Brenda Bee Coe had no envy for the Ship Captain’s wife she scrubbed and cooked for in the sooted kitchen shed behind the three-storied house with a widow’s walk perched atop its steep tin roof from which tall-masted ships could be spied tacking inside the reef toward the island. Brenda felt gratitude she was living life after death, swept up from the ocean of hardship in the net of John Coe’s kindness. Envy did not gnaw at Brenda’s soul, only a bitter sense buried deep and hidden from the world that one day the Evil Eye would be upon her, carry her away from the strong arms of John back onto the Slaver into a whale belly of white misery. For this reason Brenda always wore a clove of garlic around her neck on a thinly braided rope, to hold off the Eye of the Evil One lest he come upon her unawares to carry her away from her sea of plenty. Brenda insisted her nine sons each wear a garlic necklace, even though she knew they discarded them when they left the crowded little shack on Crawfish Alley. But Brenda’s only daughter, the jewel in her sea of plenty, Pearl, never discarded her garlic necklace. Pearl obeyed her mama. Pearl knew the Evil Eye could snatch her away quick as a pox can worm the life out of a child’s heart.
When Pearl turned sixteen and went off to work in the cigar factories, she still wore the garlic necklace. That is what first attracted young Abuelo to Pearl, the creamy colored garlic against a black skin shining brilliant with vibrance of life. Years after they were married Abuelo suspected Pearl had not so much worn the garlic necklace to keep off the Evil Eye, but to beguile him with her voluptuous charms and deeply contented nature. Perhaps, Abuelo thought with a laugh which always sent a bright image of Pearl’s lovely face to mind, she tricked him with that jungle religion her mother brought across the seas on the Slaver from Africa.
Pearl became the gem setting which closed the ring of Abuelo’s young life. Pearl was the first of two fortuitous twists to seal Abuelo’s fate forever. Abuelo believed when his father abruptly took him at the age of seventeen from the Chinchalito, it had less to do with his father’s desire to have his son become part of the emerging La Liga, more to do with an African plot of love planned by Pearl’s mother to put one more ocean between her only daughter and slavery, marry Pearl off to a Cuban man, into the sea of a different society where the Evil One would never find her. Such is what Abuelo thought, that he was ensnared by jungle conspiracy. Like many men who are convinced they have fallen prey to a charmed woman highly coveted by others, Abuelo accepted a preordained fate guiding larger passions which made him victim of an inescapable coup d’état of the heart. Abuelo’s love for Pearl came up so big and unexpectedly it overpowered his sense of self, left him trembling with the blind faith of newfound religion. No te agites qué el corazon no se opera, that is what Abuelo’s father counseled at the turn of the century when his untried son first started with Pearl. Take it easy, the heart can’t be operated on.
No. In those days the heart could not be operated on, but if it could it would have been to no avail. Abuelo lost his heart the morning he saw Pearl his first day of work in the large cigar factory. He did not yet know she had stolen his heart. Abuelo thought he still had a choice in the matter. Pearl was one of the few women who worked in the cigar factory, the only woman on the third floor where Abuelo began his new job of Cigarmaker. Abuelo was not so much struck by Pearl’s beauty, rather by the position she held in the factory. Most women labored in the lowly role of Stripper, who each day untied hundreds of tercios, bundled tobacco leaves barged from Havana. The women carefully stripped precious leaves from spiny stems, then pressed them between two boards to be sent on as wrappers to the Selectors. Never had Abuelo seen a female Selector. A Selector was an exalted position held by men with a keen sense of vision to distinguish the air-cured tobacco leaves by true color value. Perhaps Pearl inherited her extraordinary eyesight from her father, who could read the bottom of a storm-tossed sea. To watch Pearl’s hands work quickly through stacks of tobacco leaves, eyes searching between colors ranging from golden papaya to ripe mahogany shading called maduro, was like witnessing a cat in a dark granary go about its stealthy nocturnal business of separating mice from mountains of wheat. Pearl did not work like a machine, rather as an adroit athlete laughing at a task made simple by exertion of inbred attributes. The creamy clove of garlic on Pearl’s braided rope necklace rose and fell where her breasts began their full swell beneath a thin cotton dress. Pearl’s skin glistened in the heat, her fingers flew, her eyes did not miss a trick. Blue clouds from the narrow cigars she continuously smoked swirled around her. Pearl appeared to exist in a haloed mist, struck by steady light cascading through lofty north-facing windows blocking fickle sea breezes which could disturb the cigarmakings so carefully laid out on the rowed tables of the great hall. Pearl’s body exuded aromas fueling every man’s desire high up in the third story of the cigar factory. The perfume of Pearl was a heady mixture of succulent reminiscences, of green dreams and urgent yearnings, of growing tobacco leaves hidden in slippery shade of muddied hillsides, of the pungent burnt scent of garlic rooted from firm earth. In a sea of heat the men of the great hall watched Pearl from afar and on the sly as she selected among tobacco leaves for those of the chosen colors. Perspiration of honest work ran coolly along the back of Pearl’s arched neck, then out of sight beneath her white dress, traveling the length of her strong female spine. To the men of the great hall Pearl was a sweeter dish than boniatello, the sugary preserve boiled from pulpy flesh of sweet potato. The men of the great hall desired someone they could sniff, lick and eat up, a great gorgeous feast of female. Pearl became the fantasy entrée on the menu of every self-respecting Latin male in the great hall. The problem was Pearl was born with an appetite greater than that of all the sniffing males combined.
