Like a seesaw on a playground, the debate bounded from one side of the story to the other and back, the customers in the crowded bakery space mimicking the to-and-fro with bobs of their alternately convinced and convinced-again heads.
Amidst the public debate that ensued, a number of those present struggled with more private concerns about the case of Madison Fuller and what was coming to be known as the Bicycle Trial. Foremost in this group was Branson Bowles. Seeing May again the day before, when she had stomped onto his beach, had stirred in him feelings he had been denying for years. Poor May! He couldn’t imagine how much she must be suffering. Her brother arrested! Branson was suffering, too, for he knew that May held him responsible for Madison’s dilemma, and he wondered if he ought not come forth and claim the lonely hearts ad, whether he had written it or not. Would the police believe him if he did? Would it be enough to clear Madison’s name and to win back May’s respect and her affection? Was Branson’s dignity worth her tender dasheen and her dainty touch?
While Branson, nervous and worried, shook his head from side to side, Trevor moved his up and down in an effort to see one wave of customers over the next. He was anxious to close his doors for the day and to reflect on the problem at hand, for which he felt somewhat responsible, since Madison had turned to him for help. Trevor never liked to disappoint, and disappoint he arguably had, if Madison was sitting somewhere behind bars. Trevor couldn’t even point a finger at Bruce, whose report had merely brought to light the mess that the police were cooking up—a mess that at the end of the day couldn’t really amount to much, could it? Madison was innocent. Of that, Trevor was absolutely sure, and so truth would prevail in the end.
Trevor tried to believe in these arguments he elaborated in his head, but nothing on Oh was so straightforward. All the more when Oh’s authorities came into the picture, dancing their procedural dances to the islanders’ drums. If the case went to trial, as it appeared it would, Trevor was not at all confident that the evidence misconstrued by the police wouldn’t be misconstrued by the public, too. The island’s justice wasn’t always just.
As Trevor’s thoughts thus meandered, his hands waved and grabbed and wrapped and saluted, serving up drinks and loaves and making conversation and correct change. His son Randolph assisted, carrying out hot trays of fresh goodies as the shelves were emptied and emptied again. Like his father, outwardly he managed to keep time with the talk and the orders, while inwardly his heart went out to his friend, poor Madison.
As poor Madison pondered his problems in the lonely jail, back at the bakery for the evening rush, Raoul Orlean pondered a few things, too. It seemed to him that this bicycle affair had gone a bit too far, even for Oh, and he wished that everyone would stop talking about it. They were making more and more of a mountain out of a molehill. Didn’t they see that? There was likely no crime, so far no victim, and, near as Raoul could tell, not an evil bone in Madison’s body. The case was barely a case at all, and Raoul doubted if even Oh’s police force could make the charges stick.
The islanders, naturally, weren’t helping. With their gossip and their speculation they were letting the matter swirl irresponsibly and irretrievably out-of-hand, and Raoul wanted nothing to do with it. He had no idea why someone had written Rena’s name on the side of his house, but the more he heard it mentioned, the less interest he had in finding out.
Truth be told, he was more interested in why someone had painted Dagmore’s name on his cottage, and although he had taken his leave of Mrs. Jaymes the day before without learning all that he could, he had promised her to return to hear the rest. The story of this Captain Dagmore was rivaling that of Raoul’s favorite book, the one about mathematician Stan Kalpi. Like Dagmore, Stan Kalpi had abandoned his future to go home and look for his past. Raoul had never done that, not exactly, but he recognized the importance of one’s roots above all else—roots were as hard and irrefutable as facts—and so he fancied himself, too, a Stan Kalpi of sorts (for that, and for his devotion to detail and his love of absolutes).
