They reached a secluded cove and went ashore, Branson dragging the heavy boat onto the sand, May balancing the heavy lunch in her dainty arms. Not far away they spread a blanket and May laid out the meal. The anticipation of May’s cooking was as exciting to Branson as the sight of her setting up their picnic. She had beautiful hands that danced around pots and utensils and gourds and cutlets with a fluidity as smooth and graceful as the gentle tide that lapped against the rocks at the cove’s outer edges. At home, too, Branson enjoyed watching May prepare a meal, as much as he enjoyed eating it. Her recipes and movements were nothing short of magic.
Which was fitting, for a magical day ensued. They ate and talked and dreamed and made plans, laughing and touching in between. When the sun began to set, they stood arm in arm and watched it gently bend toward the horizon. Then they gathered their things quickly and May jumped into the boat, while Branson pushed it off into the water. Aboard, they sat opposite each other, and Branson softly rowed them home. Had you seen it, you would have said that their black silhouette against the sun’s golden flare looked just like a frame from a movie. The proverbial happy and sunsetted ending, that no storm would dare to mar.
In her kitchen, May finally heard Madison stir. She had just enough time to wonder if Branson still had that old fishing boat of his before the memory of it, and her unanticipated smile, dissipated in favor of more pressing matters.
“Madison, are you up?” she hollered. “Come out here. I need to talk to you about Trevor. Did he have anything helpful to say last night?”
Madison yelled back from the bathroom, but between the door’s thick wood and the sink’s splashing water, May couldn’t make out his words.
“Come out of there, will you?” she shouted. “We need to go see Trevor together. He has to make Bruce come clean about that ad. Bruce must know who placed it. Who it is on this island who has a fishing boat and wants a woman to cook for him with her dainty little hands.”
May froze, hearing her own words.
A minute later Madison emerged from the bathroom, still rubbing his face with a towel. “What were you saying?” he asked her. But when he reached the kitchen and lowered the towel from his eyes, May was gone. By her chair, for the second time that day, a puddle of tea dirtied broken china bits and seeped into the cracks of the tired floor.
Branson Bowles lived on a fine piece of land. From a dangerous height it overlooked the sea and a small private beach, the latter accessible by a steep rocky path. Branson had inherited the house and property from me, I’m proud to say—his teacher’s salary would never have permitted him residency in such a prime locale. This particular morning found Branson lying on the beach in question, worn from a long and early swim, his eyes closed and the rising sun drying the salt water on his body. As he lay there contemplating the day’s chores (buy bath soap and breadfruit, sweep the kitchen, bathe the dogs, prepare his lessons for the following week), the last person on the island (in the world, for that matter) whom he expected to see coming down the treacherous pathway to his beach was May Fuller, for he had spent the last fifteen years avoiding her, and she him.
So impossible was her presence there that, when he saw her, he blinked and rubbed his eyes. She must be some trick of the sunlight, a mirage, he thought. The more he blinked, the closer she came, and the near-naked Branson was overcome with a slew of emotions at once: embarrassment, fear, excitement, curiosity, and hope, to name a few. He jumped up and tried to collect himself, wrapped his towel around his waist, and knocked the sand from his hair. He looked around the beach, as if he should somehow tidy it up, too, before she reached it, but by then she was already just a few feet away.
“Branson, I have to talk to you about something extremely important.”
Branson found May’s matter-of-factness unsettling, at this their first meeting in years. “May? What are you doing here?”
“I’m here about the ad in the Crier,” she snapped. “A good cook, dainty hands. Is that what you want?” She shook her hands in front of his face.
“A what?” he replied, backing away and swatting at her flitting hands. “What are you talking about?”
“A good cook,” she insisted, moving her face nearer and nearer to his. “With dainty hands. Is that what you want? Is it?” May was yelling now, her lips achingly close to Branson’s.
“I don’t know what you want me to say” was all he could manage to get out.
“Branson,” she tried more calmly, “you still have that fishing boat that used to be your dad’s?”