Pearl’s appetite could be quenched by only one man, the young Abuelo, whose arms had the steel muscles of one born to roll perfect cigars. Pearl’s appetite for Abuelo would never be satisfied in a lifetime. She wasted no precious moments letting her desire be known. The job of Selector was to bundle twenty-five carefully chosen leaf wrappers into an earthenware crock, then call for a boy to run the crock to the Cigarmakers’ benches. Each time Pearl sent a crock she knew was headed for Abuelo’s bench it contained among the perfectly matched leaves a small, star-shaped pink blossom. The flower emitted no scent to distract from the natural aroma of the tobacco, but bore the meaning of not so hidden intentions to be acted upon beneath the eye of future moons. When the future arrived the moon winked time and time again as the hot skin of Pearl and Abuelo’s bodies came together crushing the clove of garlic between them in a fateful sea of plenty.
As La Liga grew among cigar workers so too did the family of Pearl and Abuelo grow. By the end of the century Key West was the cigar-producing capital of the world and Pearl and Abuelo had five children. Abuelo’s voice had also grown, deep and mellow from free smokers, the imperfect cigars inhaled continuously from dawn till dusk by workers in the great hall. The vowels of Abuelo’s voice came strong as notes from a bass cello being played in the depths of a well. It was Abuelo’s voice which gave his life its second fortuitous twist, elevated him to unrivaled status among the workers. Abuelo became a Reader. Through the long, tedious days in the great halls of the cigar factories, amidst the flat fall of light from high windows sealed against winds of the outside world, there was one voice above all in the void of passing time. This voice filled ears and minds, becoming familiar as one’s own conscience, cajoling like a crony, spiteful as a spurned lover, thunderous as a bull in a spring meadow. The owner of this voice earned more than the lordly cigar Pickers and Packers at the pinnacle of their careers. This man was the Reader, elevated on a platform in the center of the great halls, seated purposefully on a stool, straw hat cocked at advantageous angle. When the Reader spoke, no other talking was allowed, in English, Spanish or Bahamian. The Reader’s voice made the day jump with thoughts, translating into Spanish the island’s English newspapers, reading newspapers fresh off the ferry from Havana bearing news of Cuba, Barcelona, B
uenos Aires. The Reader read from the classics, becoming every character in Don Quixote, The Count of Monte Cristo, A Tale of Two Cities. As he read he educated himself and the others. He became a one-man school for the cigar workers. They paid him a handsome profit from their own pockets, voted upon favorites from his readings, to hear them time and again. Among the glories of literature Abuelo brought to life his personal favorite was the great Góngora, the Spaniard who emerged cloaked in a glowing mantle of lyricism, magically inventing his poetic self from the crusty seventeenth century with a sudden awesome “melancholy yawn of the earth.” The great Góngora was a favorite of Abuelo’s father. The leather-bound book of Góngora’s poems was the only possession his father brought on the smuggled night voyage of the schooner from Havana so long ago. More and more the workers wanted to hear from the great Góngora. Not because Góngora was the favorite of Abuelo’s father, who had become the iron-fisted jefe of La Liga. Not because Abuelo’s father placed his son at center stage of the vast hall to read to the workers. The workers wanted that which could not be faked or bought. The singular fact was, more than at any other time, when Abuelo recited the great Góngora his voice rose from the well of the printed page tinged with mystery of infinity, surged with an inner beat of lyricism on the wing:
The bee as queen who shines with wandering gold;
Either the sap she drinks from the pure air,
Or else the exudation of the skies
That sip the spittle from each silent star.
