Home by Another Way

by Robert Benson

  “Oh, good, then I won’t have to go.”

  In a minute while I am packing my suitcase, I will say, “Will you listen for the telephone while I am in the shower?”

  “Oh, yes,” she will say. “They will call soon.”

  We are both pretending we are expecting the telephone call that says the retreat has been canceled for one reason or another. My experience is that Episcopalians will cancel a retreat on short notice if it turns out they cannot get separate rooms from each other and Methodists will call it off if they cannot get coffee before the dining room is open in the morning. I expect some evangelical group to call some morning and say they do not need the retreat after all because the Rapture has come and they are all going on to glory without the rest of us. I do hope they call before I get to the airport. I do not know what happens here after the Rapture, but I am certain I want to be in line next to Sara rather than standing alone in the line at security.

  One of the other ritual conversations we now have goes like this: “We have to leave St. Cecilia on Saturday,” Sara will say.

  She is only allowed to say this sentence during the last week we are there. Before that, we both have to pretend we will be able to stay forever.

  “No, no, no,” I will say. “I called Margaret, and she said no one else is booked into Seastone until at least 2010, and that is a tentative booking, and we can stay as long as we like.”

  “Oh good,” she will say as she turns back to her book. “Thanks, honey.”

  “You are welcome.”

  Such ritual sentences and conversations can slip by you if you are not paying attention. You can have one and not even know it.

  Some of them are signals and signs. Some of them are reminders of moments when you discovered that something about your life together had changed or was about to.

  I have long believed the way you get places in your life is that you keep moving in a certain direction over a long period of time, and then one day you look up, and you have crossed the line into some new place. You had no idea you were anywhere close to the line in the first place.

  That is how Sara and I decided to get married.

  We had been together for a while, a good long while, long enough for me to have put in a couple of thousand hours working on the gardens in her backyard. One afternoon we were sitting in the sunshine, watching the goldfinches we had tricked into the yard with the proper feeder and waiting to see the sun drop down below the hills across the way.

  “What are you thinking about?” I asked.

  Then I added, “Don’t edit.” It was a premarital ritual sentence that meant I really do want to know what you are thinking although it could turn out I would rather not have known. She was quiet for a few moments.

  “I am thinking about getting married,” she said.

  “So am I,” I said. And then we both went back to watching the sun set and the goldfinches feed and said no more about it.

  The next evening we were in the car headed to a restaurant for dinner. I stopped at the light at the big intersection of Old Hickory Boulevard and Lebanon Road. We were not talking much about anything, partly because at least one of us was still thinking about getting married. It was sixteen minutes after six for those of you keeping score at home.

  Sara reached over and turned down the radio.

  “To you,” she said.

  “Oh, good,” I replied. “This is going to work out great.” We turned the radio back up.

  Neither of us actually knows who proposed to whom, but we both take credit for it. Which is fine. There has been enough joy in it to go around.

  “So how did you get here from London?” we asked David one evening when we were sitting at the Galley Door. It was apparent to us—British accent and slightly-wind-and-sun-smoothed tan notwithstanding—that David has not always lived on St. Cecilia. For some reason we had a sense David was a transplant, an expatriate from England. I was interested in how he stumbled over the line and onto St. Cecilia.

  There are clues in words. Sometimes you catch them; sometimes you do not. We are word people, Sara and I, people of the sentence, if you will. And whatever the clues were, we had picked up on them and guessed correctly.

  As I was asking the question, I was watching his granddaughter play in the sand by the beach. Earlier his grandson had warned me I should roll up my windows because rain was coming. When I questioned his forecast, he pointed to the notch between the big mountain and the second ridge to the north. “If there are clouds in that notch, then it will rain,” he said. He was right; it did rain. I found myself wishing I had raised my children here, where the sun shines and the water is warm and the world looks as though you are standing on the edge of it.

  I was watching his daughter-in-law welcome people to the tables, and I could see his wife and his son through the windows of the kitchen.

  “We came out for Christmas one year,” he said. “We just sort of never went back.”

  “Never?”

  “Well, we had to go back to put the house up for sale, but that was the only time.”

  “How long ago was it?” we asked.

  “Sixteen years.”

  One of the people we have come to know is a man named Tim. The first time we met Tim, he waited on our table at the hotel restaurant at Bluewater Beach. He was formal and attentive, and I remember thinking this was too small a job for the person Tim seemed to be.

  The next time we were there, we discovered Tim was the maître d’. And the next time he had changed from a white jacket to a suit, and as he chatted us up while we waited for dinner, he told us he was also the restaurant manager.

  On the way home to the States, I was looking at some of the magazines I had picked up in St. Cecilia. There was a feature story on Tim. He is the postman in St. Peter’s Parish, and he hitchhikes into town each morning to pick up the mail, and then he hitches back to deliver the mail before he goes to Bluewater Beach to be a waiter or a host or whatever else is on tap for the evening.

