by Amanda Smyth
Perhaps because Joe Rodriguez was now afraid of me, perhaps because he saw that there would never be a winner in this game, that at very best, I might leave the Rodriguez household and someone else would come along in my place, yet another girl, not Brigid, because— as his mother told him—Brigid was never coming back, but another girl (maybe as hopeless as the last one) that he would have to get used to all over again, he decided at last to accept me.
I knew that Helen Rodriguez was pleased, because she told me so. I was more help to her than she had imagined. Like on that day when we were driving from the grocery and she was about to pull into Roberts Street, in Woodbrook, and I saw a little boy escape from his mother who was busy talking to somebody, and run out into the road. I called out, “Madam, stop!” She slammed her foot on the brakes and the child stopped right there, his eyes wide and frightened. When his mother came running, Helen Rodriguez put her hands up to her face. “Thank God you saw him, Celia.” And another day, when she was buying material for a new dress in Glendenings, and she was flustered and hot, she dropped a ten-dollar note on the floor. “Madam, look,” I said, and picked up the money.
“You’re not just another pair of hands, you’re another pair of eyes.”
I liked to go with her on these short trips. I liked going out in the car. While she drove, she often talked about England. She told me that she came from a beautiful village in a county called Warwickshire. At college, she trained to be a schoolteacher. If she hadn’t met Dr. Emmanuel Rodriguez, when he was studying at the nearby university, she might still be in England, teaching. But then, that’s what true love is, she said that day, a kind of sacrifice.
“In the same way that God gave His Son as a testimony of His love for His children. When you love someone you give things up.” Not that she would ever compare her love for her husband with the love of God!
Helen Rodriguez longed to go back to England. She missed her sister who still lived in the town where they had grown up. They were very close, she said. At the same time, they were quite different. Isobel was strong and capable, running the farm where she lived with her husband and four children. “I hardly know my nieces and nephews. And they don’t know Consuella. They’ve never even seen her.”
She talked about the changing seasons. When leaves turned yellow, red, orange, and fell from the trees. And winter, when snow made a thick white blanket and water froze so hard you could walk on lakes and ponds and, sometimes, rivers, too. “Of course it gets very cold, but the snow is so beautiful and children love it.” She tried to describe her favorite spring flowers. “They’re yellow and they have an orange spout that shoots out of the center. They have a powdery, sweet scent. Have you ever noticed that flowers here barely smell?”
“What about the frangipani, madam?” I said.
“Yes, I suppose so. But what good are they really, you can’t put them in a vase.” At the bottom of the road where Helen lived as a child there was a wood filled with bluebells. She asked me, “Have you ever seen bluebells?” I wanted to say, How could I? Summers, she said, were warm but never hot like here where you can’t breathe. She often found herself yearning for strawberries. Once she said, “I hate this place.” And then she was sorry, because, she said, Trinidad is my home.
“I have family in England as well.”
“Where?” she asked, surprised.
“Southampton,” and I said it in a quiet way, as if it was a private and personal matter. Sometimes she spoke to me as if I was her friend. But even then, I knew I could never be her friend.
I FOUND A way to get along with Marva. I asked about her life, and she was pleased that I was interested in it. I’d say, Marva, how is your daughter, and she’d say, my poor daughter, my poor daughter (her daughter was blind), and I would say, “The meek shall inherit the earth,” or, “God is good and He will take care of her,” and if Helen Rodriguez heard me say this, so much the better; a look of praise came over her face at once.
Marva had married young. Her first husband worked in a funeral parlor. After she caught him fooling around with one of the female cadavers he dressed and made up, she packed her bags and left him. “I decided to never trust a man again,” she told me, one morning. “How you could sleep with a dead person? Only a man could sleep with a corpse.” Her second husband was a thief. After her daughter was born, he took their savings and jumped on a boat to Grenada. “He’s still there now,” she said, “with a new woman young enough to call him pappy.” Marva said it was easy to make a man fall in love; a woman only had to squat over a pot of hot rice, let her sweat drip into it, then serve the rice to the one she wants.