Years later, as young Justo stood at Abuelo’s side in the back room of the Cuban grocería, there was still respect for the retired Reader. Ears pricked up at the sound of Abuelo’s voice still steady and strong through an ever-present cigar smoke swirling about his craggy face. The cigar factories had long since been boarded up against modern times, when cigars are made by machines in air-conditioned rooms. A generation had passed since La Liga grew so strong among the workers the owners started nonunion factories three hundred miles north of the glitter and culture of Key West. The factories had been transplanted to the swampy palmetto lands around Tampa, where malaria waited, and insects swarmed in rain barrels of precious drinking water drained from roofs of hastily constructed houses. Such was not a place for Abuelo. No. Abuelo’s family stayed in Stella Maris, Star of the Sea, where Pavlova once danced at old San Carlos. Even though bright important times had faded to Depression-era gray, the star of cultural pride still burned bright in hearts and memories of men who put the coral-capped island on the map, rolling out one hundred million cigars a year. Bang! Justo could still hear Abuelo’s tamarind cane striking the floor in the back room of the grocería. Bang! The metal tip of the cane struck again, all the men coming to attention as Abuelo elevated the cane haughtily as a teacher with a pointer in a classroom of thick-headed boys destined to grow to men forever ignorant of the ways of women, unless they heeded the words of great Góngora. Abuelo raised the cane higher, until the metal tip nudged the white dancer tights banded around the forceful thrust of Pavlova’s thighs, her body trapped forever in an eternal leap from the poster nailed to the wall. Never taking his eyes from the curved spirit of Pavlova’s leap Abuelo’s voice swelled with wisdom of great Góngora, filling every square inch of the small room as if it were the vast hall of a ghostly cigar factory:
That fixed armada in the eastern sea
Of islands firm I cannot well describe,
Whose number, though for no lasciviousness
But for their sweetness and variety,
The beautiful confusion emulate
When in the white pools of Europa’s rose
The virginal and naked hunting tribe …
Great Góngora’s words echoed in Justo’s ears as if spoken only moments before by Abuelo in the back room of the grocería. Justo last heard Góngora’s poetry twenty years ago, in a time of “beautiful confusion.” All gone now, gone the way of handmade cigars and natural sponges. The turtles were endangered, and not all sport fishermen let their less than prize catches from the sea off the hook. What would Abuelo think of it all now? This time of rich rock and roll crooners of drug tunes and hot dogs in alligator loafers blowing away slow greyhounds. A time of conspicuous corruption which had less to do with simple survival and more to do with spiritual greed. Stella Maris had lost more than her virginity and glitter. The Góngorian time of “sweetness and variety,” which Abuelo once hailed in the now deserted great halls of the cigar factories, gone forever, along with sponges in the sea and arias soaring to the chandeliered ceiling of the San Carlos.
Justo popped another conch fritter into his mouth, let it gather in the sour storm of his stomach. He handed the last fritter over to Ocho in the backseat of the car as he wheeled around the corner onto Passover Lane across from the cemetery. He parked beneath the spread of a Banyan tree shading the high morning sun. Handsomemost’s escapade at the airport had not slowed Justo down too much this morning. The iron gates of the cemetery were just being swung open, still early enough so he wouldn’t have to deal with mourners he didn’t know, or the afternoon scramble of tourists prowling through tombstones gawking at quaint Cuban and Bahamian family names chiseled into granite, or searching among crumbling limestone crosses to discover the locally famous inscription of eternal recrimination cut into a marble slab: I TOLD YOU I WAS SICK. The cemetery was near the highest point on the island, towering a full fifteen feet above sea level. This fact made some laugh with derision, the more timid to look anxiously in the direction of the sea, where twenty-foot tidal surges might appear. The cemetery had been moved to this high ground more than a hundred years before, when the waves driven hard before a hurricane gouged a tumble of bones and buried family secrets from the island’s original graveyard, exposing skeletons of slaves rescued from Slavers only to receive a final reward of Christian burial. The town fathers did not want another jumble of bones to bob up in the wake of a hurricane’s tidal fury, exposing a nightmare past married to a dream future.
