Away with the Fishes

by Stephanie Siciarz

  “You’re very persistent,” Abigail admitted, but despite the standing ovation that the other riders felt moved to produce, Abigail still declined tea with Dagmore. She knew too well the trouble that men caused. It started with a cup of tea, then there was sugar and “Honey,” and before you knew it your belly was bursting. Abigail had had enough of that for now.

  If his lofty words hadn’t quite done the trick, perhaps Abigail would be swayed by something more down-to-earth. Plan F was a basket of fruit. Mango, papaya, guava, banana, soursop, and a small-but-still-significantly sized watermelon. When Dagmore showed up with such abundance, Abigail was too stunned to speak. To Dagmore’s renewed invitation to tea, all she could manage in the form of refusal was a firm shake of the head.

  “Not a single word of complaint?” Mrs. Jaymes asked, delighted. “A good sign. A very good sign.”

  Plans G and H were executed in tandem, fresh grouper and a fresh hen, respectively, which Mrs. Jaymes herself went to the fish and poultry markets to purchase. So as not to arrive with sweaty fish and chicken, Dagmore had left it a bit late and almost missed Abigail. When she saw him coming, she quickly jumped on the bus that had stopped in front her. She urged the driver to leave, but he, along with the other regular passengers, had taken an interest in the business of Captain Dagmore (there being little else of interest on his daily route), and he insisted they all hear Dagmore out.

  “Abigail,” he huffed, tired from running to get to her in time. “How are you today?” There had grown a strange familiarity between them in spite of themselves, owing to the constancy of Dagmore’s efforts to court her. She nodded at him through the open door of the bus but didn’t say anything. He gave her the grouper and the hen and again invited her to join him for tea at the villa. She accepted the gifts, said “no, thank you,” then took her seat and stared straight ahead, making it clear that her transaction with Dagmore was done.

  As the bus pulled onto the road, the riders’ tongues loosened and they bothered Abigail about the kindly Captain Bowles. The men were annoyed that Abigail was making a fool of an island man, and jealous of all the free food she was getting; the women were appalled by her snobbish pride, and jealous that such a distinguished and wealthy man as Dagmore sought Abigail’s hand, not theirs. By the time Abigail got off the bus, her fellow riders were in such a lather that the “good night” she uttered was met with hostile indifference and all but ignored.

  This got her to worrying. Abigail’s midwifery business was doing well enough, but it wasn’t booming, despite the islanders’ enthusiastic love-making. The midwife market was saturated with ladies older and better known (though not more talented) than she. Her income depended on the locals’ acceptance of her as a humble and compassionate being. If word of this Dagmore business spread, it was likely to jeopardize her work. She decided then and there, though it pleased her little, that the next time the Captain showed up at the bus stop, she would publicly accept his invitation to tea, and then deal with him in private at the villa.

  How dare he compromise her bread and butter with his fowl and big, stinking fish?

  “So Abigail finally went to the villa for tea?” Raoul asked Mrs. Jaymes.

  “Even better. He got her on a picnic. Eventually. That’s when she told him she only accepted to protect her reputation.”

  Mrs. Jaymes explained that the day of the failed fish and fowl, Dagmore had come home especially downhearted and had taken out his fishing boat. He rarely put it in the water, as much as he loved it, and when he did, he always let it bob close to home. That day, though, the smooth, quiet sea had beckoned.

  “Dagmore felt the sky overhead and the sea underneath and it calmed him,” Mrs. Jaymes said. “He breathed in the sea air and thought of his sea-faring father. He rowed up the coastline and even went ashore.”

  She leaned closer to Raoul and added, by way of aside, “He hadn’t been exploring in years, you know. He still hadn’t learned to live on Oh, although he could imagine himself nowhere else.”

  “How does Abigail fit into all this?” Raoul wondered aloud.

  “She fits in because when the Captain went ashore, he found an enormous jacaranda tree, thick with purple blossoms. He remembered seeing Abigail admire jacarandas when she passed them, and he remembered the purple flowers on her dress the first time they met. Maybe tea in a fancy villa was too stifling for a girl as free and strong and modest as Abigail, he figured. Maybe she would prefer a simple picnic out of doors. Soon after that, he went to the bus stop and said to her very directly, straight from his heart, ‘Would you like to go on a picnic? There’s a beach not far from me with a beautiful jacaranda tree. I can take you there in my boat.’ And she made a big show of saying ‘Thank you for your invitation. Let’s go on Sunday’—.”