  Most everyone we have met on St. Cecilia cobbles together a living. We know this because we have heard it over supper somewhere.

  David works at the Galley Door four days a week, and he and his wife also have a gift shop downtown. Randy cooks at Domingo’s, and he cooks at Three Palms too, and he has a house where he does private dinner parties every month or so.

  The guy who owns the art gallery is also a painter. He is also an illustrator, which is how he makes a living. He spends a fair portion of the year in the States, hustling illustration business so he can hang on to his studio and his gallery. The woman who watches the gallery for him while he is gone is a housewife whose husband teaches at the medical school. They also housesit for people.

  Tim is a postman and a waiter and a maître d’ and a restaurant manager. Andrew has a restaurant and a water-sports business and a catering service and runs the biggest annual fishing tournament on the island.

  I met a man at the Heptagon one day who handed me a card that said, “Taxi, tours, real-estate sales, property management, auto rental, and personal services.”

  I heard a story about a house painter who was considering branching out into neurosurgery. It was not a bad strategy, I suppose, there not being a neurosurgeon on the island. When it was explained to him how much training and cost was involved, he thoughtfully considered his position for a moment. “I think I will need a manual,” he said.

  It is an island of generalists. A crowd of folks with whom I—writer, housekeeper, teacher, retreat leader, and general all-round yardman—feel very comfortable. It is a crowd of people with whom I am very comfortable breaking bread. It is a crowd of people who keeps stumbling over lines into new places.

  It may well be a crowd with whom I could be comfortable making a life.

  Stumbling over the line is how I became a writer too.

  I was raised in a family of publishers and writers and poets and artists of all sorts. The people I knew when I was growing up, the grownups I mean, we
re my father’s publishing and artistic friends. They would stay at our house, and we would go on vacations together, and I was forever being hauled off to some concert or conference or something and listening to people read their words or sing their songs.

  It turned out I had a gift for turning phrases and for the random rearrangement of alphabetical characters that would bring a smile to the faces of strangers from time to time. I knew it when I was thirteen. I spent many years in publishing and then in advertising and then in editing, trying to learn how to be a writer.

  One day in the course of ghostwriting a book for the third time in my life, I realized I could write a book of my own. To this day I can tell you where I was and what time of day it was and what I was wearing and which paragraphs I was writing. But I have to say that I had no idea the line was in front of me until I realized I was on the other side of it. I had gone from wanting to be a writer to talking about being a writer to actually being a writer, and I was the last one to notice I had finally crossed over the line.

  Most everything good in my life has been a surprise. I am far enough along now to stop trying to figure stuff out and to spend my time trying to be awake enough to see stuff when it happens and attentive enough to hear the clues in the sentences around me.

  It could be I stumbled over some sort of line between living in the States and living in St. Cecilia one day in a rainstorm. They have a rain quota in St. Cecilia they are supposed to hit before the dry season comes, and evidently they had some catching up to do that day.

  I had managed to get the scribbling round in and was headed upstairs to see if Sara was ready for the sunning round when the clouds came up and the sky started to fall.

  We sat on the porch and watched the road down by Bluewater Beach being washed away. We watched as a couple of boats in the bay filled up with so much water we thought they were going to sink. So did the owners, because they came out twice during the height of the storm to bail out the boats. We watched the water back up out of the bay and up toward the hotel at Bluewater Beach. And we watched the mud line move out into the bay as the mud washed down from the hills and the ridges. It went on for eight hours.

  At one point we went in to make a sandwich and realized there were three inches of water in our bedroom. I thought the water had been coming in the windows, but it turned out the cistern under the house had been overcome by the rain, and the cool, clean, fresh water was backing up into our bedroom.

  We spent the whole day on the porch, up under the veranda, watching the rain and the water and the cars getting stuck. And I realized I never wanted to leave.

  Going to St. Cecilia may have started out to be about going to the sun. It is crossing a line about something else, it seems.

  David says that often the people who like Windbreak Cove are the sort of people who come back to stay. I hope he is right. And I think I already knew that.

  If you stay in a cottage for a few days or a few weeks at Windbreak Cove, then you cannot just stay at Windbreak Cove. There is no restaurant to go to and no coffee in the lobby and no room service. They come and clean your cottage only about every three days, and the office is closed for more hours than it is open. You cannot just hide out at Windbreak and never actually go to St. Cecilia.

  When it comes to food and supplies, to neatness and clean clothes, to information and conversation, you are on your own, by and large. You have to live a life there, your own life, and if it does not work from day to day and hour to hour, you cannot call the front desk. Most of the time, no one is there. On the one hand, you are happy for the solitude. On the other hand, you discover that you have to leave your solitude to go and find your place.

  It could be I stumbled over the line to St. Cecilia one Sunday morning when I was at St. Peter’s for Mass.

  St. Peter’s Anglican Church is the oldest Protestant church in the Leeward Islands. It is one of four Anglican parishes on the island, and they share a priest. The first time we went, we happened to be there on the Sunday of the month he was there as well.

