The Coconut Latitudes: Secrets, Storms, and Survival in the Caribbean

by Rita M. Gardner

  “I don’t know.”

  “You scared them. Me too.” Berta reaches for me.

  “I don’t care.” I start wailing again until I lose my breath.

  Berta holds on to my arm as if I’ll try to escape. As if there’s anywhere else to go.

  “I hate him,” I whisper, the words barely making a sound.

  “Yeah.” Her voice is flat.

  “He’s going to spank me.”

  “I know. Mama says he didn’t used to be like this; it’s just the rum talking.” She holds me against her and I can feel her heart beat. She’s afraid too, I can smell it.

  More flashlights. Mama’s white face looms out of the shadows. Bobby barks and wags his tail as if we’re playing a game. Daddy looks at me, but for once doesn’t say anything. When we get inside the house, instead of spanking me, Daddy goes to bed without another word. So it’s Mama who turns me over her knee. When Daddy hits me, it really hurts, but Mama’s slaps are softer, like she doesn’t actually mean it. She shakes each time her hand hits my bottom as if it hurts her too.

  Afterwards, Berta lets me curl up beside her in bed and whispers into my hair. “When we’re older, we can live together, and I’ll take care of you.”

  I think of Mama all alone with Daddy and gulp, “What about Mama?”

  “Oh, we’ll be grown up by then. It’ll just be you and me. Now go to sleep and don’t kick me.”

  I decide to pray, but I can’t figure out who or what God is. All I know about God is he’s supposed to be an old bearded man in a white cape. I don’t really want to pray to poor Jesus. I’ve seen pictures of him hanging in the grocer’s store—nailed up and bleeding from the cross, looking skinnier than Daddy, even. Daddy says God doesn’t exist. I shut my eyes as I listen to Berta’s sleeping noises and talk in my head to anybody who will maybe, someday, listen and make things better, like in the stories I read with happily-ever-after endings.

  Chapter Five

  Cocoloco

  Daddy says coconuts are just like him: they don’t survive in cold climates—they must have warm, sandy soil and plenty of sunshine. They grow between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Cocoloco is right in the zone at latitude 18° N. In the daytime, when Daddy is sober, he sometimes reads to me from the article he’s writing for National Geographic about our finca.

  He says he hopes the magazine will publish it. He writes in longhand, and then Mama types it up on the Royal portable. His article is how I know so much about coconuts, which originated in southern Asia. Because the nuts float, they bobbed across the Pacific Ocean to far shores, carried by currents until they made landfall and sprouted to new life throughout the tropics. The survivors of these voyages dot the water’s edge all along Cocoloco’s shoreline. The raggedy palms, starved of real soil, still manage to put down roots on the beach just above the high water mark. The roots are shallow and spreading and hold tight to the earth like hundreds of tentacles.

  Coconut palms rarely snap. After a hurricane’s punch, they’ll recover and just keep growing, bent and gnarled. Twisted almost sideways by storms, they stretch out over the shallows then finally bend upward toward the sun. The green crowns cast spidery shadows on the water below. I like to climb these castaways because I can sprawl out on the nearly horizontal trunk. Hugging the warm, rough surface, I lean over and watch the waves break just a few feet below me while I’m held safely in my swaying perch.

  Daddy’s drinking gets worse, but our palms grow straight up and proud, and they produce more and more coconuts each harvest. In a few more years we’ll be in full production, unless a hurricane hits. He says once the trees are strongly rooted, we won’t have to worry about storms at all. Maybe, I think, my family is like a bunch of coconuts washed onto the beach, trying to spread our own roots into new earth. At night I sometimes have nightmares of a wall of water coming ashore. I have to find something solid to hang on to, and I run toward a palm tree, but I can never get my arms completely around the trunk, and I wake up just before I’m carried off into the ocean.