  “—because she wanted everyone around to know she hadn’t refused him,” Raoul chimed in.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Jaymes confirmed. “The Captain thought his heartfelt words had done it. Or his jacaranda Plan J. But that one failed as miserably as his Ice-cream Plan before it.”

  45

  It was Saturday afternoon at the Orleans, and, like every Saturday, Ms. Lila was preparing one of Raoul’s favorite meals, minced beef in mango and beer, with a side of fried plantains. On Saturdays they always ate an early dinner, after which they took a stroll to the Loyal Cinema for the early showing. Ms. Lila was in the kitchen, busy peeling and slicing, when Raoul returned home from his most recent tête-à-tête with Mrs. Jaymes.

  “Any luck?” she asked him, quickly adding, “did you ever pick up the paint?”

  “No,” he sighed, then added, “I ordered it but have to pick it up next week.”

  “Mrs. Jaymes didn’t tell you anything about Abigail?”

  “She told me, alright,” he said. “Try making heads or tails out of any of it.”

  “Oh, dear. Is she losing her mind? She is well past ninety,” Ms. Lila said.

  “Her mind is sharp as a tack! The problem is Dagmore’s story. It only skirts the issues. Fishing boats, Abigail. None of it connects and none of it has anything to do with Rena Baker. Mrs. Jaymes is certain that the Captain didn’t even know a Baker on Oh.”

  “Well, what did she tell you?” Ms. Lila asked. “You’ve been there the better part of a day.”

  While Ms. Lila saw to her starches and minced her meat, Raoul pulled out his notebook and relayed to her all that Mrs. Jaymes had relayed to him. He told her about the Savings Bank and Abigail’s bursting bosoms, about Mrs. Jaymes’s doubts and Dagmore’s insistence. He told her about the Captain’s plans to win Abigail’s heart, from his very first declined invitation to failed plans B through J.

  “So the jacaranda plan didn’t work either,” Mrs. Lila remarked as she stewed. “What happened? You said Abigail agreed to a picnic, if for all the wrong reasons.”

  “Let’s see,” Raoul said, fishing in his bag for his notes. “Mrs. Jaymes had so much to say I could barely get it all down.” He opened up what was now the third notebook filled with the facts of Dagmore’s life and began to read aloud.

  Mrs. Jaymes had been trying to get the Captain on a picnic with a pretty girl for longer than she cared to remember. When he came home on a Friday evening, however, announcing his Sunday plans with Abigail, she had second thoughts. Now that Abigail’s visit was nigh, her doubts about the girl’s suitability came back—as did her twitching instincts, which told her that things were not destined to end happily. Because she didn’t know what to do to fix them, in an unusual departure from her custom, Mrs. Jaymes kept her doubts to herself and prepared a potato pie for the picnic. Dagmore asked her to stew some plums, too, to bread and fry some snapper, and to ice some bush tea. For his part, he spent all of Saturday cleaning the beach and polishing his boat. Everything had to be perfect if he was to propose to Abigail that they wed.

  Despite the Captain’s careful plans—or because of them, Mrs. Jaymes would have argued—there was to be no proposal that Sunday. Close to twelve o’clock o
n Saturday night, the skies erupted in a loud and pounding rain that drenched the island nonstop until dawn. The sky seemed to clear as the sun came up, but by lunchtime the clouds had overtaken it again.

  “She’s not going to come on a picnic with all this rain,” Mrs. Jaymes gently warned the Captain.

  And she didn’t.

  Though Abigail assured the Captain, at the bus stop the next day, that she still had every intention of joining him for an outing (where she planned to tell him in no uncertain terms to leave her alone), every time they tried to meet after that, their plans were thwarted. If they scheduled a picnic, it rained; an afternoon tea, then one of her children came down with a cough; a picture show, and the current went. Abigail got some new clients, too, with precarious pregnancies that demanded her attention twenty-four hours a day. Months went by during which Dagmore wasn’t able to reach her to reschedule their latest rescheduling. When Abigail finally had time on her hands, Dagmore was so discouraged and depressed that he couldn’t muster the will to call on her, and by the time he snapped out of his funk, she was busy again, with her clients, her babies, her clients’ babies, or with Easter, Christmas, All Saints Day or Guy Fawkes Night. Before Dagmore knew it, a year had gone by, then two. Abigail must have thought she had rid herself of him for good.