“Sure. It’s right there,” and he pointed to it a short distance away, bobbing on its mooring. “Do you need me to take you somewhere?”
“Don’t be stupid. I don’t want to go anywhere with you,” she nearly spat at him. “I just want you to tell everyone that you placed that ad in the newspaper, that ad for a good cook with dainty hands, and that it was me you were looking for, to row around with you in your silly boat.”
“Why would I do that?” Branson asked her.
“Because it’s the truth, and if you don’t fess up to it, the police are going to use the ad as evidence against my brother. They think he killed his girlfriend Rena, and then advertised for her replacement!”
“I didn’t kill anyone! I can’t admit to that ad,” he yelped. “I mean, I do have a fishing boat, and I’d be happy if you wanted to row around with me in it sometime, and you know what a fantastic cook I always thought you were. But I can’t do it!”
“No one thinks you killed anyone. I It doesn’t matter if you admit to the ad.”
“It matters to me,” he argued. “I can’t have everyone thinking I’m the kind of man who hunts for women in the island paper. I’m an instructor at the Boys’ School, for heaven’s sake!”
“I know what you are. You’re as soft as guava jelly if you don’t come forward and help my brother! They could put him in jail!”
“But May, I didn’t do it.”
“So it wasn’t me you were looking for with that ad?”
“No! Yes! I mean, ‘yes’ to you, ‘no’ to the ad.”
“You’re not making any sense. Are you going to tell everyone you wrote the ad or aren’t you?” she demanded.
“May, how can I?” Branson pleaded, his voice an octave higher in its desperation. “Come inside and I’ll make you some tea. We can talk this over calmly. I’ll show you the house. The kitchen floor needs sweeping, but otherwise it’s in order.”
May stared at him, flabbergasted. “Just tell me one thing, Branson.”
“What’s that?”
“What does a bicycle have to do with anything?” she asked. “In the ad you said you wanted a lady with a bicycle. Why?”
“May, I really don’t know. Please, forget about the ad and come inside,” he begged. “You seem a little upset.”
May clasped her head in her hands and let out an exasperated scream. Then she ran over to Branson’s fishing boat, gave it a good strong starboard kick and ran up the rocks with her skirt pulled up over her knees.
Branson was stunned. He could do little more than watch her as she struggled up the steps, the sun on her shoulders, the foliage on either side of the path framing her tense and hurried body, her slim fingers gripping the hem of her white cotton dress.
As he looked at her, he realized he hadn’t seen anything quite so beautiful for a very, very, very long time.
May’s interview with Branson had left her a little stunned, too. When she reached the top of the path, she could feel her face hot, her cheeks flushed. Her palms were sweaty. She must have run up the rocks too quickly, she tried to convince herself, for it was foolish to think that Branson might still have such an effect on her. Not after so much time and so many tears. What kind of man was he, May asked herself, to put his pride above her brother’s freedom? To have turned his back on their budding love? Alongside these impossible questions in May’s mind, another germinated, most impossible of them all. Was Branson still in love with her? Did he
really want her back, after all these long and lonely years?
May didn’t have time to dwell on Branson. Urgent matters awaited. The sun was up proper now, to light up what it would, and the fireflies made their retreat. Nighttime had delivered our cast to their matutinal chores, Trevor and Randolph to their loaves and their cakes, Raoul to his riddle, Branson to his dusty kitchen floor, his heart troubled by the morning’s peculiar events.
Only Arnold and Joshua lay snoring still in their respective beds, the search warrant for Madison’s property cooling on Arnold’s bedside table. Drunk from the congratulatory rum of the night before, they pulled their sheets up over their heads and they slept and they dreamed, like two tired fireflies made redundant by the bright new day.
18
Ah, the sting of a first love failed! Never so acute as on Oh, where the bees themselves raise their brows and look down on your aching, itchy welt. Not that first loves alone will disappoint, mind you. Every day, somewhere on the island, a fisherman falls short, or a housewife wanders. Somewhere else, the beetles gossip about the islanders’ betrayals, while the iguanas mock the mistresses and cuckolds. Not even the undeclared lover is spared, for the wind will ridicule him his cowardice.