“Really?” I said.
“Yes,” she said, and poked the air with her finger. “Men might be bad, but women can be worse than bad.”
Marva was so busy with her own life she had no interest in mine; she never asked about my family or where I had come from or how I knew William and Solomon Shamiel. She had opinions about all sorts of things: about who and what she liked, and who and what she didn’t like. She liked William, but she did not like his brother. She did not care for Joe because he was spoiled. Consuella was a sweet child, but they were going to spoil her too. “You only have to open her cupboard and see how many toys she has. Toys she can’t even use. Some of them come from Alexander. They should give them away. It’s bad luck to hold on to the things of a dead child.” We were standing in the kitchen and I was about to lay the table for lunch.
“What dead child?” I put down the tray I was carrying.
Marva glanced at the door. “I’m surprised William never told you. It was a big thing.” She lowered her voice. “Alexander was born before Consuella. Poor child had terrible epileptic fits. Around this same time, a Chinese lady used to come to Joe in his dreams and threaten to take away his baby brother. The lady would stand in the corner of the room, and Joe would wake, terrified. His mother would have to go and lie with him. Then one Saturday afternoon, the family was all in the living room—and for no reason, Alexander start to scream.
“Madam pick him up and for a second he was calm. But then she walk with him about the room, and every time she get near the corner, he bawl even more. She couldn’t understand it. There was nothing there. Then Joe shouts, ‘The Chinese lady. It’s the Chinese lady!’ Brigid was in the yard picking oranges and I was cleaning the stove. We rush inside and see Dr. Emmanuel Rodriguez and the mother standing over him. Next thing Alexander close his eyes and die. Just like that. Like when you put out a candle.” Marva pursed her thin lips and blew. “They bury him in England. And in the yard they plant a special tree for him.”
“Where in the yard? Which tree?”
Marva looked out the window and pointed somewhere I couldn’t see.
“The little ficus tree. Just to the left of the toolshed. If you look at the trunk there is a tiny plaque and the plaque has the name and birth date and when he die. Sometimes madam pray right there on the ground.”
Sure enough the plaque was there.
Not long after Marva had told me this, one evening, when the sun was going down, I saw Helen Rodriguez wander into the yard. She stopped and knelt by the tree, and, with her rosary beads wrapped around her fingers, put her hands together, in prayer. I don’t know how long she was there, but when she passed my room it was pitch-black.
WILLIAM MADE IT easier for me to settle in quickly and I was grateful. Every morning, as soon as he arrived, he came to look for me. I was usually laying the table for breakfast. I’d say, “Morning William, how are you?” And he’d say, in a typically soft voice, “Good. Everything is good.” And sometimes, if he was feeling more confident, “Better for seeing you,” and he’d smile, and put on his yard boots, right there. Then he’d walk up the garden and begin his work. Often when I was cleaning the upstairs rooms, or walking back and forth along the passageway with Consuella, I would look out and see him on the lawn. If I waved he waved back. If I didn’t wave, he went on with his work. While I ate lunch in the pantr
y, he hovered by the outside sink washing his hands or cleaning his tools, scrubbing something. Sometimes I pretended he wasn’t there and carried on eating and reading.
Throughout the day, in between chores, he hung about the kitchen, mostly listening to Marva, and he often sat right there in the doorway drinking water from a green tin cup. I would say, William, can you please pick me some mangoes for Mrs. Rodriguez, and he would get up and, before I knew it, have the mangoes there in his big hands. Or when I had finished polishing one of the large brass plates that hung on the wall, “William, this is heavy, could you please help put it back up,” and quick as a flash he would carry it upstairs and mount the plate perfectly on the wall. He brought breadfruit from Laventille, because he remembered how I liked it and how it made me well (once I said, “Thank you, I’m not sick anymore, though”), and he carried sweet buns or milk bread—a gift from his mother. “Mother say you forget her now you live in St. Clair.”
“I never have a minute, William. You see how much I have to do here.” Every afternoon when I told him goodbye, William said, “See you tomorrow, please God.”