  At Cocoloco, we’re growing three varieties of palms, and they can pollinate themselves, but according to Daddy, bees and hornets help the process, and plenty of those buzz around everywhere. Copra is the dried meat of the coconut that Daddy sells to companies that turn it into soap and cooking oil. Daddy says that in India, where he first got the idea for Cocoloco, they call coconut palms “trees of heaven” because every single part can be used. In Miches, layers of coconut fronds become roofs for houses, or are braided into baskets and chair seats, and trunks are split into logs. Daddy uses the hard inner shell as fuel to dry the coconut crops into copra. In his workshop he makes lampshades from the fiber of husks, and he turns the half-shells into pretty bowls. Mama cooks with coconut oil and we all wash our hair and dishes with coconut soap. We drink the tangy water of the young green nuts, and eat the jelly inside like custard. When the nutmeat is mature it hardens to a texture like raw carrot, which Mama grates into filling for coconut cream pies and frosting for cakes.

  Daddy says coconuts only have one enemy besides hurricanes: the rhinoceros beetle. He writes about it for his story:

  Most diseases that occur in the palms are caused by either extreme dry or wet weather, and we have had very minor losses. Since the palms don’t put out a taproot, but hundreds of roots about the diameter of a pencil, spreading in all directions, we planted them thirty-four feet apart, which allows plenty of room. As the fronds from one palm seldom reach those of another, the possibility of disease spread is also lessened. The biggest danger to the palms was during the first four years of growth, caused by the “catarones” or rhinoceros beetles. They burrow into the trunk near the ground, eat out the heart and the palm dies. We tried various methods of control and ended up by merely digging them out carefully and killing them. The men who hunted them also hacked into rotting logs to find hatching places and destroy the larvae. Since the beetles seldom attack a mature palm, this danger is practically over.

  I’VE SEEN THOSE DISEASED PALMS, pockmarked with ugly holes; the fronds hanging limp, dying. Once Berta said Daddy uses alcohol to try to kill whatever is eating him alive. It makes me think of the rhinoceros beetles, crawling around inside him, making him sick, but it’s the rum that’s doing all the damage to Daddy, as far as I can figure. She says Daddy has bad thoughts inside, and that rum helps him forget them. “What kind of bad thoughts?” I ask. Berta says she doesn’t know what they are either, and looks away, picking at her lip, like she knows something she can’t say.

  Reading Daddy’s article about our finca, you’d never know that anything is ever wrong here. No bad thoughts or memories or drunkenness—life is just wonderful. He never says much about us in his story—it’s all about coconuts.

  As coco palms bear a new bunch monthly which ripens in a year’s time, and can be harvested every three months, the plantation is also divided into three parts. Thus the first week of every month is used in harvest and the second in husking. The shell-chipping and drying start during the second or third week, depending on the quantity, and this is repeated in the next area in the following month. Maintenance of the land and palms is done by other men who work steadily with the versatile machete, cleaning the debris from around the palms and cutting down the underbrush which grows thick and fast here in the tropics.

  DADDY MAKES IT SOUND LIKE the whole cycle of harvest is orderly and everything happens like clockwork. He’s in charge of the copra drying, and we make the trip to Cocoloco from Miches every few days during each harvest. If the ocean is too rough to have the boat in the water, we journey by foot to the finca, taking twice as long. Crossing the Yeguada River might be easy at low tide, or a scary trip through stiff current at high tide as we balance food sacks above our heads and hope we won’t slip on a submerged branch or rock. From the other side of the river, it’s four kilometers to Cocoloco.

  From the time I hoist my canvas bag over my shoulder, I’m full of dread. We’ll be spending three days up
at Cocoloco on this trip, so we’re laden with knapsacks full of groceries and books. If it were low tide, the walk on the beach would be a stroll on smooth ground. But it’s high tide. The sand is soft and sticky, and we sink up to our ankles in mushy wetness. The Jovero River lies just before the finca. Usually that river stays shoaled up, puddling into a shallow pond, shaded by grape leaf bushes and almendra trees, but today it has broken through its banks, cutting a wide path to the bay. After a storm it’s always hard to gauge its depth, and I already know Berta or I will be, as usual, the guinea pigs sent ahead to see how deep the water is. With us smaller figures as measuring sticks, Daddy will calculate the best crossing spot for the rest of the family, where our food and supplies have a better chance of staying dry. It is my turn at the Jovero.

