THE
BLACK
PEACOCK
A NOVEL BY
RACHEL
MANLEY
Copyright © 2017 Rachel Manley
This edition copyright © 2017 Cormorant Books Inc.
This is a first edition.
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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (cbf) for our publishing activities, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation, an agency of the Ontario Ministry of Culture, and the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit Program.
library and archives canada cataloguing in publication
Manley, Rachel, author
The black peacock / Rachel Manley.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
isbn 978-1-77086-508-2 (softcover). — isbn 978-1-77086-509-9 (html)
i. Title.
ps8576.a5494b33 2017 c813’.54 c2017-904540-7
c2017-904541-5
Cover design: angeljohnguerra.com
Interior text design: Tannice Goddard, bookstopress.com
Printer: Friesens
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To Drum and Luke
My life’s silver linings
“I heard them cry — the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind …”
— wallace stevens, “domination of black”
LETHE
The thing about Peacock Island is this: it happened in a gasp. And I can never be sure. I can never be sure of any of it.
Peacock Island. The memory rises out of the past, but probably not as I knew it or realized what I knew at the time. The tiny island lies somewhere in the Eastern Caribbean. Even today I have no idea exactly where, nor how Daniel found it. I like to think he was sailing through the Windward (or was it the Leeward Islands?) and, plunging and swaying, came upon land seeking shelter from dark, desperate skies and the unleashed waters of a dangerous storm; or maybe he happened upon this place by chance — a romantic weekend sailing, saw it against the glistening of water in sun, a knuckle of green, dense and mysterious, drawing his endless curiosity to a hospitable dock where he dropped anchor.
This was not an island with the promise of beach and palms. This was the menace of steep rock coast, guarded by a moat deeply blue, the tiny island rising with huge, dark trees, ferocious, jagged iguana tails in day-old western light.
There he wanted to write his book on Columbus.
“I am a sailor,” he declared. “I can write that book.”
After University, after his broken marriage, armed with his Com-monwealth poetry prize, he had spent five years travelling through the United States and Europe on various long fellowships and shorter writers’ residencies at colonies or retreats. He went to academic centres in Italy and France. He was guest lecturer at semi-prestigious universities. His letters to me at the time reflected a strange disembodiment of the man I had known as mind and flesh, ideas and words, when as students we knew we would live forever. Now he was flying in those big silver bellies he had once described in a youthful poem as “quivering,” coming to Jamaica from Trinidad, to our university at Mona, from his island to mine, for the first time. I would try to imagine him struggling through airports with his battered old bags and typewriter case, or sitting writing at a desk in a window looking over some hillside vineyard through his crookedly seated, greasy black-framed glasses, or maybe from a Montana ranch watching maverick horses canter measuredly over the evergreen — or would they be snowy? — fields of distance, calculating their freedom behind tidy white wooden paling. I’d still see his occasional article in Caribbean newspapers that he clipped and addressed to me, his writing now obsessed with foreign politics, intricate and stealthy, woven cobwebs, proof of continuing life from some abandoned, untended room of his life.
And then he had abruptly ended the exploration of his exile and went home. Home to the islands.
To an islander, any island can become home.
“I cannot write for the world anymore,” he told me. “Time is running out. I must now shed the world and write only for myself.”
That was Daniel. His drumroll didn’t startle me. He had always had that sense of urgency, as though he could hear time’s heels slapping the pavement behind him. I never understood it, for me, time seemed to be in abundance. Although I’d played the role of tragic heroine in my youth, I always lived with the instinct that I must witness and grieve. My fear was that I would outlive all whom I knew.
This place had all the myth of exile, of adventure and desert-island simplicity. It had a mysterious otherness, one that one sensed could not be defined by predictable assumptions.
Peacock Island spoke of an epic quest that Columbus would applaud. Daniel couldn’t resist the challenge as he too was launched on his own fearful adventure — writing the novel that would engage all of him — that gathered up and ordered all that he’d been, known, rejoiced in, suffered.
“I understand the sea. I understand Columbus,” he said.
The island was somewhere off St. Vincent; that’s the airport I flew in to. I wanted Daniel to meet me there, but he was adamant: if he ever left, he’d never go back. He spoke to me, he said, from a radio phone; the only one on the island, it belonged to the local coast guard. He sounded as if he were standing in heavy rain. He needed me, he said. I needed him more, but before I could tell him, the line went dead.
