Trinidad Noir

by Earl Lovelace

  “It’s not whether I like him or not—it’s not about that. You can’t resist Ralph, he’s like a force of nature,” Drew told Isobel when he first started seeing her.

  “I can resist him,” she’d replied.

  “That’s what all women say,” he told her, but secretly he was pleased that she could see through Ralph.

  Was this how it happened? That you crossed lines so easily? On their small island, where good and evil were so carefully demarcated, it was surprisingly easy to move between the two. Ralph was supported by a strong religious platform. It had been a clever manoeuvre by their prime minister to appeal to the righteous, a hard-nosed approach that sent shivers around the region. What was it the papers said? An unprecedented show of military muscle.

  Every day, from the window in his office, Drew looked at the palms that waved the dead through, large branches forming a canopy against the sun. He was sorry that he had met with the boy’s mother; sorry that she’d shown him the picture of the boy. In the photograph, an even-featured boy with odd topaz eyes had smiled out at him. White teeth set against copper skin, a saga-boy smile.

  “Why do they keep calling you out at night?” Isobel had asked him on the way to work that morning. “Tell Ralph, when you have lunch with him today, that your wife wants to know why he keeps calling her husband in the middle of the night.”

  That night, after they’d made love, Isobel fell asleep with her back pressed up against him. She was sleeping deeply when he shook her awake.

  “I have something to tell you,” he said.

  Isobel

  The night Drew had woken her to tell her about the boy, there was no more lovemaking. She had to take a sleeping pill to fall asleep again. She woke groggy and waited for him to go to work before she got up. The hot water beating on her head when she showered cleared her thoughts. She would find the boy’s mother and tell her the terrible thing her husband had done. She wore a comfortable pair of shoes; it would take an hour to walk to the hospital where she guessed the woman would be. Drew had taken the car that morning and he would be expecting her to stay at home.

  She walked through the cows that grazed under the branches of the large saman trees. The passion fruit vine on the fence that separated their house from the banking complex was heavy with fragrant globes. She walked past the guava trees on the hillock that overlooked the houses of the rich on the coast. From here she could see the hospital on the other side of the savannah, up the street and left off the highway. She timed her breath to her stride, as if she were pacing herself for a long run. The road was quiet, the school rush over, her girls sitting safely in their classrooms; Robbie was having his morning fruit at his grandmother’s home. Behind her, a truck roared up the highway, gears grinding as it picked up speed. She walked faster, trying to outpace the memory of Drew’s face. He dropped the children at school every morning, letting her sleep because he knew she liked to read late into the night. He’d probably kept them quiet this morning, packing Robbie’s bag and putting Mara’s hair in a ponytail.

  She broke into a short run, her breath labouring as the truck thundered past her, leaving her with a lungful of diesel fumes.

  The woman was where she expected. She’d noticed her a few days before, the day she’d dropped Drew at work. She’d seen the violence in the way he’d grabbed the woman’s hand. This had so shocked Isobel, she’d braked the car and called out to him. Now it made sense. And this was how she knew the woman would be here, sitting on a bench outside the mortuary.

  “They have him,” Isobel said when she sat down next to the boy’s mother. “They have him inside. I’ll come with you to get him. Come, we will go together.” She was ready to face Drew. There was no need to tell the woman what had happened; she would be given a sealed casket. She told Carmelita to say that she would return with a lawyer if they did not produce her son.

  Drew let them into his office, his face even. Had she expected something more dramatic, a scene perhaps, or some form of repentance? Instead, his quiet acquiescence frightened her. She’d been sure that she had the upper hand, but she’d underestimated him, and now it was she who was forced to consider her position. What had she gambled with this move, what must she be prepared to surrender?

  “The casket is sealed,” he told Carmelita. “These discrepancies are quite normal. We were due to call you today. I am so sorry for your loss.”

  Isobel was thrown by his poise, shocked by his ability to lie so easily. This shifting of gears revealed a stranger hidden inside her husband. When she was a child, she’d once slept the whole night with a garden lizard under the blanket. It had made her feel ill to think of the lizard heating up from her warmth.

