Eden Burning

by Belva Plain

  She answered with a blunt question. “What do you do?”

  “I’ve been in the securities business with my father.”

  “Oh, yes, surely, I remember. Do you like it?”

  “Not particularly.” He surprised himself with his reply, for he had thought, during this past year, that he did, after all, like it well enough.

  “Why do you do it, then?”

  “I don’t know. I drifted into it. I guess that’s the best answer I can give.”

  “It’s an honest answer, anyway,”

  He tried to think of something else to say. “What is this tree we’re sitting under? The roots are extraordinary, I’ve never seen one like it.”

  “It’s a banyan. From India. Practically everything on this island is from somewhere else, you know. The parrot and the sugarcane, coffee, bananas—”

  “Bananas are not native?”

  “No, Alexander the Great saw them first when he went to India. Europeans brought them to the New World. Carried by long tides from other places to take root here. Like me, and like us all.”

  “You speak poetry,” Francis said. Imagining that he saw a small frown between her eyebrows, he added quickly, “I don’t mean you’re affected. I meant your imagery. Maybe you’re not even aware of it.”

  “Oh, yes, Lionel always tells me my imagination runs away with me.”

  “What are you saying about me?” Lionel inquired, coming back to the table.

  “Well, you do always say I’m unrealistic, don’t you?”

  “Lord, yes, you haven’t the foggiest notion. But then, that’s the charm of the feminine, isn’t it? Right, Francis?”

  “I’ll let you know when I’ve been married four years, like you,” Francis replied, giving Lionel the “social” smile which, since he had married and entered the social world, he had at last had to learn. Then, catching Marjorie’s glance, the smile turned genuine. He was uncomfortable in this cloudy atmosphere of antagonism, and suddenly grateful for the harmony in his own marriage, he reached over to take his wife’s hand.

  “I’ve a complication,” Lionel said. “The fellow I was just speaking to has to leave tomorrow afternoon, so I’ll need to spend the morning with him on business. And I had planned to drive you to Eleuthera. I know you’re anxious to get it over with and go home yourselves.”

  “No problem,” Francis said quickly. “If you can get us a car and give us directions, we’ll make it on our own.”

  “You’d never find your way around the place after you got there, never know what you were looking at. Two thousand acres, rank as a jungle.”

  “I’ll drive you,” Kate offered.

  Marjorie protested, “That would be taking up your whole day!”

  “I don’t mind that. I’ll pick you up at half past eight.”

  She came bouncing down the drive in a canvas-topped Jeep. “A Jeep is what you need for these roads.” She looked at Marjorie’s white sandals. “You’ll ruin those, or break your ankle. Haven’t you anything else?”

  “Only sneakers for tennis. But they’ll look so silly with this dress.”

  “Put them on, then. No one’s going to look at you.” And as if aware that she had been brusque, Kate added honestly,

  “Not that you don’t deserve to be looked at.”

  For the first few miles the road ran close to the sea. Fishermen were hauling in their nets. Laundry was drying on the rocks beside coves where salt water met fresh. Bare-bottomed children played in front of dilapidated, moldy cabins. Soon the road turned inland and began to climb as cane fields gave way to banana groves. Through the tattered leafage one caught here and there a glimpse of the sea below, calm and gilded in the morning sun. Laden donkeys plodded downhill. Women stood aside as the car passed, their faces without expression under the heavy baskets of produce that rested on coiled pads on their heads.

  “How delightful! How quaint!” Marjorie cried.

  “You think so?” Kate responded, somewhat dryly.

  Here and there, among the notches and furrows of the rising hills, a lane ran to a grand white house.

  “Estate Anne,” Kate said of one. “Friends of Herbert’s and Julia’s. They race horses. Or rather, he races horses and she plays bridge. Not that I’ve anything against bridge, I don’t play too badly myself, but it seems to me one ought to do something else, too, with one’s life.”

  From the rear seat behind the two women, Francis had a three-quarter view of Kate’s face. Changing its expression from moment to moment, it reflected, he saw, what was going on in her head. There was no deception in that face. Just now a cloud was passing across it, as though she had been reprimanded or were recalling a reprimand, some loneliness, some exclusion.