The boatman would fetch me and bring me over, he’d said. And he did. As promised, a silent, stocky half-Indian dugla youth with the lightest brown eyes — almost yellow — met me wordlessly with a piece of cardboard bearing my name in Daniel’s almost pretty handwriting. It was frilled like decorative grille work, too coy for the usual severity of his thoughts. When we got to the dock, the boatman pointed to a small, flat-bottomed ferry already heavily loaded with boxes. I worried it sat too low in the water. He pulled one end toward the two of us with the rope, and helped me climb over the side, pointing to a small bench at the bow. I balanced myself, taking my unsteady seat. I thanked him as he dropped the old grey bag down beside me like a sorrow, and hurried off to detach the rope from the dock, jump on board and position himself by the motor at the stern. The vessel was now even lower in the water and, facing each other, we were now a see-saw, me up, he down.
Deep hulls soften water. This water was hard. The shallow motorboat tearing along its unyielding surface, slamming hard, a door banging over and over, shutting against comfort or hope as we tensed to prepare for the next blow. He faced our journey while I watched St. Vincent recede to a smudge, the wake of the past churned up into a keloid from which we were being propelled. I thought about the manuscript in my bag. A story about my grandfather Ernest, long dead, and steadied myself by watching the youth’s face at the centre of a manic choreography of whipping locks, as though it were a fixed point of reference for a dancer’s pirouette until he pointed be
yond me and I turned round to the sight of land approaching. It was hard to see anything. Shading my eyes with one hand, I looked into the late afternoon sun that made the sea shine like glass. It slowly came into view in stony greys and dark green, feral and wilful, a clutter of windblown rock face and ungroomed trees turned away from welcome. A feeling of recognition overwhelmed me, as it had on the birth of my first son; I knew this face I’d never seen before, that this meeting would always be important to me.
The ferryman cut the engine to a stutter. Apart from a small dock that extended quite far out into the sea, I saw no other access to the island, not a single house from the water as we approached; only an old wall, the side of a tall building that looked like a fort with light glinting from small domed windows, with a cannon like some dinosaur bone perched at its western tip, more history than destiny.
And there he was: Daniel, standing on the dock, a speck that grew larger as we puttered in.
I remember that moment, navigating the last few feet to each other after all those years, the two of us who had gone on living our daily lives quite normally beyond one another. Now here we were again, as though we had simply got misplaced, and now, despite the vastness of the world, we’d found exactly the same small point on the map. Us.
“What a thing!” he said as the boy jumped over the edge to moor the boat. I stood, reaching out for balance to take Daniel’s outstretched hands, one of which he retrieved for a moment to toss away the habitual cigarette smoldering from his lips.
I had no idea where I was, but I knew at the time I was committing this scene to the unbearable beauty of memory.
He helped me over the side with my small, dense bag. Because of its importance to me, I insisted on carrying it myself. For a moment, it was clutched between our bellies as he leaned down to embrace me, his head resting for a tender moment on mine. He smelled of smoke and wood chips. This was the Daniel I knew.
“I can’t find this place on a map.” I really couldn’t.
“I don’t even know if it is on a map. I call it Peacock Island. It’s got more peacocks than people. That’s why I came here.”
One of his eyes was drifting, always dreaming, searching for something somewhere else, while the other gazed at me. I felt self-conscious. I must have looked so much older.
“I am falling into my fault lines.” It had been a decade since I’d seen him.
“Fault lines are character,” he replied chivalrously.
Or our personality. Then it would become a long debate. What’s the difference between character and personality? He would say character is dna. Or I would say it was fashioned by the wherewithal one has to survive. He would say personality was determined by whom one learned to communicate with early in life. I would say it was dna. Or maybe it was the other way around.
“Doesn’t a story have to have an end?”
“No.”
“How come?”
“Because death happens.”
We always bantered. Sometimes I can’t remember which thoughts were his and which were mine.
He’d smile with his closed, gently amused shuffle of the mouth, corners drawn down and tightened into one of an infinite number of choreographed little knots, each meaning something unique, each for a different person, one eye gazing intently at some point to which he’d attach his stare, the other remaining strangely detached as though dreaming, they were never quite the same. It was as though the determined acrobatics of our discussions over the years would never unbalance him. And over many years they seldom did.
I had expected him to look middle-aged, maybe paunchy and plumper. He still had a largeness about him, with soft shoulders that seemed to stoop graciously to greet me, yet he looked gaunt in a seaworthy way, his gentle brown skin maybe a shade darker, undefended from sun. He appeared more defined than I remembered him, now fully grey at fifty-three, his eyes had gained their majesty with pale rings around the pupils; he had intensified rather than mellowed. His face had lost its youthful puppy fat; its expressions had sculpted indents, two gutters on either side of his mouth with a single strong lengthwise frown line down the centre of his forehead. But when he smiled, the sweetness from his youth returned.