MARVA SAID, “WILLIAM like you too bad.”
I brushed her off. “William is my friend. There’s nothing more to it than that.”
“Well, better William than Solomon.”
I said, “Better no one than William or Solomon!”
TRUTH WAS, I knew that William was too shy to ask me out. He would hint at something that was going on in Port of Spain, something he thought I might enjoy. Like the opening party of a new dance hall in St. James, where there was a modern band playing, and dancing, and all sorts of young people just like him and me. Or he would tell me about a movie, like Anne of the Indies or a film with Rita Hayworth because he knew by the picture I had put on my wall that I liked her. William went to the cinema at least once a week. On Sunday afternoons, he took a picnic and went to the beach with friends. “The water is calm like a lake,” he’d say. “Like stepping into a bathtub.” It wasn’t that I didn’t like William; I just didn’t want to have to think about him in any way other than as a friend. I liked things as they were; I didn’t want them to change.
WHEN THE HOUSE was quiet and I was in my room or sitting on the bench, I found myself thinking about Black Rock. If I thought about Aunt Tassi, it was with a heaviness and sadness. And if I thought about my cousins, I felt irritated. I tried not to think about Roman Bartholomew. I was sorry I never told Miss McCartney goodbye. I would close my eyes and see the school as if it was right there: the whole first row of my class, my wooden desk, the pictures on the walls, and at the back of the classroom the map of the world, the pink place that was England. I could see Joan Maingot walking on her tiptoes, and her boyfriend. I was no longer jealous of her happy life. It didn’t matter; Black Rock was far away. There was nothing there for me now.
IT WAS ON one of these quiet nights, while I was putting away my memories like old belongings in a trunk, that I decided to take a trip to Tamana to see Aunt Sula.
• • •
AFTER I HAD spoken to Mrs. Rodriguez, in a brief note I wrote and told Aunt Sula that I would like to visit one weekend in May. She replied at once:
Dearest Celia,
I can’t tell you how happy I was to hear from you. I am guessing you must be working in Port of Spain for the family you mentioned. You are welcome here anytime, so tell me when you wish to come. If you can get a lift, that would be best. Otherwise you can take a bus to Arima and change there. Buses to Tamana run twice a day. Let me know. Sooner the better. I’ll wait to hear from you.
Much love,
Aunt Sula
THIRTEEN
IT WAS MY FIRST WEEKEND OFF IN MONTHS. SOLOMON arrived at 7:00 a.m. I heard the horn outside and picked up the lunch I had made for us both, in the brown paper bag on the kitchen table. I had a change of clothes, because I wasn’t sure what kind of state I would be in when I got there. It was a long drive to Tamana, three hours, they said. Which was why Solomon had asked for five dollars, to cover gas and the wear and tear on his tires from the country roads. “You know how rough those roads are when you get onto the estate.” If it was somebody else, he would charge more, but as it’s me, and he knows how William like me, he was prepared to do a deal. Also, he was going that way to see his friend Nathaniel.
William said the price was not so bad when you think how Solomon would sell his mother if he could get a good deal.
I said, “One day your brother will end up in jail like his father.”
William shook his head. “Solomon could fall in a sewer and come out smelling like a prince.”
The sky was blue as usual, and everything looked clear. Sometimes, it was as if the colors of things—signposts, a wall, the flowers in the yard—were brighter than ever. When the sun was high, the light was dazzling. It was dry season and there was a lot of dust everywhere. Around the Savannah, the land was parched like old bones left out in the sun, and when a horse or a car or a sudden wind ran over it, sheets of dust flew up in the air. The Poui trees had let their blossom fall and it lay on the ground in sprinklings of pink and yellow. That day, there were still a few with flowers on their pale branches.
Solomon drove through the back part of town, past the hospital and the gas station, and along the edge of Laventille, where all the houses looked brown and broken and patched up. And eventually, we came out onto the main road. Most of the cars were coming in the opposite direction, so the road was quite clear. It didn’t seem like the same truck William and I had traveled in that night I came from Tobago. I didn’t remember it being so tatty inside or so noisy. It would be difficult to talk.
