The Sea Grape Tree Page 4

  “But who going to look after Ashanti, like how she so difficult with the autism? Nobody going to want to take care of her.”

  “They have a school in Port Antonio for children like her, and that is another reason I want to work there. I call the number on the pamphlet the doctor gave us, remember the one? They say that they have a day school for children like her, children with disabilities, that’s what they call it. They say that since she going on five, she should start school now, and when Joella start school in September, she can help me with her in the taxi coming and going.”

  “And Rickia? She can’t stay by herself when she come home from school. And I can’t be here to make sure she do homework and everything.”

  “She going over to Miss Livingston after school and help with the baby. She always good about her homework, anyway, so she can do it there.”

  “Miss Livingston agree to this?”

  “I tell her I will pay her little money and she say yes. She need the money and she like the company.” A lot of thinking had gone into Beth’s new plan, Shad realized. Without a word to him, she’d done her research and made calls and arrangements with other people, and he, a man who was known as a sniffer and snuffer (according to Miss Mac), a man who knew everything about everybody in Largo, had been clueless about his own woman’s goings-on.

  As hurtful as the news was to Shad, it was even more painful because he hadn’t been consulted. Although he was unable to read and write beyond a fifth-grade level, Shad had established himself as Largo Bay’s problem solver. The role had started from childhood when, as the self-appointed village messenger, he’d earned access to the villagers’ lives. He’d seen who was sitting in the obeah man’s waiting room when he paid a bill for Miss Hilda. He’d known who was coming from England when he delivered invitations to Mas Josiah’s party, and overheard the pastor cursing his wife once when he went to collect his dollar.

  With knowledge of their secrets, the little barefoot boy had morphed into the village’s go-to man as an adult. Yet Shad was keenly aware that he was looked down on by many who were higher up the food chain—even while he was looked up to by his peers. He understood the social context in which he operated, understood the complexities of his people and how they thought. He was a man who observed, who analyzed, who hung back until it was time, and acted when it was. He was a man of street smarts, an Anansi—the African spider of folk tales that had traveled to the Caribbean with the enslaved thousands—a man who, in another time and place, would have been a financial genius.

  “Stop right here,” Shad said as he turned on the bedside lamp. “What you planning to do with this money you going to make? I know you, and you always have a purpose for everything.”

  Beth closed her eyes. “We can always use little extra, not true? Like how Joella going to high school—”

  “I can manage that now, so what else?”

  “What you mean?”

  “Don’t act so innocent. You want to buy a car? Another house? Talk to me.”

  She took her time, followed by the crick-crack of her rollers as she turned to look at him. “You said we going to marry, right? But you say the—the wedding have to wait until we have the money. I was just thinking I could find little work, you know, cleaning house to pay for the wedding, and we wouldn’t have to wait.”

  Shad sat up, propping his elbows on his knees. “Everything going along nice-nice, and we about to build the new hotel. I going to have to work harder, supervising the hotel going up and running the bar. Everything already going to be in confusion, and you want to cause more confusion by traveling to Port Antonio, twenty miles each way, every day—just for a wedding? It going to mean that you coming home late, that dinner going to be cooked late, that nobody here when I come home for my lunch—”

  “Shad,” Beth said, sitting up beside him, “I tired of being your woman. All these years we together, seventeen, going on eighteen years now, and I just your common-law wife. We have four children—not one, not two, not even three—four children.” She held up her fingers one by one.

  “When you lost the conductor work and you start to rob people purses, it was me who tell you to stop the foolishness, and when they catch you and put you in the Pen for the year, it was me traveling to Kingston every week and taking food for you, with my belly getting bigger with Joella. And after you get out, is me make you come to Largo to live with your grandmother, and when she was sick, is me taking care of her and the baby while you building the hotel. Then you start the bartending at the hotel, and is me start planting garden so we could have little extra money and eat fresh food.” Shad slid down to rest on the headboard, allowing her to get the memorized list off her chest, the way a woman had to.

  “I have Rickia just before your granny dead,” she continued, “and I sew the dress for Granny to bury in with the baby nursing at my breast. You lose the work when the hotel mash up in the hurricane, and we live off the garden and your fishing, barely making it. Then the bar build back and you bringing in steady money, and I have Ashanti and Joshua.” She exhaled hard and short, a train letting out steam. “I done now with the baby making, you hear me, and is my time now, my time to bring in steady money—like you.”

  Shad stroked her arm. “We have enough money, even added on a second bedroom for the children last year. I don’t know what you talking about, Beth. We making it, we making it.”

  “But you need little help, and the wedding—you told me last year to set a date, and I set it for July this year. Then you tell me to hold off because we don’t have the money for no wedding.”

  “Like how you was sewing wedding dress and soaking fruit and talking about invitations, you sound like some English princess. You make me afraid of the whole thing. That kind of wedding cost plenty money.”

  “I just saying we should have a good-good wedding—after all this time. We need to set a example. We need to show the children that we respectable and married.”

  “You mean we not respectable now? We don’t need no wedding to show that.”