  Mama takes my pack and I step into the rushing water. I grit my teeth and stumble ahead. Every step is torture because I can’t see below the surface and I’m frightened of what I might step on. After a few yards, the bottom suddenly drops off and I lose my footing. Swept away in the current, I stroke furiously across to the other side, gasping and swallowing water. Daddy, Mama and Berta then take a different route, wading into the ocean where the breakers collide with the current, slowing its rush. Berta carries Bobby, but he wiggles out of her arms and swims easily across. Even though the water is almost waist high, they keep their balance and the food stays dry. Wet and angry, I spit out saltwater as Mama heaves the pack back onto my shoulders.

  “You’ll be dry by the time we get to the finca,” Mama says. She lights a cigarette and pushes dripping hair out of my face. I twist my head away and glare at Daddy’s back. He’s already halfway to the path that leads to the house on stilts.

  Daddy designed the finca house. The downstairs is open, a slab of concrete with a picnic table and bench. Our kitchen is a cabinet in the corner that holds a Coleman camp stove and lantern, and shelves with dishware and staples. A rain barrel perches in a corner, but we can’t count on rain, so we also have a pump outside that gushes out brackish water. Upstairs, a small porch leads into a single room with two sets of bunk beds divided by a curtain. Mama and Daddy have one side, and Berta and I the other. The windows and door are screened to keep out tarantulas and centipedes.

  It’s very quiet at Cocoloco, and Daddy seems happiest here. He doesn’t drink as much away from the village. But that thought doesn’t comfort me. I shiver, not from cold, but from the leftover fright of the Jovero River. Berta primes the pump as Mama puts away our food, and I rinse off my sandy clothes. I wish I could run away, but there’s nowhere to go. Besides, I already tried that once.

  Chapter Six

  Accidents and Mysteries

  The summer has been quiet. We’re not getting any news magazines, or the other US publications we subscribe to, so we’re stuck with the local papers filled with stories celebrating El Jefe’s twenty-fifth anniversary as the country’s leader. One article points out that there have been no civil wars since his rule, a first for the nation. Gracias a Dios y Trujillo, of course. Thanks to God and Trujillo, always.

  We get a letter from the Jonsens in Ciudad Trujillo. They’re coming for a visit at the end of August. Other than the Breedens, who are American, they are my parents’ closest friends. They have three children. Their son Jaak is nine, a year younger than me, and I have a crush on him even if I only see him once or twice a year. The Jonsens came to the island as refugees from Estonia when their country was overtaken by Germany in World War II. Daddy says Trujillo opened the doors to many Eastern Europeans fleeing Nazi persecution, and that El Jefe offered this asylum because he was trying to improve his reputation with the Allied nations. I don’t understand about the reputation part, but Berta fills me in. Many years before we ever moved to the island, Trujillo had ideas of overthrowing Haiti, at one point ordering the killing of thousands of Haitians living on the Dominican side of the border between the two countries. According to Berta, this made the US government very mad. So Trujillo, to make the Americans overlook the Haitian mess, decided to publicize this gesture of goodwill—offering home and freedom to World War II victims. Berta says Trujillo’s plan didn’t really work out too well. The first batch of refugees was sent to the north, where they had to machete their way through brush and jungle to clear homesteads. A small colony became dairy farmers, and their descendants still live near Sosua. One of Carmen’s uncles goes to that village, west of the Samana Peninsula, to buy their cheeses. He says many farmers there have blue eyes and cabello amarillo—yellow hair. Other refugees found their way to the capital and started businesses there.

  I ask Daddy, if Trujillo did those other bad things, then why are we here?

  Daddy waves his arms, as if impatient, and says, “Oh, that was a long time ago—you can’t understand about politics, and besides, everything is stable now, and I wouldn’t have brought the whole damn family here if it wasn’t safe.”

  Berta says that Trujillo only wanted the foreigners for the money and skills they would bring and so the settlers would marry Dominicans and help “lighten” the race. She says Trujillo, who pretends to be of pure Spanish blood, has a Haitian grandmother, and that he powders his face and neck to look whiter than he really is.

  The Jonsens arrive for a week stay. We only see the family once a year, but I’ve liked Jaak since I was five. He has sky-blue eyes and straight blond hair that flops into his face. He’s the most handsome boy I’ve ever seen, and the only boy or girl my age I can talk to in English.