Rena Baker? He wouldn’t waste his time! Raoul’s flies were now aflutter with the story of Dagmore and his house. What messages did Dagmore’s house send to him? Why didn’t he see or hear? Were they words on walls, like in the case of Raoul? Perky pink on faded pastel? And what was the trouble that Dagmore’s invitations invited? Raoul couldn’t wait to visit Mrs. Jaymes again, to address these flies and more. Mostly, though, there was a great big horsefly he hoped to hush: how had a questing and bookish sea captain, with whom Raoul was beginning to feel a kinship, gone out of his tree, and ended up dead in the water?
It was nearly midnight when the bakery quieted down. Most of the flood of customers had come and gone by ten, but the next two hours witnessed a steady flow of the men-about-town who, with nowhere else to party, dropped in at the bakery whenever Trevor stayed open late. Raoul had gone home when the tide of islanders ebbed, and Randolph left soon after. He was headed to the courthouse where Madison was jailed, hoping to finagle a visit despite the late hour. Branson, who remained at the bakery with Trevor, was a bundle of nerves. He could hardly stand still as the young men talked about trials and evidence and a fisherman maybe gone mad, but he resisted, so that he could speak with Trevor alone after the partiers departed.
Finally, the last one sensed that the conversation and his welcome were wearing thin, and he grudgingly said his “good nights.” Such was Branson’s relief as he watched the man walk out—palpable, practically—that it drove Trevor to ask him, “What’s going on with you?”
“Aren’t you worried about Madison?” Branson replied.
“You know I am! But you look like you just killed Rena yourself. What’s the matter?”
Branson sighed. He hadn’t yet gotten round to telling Trevor about May’s visit and her accusations, but once he did, Trevor suddenly recalled, and made sense of, May’s scene at the bakery the day before. He started to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Branson said, offended.
“What’s so funny is that silly woman thinks you’re so in love with her, you would put an ad in the Morning Crier to get her back.”
Branson looked at Trevor sheepishly and didn’t say a word.
“Don’t tell me you did it! You placed the ad?” Trevor was incredulous.
“No, of course I didn’t! You know me better than that. But she thinks I did.”
“Who cares what she thinks?”
“I do.” Branson explained that seeing May again had reminded him how much she once meant to him, that he had fooled himself into believing a stint off the island had erased his feelings. It simply wasn’t true.
Trevor didn’t like where Branson was headed. He remembered how much his friend had suffered at May’s hands, and he still blamed her for Branson’s eight-year absence from Oh. “Do you really want to jump back into that mess?” he asked him. “May didn’t seem too keen on you yesterday, when she was standing here spitting fire.”
“She hates me alright,” Branson confirmed.
Trevor wasn’t following and said so.
Branson sighed impatiently, failing to see how his dearest friend could fail to see the solution, obvious as it was.
“If I go to the police and say that I’m the one who placed the anonymous ad, then that would clear Madison’s name, and May won’t hate me anymore.”
“Says who?” Trevor objected. “You don’t know if she still has feelings for you—it didn’t look to me like she did—and how can you be so sure, if she does, that this is all it will take to win her back?”
Branson was silent.
“Have you thought about this,” Trevor went on. “Suppose you speak up and tell your lover’s lie, embarrass yourself and maybe lose your job, and they still keep Madison in jail. They have a whole sack of evidence against him, you know, or so they think. Next thing, you’ll be in jail right there with him and charged as his accomplice. Heed my words.”
Well! Branson hadn’t thought of that! It never
occurred to him that a phony confession might backfire and that he could lose his job, or worse, land himself behind bars. That certainly wouldn’t do. He looked at Trevor helplessly and Trevor looked back, like a parent who scolds a child while inside his heart is breaking.
“You know better than this, Bran,” he said, and he rubbed the top of Branson’s shoulder between his thumb and fingers. “When did a lie ever put things to right?”
28
Since most of Oh is tucked into thick and fertile greenery, the islanders call “country” everything more than a half-dozen kilometers from Port-St. Luke, Oh’s bustling capital. The farther beyond the outskirts of “town” you go, the deeper into the country you are considered to be, regardless of the fact that much of the so-called country is speckled with towns of its own. Take, for example, a town on Oh’s northern tip (Port-St. Luke resides in the south): officially denoted Chanterelle, you are as likely to hear it called Rainbow City, especially in the run-up to (and in the wake of) Oh’s annual Rainbow Fair.