  “Talk the truth, Shadrack Myers.” Her voice had gone cool, chilling him already. “You don’t want to marry me.”

  “I want to married to you, sweetness, but we don’t have to rush it.”

  “Four children and eighteen years, and we—”

  “I love you until sun don’t shine, you know that.”

  The mother of his children lay down again, straightening her nightgown under the sheet, her face to the wall.

  “Beth,” he reasoned with her back, “how many people you see married in Largo Bay, apart from the Delgados and pastor? Miss Alice and Mistah Jethro is the onliest ones, and they only marry right before Jethro died, because pastor tell him he going straight to hell when he dead.” Above the sheet he could see the baby hairs on the back of her neck and resisted the urge to stroke them.

  “Boonoonoonoos,” he said, calling her by the name Granny called him when she was in a good mood. “People in Jamaica don’t get married, you know that. It feel like bondage, from way back, from slavery days. Is only when these ministers start to come and say that we living in sin that it shame us, but you and I not living in sin. We don’t sleep with nobody else but us, you know that. The Bible say we shouldn’t commit adultery, but show me where it say we must marry in long dress and suit with a minister and plenty people in a church, and that we must feed all of them afterward.”

  Her voice was muffled. “Corinthians say every man should have his wife and every woman should have her husband.”

  An old argument that was beginning to get stale, one that even he was getting tired of, the wedding question had intensified over the past year. It had all started with the last minister, a self-righteous man who had departed over a matter related to sexual preference, but now the new minister had taken up the slack. Like all the other villagers, Beth at first had ignored the threats of hellfire for the unmarri
ed, even though her own parents had been married. But she’d finally concluded that she and Shad were doomed and she’d been planning a wedding since late the year before. A contributing factor, Shad suspected, was that she saw that the island’s well-to-do families were headed by married parents and, since middle-class people were respected, and since she was an ambitious woman, Beth had decided to claim her place among them by becoming a married woman.

  Whenever he raised the topic of marriage, Shad had received advice to the contrary from several local residents, including his own boss.

  “Stay away from it as long as you can,” Eric had remarked once. “If it doesn’t drive you to divorce, it will drive you to drink. A wedding ring makes a woman go crazy, I’m telling you. She suddenly thinks she can run your life.” Eric had been reading a newspaper when he said it and Shad still remembered the black eyebrows above the paper.

  Shad touched Beth on the shoulder. “Name me one thing that marriage is good for,” he said.

  “Com-mitment.” She pronounced the word carefully, as if she’d heard it on one of the soap operas she watched while cooking dinner.

  “We not committed now?”

  “No. You can go off any time and leave me with the children and—”

  “I come home every night to you for sixteen years now. I don’t love another woman for more than eighteen years. What you call that, not commitment? I bring home all my money, all my tips. I don’t spend a penny on another woman, on nothing outside the house, not even on liquor. I buy you a television, a refrigerator, and me and Frank put on the back room last year. You don’t call that love?”

  Beth turned over. “I know you love me, and I know you will think about it because you love me. If you can’t afford to pay for a nice wedding, like you say, you will understand that I need to have a job so we can have a nice wedding. Now get your rest, because Miss Livingston’s cock going to crow soon.” He felt for the lamp switch without looking, turned it off, and reached for her.

  “One more thing,” she said, rolling away from him. “No sex before marriage, so Pastor say.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  * * *

  Roper’s home was nothing as Sarah had imagined. Instead of a rustic cottage surrounded by palms, she’d found a very modern, wood-and-glass structure clinging to a mountain. The view too was a surprise, particularly the colors. The greens of the bamboo around the house and the blues of the ocean visible from its deck were more brilliant than any colors she’d ever seen in nature. She had the sensation of almost being pummeled by the stimuli coming at her.

  The Caribbean Sea—with at least six different blues she’d identified—filled everything with its presence. The smell of salt had assailed her from the minute she stepped out of Immigration, the trade winds wrinkling her hair into a frizzy mess within minutes. Most constant in subsequent days was the drumbeat of the waves, which seemed to pursue her all day.

  There was noise everywhere. The villagers spoke and laughed loudly. Passing taxis played their radios at top volume and blew their horns as they tore down the road. Even the night air was pierced by the bellowing of frogs—­mercifully segueing into the cooing of doves in the early morning. She’d lain awake the first couple of nights convinced that she’d never sleep with the racket of waves, wind, and frogs, but on her third morning Sarah awakened to find that she’d slept deeply, deeper than she had in months, maybe in years.

  She’d started setting up her traveling easel—not as portable as she’d hoped—on the beach across from Roper’s house. There was a clearing under the coconut trees that gave her a view of the ocean while providing shade. She was relieved to find that this eastern end of the beach was almost deserted, the fishing activity being concentrated on the opposite end, and there’d been few interruptions since she’d started working. On one occasion a gaggle of children had come and stared at her from ten feet away before running off, jabbering in patois.