We walked up a crumbling bank of mossy stone steps onto a clearing amongst the trees. His familiar smoker’s cough was now more of a sustained hack. At one point I almost slipped, but he grabbed my arm.
“Lethe, you still teeter!” He looked delighted.
“I’m struggling with this damn bag.” But I wouldn’t let go of it.
The ferryman followed us with some of the boxes he was stacking at the top of the stairs. I thanked him but he paid me no attention.
I asked his name.
“Charon,” said Daniel.
“But that’s a girl’s name,” I whispered.
“No, spelled with a C. The Ferryman. You should know that!”
“Don’t speak so loud!”
“Charon,” I called out to him again.
“He can’t hear you, he’s deaf.”
“Oh,” I said, thinking how easily two words gave an ominous journey context.
“My place is just up there, but I want to circle the island first to show you.”
I worried about circling an island when I hadn’t used a bathroom in hours, but he assured me it wouldn’t take long.
He led me to an old convertible sports car that smelled of damp and dogs. It belonged to his neighbour, he said. So there were other people!
“The car doors don’t open,” Daniel explained, looking awkwardly at me as though not sure what a woman can and cannot do at fifty, and then helped me climb over the low side door before heaving his large frame over and behind the wheel. It had been so long. I sat there feeling shy.
He turned to me and nodded once, firmly, with satisfaction.
“You’re here, Lethe.”
The silence of this place gave not even an echo back.
And then, as with everything he did, he composed himself and turned the ignition key, pleased when it started, and we set off bouncing along the narrow, crumbling shape of road cracked like an old grave. We passed only the occasional outline of a house, no more than a suggestion of human life glimpsed between this last sanctuary of Caribbean trees, monarchs of their kingdom. All the roads were dead ends. They stopped after a mile or less, giving way to a spongy hash of leaves till the worn tires swerved and then gripped on to a new stretch of dishevelled, defeated paving.
I had never seen trees so tall. They must have been there from the beginning of time. They caused darkness, a sense of sunken under-worldliness that felt to me like a new dimension. Where before I had known a world of mountains, this was a place defined by its valleys, valleys with no mountains, valleys as the lap of trees, valleys as the only things one could access. I was seeing the place through Daniel’s eyes and mind, trusting it all in the sense of nowhere else to go, like some psalm whose number we know to go to for refuge — but this place held only comfort for me. I was quite unafraid as I searched for the time of day through the glimpses of sky.
“This place is profound, no?”
Daniel always made the word profound sound more profound. Though he said it without gravitas, lifting the last syllable in Trini-dadian glee instead of giving in to it, lowering my voice in awe as I would, yet it carried a sense of applause and celebration. Trinidadians had a way of speaking as though to an audience.
“A place like this could make a person believe in the sacred,” he said reaching to hold my hand for a moment.
“Or become scared. Who owns this island?” None of it made sense to me and Daniel was enjoying being mysterious.
“Aesop and the peacocks.”
Aesop, the silent ferryman’s father. The coast guard. The neighbour, he explained.
Whoever owned it originally, whatever administrative hands had wrested it
from the days of its abandoned fortress, had forgotten all about it by now. Ten families lived there, as far as he knew, and he, Daniel, was their only visitor. These were old families who’d been there for generations. They leave to work and have their children, and then they return to die.
“Like an elephant graveyard?”
“Something like that. A return to one’s self.”
“What peacocks?” I asked.
“You will meet them.”
Daniel stopped the car with the engine still running and pointed to a grey beachhead beyond huge sea grapes and almond trees. The leaves were lush and much larger than I was used to in Jamaica or Barbados.
“The only beach with sand,” he said. “Battle Beach.”
“Grey sand,” I noted disapprovingly. We’d always argued over the colour of island sand. He liked the growl of dark sand and churning waters to fight. He was a strong swimmer. He said I was like a tourist looking for white sand and calm water.
“Why Battle Beach? What battle?” I asked. I couldn’t think why colonial powers would fight for this small atoll.
“Fools like me battling the waves.” He winked knowingly at me, enjoying a reference point from our common history. When we were young his quick little winks annoyed me; I must have been getting soft, for now it was just a familiar small expression, one of his punctuation marks that had become part of our shared language.
He turned the car around and we drove away.
Although I come from islands, I grew up in a city. Island cities like Kingston born of European colonial history whose imprint stands sturdy, mocking the idealism and graffiti of national will, make us feel safe somehow, not because they promise hospitals and libraries and theatres and post offices and churches; but, beyond that, they possess something I was now searching for — some sense of order imposed on the land. As we bumped along I could only think of this missing concept I had known vaguely as a hymn in my head about Jerusalem, and vowing to thee my country and paths of peace. Something that promised our lives shape and the hope of certainty.
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