The Fair was born of Chanterelle’s fortunate latitude and longitude, which had positioned it on a hillside point from which an inordinate number of rainbows could be spotted, though in Chanterelle-proper little rain ever fell. The rainbows that were seen there much of the year derived from downpours elsewhere, and from the mist that Oh’s wind skimmed off the sea and lifted into Chanterelle’s sunny view. The rainbows’ numbers were greatest just as the island’s dry season drew to a close, when random, gentle rains began to foreshadow the storms to come, which is more or less when the Fair took place every year.
Though purportedly in honor of the delicate and ephemeral rainbows visible from Rainbow Hill, the Fair itself was a rather raucous event. It started early in the morning, when the ladies of Chanterelle sold fried bakes, saltfish souse, and freshly prepared pineapple juice. When breakfast was done, the footballing started, with spectators swapping their juice for local beer or mixing it with local rum. Rough under the best of circumstances, island football spiked with booze was especially bad. Tempers flared and supporters shouted and words grew more colorful with every yellow card.
When the matches ended and the music began, there was more food and drink, more fish broth and mauby, and the already excited crowd got wilder still. The partying continued throughout the day and into the night, the height of the revelry (or the depths) witnessed as the moon climbed up the dark sky that had long since swallowed the town’s famous rainbows. The islanders danced and jumped and caroused until morning, when they crept home exhausted and gratified, ooh-ing and ahh-ing at the renascent rainbows they had all but ignored the day before.
The event was as awaited as Carnival or Christmas. Most years, the islanders’ anticipation was ignited by an early shower, or even a drizzle that augured the rains to come. Some years, it was spurred by an outright downpour, and Fair-goers geared themselves up for an equally frenzied fete. Every once in a while, though, when the moon was blue, the island announced the Chanterelle bash with a bang, with a storm that downed a bike on a muddy backroad and carried off the body of a fisherman’s girl.
When something like that happened, every Rainbow reveler was dead sure the Fair would be a real humdinger.
29
For the second time in three days (it was Sunday, but Customs and Excise never closed, what with the ships and planes arriving every night and day), Raoul’s morning consisted of the briefest of stops at his workplace and a lengthy visit to Mrs. Jaymes’s house on Ladywood Road. The story of the colorful Captain Dagmore was, on its own, enough to lure Raoul from the grey of his office walls. The fact that every member of his staff on duty was now nattering on about Madison Fuller and the girl he had allegedly killed, only added to Raoul’s agitation, and to his hurry to put headquarters behind him.
“Get back to work,” he ordered them all as he left. “We’re not in the business of scuttlebutt here!” (Or so Raoul thought. His employees knew better, for scuttlebutt occupied far more of their workday than either customs or excise ever did, especially on a weekend.)
When Raoul reached the residence of Mrs. Jaymes, he found her on the verandah with Hammer, sizing up the garden and discussing the arrangement of the flowers in their beds. Hammer, who was in spirit as resourceful and handy as ever, was far less so in body. So to busy his nimble spirit, he engaged in gentle, incessant gardening, planting and re-planting the flowers and shrubs.
“Good morning,” they said to Raoul in unison, interrupting their debate.
“Back so soon!” Mrs. Jaymes exclaimed, unable to disguise her glee. “Are you here to investigate the Captain some more?”
“Yes,” Raoul confirmed, “if I may.”
“Come in, come in,” Mrs. Jaymes urged him, getting up from her chair and leading him inside the house. “Hammer was just about to start in the garden. Weren’t you, dear?”
Hammer tipped his hat in reply and Raoul flashed him a polite smile.