So take heed if ever you find yourself embroiled here, and never expect that the canopy of trees will watch your sunburned back. On Oh loyalty and love are sticky business. Just take Branson and May, for instance, or little Dagmore and the sea that tossed him to and fro. Devotion is as capricious as the hurricane’s winds, which—out of the blue—will veer abruptly from a seemingly certain path. But take heart, too, for the island’s fickle nature gives rise to a convenient absolute: hope. Harbor it right next to your fishing boat!
Who’s to say that one day your crush won’t come round, or that with a bit of persuasion your neighbor’s spouse won’t notice your charms? Perhaps a mudslide will wash away your heart’s obstacles or a rain shower reveal a tender secret. If a cyclone can be swayed, then where is the islander whose allegiance can’t be coaxed? The palm whose formidable trunk might not be bent?
Sooner or later, even the most stubborn of dry spells will end in a sudden and inevitable splash.
19
Captain Thomson took Dagmore home shortly after his ninth birthday, celebrated aboard ship with as much fanfare and dignity as a gang of rude sailors could muster. The day in question wasn’t the anniversary of little Dagmore’s birth, not exactly, but the anniversary of the day that he had become Dagmore Bowles. Whether he was nine (or eight or ten), no one was completely sure, though this in no way diminished the felicity of the occasion. The crew had swabbed and polished the deck until it sparkled, and in the shade of the sails laid as fancy a table as the galley’s provisions and the cook’s imagination would allow. There was fish, for sure. Breaded fish, boiled fish, fish minced with onion and swimming in oil. There were potatoes and plantains, cornmeal and dumplings. For dessert, the cook had attempted a pineapple cake that, despite its filling of oldish jam and its somewhat charred underside, would have cut quite a figure center-table, had the sun not melted the sugary frosting that oozed down the sides of it like so many opalescent tears.
Every man on board took part in the celebration, which was as bittersweet as the wine they shared. Little Dagmore had had a good run; his plan had worked after all, at least for a little while. He had so proven himself in his studies, and carved out such a niche for himself in the Captain’s crew, that he had managed to stave off attendance at a proper school at “home” (wherever that was) for nearly two years. He had made himself an expert on every island the ship visited and revisited, knew each one’s flora and fauna, its shoals and corals. Too much so, in fact. In his zeal for his academics, he had unwittingly exhausted, or nearly, the expertise of Enoch and his own father, who could no longer justify limiting his son to a life at sea.
Dagmore’s birthday party thus doubled as a farewell, and not a soul there didn’t feel as if he were sending off a son of his very own. Most of the men had even scrounged some sort of gift to bestow and to be remembered by. From homemade paper or cloth wrappings, little Dagmore pulled seashells, calabash shells turned into decorative bowls, a homemade deck of playing cards, kerchiefs blanched white by the sun, and a hand-carved wooden flute. Enoch gave him a book of poems, and his father, a brand-new leather notebook with his initials impressed into the cover. Lucky for them all, Dagmore had turned into quite a little gentleman by then, having mastered his father’s stern but genteel manners, and so the only public tears that day belonged to the pineapple cake.
When darkness fell, Dagmore could no longer restrain his sorrow, and neither could anyone else. Tears flowed freely, and the men’s collective hiccups and sobs bounced contagious throughout the ship’s hull. They covered its slippery deck from end to end and climbed over the coarse and sturdy rigging to the very tips of the drawn and rugged sails. From there they tumbled out to sea and were eclipsed, finally, by the enormity of the waves.
Dagmore would celebrate fifteen birthdays in his new home, but none that would match the last one on his father’s ship. Nearly half of them would be feted rather unceremoniously (little cakes in foil cups, a new box of pencils) at the “proper” school his father had found for him in England. It was a stuffy place, he thought, but he flourished there—if only because it broke his heart to think of disappointing the Captain, who came to visit him as often as he could (and wrote to him every day in between).
