It was Saturday, no need to work, but Bowen rose early in his room at the guest house and decided to hike up the mountainside to the museum. No one bothered him in the streets. Walking Victoria Drive to the upper reaches of the city he looked down on the waterfront to the crowds gathered in the open market but could not hear their noise. The peace of the early morning was strengthened by the sea beyond, crystalline and windless. Two fishing boats were out with sagging sails, frigate birds circling and circling high up off the harbor point, a wheel of black dots that gave Bowen the impression of magnification, seeing beyond the visible, microbes swimming soundlessly on a laboratory slide. To the west off the point, a line of four big-winged birds, probably pelicans, swooped in formation down toward the barrier reef.
The air was clear and sweetened, unpenetrated by weekday noise, until he crossed the block that separated the government houses from the shanties of the ghetto and then the city smelled like rotting fruit and kerosene, urine and garlic, and the sun burned with a cruel intensity. It was a reggae bass he heard first, syncopated and booming, unmistakably provocative, a strong narcotic presence in the empty street. The music fizzed at high volume from the cracked speakers of the Black Cat bar—the Black Cat open all night, a chapel where men came to release the duty of hard living. A beam of sunlight edged past the entrance to a man asleep on a board bench, a beer bottle sparkling on the dirt floor. Ahead a group of fellows leaned against a parked taxi. As Bowen walked by they stopped talking to take a cold look at him. Bowen nodded politely but instantly regretted it. He had called attention to himself as an easy mark; the gesture was an unwitting invitation to sell him dope, beg his money, to let the antipathy surface. They watched him as if he were an event they did not yet understand.
But nobody said anything and he passed by unmolested.
He was from the States, too new to the island to be relaxed but beginning at least to be annoyed by the endless rituals of the street. This world stunned him, produced its own measure of guilt and yet excited him. The fieldwork was his first, free of graduate school and swept up by Smithsonian omnipotence and a rebirth of interest in the Pre-Columbian Conference of the Antilles. Stepping from the Liat Avro onto this land, he felt like something unjustly sheltered, brought up from underground and deposited in the sun.
Behind Bowen a car honked and it startled him fully awake. He jumped off the pavement into the dry, scattered saw grass that pricked his sandaled feet. A chip of red pottery lodged in the black dirt drew his attention and he stooped to pick it out. The piece was embedded in the baked soil and he was forced to dig around it with his pocketknife. Wherever Bowen walked he searched the ground, eyes downcast like a penitent, for clues to a new site: shards and chalky shells, a rock worn smooth by human friction, a discolored patch of earth; or colonial rubbish—old bottles, oxygenated crumbs of iron, the verdigris of a copper nail, anything that spoke honestly of the past, a mindprint or a voice that he must hear first before the distortion, the objectification, of exposure. The cataloging, the collected data thereafter would always be in accessible public domain; the pleasures of the first touch would remain private and real. Bowen flipped the shard in his hand and rubbed the dirt away. The surface had been pebble-polished, diagonals scratched through a white slip glaze with a fish bone or thorn. He slipped the fragment into the pocket of his khaki shorts. The horn, he realized with vague irritation, was still bleating impatiently.
An old Morris Minor, once bright red, scarred from front to back by bad roads and haphazard driving, had pulled over. Bowen couldn’t see down inside so he came over and bent to the window for a look. Inside he saw a dark, blunt face, eyes that appeared abnormally convex, a nose that seemed like the first blow of an irregular bubble. The man’s kinky hair was longish, combed up and back to where it curdled into short locks. The man grinned charitably, his pale palm beckoning Bowen into the car.
“You goin up?”
Bowen crammed his large body, as pale and sharply pink as the man’s hand, into the passenger seat. “Marcus,” he said, acknowledging the driver. The car leapt forward. “It’s getting hot, isn’t it.”
“Every day, mahn.”
“I forget what I’m doing.”
“I see you stop to make a study ahnd I tell myself you goin up de hill.”
“Yes. That’s right.”
Marcus was the deputy agricultural officer, a prize for the ministry, young and talented, willing to forsake the lure of the north for his homeland. He was responsible for the care of the Botanic Gardens, the hemisphere’s oldest. His predecessors to a man were British and white: loyal adventurers, disciples of Kew and the Royal Society. Bowen saw Marcus frequently, for the fledgling museum was housed inside the gardens in the cottage of the old overseer. The colonial residence was ramshackle when Bowen was first shown it, the only blemish in the extraordinarily ordered world of the gardens’ property.