Once inside, Raoul and Mrs. Jaymes repeated the ritual of the time before. Tea (no, thank you), fluffed cushions, the smoothing of impatient notebook pages. Mrs. Jaymes asked Raoul where she had left off in her story and he told her, at the part where Dagmore’s guests had said yes and were just ten days from Oh.
“The part,” he added, “where everything was going exactly according to plan.”
The sun was hot and curious on the day that Dagmore hummed his way to town to collect his first visitors, and it was as anxious as Mrs. Jaymes to see what the fuss was all about. Under the sun’s glaring eye, the whole island had spruced itself up for the Abbelscotts’ arrival. The trees were pert and green, the flowers full and rich, the blues of sea and sky impeccably coordinated. The temperature was high, but the winds just high enough to make the sticky heat tolerable. The trio of guests—Emmitt Abbelscott, his wife Anna, and their daughter Martine—had traveled to Oh by ship and were walking the plank that would lead them to Dagmore just as their host neared the harbor. Wishing to make a big splash, the Captain had forgone his piano clothes in favor of his finest seaman’s attire, the very same white cap and brass-buttoned jacket he had worn when he himself disembarked on Oh, well over a year before.
“Welcome!” Dagmore greeted them, reaching the dock and extending his hand to give the professor’s a shake. To Anna he bowed his head and smiled, then looking down at the girl who clung sleepily to her mother’s side, he said, “You must be Martine. My, how grown-up you are!”
While the Abbelscotts’ eyes adjusted to the island sun, Dagmore arranged for their belongings and for a vehicle to take them all home. As they drove up the steep and winding roads that carried them higher and higher above Port-St. Luke, the Abbelscotts admired the shrinking and picturesque capital and the crystalline water that stretched as far as they could see. So entranced were they by the scenery, that they spoke of little else, asking Dagmore a million questions, which he was both happy and proud to answer. When they finally reached the villa, Mrs. Jaymes silently served them pineapple juice over ice, on the verandah, from which they gazed in awe at the beach below.
“It’s marvelous,” Anna announced, and Dagmore sighed complacently. So far, everything was going as expected. Neither he nor the island had failed to impress.
They finished their drinks and a tour of the house, and while Anna and little Martine went to rest before dinner, Dagmore and Emmitt took a walk down the rocky path to the beach. Once utterly assured that the beach was Dagmore’s and Dagmore’s alone, Emmitt stripped down and waded in, leaving his shirt, socks, trousers, and under-things in a pile in the sand. Mrs. Jaymes, who was cooking dinner at the time, poised to spot any signs of trouble, caught sight of him from the kitchen window and, startled, dropped a plate. It smashed apart on the tile flooring, tiny pieces of it scattering every which way.
The first casualty of the Captain’s cockamamie plan to host a houseful of strangers! she thought, and it gave her pleasure to sweep up the miniscule ceramic flecks, each one yet another sign that her fears were well-foun
ded and her suspicions well-placed.
In the mornings, Dagmore took the Abbelscotts on island tours, dazzling them with the local flora and fauna, and with his knowledge of both. In the afternoons, after the lunch prepared by Mrs. Jaymes had been enthusiastically consumed, they lounged on Dagmore’s beach and swam in his private bit of sea. In the evenings came more island delicacies, followed by cocktails and cigars in the sitting room. There, the guests were equally enthralled by Dagmore’s piano-playing and by his lectures on Oh’s every aspect, from its cocoa plantations and its honeycombs, to its plantains and its bush tea. When, with heavy heart, the Abbelscotts finally packed their cases and went home, promising to return again soon, Mrs. Jaymes surveyed the damage and was irked to find that it amounted only to the broken plate, and the extra bedsheets she had had to launder. Miffed that her instincts were still just that, she sat and shook her head.
Storms that took too long to brew were bitter cups to swallow.
Raoul crinkled his brow and looked at Mrs. Jaymes, visibly disappointed. “Then everything did go according to plan,” he complained. “You said those invitations were trouble. That the house was sending messages. What about all that?” he cried, as if accusing her.
Away with the Fishes Page 15