The cemetery possessed an odd calm at the island’s crowded heart. It was corralled on all four sides by narrow streets of cigarmakers’ cottages and steep-roofed Conch houses, nudging for a better view of this high point on the island, reserved not for the living, but for the dead. An unnatural peace prevailed, as if this were simply a grassy plain overgrown with tombstones, mausoleums and monuments, where island birds found refuge to root undisturbed for grubs and worms, oblivious to grief or curiosity of human passersby. Gaggles of spindly-legged white ibis stalked awkwardly in grassy tufts between tombs, long curved bills held ready. Atop a twenty-foot obelisk erected to memorialize a man of forgotten distinction a swallow-tailed kite hawk perched, alert for an errant fieldmouse to scamper among bouquets of plastic flowers arrayed among weeds crowding hundreds of neglected tombstones. The swallow-tail eyed Justo loftily as he walked along deserted asphalt pathways. Where one pathway bisected another, a short cement monument had been erected, stenciled with avenue designations: FIRST AVENUE, SECOND AVENUE, THIRD AVENUE, avenues not intended for cars, but a grid laid out for ghosts in a city of the dead. Justo’s family plot was on THIRD AVENUE, beyond the Jewish section, close to a red-bricked plaza of a fraternal organization bearing the name WOOD CUTTERS OF THE WORLD. Justo did not like being in the cemetery any earlier than he was. Cocks had stopped their shrill crowing in the distance, giving up their demand for longer dawnings and shorter days. The quiet cocks gave Justo comfort, for any Santería ritual carried out in the cemetery during the night had to end before first light. Over the years the cemetery was the scene of many such rituals. At dawn tombstones were discovered with chicken blood smeared across them to drain evil from the graves. Often an entire chicken was found, wings spread, gutted bowels scattered like gaudy rocks to hold down restless spirits. These were normal things, which sometimes appeared as alarming headlines in the local paper. There were other things not so normal, which spooked jittery newcomers, solidified long-held beliefs of old-timers about voodoo spirits prowling from their
nocturnal nests. What was to be avoided by all was to arrive at the cemetery before the last cock crowed. To glimpse a nocturnal ritual of private acts and sacred offerings inadvertently was to invite horrifying calamity. Those trying to appease the spirits were not to be exposed, the Saints must be fed, the devils dodged. The innocent onlooker could be overrun in a rush of transcendent deliverance or final evil. Some things are best left undisturbed.
Justo rubbed his gold chicken bone as he made his way quickly through this city of the dead. The swallow-tailed hawk eyeing him from the obelisk’s granite point whistled high to the wind and wheeled off into open sky. Ocho crashed about among the tombstones and weeds, not so much on an intuitive hunt, but a tentative exploration. The dog stopped, pointing his long nose at objects not seen, but sensed. Ocho looked back at Justo with a wild-eyed superstitious expression so natural to a dog. Justo took the dog’s cue, he stopped beneath the high-arched branches of a leafless woman’s-tongue tree. He thought he heard a noise. He held his breath, there was a slight rattle in the distance. Justo’s gaze swept across the crowded horizon of gravestones and tombs divided by salt-rusted railings defining family plots decorated with reposing lambs carved in stone, alabaster angels in flight, marble cupids descending and winged cement cherubs rising. Everything was bleached by the sun to an other-worldly sepia. Growing among crumbling mausoleums and cracked stacks of aboveground grave vaults tall trees existed in faded ethereal stateliness. Skimpy palms lined the avenues of the dead back to the cemetery entrance, where it was rumored six hundred men were secretly buried on a dark night in 1909, pieces of their shattered bodies carted in by horse-drawn wagons, intermixed in an anonymous jigsaw puzzle of a common grave. These men, Abuelo had told Justo, had been blown apart in a savage blast while struggling to complete the Overseas Railway, more than a hundred-mile run of bridges across the forty-three Florida Keys, linking Key West to mainland America’s way of life. Justo believed the men were buried in the cemetery. When he was a boy he discovered the neatly severed head of a pig resting amidst a tangle of mexican fire-cracker vines covering the rumored location of the mass grave. Some things were best left undisturbed. The sound Justo thought he heard in the distance was now above him. The rustle of a breeze shook the bronze-colored seed pods of the woman’s-tongue tree. That was the sound. In high winds the tongue-shaped pods rattled with a pitched racket some likened to the deafening sound of gossiping women. There was only a slight rattle above Justo. He walked on, turning toward Third Avenue to where his parents and grandparents rested in coral rock beneath a life-size marble angel, an eternal offering of spring lilies in her outstretched hand.
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