They made their turn off the main road and started up the greater incline of the hill. Where the land leveled to a small plateau the jungle had been stripped and the gardens laid out two centuries ago. From here the countryside pleated and rose symphonically, soaring to the vertical peaks that flanked the modest industry of Kingstown. Marcus accelerated to the right to bypass a taxi that had slowed in front of them. A white woman, one of the many gray-haired dowagers out inspecting worlds their husbands had never thought to show them, had twisted herself halfway out the window to photograph the view of the harbor below, the Grenadines like haloed gems falling into the horizon. She yelped girlishly as the Morris Minor passed close to her extended shoulder on the narrow road and popped back into the cab, losing her sun hat in the process. Bowen smiled sourly, disapproving of the woman’s ostentation, that type of blatant tourism that marched over the precious subtleties of a culture as if nations were only artifice, extravagant Disneylands. And yet what was so wrong with an old woman snapping a picture.
Another few minutes of vigorous steering and downshifting up the grade and they were at the main entrance to the gardens, the tall wrought-iron gates chained across the road. Marcus left the engine running as he unlocked the gates and swung them back on their stops. The taxi they had overtaken pulled alongside Bowen. Marcus stood proudly in the center of the road underneath the arched iron letters. St. Vincent Botanic Gardens.
He walked back to the taxi and chatted with its occupants, welcoming them with the benign smile of ownership. “Lady, I hope you okay. You okay, eh? I doan want you comin ahll de way to find de gate close up.” But the woman and her two companions were delighted by the incident. Her sun hat had been crushed by another car before she could retrieve it. They worked themselves out of the taxi, the woman with the camera displaying her ruined hat with satisfaction. It would transform into a story of adventure; she was having one of the best times of her life, she said. She leaned over and framed her face in the window by Bowen’s seat, oil that had run from her skin beaded into her makeup, the enthusiasm of her bright red mouth almost grotesque.
“Hello, who are you?” she said with gay familiarity.
“Good morning.” He felt as if his mother had somehow found him out here in the backwater.
“Come have your picture taken. Come on,” she coaxed.
“No thanks.”
She made Marcus stand straight and still by the entrance as she photographed him. While Bowen remained in the car, the black man accommodated his passenger’s fellow countrymen with easy graciousness, even warning them not to pay more than two dollars to the shantytown boys he had trained as guides. The questions and answers between them seemed formed by complicity.
Marcus returned to the car and drove slowly ahead into the gardens through a channel of purple bougainvillea cresting overhead. Bowen expected the man’s mood to reverse itself now that they had escaped the women, but it did not. He asked, “Does it bother you to have them running all over the place like that?”
“What? Dem people?” Marcus answered, swinging his head back. “No, mahn. Dis pla
ce made fah outside folk to come see, see someting done right in dis shitty-ahss country.” He said it without irony, without an inflection of regret. Bowen did not believe that Marcus was telling the truth. He was surprised, at least, that he resented the offense of tourists more than the black man did.
They turned and stopped behind a walled hedge of crimson ixora that hid from public view a double row of long ramadas canopied with black nylon screening. This was the propagation center for the gardens. In the coolness of wet stones, a half-light filtered down upon line after line of seedlings, their rich black scoops of earth girdled in plastic sleeves. The air was moist and thickly powdered with fragrant pollens. Marcus pushed his seat forward and began to unload trayfuls of young plants, mintlike but fat and deep green, from the rear seat and floor. Bowen had not noticed them before; now he was aware of their peculiar scent.
“Can I give you a hand?”
“Ahll right,” Marcus replied, but it didn’t sound like it mattered to him one way or the other.
“What are these?”
“Here, mahn,” said Marcus, breaking off one of the sticky leaves and crushing it below Bowen’s nose. “You tell me.”
The pure, hot aroma of the sap expanded in Bowen’s nostrils, triggering a line of emotions, images into his memory. It was the smell of women he had slept with, of people crowded against him in bars, of hitchhikers, of a certain type of music—the smell of an era in his life.
“Patchouli. I never even knew it was a plant. I don’t know what I thought it was.”