  “The casket will go to the funeral home,” she heard him say. “I’m signing the papers to release the body to the funeral home. You can bury him from there.”

  * * *

  When he came home that evening, they did not speak for three days. On the third night, he woke her in the middle of the night.

  “Do you know what the fuck you have done?” he asked her. “Do you? You’ve put us all in danger.”

  “I don’t want to know, Drew.” She kept her face averted. How much was she prepared to give up? Her marriage? The lives of her children?

  The next morning they went on as usual because neither could think of what else to do.

  * * *

  It was only later that Isobel was able to piece together what had happened. The woman had bribed the funeral director to release the casket to her.

  Let me bring the boy home for a last night. Let me feed his spirit one last meal. Let me pack his bag for heaven.

  This is what Isobel imagined Carmelita would have said to the funeral director. It’s what she would have said.

  Later Carmelita told her that she had bathed Daniel with lavender-scented water, sponging each laceration and examining every inch of his body. The next morning, she’d asked Father Duncan to reseal the coffin. In the family plot, he settled gently in the loamy dirt grown by generations of flesh and blood. That night, Carmelita found a gun hidden under some clothes in Daniel’s room. There was no one that she could ask about the technicalities of a gun. It shot when she fired. She looked up the address of Dr. Andrew Olivierre. It took her less than a week to learn the man’s routine.

  * * *

  It still surprised Isobel that neither child had mentioned the attack at the old house. In the aftermath, both girls had been calm. Carmelita had appeared just after midday. The neighbours said she sat there for most of the afternoon, waiting through a light drizzle under the trunk of a frangipani tree. When Drew pulled up to the gate, she moved quickly.

  When she heard the first shots, Isobel ran toward the echo. By the time she arrived at the gate, Drew had Carmelita pinned against the car. With her arm twisted behind her back, her scapula stood in bold relief, like a broken wing.

  Isobel pulled Drew off the keening woman, her hands frantic over his body, feeling for mortal wounds to explain the blood.

  “Surface wounds,” she told him. “It’s okay. It’s okay, Drew. It’s just a pellet gun. It’s just pellets.” Isobel knew that old women who live in the hills knew how to deliver babies, brew raw medicine, and cook like angels, but they did not know how to use guns. The pellet gun had wobbled in her trembling hands.

  “Why you lie? Why you lie about Daniel? You know they kill him. You see how they strip his body and rip it up like a old bedsheet. You see how they knock out his teeth and pull out his nails. I grow that child like a plant. From a seed, I grow him. Why you lie, Mr. Doctor? God don’t sleep. You will rot in hell.”

  “Stop it,” said Isobel. “Enough.”

  “Miss Isobel. Is his signature. His writing. He signed it. And he had to see what I saw. He knew. He knew what they did and he lied for them. Is pure evil. Pure evil your husband do that night.”

  That night Isobel and Drew made love for the first time since the day she’d appeared with Carmelita. At first they were caut
ious but soon they held each other with the sharp bites and blind thrusts of an unsettled argument. They were still very good together. But that morning she kept her face away, throwing an arm over her eyes and turning inward until he left the bed, not wanting to see the scabby marks on his chest.

  By the end of the week they had moved to a quiet suburb and changed their phone numbers.

  * * *

  Isobel had never lived in the shadow of a mahogany tree. It stood tall, reaching toward the sky, giving off resinous clicks as it stretched its branches over the house. In the evening, the tree turned its leaves to catch the dry-season breeze that rode down the valley. If she listened from the kitchen, Isobel could hear the tiny pops as the tree released its cocoa-shaped pods, setting free the little helicopter spirals. Each morning she collected the spent husks where they lay curled like tiny sculptures on the sloping lawn that ran to the edge of the driveway.

  The man who had lived there many years before had raised hibiscus. People had driven from all corners of the island to choose from his rainbow-hued hybrids. It gave her pleasure to return hibiscus to the garden and tuck them neatly into fat manure beds that she shaped with her garden hoe.