Captain Thomson had spared no expense. Dagmore’s new home was certainly one to envy. Marble and ivy halls with masters who coddled the youth and genius (and wealth) in their charge, horses or cricket on Saturdays, and tea every afternoon. While the other boys seemed content with long runs on the manicured lawns and weren’t bothered by the oft-cloudy skies, Dagmore quietly puzzled at his new life. Calculus and Plato and museums were all well and good, especially if they made his father proud, but the white shirts and porcelain cups so precious to Dagmore at sea, were in his new home merely a reminder of all he missed. The waves and the wind that smelled of saltwater. The stars, which here seemed not to burn as brightly. And there wasn’t a palm or a mango for miles and miles, at least as far as he could tell. There were apples and pears to eat, and berries of every color. Dagmore did enjoy those. When he crawled into bed at the end of every day, however, he missed the tree frogs, the way their chirping had lulled him to sleep when he was Quick and alone.
Dagmore’s nostalgia grew, until it was the only thing he could talk about when his father came to visit. Captain Thomson understood. If anyone knew the draw of the sea, it was he. There would be plenty of time for islands and ships, he assured his son, if he only finished his studies first. His future was bright, but its brightness had to be backed by degrees and certificates. Dagmore loved his father so much, worshipped him, really, that in the end he couldn’t argue. He resigned to busy himself with his books, and quietly counted the days until he would serve under the Captain once again.
In the meantime, when the first four of Dagmore’s birthdays at school had gone by without any sea change in his disposition, Captain Thomson got an idea. It seemed clear to him that what his son was missing was music. The tweet of the frogs, the whistle of the wind, the lap and smack of water on wood. So he arranged for Dagmore to make some music of his own. After Dagmore’s thirteenth birthday, the Captain took him a piano. Not just any piano, but one with a top that curved and gaped, covered in a red cherry finish. It was housed in a lecture hall at the school and at first Dagmore had no idea what to make of it. Shiny and big and imposing, it reminded him vaguely of his father’s ship, but when he touched the keys and their dull, random notes rang out, he jerked, startled.
“Well?” his father said.
Dagmore hadn’t the faintest idea what to say, but his father’s eyes were moist with anticipation and excitement, and so Dagmore smiled at him, and one smile led to another, which led to a series of exchanged giggles, and finally a guffaw from Captain Thomson.
“That’s not all,” his father told him. There was Miss Veronica, too.
“Miss Veronica?” Dagmore said.
The two words conjured an image of youth and bounce in Dagmore’s barely teenaged head, but alas Miss Veronica was a “miss” by marital status alone. She turned out to be close to seventy, sprightly if spindly, her bounce now a mere shadow of what it must have once been. Miss Veronica, he was told, would give him a piano lesson every afternoon when his schoolday was done. Dagmore, on principle, would never have dreamed of refusing a gift from his father. This one, though, this mammoth, noisy instrument with its comparatively tiny and twittering teacher appealed for the sheer strangeness of its proportions, principles aside. So Dagmore, with a “pleased to meet you, Miss” and a peck on his father’s cheek, sealed the deal.
The three birthdays after that found Dagmore much happier indeed, to his father’s delight. The boy demonstrated a unique and natural talent, and he and Miss Veronica forged quite a friendship over scales and minuets. She couldn’t have imagined that when Dagmore played, the reason he played, was to take himself as far away from her as he could go. The piano, like his father’s ship, carried him across the sea, and back to the islands that he was missing more than ever. Music became his solace. The notes that mottled the parchment, like whirring fruitflies on coconut flesh, oozed from his fingers and transported him. Every trill was an island bird, every swell a thunderstorm that diminuendoed into the drip of lingering drops of rain. Not only did the music tell him what to do, where to pause, where to breathe, when to tread lightly and when to pounce, but the starkness of the keys, the black against the white, reminded him of the simplicity of his youth. On an island you always knew who you were, regardless of what name they gave you.
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