  Then, in the next instant, as if remembering an obligation to be entertaining, she said, “Look at those mountain palms, over there, the smooth stems with the puff on top; don’t they remind you of a Gay Nineties hat? Feathers and Lily Langtry, with the long neck?” And she went on brightly, “There are gorges high up here where you can actually see fossils and shells from coral reefs. All this was under the ocean once.”

  Mahogany and bamboo arched above the narrow way. Great ferns of the rain forest dripped and glistened where, in the proliferation of leaf and vine, no light could penetrate.

  Kate expressed Francis’ thought. “This place swarms with life. Crawling, walking, swimming, and flying.”

  “I shouldn’t think anything could move through here,” Marjorie said with a shudder. “Not that I’d want to. It’s eerie.”

  “There are trails. People come up to poach. The most marvelous parrots breed here and it’s illegal to steal them, but people do. The smuggle them out of the country in suitcases, and most of them die on the way. It’s brutal. I get furious when I think about it,” Kate said passionately.

  Now began a gradual descent from the summit. The road wound and twisted. They passed a village, a handful of cabins, a patch of coconut and banana trees, then tilted fields and sunshine on the great mountain’s flank, with sheep and cattle grazing in deep grass.

  “Oh, what are those?” cried Marjorie, observing everything. Out of the distance she had picked what appeared to be white birds, standing on cows’ backs.

  “Cattle egrets. They eat insects off the cow’s back.”

  “Well,” Marjorie said, “curiouser and curiouser, as Alice remarked.”

  Suddenly Kate stopped the car. “There it is. Eleuthera.”

  Beneath them on a spacious tableland stood a long white house. At its back the mountain soared; before it, in enormous silence, lay the shimmering sea.

  Kate spoke softly. “The end of the world, isn’t it? A dropping-off place.”

  She released the brake and the car descended. Rusted gates were flung back against stone posts. The long lane between royal palms was overgrown. The aristocratic arch above the door had broken off; tall windows were shuttered; weeds were knee-high on the paths. Ruin, like a disfiguring disease, had eaten away.

  They stared for a moment. Marjorie asked, “This is the house, isn’t it, where your mother grew up?”

  Francis nodded, unable, for the moment, to speak. He had not expected to be so moved, to feel such pain. People had sat and talked on this veranda; people had come up this driveway to the sight of flowers and the welcome of a barking dog. All of this had been alive.

  His eyes went moist and he got out of the car to squint into the sun so that no one would see.

  They went inside. In the great hall every surface was chiseled and adorned. The stair rails were elaborate twisted spirals; the newel posts were pineapples; the walls were paneled and carved. Through the open door the sun came shafting and a fine golden wood dust stirred in the warm air.

  “It’s like Drummond Hall, on a smaller scale,” Marjorie observed.

  “These great houses are cut pretty much to the same pattern,” Kate answered. “Here’s the library. That’s mahoe, cabinetmaker’s wood, and very precious. It’s beautiful whe
n it’s polished.”

  “There are no shelves on this side!” Marjorie exclaimed. “It’s only half finished! Isn’t that odd?”

  Francis felt that a man should assert practicality. “The roofs been leaking, look.” He added doubtfully, “I wonder whether a thing like that ought to be repaired before we put the place on the market?”

  “I don’t think you ought to put a cent into it,” Marjorie declared. “To begin with, we haven’t got any money, have we? No, just mark it down and sell ‘as is.’ Clearance sale. That’s that.”

  “Strange that the place hasn’t been vandalized,” Francis remarked. “It hasn’t been, you can see that.”

  “People here are afraid it’s haunted,” Kate said. “The village people believe in spirits and witches, you know. You’ve heard about Anancy tales?”

  “Yes,” Francis said. “Old tales from Africa.”

  “Incredible ignorance in this day and age!” Marjorie commented.

  “Not incredible, considering the way they live,” Kate answered. There was a trace of impatience in her voice.