  St. Cecilians consider themselves to be a religious people. The government literature declares them to be a “Bible-oriented society.” Religion is an intrinsic part of everyday life. Not, it seems to me, in an obtrusive way, but rather in an elemental way. Among the holidays—paid holidays when the island shuts down and the government closes—are Boxing Day and Whitmonday. How many places can you go where the day after Pentecost is declared a national holiday? Where I come from, even the church folks do not take the day off for Pentecost.

  There is a tradition in the churches on St. Cecilia. They have a lot of visitors because of the tourist trade, and if you are a visitor to their service, then they ask you to stand and to say who you are and where you are from. Then they applaud.

  Someday I would like not to have to introduce myself at St. Peter’s anymore.

  We have a sort of shrine in our house now, on a small green table in a sky blue colored room. It has a small lamp we leave on night and day. The shrine has Sara’s discount card from the supermarket on the island. It has coins and bills with Queen Elizabeth on them. She keeps her St. Cecilia driver’s license there and the statue a friend gave us the last time we were there. There are sketches too, penciled onto the back of watercolor cards—sketches of the way Sara would build a house if we get the chance to build one there.

  In addition to our shrine, we also have a running list of schemes to cobble together a living on St. Cecilia.

  We can do our regular work there already. Writers and agents can work anywhere there is electricity and a phone line and an airport and a FedEx drop. Sara thinks if we had a small bed-and-breakfast, maybe four rooms besides our own, then we could have guests for two weeks a month and have no guests for the other two.

  The last time we were there, we visited the art gallery. There was a card in the window that said it was for sale, and the asking price was not out of reach. If my son were graduating from college this spring instead of graduating from high school, we might well have pulled a David. “We came out for our anniversary and just sort of never went home,” I can hear myself saying.

  Sara has also noticed the salt flats on a sister island and thinks salt mining—for cooking salt or for some beauty product—may well be the answer. We have bought a new camera too, and Sara is working on her photography skills, and I am composing romantic greeting cards in my head.

  We may well be crossing a line here.

  Getting married led us to the shore for our honeymoon. Which led to our going to the beach for our anniversary each October, and that led to an attempt to celebrate our tenth anniversary in a way we would never forget.

  That led to a ride across a lagoon in The African Queen and the little parade, and then it led to St. Cecilia. Who can tell exactly what may happen next?

  The last time we were there, I was awake early on the first morning, sitting up and about to get out of bed to begin the scribbling round, and Sara sat up in the bed. With wonder in her voice, she said, “Look at where we are.”

  So we looked. Past the soft yellow walls of the little bedroom, with the first light slipping in through the windows. Out the window then and over the bougainvillea, deep purple against the white of the balcony and the early blue of the sky, a sky that still held the moon and some of the stars. Through the trees and across the grasses waving in the wind and on to the edge of the cliff. And over the edge to the straits, all green and gray and blue, with a fishing boat off in the distance and ripples of waves and the shore of St. Catherine in the distance, lit up by the sun.

  Later, in my head, I started driving the island, down past Bluewater and along the shoreline to Princetown. Up the hill and through the roundabout and back around past Leon’s and into the hills where the plantations are. Past the art gallery road and then around the curve to where the horse track is and the beach where we went body-surfing with the children. Up along the windward coast to Three Kings Bay and then around to Newcastle.

  Later
in the day I wished I had mustered up the wit to say, “Look at who we are among too.” The people at St. Peter’s and in the market and down at Domingo’s. Margaret and David and Andrew and Kate and Mrs. Gilbert. Deb and Daisy and Linda and Tim and James and Captain Christmas. And the folks who are liming at the Heptagon and shopping at the Trade Winds.

  I want these people to be my friends, I thought. And I may be willing to cross a line to make it so.

  We were standing in the airport in Miami, headed toward Charlotte and then back to Tennessee. Sara sighed.

  “I do not know if I am going home or leaving home,” she said. And then we were both quiet for a long time. It had been our first trip to St. Cecilia, and we were both stunned we could feel that way about a place so quickly and so deeply. We were afraid to say much more.

  “Are you going to be there when I get there?” I finally asked in Charlotte. It is a derivative of one of the ritual sentences of our marriage.

  She nodded, though more slowly than she often does. There were tears in her eyes as she started to understand what we had just discovered or maybe discovered again. Not only on St. Cecilia but in our hearts.

  “Then, either way, it will be home,” I said. “So I am going too.”

  Later, as the plane pushed back, one of us said, “With you.”

  And we began to giggle.

  Author’s Note

  I have a confession to make, and I have gratitude that is due, as is the case with all writers almost all the time, whether we always do so or not.

  The confession is that St. Cecilia and its people and its places are real, though most of the names in this book are not, including the name St. Cecilia. There are some names that are real, the sort of obvious ones, like the name of the body of water the island sits in and the name of the state I live in. But I have invented names for the real places mentioned and described in these pages. I did so for a reason.