  Her new home was deceptive, modestly folding in on itself, presenting a bland facade to the road, but it came from a long pedigree of high-ceilinged, graceful houses that dotted the surrounding hills. It was not like the home of the man who lived across the street, a good-looking brown-skinned man they nicknamed The Whistler. His house was contemporary, bare-boned, dramatic.

  Below their house was a damp cellar, secured with a temperamental padlock, where Isobel stored the baby bassinet with its elaborate netting and faint scent of vetiver. She had spent her first mornings in their new home in this cool dark cave rooting out hidden treasures from long-gone eras. All the while she hunted, she could hear her neighbour whistling his way through a catchy series of 1920s dance hits. She heard him sweeping his front steps as he whistled, a cheerful reassuring sound that reminded her of the nursery smell of boiling rice and butter. When she’d looked out from the cellar, all she could see was the smudge of his broom as it danced in a mist of sunlit dust motes. She’d heard that he was very rich, money made from growing tomatoes, according to the other neighbours.

  Isobel and Drew seldom spoke of the incident at the old house. Now days were spent arranging new routines. Once she had built her world on the assumption that Drew was a good man. It was he who attended church with the three children every week. Her oldest, at eight, had just begun to question why Isobel came only infrequently to Mass. Ava was pretty and fine-boned, looking like Drew’s mother, and the old lady shamelessly favoured her over the younger and plumper Mara. Her baby, Robert, was still beautiful in a bow-lipped, milky way. Everyone had told her that she would love the third child the most. When he emerged, perfectly whole and male, she feared he would steal her heart from her daughters. But her love for each child had a distinct flavour and texture, mercurial in the way it bubbled through her life.

  The new house sat in the shadow of The Whistler’s house. At certain times of day, the raw-boned house eclipsed their light, blocking the sun at its hottest point. Ralph had found the house for them after the shooting, though for a time there was talk about moving to Canada. Ralph said not to worry about Carmelita and they had not pressed charges. There would be no retribution and even if she did go to the police, she would not get far. Isobel made Drew promise that Ralph would not harm the old lady.

  “It’s the least you can do for her.”

  Ralph said he knew the neighbour, a nice man. He grew lots of tomatoes; he’d made his fortune in them. When she’d first heard him whistling, Isobel had thought about the boy. That day, on the bench outside the mortuary, Carmelita had told Isobel about Daniel. In his last months, Daniel had learned to whistle. He perfected the birdcalls of the Northern Range, practising the gong sound of the bellbird that lived high in the moist forest and whistling out the window at the jumbie bird in the mango tree. These were memories Carmelita wanted to keep.

  It was good that Carmelita and Isobel never knew the bloody tune Daniel whistled until the end. Or how the soldiers in the forest had prepared the body of the child in the way they were taught by their elders. Brutal as they had been in life, they were gentle and superstitious in death, preparing the body with deference, worrying about the nine-night’s ritual. Should they send a note to Dr. Drew to ask him to nail the boy’s feet to the hastily assembled box that guilt made them build before they sent him to the mortuary? Should they insist that Dr. Drew bury the boy facedown so he could not come back for retribution? In their heavy uniforms, these men did not fear the living, but deep in the forest they would take no chances with a dead boy.

  If Isobel had known these things, she might not have stayed. But she never knew any of this. Instead, in the dry rotting-leaf smell of her new garden, she learned how to skim unwelcome thoughts from the surface of her mind.

  It was Mara who saw the dragonfly, a big blue darner among the red ones that gathered every evening to dance above the olive water of the pond. “Did you know,” Isobel whispered, tickling the girls, “old wives say that he uses his tail to sew the lips of naughty boys shut? The devil’s darning needles.” They’d looked for him again, but he’d only come that once.