  She really is too impatient, Francis thought. Yet it’s true, the villages are miserable places. What can those people know?

  “Shall we walk around the grounds now?” Kate asked. “There used to be roads to drive on, but they’re too overgrown for the car.”

  “How do you know your way around?” Marjorie asked.

  “I used to visit here sometimes when I was a child. My grandfather knew Virgil Francis.”

  “You knew my great-grandfather?” Francis was astonished.

  “Not well. But everybody on St. Felice knows who everybody else is. You know, I think you must be like him. He was tall as a reed, and the one thing I do remember is his sort of beaky nose, like yours,” she said, regarding Francis. “It’s funny the things one can remember about people, unimportant things from years ago.”

  Marjorie had discovered a sugar mill, or rather, the ruins of one. The top layers of tile had broken off to a third of the original height. Their rubble lay in the long grass. An enormous rusty cauldron lay there, too.

  “They used to bake cassava flour in that to feed the slaves,” Kate said. “And here, look, here’s the keystone of the mill. T.F. F for Francis, naturally. I don’t know who T was…. The date’s 1727.”

  Marjorie had gone on ahead, grasping things swiftly, as was her way, and passing on to the next. Francis, on the other hand, liked to linger, to savor and speculate. Flour for the slaves. Vividly, he could feel this place as it must have been, not silent as now, but busy with running feet and voices, tension and commotion, in the buzzing heat.

  “There must have been a house here,” Marjoie called back. “There’s a foundation.”

  Kate called, “The overseer’s house. He would have lived there with the bookkeepers. And past them were the slave quarters, the barracoons. There would have been about fifty huts on a place this size. And then the factory compound, with the boiling house and the mill.”

  There was a sudden movement in the tall grass. A small flock of goats clattered into view, stared for a moment at the strangers, and went back to feeding.

  “Gone wild,” Kate observed.

  “That stuff they’re eating looks like cactus, for heaven’s sake,” Marjorie said.

  “It is. It’s called Turk’s head, and goats are the only creatures who’ll eat it.”

  Francis stood still. Let me feel this, he thought. Bee hum. Wind rush. Goats rip the grass.

  A soft languor and longing, a peace that was part sadness, lay upon him. And he spoke it aloud. “Sad. Sad.”

  “Nonsense! It was based on slavery,” Marjorie said briskly.

  “I don’t mean that, of course. I mean—” His voice fell away.

  Marjorie’s voice rang clearly. “They deserved what they got. In addition to owning other human beings, they were disgracefully incompetent. They exhausted the soil, spent more than they had, and let everything fall apart. Shall we go back to the house?”

  They sat down on the veranda steps. Far below them, the river was a silver trickle. Around the point of the little bay one saw a fringe of cliffside trees bent inland by the ocean wind.

  “That’s where the Atlantic rolls, meeting the Caribbean. If you’re the kind who gets seasick,” Kate warned, “it’s no place to go sailing.”

  Marjorie screamed and jumped. A small snake had slithered across what remained of the garden path and disappeared in the undergrowth.

  “It won’t hurt you,” Kate said. “It’s harmless.”

  “No poisonous snakes on the island? I’ve heard there are some who kill in a minute.”

  “The fer-de-lance. About five feet long. They’d hide in a bunch of bananas, and you would die in minutes if one struck you. There still were a few when I was a child, but there are no more now.”

  “I feel creepy here all the same,” Marjorie said. “Let’s go, shall we? Unless there’s anything more you need to know, Francis?”

  He considered. “What I need to know is, what persuasion can I use to sell this place? What are its assets?”

  Kate made a sweep with her arm. “Its assets are all around you, aren’t they?”

  He looked at her. She was very serious. “Yes,” he said gently, “the beauty. The beauty on this hill.”

  “You’re not going to sell beauty,” Marjorie said. “Here, I’ve got pencil and paper in my bag, let’s make notes. Now,” she told Kate, “it’s obvious you know how to run an estate. What would you do with this if it belonged to you?”