“Dis a good cahsh crop,” Marcus said seriously. “We has a guy in Chateaubelair tell me he want to try it, so I bring some down fah him from de Windwahd Station. When de bush young like dis, it doan carry much stink. But a mahn in Queenslahnd keep ten acres. In de rainy season, when de plahnt juicy ahnd de fellah staht to cuttin it, you smell de oil on de whole mountahn.”
“I’d like to see that,” Bowen said. “If you go up when the harvest begins, will you take me with you? Would you mind?”
Instead of answering, Marcus continued removing plants from the car as if he hadn’t heard. Bowen stood waiting for some response but when it was not forthcoming he shrugged his shoulders and put himself back to the job, a little hurt at being ignored. When they had finished, Marcus showed him a spigot where he could wash the dirt from his hands. They were very close together sharing the stream of chilled water, squatting on their heels. Marcus looked carefully at Bowen without regard to how improper the act might appear, his eyes impenetrable, monochromatic like the highland rain forests, as dark as the soil they washed from their hands. Bowen saw something in them he recognized but could not name. A magnetic resonance that did not seem clearly placed in time.
“So you in-trested in plahnts, eh?”
“Sure.” Bowen was uncertain whether he should say more. He did not want to commit himself too eagerly or somehow be pretentious. Or be rebuked.
The agriculturalist dried his hands on his pants and started talking, the love of his words a fact Bowen appreciated more than the knowledge they spoke for. Bowen followed him through the hedge that separated them from the formal realm of the gardens.
“See dis,” he said, pulling out a branch from a wall of rampant vegetation shifting in the breeze trickling down the mountainside, a bank of organic flags collected from many nations. “Amherstia nobilis. We cahll it Flame Amherstia. Dis tree very rare, mahn. She comes from India or somewheres like daht. A British fellah bring it here in 1906. Lot of guys bringin stuff here den.
“Ahnd see dis white greeny stuff wit stickah? We cahll dis Wait-a-Bit. It grow too fahst ahnd everywheres daht I must send a mahn to chop it every week.”
They went over to a towering tree shedding its large compound leaves for the magnificence of a downpour of yellow blooms. “Cassia fistula. You like de sound of daht? Golden Showah. Muddahs like dese fruit pod very much fah a sick child. Monstera deliciosa. Some cahll it Cerimahn, some cahll it Delicious Monstah. You cahn eat dis spike comin out de bloom, ya know.
“Milk-ahnd-Wine Lily. Lobstah Claw. Firebrush. Womahn’s Tongue. Jerus-lem Thorn. Look here. Pelicahn Flowah. Feel how nice de leaves lay. Nobody bring dis plahnt from somewheres else.”
The unopened flowers of the vine were pelican-shaped, a pointed beaked crest arching into two wide wings folded down in rest. Bowen plucked one of the larger flowers and cradled it in his hands. The flower seemed like a womb, an egg, something ready to give birth to a small life. It was too awkwardly shaped to be stuck into a vase in the museum so he passed it over to Marcus. Marcus examined the blossom for a moment as if he might find a flaw and then tossed it on the ground.
The tour continued. Ornamental and blandly functional, toxic or medicinal, aquatic and xerophytic, Marcus revealed them all, often naming family, genera, or land of origin for Bowen. Dis one good fah shade, come from Africa, mahn. Dis one here kill you. Dis one de best fah keepin dirt on hillsides. Some crazy guys eat ahnd smoke dese seeds to feel nice. He pulled the milky green buds from the ilang-ilang and squeezed them between his red fingertips so Bowen could smell this, the flower of flowers, the world’s most exotic essence.
Marcus’s involvement as a master of his silent, perfect domain made Bowen anxious to get on with his own work, to immerse himself in the chaos of the inanimate morsels of the past, to puzzle the fallen world back together again by matching cracks, designs, colors. The agricultural officer offered to walk over to the museum with him to check on the progress of the Amerindian plants he and Doc Kirby had cultivated there—Doc’s idea for using the native flora as a device for the past to enter the future. Savages knew the pleasure of lemon grass tea and the comfort of tobacco. Visitors to the museum identified with that.