  It had taken her a few jet-lagged days to settle into her new routine after being met at the airport by Sonja, Roper’s girlfriend. The woman had held up a handmade sign that said Sarah Davenport and smiled broadly when the new arrival nodded. She’d apologized for Roper’s absence (he was opening a show in Toronto, apparently) and for being sleepy, the result of working late the night before.

  “I’m a writer,” Sonja had mumbled as they started off toward the parking lot, “and my best time to work is when everyone else is sleeping.” Roper had apparently woken her that morning to remind her to meet the London flight.

  “Totally forgot, of course.” The writer’s hair stood in a spiky Afro, and Sarah wasn’t sure if she’d styled it that way or forgotten to brush it. “Anyway, if I fall asleep, just shake me and take over the wheel!”

  The driver had proven to be more awake than her guest. Having had only snatches of sleep on the flight, Sarah had fallen asleep for most of the four-hour drive back to Largo. When the SUV ascended the steep driveway to the house, she’d jerked awake. Together the women had lugged the bags and easel into the house and deposited them on the rug inside the door. The maid—called helpers on the island, Sonja had whispered—had met them at the door.

  “My name Carthena,” she’d informed Sarah. She looked to be in her mid- to late-twenties and wore capri pants and a T-shirt with a gold design on the front. A shower of pink and white beads decorated the braids that cascaded to her shoulders.

  “How long you planning to stay, miss?” the woman asked on the way to Sarah’s room.

  “As long—as it—takes, I suppose,” Sarah had answered, struggling with her suitcase down the stairs. She was already regretting refusing Carthena’s help with the bag because of her guilt about being served by anyone.

  “A real English lady,” the helper remarked. “I never meet one before.”

  The guest room on the lower level contained a sitting area and a bedroom with twin beds, a desk, and a ceiling made of bamboo woven in a herringbone pattern. Left alone, Sarah slid open the glass doors leading from the bedroom to the terrace, absorbing the reality of her surroundings. Somehow, she was in Jamaica—and without spending a penny, thanks to a kind and wonky artist. She’d collapsed onto one of the beds, smiling broadly and giving herself two full days before starting her painting routine.

  On this, her fourth morning, the light on the ocean was breaking into a mosaic of glitter and Sarah pulled out her sketch pad to capture it. She drew a square in the center, a rough four-by-four. Her goal was to spend a week or two painting the unfamiliar in the familiar way, sticking to her miniatures, followed by a gradual expansion to a thirty-six-by-twenty-four-inch sheet—Roper’s required size for a return ticket. The five large sheets she’d placed out of sight on a high shelf so they wouldn’t annoy her.

  A noise overhead made her look up, holding on to the crown of her straw hat. She was being inspected by a large black bird with a bald head and a red ring around its neck, a vulture of some kind, sitting on the stem of a coconut leaf.

  “Hello? I’m not dead yet,” Sarah shouted, and the bird flew off to soar on an air current.

  Settling again on the kitchen stool loaned by Carthena, Sarah got back to her drawing of the waves. Water was not her strength, especially tossing, rolling, foaming water like that of Largo Bay. She’d done some work on the beaches of Kent, but that was a different ocean—heavy, dark, and certainly cold. The water of the Caribbean seemed lighter and friskier to her by comparison. Although she hadn’t stepped into the surf yet, she knew it must be warm, hot even, in line with everything she’d encountered so far.

  You’d never think Jamaica was once British, she’d written Penny in an arrived-safely email. It has a character all its own. It’s loud, crude, beautiful, and utterly unpredictable.

  The night before, Sonja had asked what she thought about the island. “It’s terribly alive, isn’t it?” Sarah had answered, frowning into her wineglass. “Everything is in motion.”<
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  “You either love it or hate it. There’s no in-between about Jamaica.” Sonja leaned forward for a handful of almonds. “Most poor countries, the ones I’ve been to, anyway, never seem passive. Nothing is easy, nothing has soft corners. I guess that contributes to our strong instinct for survival.”

  “I had no idea, none whatsoever, that being here would make me feel so—different, might be the word. I’m a total bloody foreigner here. I can’t understand one word of the dialect, probably never will. And everything feels new, the night noises, the smells—from dead dogs to flowers, even the touch of the sea breeze. I never know what to expect next.”

  “It takes a while.” Sonja nodded. “I was living in the States for fourteen years, and when I first came back I remember being in culture shock—in my own country. Took me a few weeks to settle in and start writing again.”

  “What kind of writing do you do?”

  “Business books, would you believe? I used to work in strategic planning with an insurance company, then I worked in training. After I got tired of the nine-to-five, I left and started writing training manuals for the insurance industry, then human-resource-type stuff.”

  “How do you write from so far away?”

  “Everything I need is on the Internet, from the Wall Street Journal to the latest books and research data. I can write from anywhere, even Largo.”

  Several inches shorter than Sarah and some ten years older, Sonja had a kindness to her rounded features, despite the spiky hair. Before dinner that first night, she’d taken Sarah on a tour of the house. There were three floors: the lower level, where Sarah was lodged; a middle floor with a living and dining room, Sonja’s office, the kitchen, and a deck; and a top floor, where three bedrooms and bathrooms opened off a sitting area.