  The Bonnaire Silk Cotton Tree

  by Shani Mootoo

  Foothills, Northern Range

  (Originally published in 2015)

  At the beginning, or the end—one decides as necessary which is which—of every village on the island stands a lone silk cotton tree. Woeful though it appears, its naked trunk towers above neighbouring trees. Above, its spread of branches houses birds, and at night bats rest there. Below, among the cavities in its massive buttressed roots, live some of the island’s larger snakes. It is home, too, it has long been known, to restless duppies and the mischievous yet irascible jumbie.

  * * *

  Note: In one of Trinidad’s newspapers, an Irish priest named O’Leary writes a weekly column on things spiritual and religious. Father O’Leary frequently expounds on the proliferation of the dark arts of the Caribbean, no doubt in an attempt to draw the followers of such arts toward the church, and to discourage traffic in the opposite direction. From his newspaper-pulpit he has said that the Good Lord knoweth best and giveth in wisdom, while the jumbie gives—and yes, give he does—without judiciousness. The Good Lord, he says, guides His flock to know what is good and then to seek only such as is good to them and to others. But with jumbies, he admonishes, you must be careful what you ask for—for ask and ye shall surely receive, whether it is good for ye or not—because the jumbie gives only in exchange, and nine out of ten times he extracts from you more than you had imagined you’d pay—and do not for a minute doubt it: pay you must—the cost invariably including that you will bind yourself to a living hell. Father O’Leary does not realize, however, that his intentions have the reverse effect, and that church-, temple-, mosque-going people, and others with and without religious affiliations, all made desperately curious by his reports, have sought out the tree and its number one resident, each one imagining himself or herself to be that lucky one out of the ten.

  Nandita Sharma was an artist, but unfortunately her medium was photography. In her recent solo exhibition at an art gallery in Port of Spain—timed to coincide with the free-spending mood of people at Carnival time—fifteen large framed photos were displayed. They were all colour still lifes of seafood. A close-up of a fish on the vendor’s counter, its eye trained on the photographer. An extreme macro-shot of a bundle of tied crabs. Filling the entire plane of a thirty-two-inch square photograph, a single oyster was open, its meat bulging and glistening. Impaled on the upturned tines of a silver fork so highly polished its surface was a mirror reflecting the distorted image of the photographer was an almost transparent shrimp. Everyone who was anyone had come to the opening, and Nandita heard how technically masterful her photographs were, what a great eye she had, and
that she should really do something with such talent. She was asked if she could come to someone’s house and photograph the family, and if she was available to photograph someone else’s mother’s eightieth birthday celebration. Despite the compliments, not one of her photographs sold.

  Family who had attended were dubiously proud. They took her out to a restaurant after to celebrate, as her father put it in a toast to her, “the conclusion of that phase of your life and the hope that another is about to begin.” Her father, owner of the largest newspaper on the island, said that they could finally see her potential in the field and offered to speak on her behalf with the paper’s food editor about a job for her. She didn’t mean to raise her voice against her father’s offer, but the offer was evocative of all the reasons and incidents that had led her some years ago, at age twenty-seven, to let go of her place in her family’s home and to find, instead, an apartment of her own.

  Nandita’s exhibition was reviewed in the newspaper on the page directly opposite the one on which appeared Father O’Leary’s article for that day. Although Nandita was a Hindu, albeit non-practising, she usually read Father O’Leary’s contributions. His articles were talked about by people of all persuasions, and she herself found them curiously compelling, as well as scandalous and humorous, whether he had intended them to be or not. But on the day her review appeared she had no interest, at least not immediately, in Father O’Leary and his ideas. The reviewer of her exhibition had been harsh, remarking that the hyper-realism possible—and even inherent—in the medium of photography, and as exploited by Sharma, was redundant and off-putting. Perhaps, the reviewer suggested, Sharma should make paintings from her photographs. The plasticity of paint combined with the physical, energetic act of applying paint to canvas would tame the subject, the reviewer predicted, and perhaps then the fruit of Sharma’s excellent eye for composition and detail would adorn, as they should, walls of the homes of the island’s art collectors.