They passed through a grove of ginger, the arrow-shafted stalks drooping with clusters of pearly buds, and stepped into a grassy glade surrounding the long shell of a tree toppled by its own fatigue years ago. A sign nearby on a post explained the historical importance of this, the gardens’ most acclaimed attraction. The park had filled with tourists by now. They cluttered around the naked husk of wood, its inside soft as cake, and photographed it from different angles. Bowen had known the tree was in the gardens someplace but he had not seen it until now. The sight was anticlimactic, a contrived presence, a false relic.
“Bligh’s gift to niggahs,” Marcus said with a contemptuous grin. Bowen was grateful for this bluntness and hoped now a deeper alliance would form between them in opposition to the needless romance of the tree. He heard cynicism in the black man’s voice, what he had anticipated hearing much sooner. “Dem wicked slaves doan eat cotton, cahnt stew sugah cane. Mahn, what you goin do?” Captain Bligh’s breadfruit tree lay on the neat turf, an idol rotting back into the earth though its tendrils had spread throughout the islands to nourish the bodies of souls abandoned in purgatory, to keep their feet and hands and backs on earth.
The lady from the taxicab emerged from the group of admirers and approached them. “Just think of it,” she said breathlessly. “That old tree was right there with Captain Bligh on The Bounty. It survived so much!”
“No, no,” Marcus corrected her. “Daht voyage de specimahns ahnd de cahptain did not fare well. But dis mahn Bligh was stubborn. He try it ahgain. Now everybody eatin breadfruit, even de hogs.
“Den he bring some teak. Soon teak tree everywheres you look, ahnd a fellah cahn make a dollah choppin it. Now people prayin strong to de cahptain, prayin Ol mahn Bligh, come bahck. Bring me womahn, bring me husbahnd, bring me pot to cook in, bring me piece ah meat to eat wit dis breadfruit.”
“I am fascinated by it all,” the woman said earnestly, her forehead shining, her fingers stroking the camera mounted on her belly. She drifted back to her companions and Bowen could hear her repeating the information to the group as if she had been asked to interpret what the black man had said.
Marcus seemed self-conscious after he had spoken to her. “I know what it sound like, mahn,” he explained to Bowen, “but
I was only jokin wit she. She take it too straight.”
“Not at all,” Bowen said, dismissing what he took for an apology. “Most people like that like their history under glass. Otherwise they don’t know what it means.”
The approach up to the museum had once been terraced, perhaps to make the premises more English and impressive, to assert the dominion of the residence over the lush grounds. Marcus had recently restored the house’s rose garden, returning it to the precision that had once comforted the lonely wives of the men sent here from Devon or Lancaster, transferred from Bombay, Kabul, Singapore. On the other side of the walkway, antithetical to the roses, Marcus had planted the Amerindian flora for Dr. Kirby, the retired veterinarian who had devoted himself to preserving the island’s heritage. Bowen left Marcus to tend to these, climbed the wooden steps of the museum’s veranda, tested the front door but found it locked, knocked loudly but Doc was not inside although he had said he would be here.
Bowen dug in his pockets for his own key but he did not have it. He turned back to Marcus, who had forsaken the freshly rooted Amerindian plants and was on his knees in the rose garden inspecting the browning leaves of a flowerless bush.
Bowen called down to him. “Do you have an extra key?”
“What?” Marcus said absently, barely audible across the short distance. Bowen was going to repeat himself but Marcus pushed himself up off the ground, brushing his pants with his hands, his attention returning from the problem that had attracted him to the roses. He was coming up.
“Well, I remind myself to stop by you anyways fah a look. Doc tell me dis place gettin full of rocks ahnd bone ahnd broken pot.”
He tried several keys until he found the proper one. Past the door the air was noticeably drier. The front rooms were empty, the ancient wood floors coarse and noisy, gray with a layer of dust. Doc had still not settled on the design for the display cases, although a cabinetmaker had been commissioned and set to work on storage shelves. Marcus followed Bowen down a center hallway to the rear of the building. The work area resembled a garage and had once served as both carriage house and kitchen. The floor was rough cement, artifacts everywhere upon it—in loose piles, in burlap bags, in boxes, in coffee tins. Rock carvings, some weighing hundreds of pounds, were stacked against two walls. The men stepped cautiously through the jumble to a table alongside a set of windows which Bowen shoved open to allow the air to circulate. Marcus examined the room with severity.
Easy in the Islands Page 17