  Kate spoke promptly. “I’d begin by planting trees. On the higher slopes you have deforestation. That’s pretty true all over the island, the result of improvident usage. From it you get soil erosion, droughts, and floods. As a matter of fact, we have been trying to educate the small farmer along those lines.”

  “Without much success, I’ll bet,” Marjorie said.

  “Education takes time,” Kate replied.

  Francis was uncomfortable. Plainly, the two women disliked each other. He had no idea why or what to do about it.

  And Kate continued, “After that, I’d plant bananas. Very little sugar, since you’d need too much new machinery for it. I would diversify with cattle, sheep, and fruit. And not just for export. There’s tremendous need right here. Do you know that this fertile island doesn’t even feed itself? It’s a disgrace! Children, when they drink it at all, drink canned, imported milk. The people are terribly undernourished. A disgrace!” Kate struck her fist into her palm.

  Marjorie regarded her coolly. “Go on, please. I’m making notes.”

  “I’d plant cocoa. This is the rainy side of the island, and it will do well here. Use the bananas as temporary shade when you set out new cocoa plants. And coconuts. We’ve a copra mill in town. The women here make cooking oil out of the milk and the dried remains you keep for cattle fodder. Then there’s mace, which is the cloak on the nutmeg. You can raise that for export. See, there’s some over there by the bamboo fence. Have I given you a few ideas?”

  Marjorie had been writing rapidly. “Yes, thanks. Although it occurs to me, anybody who’d even consider a place like this would know something about how to run it, wouldn’t he? These notes are probably unnecessary.”

  “You can’t tell.”

  Francis stood up. “You’re convincing, Kate. I should let you convince a buyer for me. By the way, have you any idea how I might go about finding one?”

  “It won’t be easy. But you could try Atterbury and Shaw in Covetown. They deal in properties. Shall we go?”

  He stood for a moment with his hand on the door of the car. Great cumulus clouds had wrapped the peak of Morne Bleue in cotton and washed the house in pearl-gray shadow.

  Kate looked at him curiously. “It’s got to you, hasn’t it?”

  “It’s a poem, as you said.”

  She smiled without answering, showing the gap between her two front teeth. He thought irrelevantly, I don’t know why a gap between two te
eth should be so charming.

  Upstairs in their room at Drummond Hall, Marjorie said, “You liked her.”

  “Liked who?”

  “Don’t play dumb,” she said pleasantly. “Kate, of course. Who else?”

  “Well, she’s a very nice person. She went out of her way to be helpful.”

  “I don’t mean that. You really liked her. You were attracted to her. You desire her.”

  “You’re out of your head,” he said fondly.

  “She’s your sort. Lusty and sexy,” Marjorie said, undoing her bra. Above her white breasts the tan made a heart-shaped curve.

  “Sexy? She’s not even pretty. Well, not very.”

  “She’s older than you are.”

  “Half a year!”

  “They’re not happy, couldn’t you see that?”

  “I know. I’m sorry for them.”

  “Yes, she’s your sort. Outdoors. Animals. Spiritual, too. And she undressed you with her eyes.”

  “What!” he shouted.

  “Yes, when she said that about how you look like your grandfather.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Yes, you do! She said you had your grandfather’s beaky nose.”

  “Great-grandfather.”

  “You see, you do remember!”

  “Quit it, Marjorie.”

  “It’s true, you desire her.”

  She was settling her breasts into a fresh brassiere, two lace cups on black ribbons.

  “Listen,” he said, “just wait till we get this damn dinner over and get back up here, I’ll show you something about desire.”

  The pier glass reflected a supple girl with a quick, mobile mouth and clever eyes; the man beside her, although exactly her age, wore the soft look of a boy who is eager to please.

  “Well, now that you’ve seen decay at Eleuthera, let me show you a thriving enterprise,” Lionel offered one morning a week later. “Georgina’s Fancy is half again as large as when I took it over, I want you to know. I’ve added a lot of acreage.”

  A tractor was loading cane stalks into carts, and some dark little boys, no older than eight or nine, were sweeping up the droppings.