the porch, sat in my grandmother’s chair, and stared at her moon.

  CHAPTER 9

  Uncle Martin was always looking to be someone more important than the man he really was: always in the shadow of Uncle George. One of Baobique’s lesser mountains.

  He won his chance when he and Mr. Williams followed us into the gardens at Godwyn, through the bush to the far end of the estate, watched Susan and me pull each other close.

  And he ran with it, ran us all the way back to Tours, just as Mr. Williams ran down to Sommerset. Both men bursting with the news—a Hill and a Pascal, two women, caught in the dirt, acting like one a dem shoulda been a man. I tell you, it was a SIGHT to see. Neither man believing the luck he’d unearthed out there just past Grampy’s grave.

  At Tours, it was decided. Uncle Martin and Uncle Charles discussed the settlement over a bottle of rum around the dining table, as Susan and I sat, prey to a movement we couldn’t control, at either end. My mom and Auntie Clara busying themselves making sardine sandwiches in the kitchen, and Granny listening from her lawn chair on the front porch, the sea blast carrying their angry voices and our silence straight to her ears on pregnant beads of moisture.

  Uncle Charles did the speaking.

  He screamed. Five years in prison, Jean! Five years! This isn’t San Francisco, woman. What filth have you brought here?

  Dirt and clay caked to the back of both my elbows, eyes to the floor, all I could see was my own shame—stripped and naked with nowhere to hide.

  How could you do this to us? How could you do this to George? Are you trying to kill him?

  Uncle Martin chimed in, Do you know what will happen if Mr. Williams tells the local police? They’ll lock you up for gross indecency. And what could we say, na? George wrote the law himself!

  Uncle Charles: You’d put that choice to him? You’d make your dying uncle lock up his favorite niece for this?

  Susan and I sat silent at the dining table, its white cloth glowing in the coming of the dark.

  The women were silent: Granny on her porch, Auntie Clara in the kitchen, my mom in the doorway just watching.

  This was men’s work. If Susan and I had been men ourselves, we’d have been facing ten years, not five.

  Looking back, I see how much danger we were really in. I didn’t have to be scared all those years I’d stayed away from Baobique, but I’d been wise to keep my mouth shut about being gay.

  No one is out in Baobique. They can’t be.

  Susan and I were never to see each other again. My uncles said since neither of us lived on the island, and I rarely even visited, they would be able to laugh off the rumors certain to spread from Sommerset. They would simply deny it ever happened.

  From his bedroom, Uncle George overheard the whole thing. He didn’t have to be dead to roll over in his grave, turn his slouching back to me. The next morning, the morning of the Hill funeral, bright and early, he had Uncle Charles give him a shave, a proper shave with his straight-edged razor from London. And just as Granny began working herself up over company expected after the funeral, Uncle George called me over to his good side. I fed him a sip of grapefruit juice I had just squeezed in the kitchen to keep myself from the vulnerability of idleness.

  Very slowly, through heavy, heavy lips, Uncle, the orator, took me into his confidence: There is something about an island, Jean. It gets in your blood. I could have stayed in Canada for treatment. I would have lived longer. But there are worse things than death, to me.

  His breathing was even, from the depth of his lungs. Calm.

  When the people in Sommerset had only the river and rain water to wash their clothes and supply their houses, I put in two water spouts, one at either end of the village. So they had running water close by. And when they started using those spouts every day, and the road became muddy from the spills, and the red mud caked on the old women’s feet as they carried their jugs back and forth to their homes, I paved that road so it would be easier for them to access the water.

  That simple thing, a water spout, won me the constituency. It made them feel someone cared, made them feel they were as important as the people in Bato, or Port Commons. And that one village gave us our green light for the coup. You see, nothing is too small to be overlooked. In politics, the tiniest village can take on a significance far greater than its actual size.

  Until that water spout—no, until I paved that road—I was getting rotten tomatoes thrown at me during my campaign speeches. Rotten tomatoes. This scar above my eyebrow, from a rock.

  The pull of his breath took on a labored air but didn’t stop him. His breathing more and more audible.

  Do you know that most Baobiquens have two telephones at home? Two telephones. One CarCom and one Cable and Wireless. The CarCom telephone plan is much cheaper. But there is a catch. The CarCom telephone is only compatible with other CarCom phones. Both parties must be on CarCom to communicate. If I call you on CarCom, you must receive my call on your CarCom phone. So, to use CarCom, you must know beforehand that the recipient has CarCom. Same telephone number as the Cable and Wireless phone. Same ring.

  Most Baobiquens—not all, but most—have CarCom. We must always try CarCom first for local calls because it is a Baobiquen company, locally owned. While the Cable and Wireless devices can accommodate both local and long distance calls, Cable and Wireless is a British company and none of their revenue benefits us.

  Sometimes, for a joke, we answer our telephones by saying: CarCom to CarCom. But I tell you, it is no joke. It is survival.

  He had some trouble with the saliva collecting at the base of his lazy larynx. Yet Uncle George pushed on, cleared his throat with force. Focused.

  You would be surprised at the extent to which your First World countries try to take advantage of our little island. They are most shameless. We must continually resist their exploitation.

  Years ago, when you were a child, just about the same time your country celebrated their bicentennial anniversary of independence, Baobique celebrated its first. We were no longer a British commonwealth. But it is not easy for such a small island to be self-sufficient, so when the formation of th
e European Union took away our major source of income and the United Kingdom stopped subsidizing our banana exports, we could no longer remain hidden from the rest of the world. If we did not reach out and develop new contracts, we would not survive. Instead of telling your big corporations to take their business elsewhere, we welcomed them.

  But we have done, I believe, a commendable job of resisting temptation and limiting foreign ownership on the island. We do not want to go the way of Antigua, its land stripped of all but its white sand beaches; an entire population watched bloodshot by fraternity boys through the bottoms of beer mugs on their spring holiday. What do you call it? Spring break.

  Uncle George’s breathing grew as loud as his voice.

  You would be surprised at how difficult it is to steer a different course for Baobique. It is a constant battle. Constant. With the wrong leadership, a few thoughtless decisions, it would not take long to lose all this, to turn our rain forests, our valleys, our mountains, into a First World playground, to be unwrapped, used up, and discarded by American tourists. And then what would we Baobiquens be left with? Answer me that.

  And so we have fought to keep out companies who offer us U.S. dollars at the expense of long-term sustainability. When your Caribou Cruise Lines wanted to come into Bato seven days a week, monopolize our only deep-water harbor at the expense of all other exports, so that hundreds of tourists could pour into our capital every day, litter our streets, over-use our trails to places like Soufre Lake and Victoria Falls, cut through our rain forests for better access—when the cruise line tried to do that, we just smiled. When it came time to negotiate their contract, again we smiled, but we told them they’d have to pay the Baobiquen workers who would clean their toilets, cook their caliloo and fried plantain, the same wages they paid their American employees.

  Of course, we knew they wouldn’t. They offered to build us a second deep-water port, up near Granny, in De Cote, just so they could keep the tourists streaming in. But the long-term costs to the island would have been detrimental.