  Mrs. Jaymes, meanwhile, began to think that she would never marry Dagmore off. All he wanted was Abigail, and since he couldn’t have her, he sulked. Every time he went to admire the nearby jacaranda that had almost brought them together, the sun sparkled glorious in the sky; but the minute he tried to arrange for Abigail to go see it with him, the clouds rolled in faster than he could say ‘Abigail Davies.’ It seemed to Mrs. Jaymes that the island itself kept Abigail and the Captain apart, though when she suggested as much, he told her she was mad and to keep her instincts to herself, thank you kindly.

  Raoul stopped to flip through his notebook, as if re-checking his facts.

  “Go on,” Ms. Lila said. She was skinning her mangoes and Dagmore’s story was good company while she worked.

  “Well,” Raoul said, flipping some more, “it went on like that, back and forth, for three years, if you can believe it. Three whole years the island managed to keep Dagmore and Abigail apart. That’s Mrs. Jaymes’s theory. The Captain refused to believe it, rightly so, and so what did that crazy old woman tell him to do? Come and talk to me!”

  “Why you?” Ms. Lila asked.

  “Well, not me exactly, but that’s what happened. She told the Captain to seek the advice of his island chums, only he didn’t have any. He came up with the idea to talk to someone who knew Abigail, and he happened to know that Abigail’s best friend was Emma Patrice, who I, at the time, was courting.”

  “That’s when you met him and he talked about magic?” Ms. Lila asked. “I thought you said he didn’t agree with Mrs. Jaymes.”

  “I don’t know what he believed, to tell you the truth,” Raoul answered. “He asked me if I could give him a clue about Abigail’s heart.” At this, Ms. Lila chuckled, knowing the rapport that there had always been between Abigail and Raoul.

  “Exactly,” Raoul said, agreeing with his wife that the Captain’s question was completely absurd. “I told him I could not give him a clue to Abigail’s heart, and then he said his cook had this crazy idea that some kind of island magic was keeping Abigail and him apart. He said for years they tried to make a date and every time they did, it poured with rain or someone died and there was a funeral to attend.”

  Ms. Lila was laughing so hard now, she had to temporarily abandon her chutney. “Imagine, asking you of all people about Abigail and magic in the very same sentence! What did you tell him?”

  “I told him I knew from Emma Patrice that Abigail didn’t want a man, that she had had enough of them already and the kids to show for it. I told him he was barking up the wrong tree. ‘There’s plenty of fish in the sea.’ That’s what I said.”

  “What about island magic? Did you say anything about that?”

  “Not a word. The best part is that Mrs. Jaymes says he took my advice. Listen to this.”

  Dagmore decided that Raoul was right about Abigail. He decided, too, that he had barked up her tree long enough. It was time at last to give up. And he would give up, he promised Mrs. Jaymes, after one last howl. He would leave Abigail alone forever, only not without the picnic she had promised him (where he would make a final attempt to convince her of his devotion). He ordered Mrs. Jaymes to prepare the food and the hamper, and he practically kidnapped Abigail one Sunday as she came from church. Abigail was so shocked, she had no time to decline, or even to react.

  The sun was shining, but Dagmore was ready for anything. He had armed himself with an enormous umbrella, under which they would picnic regardless of what fury the jealous island clouds might decide to unleash. Under a mango tree on a beach near where he had nabbed her, Dagmore laid down a soft, clean blanket and laid out their picnic lunch. There was snapper breaded and fried, macaroni pie, boiled dasheen, and cool cabbage salad. There was ice-cold water, fresh guava juice, and homemade pineapple wine. For dessert, stewed plums and fried dough dusted with nutmeg and cinnamon.

  Sadly, Abigail, once seated and calm on the blanket with the food spread out before her, became aware of the fact that she had been ambushed, hijacked, and plopped at a picnic against her will. She scolded Dagmore for his effrontery, and to her own cries and hollers mixed those of the island skies, which broke into thunder and burst into rain before Dagmore had time to erect his umbrella. When Abigail finally stormed off, after rudely assuring Dagmore that she didn’t love him and never would (mind you, he hadn’t yet got round to declaring himself), the food was a soggy mess of limp dough, battered cabbage, and runny purple mush. Not even the satisfaction of a final howl had the island conceded the Captain.