  I’m so excited I kick Jaak in the shins as we take Frisky for a row around the laguna and he falls in the water. I don’t mean to hurt him. He hauls himself up off the mud bank and I can see he’s trying not to cry as he limps toward Casalata. Embarrassed, I yell “I’m sorry,” but he’s inside and doesn’t hear me. I accidentally let go of the boat rope and it now bumps against the reeds on the opposite shore. I grit my teeth and swim out to bring it back. I’m afraid of the water, full of snapping turtles and dark secrets where it’s deep and the bottom is hidden. On shore, Jaak is waiting for me, signaling me for me to throw the rope up to him. He’s laughing at me as I slip in the mud and fall back in the water. I notice his left shin is bright red and scraped raw. I guess we’re even.

  “I’m sorry,” I say again as bits of pond scum stick to my clothes and skin.

  “You’re crazy, you know?” he says. I just nod and keep my gaze on his outstretched arm, which is already getting strong, even at nine years old. Pale hairs cover his forearm like a soft mist. I’ve been reading Lorna Doone. I decide Jaak is John Ridd, Lorna’s suitor, and he’s pulling me out from the dangerous bog on the foggy moors of England, away from the quicksand that can swallow a person alive.

  The night of the Jonsens’ arrival, Mama and Daddy catch up on news they’ve brought from the capital. We kids are playing cards in corner of the porch when the adults’ voices get low, always a signal that something important is being said. I perk up my ears to listen and Berta frowns slightly and also turns her head. Mr. Jonsen is talking about Jesus de Galindez, a professor at a New York university, who suddenly disappeared in a subway station after writing a paper that said bad things about Trujillo. Everyone is saying Trujillo had him kidnapped and brought to the Dominican Republic, and that he’s been murdered by El Jefe’s orders. Daddy and Mama are leaning in, paying close attention.

  I think back to when we rented the green house, before Casalata was built, and how scared and mad Daddy was when he found out that the owner was one of El Jefe’s hired killers. We’ve stayed clear of the owners since then when they come to spend time in their vacation cottage, except for when there were some young girls, nieces I guess, who arrived in the summer and wanted to play. They seemed normal to me, except for having new clothes in the latest fashions. But they weren’t that friendly to my other Dominican friends, like somehow city girls were more important than daughters of seamstresses or grocers. They played with me because we owned a finca, or because we were Americans. I’ve already figured
out being a Norteamericana makes me different no matter what. At least no one will want to hurt us.

  Casalata fills with laughter during the rest of the Jonsens’ visit and time passes too quickly. When our guests leave, stillness fills the air. I feel a sense of waiting, but I’m not sure why. No American news magazines arrive, just the stray National Geographic every few months. Early the next year, Mr. Jonsen sends us a Life magazine with a story about Gerald Murphy, an American pilot who worked for the local Dominican airline. I remember reading an article about him in El Caribe newspaper a few months ago, about his empty car found by an ocean cliff, near Ciudad Trujillo. They said it probably was an accident. But the Life article gives me goose bumps because it connects the pilot to the professor, Galindez. The story says Murphy flew Galindez (dead or alive, it wasn’t clear) to the Dominican Republic shortly after the professor vanished. Now Murphy has disappeared too, and this article says it’s no accident—it’s murder. The American government is investigating both cases.

  Later in the week, after we’ve all read the magazine from cover to cover, I notice this particular story has been ripped out. Doing chores the next day, I find it in pieces in the kitchen garbage, under a wad of coffee grounds. Mama and Daddy don’t say another word about it, but it’s clear they don’t want anyone else to know they’ve read the story about the missing professor and pilot.

  Chapter Seven

  Church Bells and Cock Fights

  Everybody in Miches goes to church on Sundays except us. The bells peal twice, loud and clear, once for the eight o’clock service and then again for ten o’clock mass. The sound ripples through town all the way to the river. Daddy is anti-Pope and very anti-Catholic, and doesn’t much care for the Protestants either, although there aren’t many of those in Miches. The priest, Padre Daniel, is the only other foreigner in town, a French Canadian who speaks Spanish with a heavy accent. He drops in one day soon after Casalata is put together to invite our family into the church fold.