“So how are things? How’s business?”
“Which one?” Solomon spoke as if it took a lot of effort.
“The delivery service you were running. You were working with the grocery.”
“I only do that now and again; I have a lot of other things going on right now. Plenty irons in the fire.”
He drove with one hand on the wheel, the other holding a cigarette. He was much better-looking than William; he had a square jaw and slanted eyes; a wide mouth. His teeth were even and straight. Yet there was something dead or cold about his eyes, and it frightened me a little. They made me think of a cavalli fish Roman once caught and brought home. It was a long, beautiful silver fish. When he slit open its belly, a big white cockroach crawled out. The fish’s eyes were open and staring and it occurred to me then that, alive or dead, they would look the same. This is how Solomon’s eyes were.
The breeze was hot and did little to cool us down. The fields on either side were dry, and they seemed to go on and on. Small houses on stilts were dotted here and there. I could see the Northern Range Mountains. They looked almost blue or purple. Little clouds of smoke told me where there were fires. It was typical at this time of year. The fires could soon get out of hand. I had noticed them in St. Ann’s when I went with Helen Rodriguez to the pharmacy; black ugly scars from the bush fires all over the hills. A piece of glass thrown in dry bush, or a cigarette, and, next thing, fire was burning down the place.
On a dusty bank, a flock of vultures were crowding around a white cow dead on its back. Its stomach was blown up like a big balloon. The birds had started on the cow’s head; the skin was ripped away so you could see the bloody flesh; the eyes had gone. They didn’t seem to be in a hurry; it was as if they had all day. Apart from wild dogs, I couldn’t imagine what else could keep them away from the carcass. I rolled up my window to keep out the smell of rotting. “Someone must have hit it with a car,” Solomon said. “It happens all the time. Especially at night. If you hit it, you may as well cut it up and take the meat. Why leave it there.”
We stopped in Arima. I gave Solomon money to buy sweet drinks. Then we sat in the truck and I took out the bread rolls filled with corned beef. The place was busy with people, and the market on the side of the road was full of traders, noise, dust, chaos. I was hoping that we would soon leave, but then Solo
mon got out and wandered over to a man outside a rum shop; they slapped each other’s backs and had a laugh about something.
After a while, he brought a beer to my window. “No thanks,” I said, politely. I picked up a newspaper from the floor and used it to fan myself. For some reason, there were a lot of flies and I wondered if there was garbage nearby. I decided that I hated this place. By the time we left Arima it was 10:00 a.m.
Soon the land was different. It was dense and dark, with the bushes and trees high on either side of the road. Now and then I saw houses, but they were remote, hidden. The song of cicadas rattled and hissed through the forest. That meant they were mating. I knew this from Miss McCartney. She said that you could hear the song from half a mile away. It was cooler in these parts, but I felt as though we were a long way from anywhere and if I called out no one would hear me. The tall bamboo said swish, swish, swish, and the bright green leaves were trembling. We carried on on this road for almost an hour. We passed through Brazil and then Talparo. At a certain bend, on the El Quemado road, little children were playing. A tiny stream poured down from a rock and they were bathing underneath it. They stared as we passed, and when I waved they waved back. Solomon said I shouldn’t encourage them, next thing they jump in the tray of the truck.
We stopped at a waterfall. After I had washed my face, I checked myself in the small mirror Helen Rodriguez had given me. I didn’t bother to change, we were almost there and I looked okay; it didn’t matter now. Solomon went to pee behind some bushes. I could hear it hitting the ground hard.
AT THE TOP of a small hill, there was a large wooden gate, big enough to drive through. The sign said TAMANA ESTATE. PRIVATE PROPERTY. I got out and opened it, and we made our way along the narrow road, which was rough and more like a track, just as Solomon said it would be. There were fields of cocoa trees; I liked their sad and colorful leaves, and the pods that hung down from their branches. Some men were walking by the trees carrying sacks and cutlasses. They watched us pass; they didn’t look too friendly.