  “Oh dear,” Ms. Lila said. “The poor man! So Abigail never went to his villa or saw the jacaranda tree.”

  “Mrs. Jaymes said Abigail did go to the house one time after that, but Dagmore was married by then. I would have stayed to find out the details, but my head was hurting.” Raoul took a deep breath and gathered his strength. “I’ll spend the day tomorrow making calls to Killig, see if anyone has turned up any signs of Rena Baker. It’s going to be Monday morning before you know it.” Ms. Lila walked over to her husband and gave his shoulders a sympathetic rub.

  Raoul closed his eyes, enjoying her touch, and muttered, “I might stop at Mrs. Jaymes’s for a quick hour or so before I go to headquarters. You never know. Maybe I’ll get lucky.”

  46

  As Raoul would discover the next day from Mrs. Jaymes, the next chapter of Dagmore’s life had no leather notebooks or visitors or badly behaved birds. Dagmore retreated to his house, where he divided his time between the sea and his sonatas, rarely going out but for quick trips to the Savings Bank or the Island Post. He devoted less time to his fishing boat on shore, though he put it in the water almost every day. He rowed from his property around the southern tip of the island until he could see the harbor of Port-St. Luke. He rowed straight out to sea until he almost lost his bearings. He rowed up the coast to the beach where he had found the jacaranda, but never went ashore again to see it up close.

  With Abigail definitively out of the picture, the island calmed down, and after a few years, Dagmore did, too. He stopped moping, stopped fretting about what he should be doing and just did it. He read his books and smoked cigars on the verandah of his beautiful house, while the stars flickered above him. He played sonatas and felt the presence of his father nearby, and he spent hours in his boat, Oh’s sea close enough to touch, daydreaming of Captain Thomson and his pirates.

  Life at the villa was peaceful for once. It wasn’t unhappy or unpleasant. It also wasn’t joyful or very alive. When the Captain turned forty-five, Mrs. Jaymes, without discussing it, started matchmaking again. Ten years had passed since she and Hammer had first strolled through town evaluating candidates, and a whole new generation of young girls
had grown up in the meantime. Dagmore had no interest in marrying. Dagmore had no interest in not marrying. Nothing much interested him at all, apart from his boat and his piano, so when Mrs. Jaymes brought home Verissa Peterkin, Dagmore didn’t put up a fight.

  She was almost thirty years old and a distant relative of Mrs. Jaymes. Verissa, who had not had her fill of men, wanted nothing more than to marry a man to take care of her and to have a houseful of babies. She knew how to cook and to clean and to sew, and, Dagmore couldn’t help but notice, she was agreeably big on the top and the bottom and nicely thin in the middle, just as he liked. They were wed by a preacher in a private ceremony on the Captain’s beach, attended by Verissa’s parents, Mrs. Jaymes, and Hammer Coates. The sea was calm that day, and the sky quiet and clear. The island blessed the union of Dagmore and Verissa with a cool, soothing breeze that kissed their cheeks when they said their “I do’s.” It was fine with Oh that Dagmore take a wife, as long as he didn’t love her, and Verissa fit the bill.

  There was a semblance of marital bliss in the Bowles villa. Dagmore and Verissa got along well enough, and Mrs. Jaymes had stayed on to help care for the babies that were bound to turn up any day. Hammer still came to unclog the pipes or to tune the piano, which the Captain still played when he wasn’t rowing his boat, and sometimes, after Hammer finished his work, he let Mrs. Jaymes make him a snack that he shared with her in the kitchen. Things were almost cheerful in the Captain’s house.

  Although Dagmore didn’t mind his wife’s company, he felt sure that the company of his own son or daughter would be preferable to hers, and to that end (and to Verissa’s), he applied himself wholeheartedly. Their tolerance of one another was all that Dagmore and Verissa shared; she, too, thought a baby would be more fun than a forty-something sea captain who preferred the company of his boat and his dead father to hers. Thus, she, too, applied herself to the production of a little Bowles, creeping from her room into the Captain’s on a nightly basis (and sometimes in the mornings). When months of trying produced no heir or heiress, Verissa and Mrs. Jaymes conspired to improve the odds. They consulted local experts and collected the bush leaves and herbs renowned to boost fertility, virility, and motility, which both Verissa (knowingly) and Dagmore (unknowingly) consumed. Nothing worked.