Anna In-Between (14 page)
“Humph!” Her mother flings her shoulder away from him and walks toward her bedroom.
Later, after lunch, Anna finds her father feeding his fish. He has some brownish nuggets in his hand and he drops them two by two into the pond. The nuggets float to the surface and swell out into plump balls. From all directions the fish come, the larger ones pushing aside the smaller ones. Concentric circles widen in the water and miniature waves ripple to the concrete edge. Where tiny fish jockey against each other for crumbs, the surface is dimpled as if peppered with raindrops.
Anna stoops down on the rough border. Before the concrete had hardened, Beatrice Sinclair instructed the workmen to sink brown and white pebbles into the wet surface. The border is pretty but the rough edges of the pebbles jab against the soft skin on the soles of Anna’s feet.
When she was a child, on hot steamy days she loved to kick off her shoes and run through the grass. She could play for hours barefooted on the stony banks of a river or on the coral-strewn sand at the beach. Now, winters and dirty pavement in New York have forced her into shoes and softened her feet.
“Your fish were hungry,” Anna says to her father.
“I give them enough to eat,” he replies gruffly.
Anna trails her fingers in the water. “Maybe you need to give them more.”
“What? For the frogs?”
Anna grins, and her father drops more nuggets in the water.
“What’s that you are giving them?” she asks.
“Dog food.” He reaches into a big bag leaning against the wall. There is a picture of a large dog, a golden retriever, on the front panel.
“Dog food?”
“I can’t get fish food in this country,” he says. He takes out a handful of the nuggets and throws them in the water.
“So what Dr. Ramdoolal said is true?” Anna has taken her hand out of the pond. Water curls down her fingers and drips to the ground.
“Dr. Ramdoolal? Oh yes, he’s right about no equipment in the hospital. Just like I can’t find fish food on this island no matter where I go.”
Anna stands and wipes her hand along the leg of her pants. Her father is observing her. “Your fingers will smell of fish and dog food,” he says.
She brings her fingers to her nose and sniffs. “Not too bad.”
“Why don’t you go in the house and wash your hands?”
But she does not leave. She trails behind him as he walks over to the opposite side of the pond. “Has it come to this? Is this what independence has brought us?”
“I don’t think the English were any better,” he says. “If that is what you mean.”
It is what she means. “I don’t remember hearing those kinds of complaints when they were here.”
“Oh, they had good hospitals for sure, with the latest medical equipment and all that. But those hospitals were for their own use.” He looks at her over his shoulder. “And, of course, for their favored few.”
She flushes with embarrassment. How could she have forgotten? They lived on the hill, in the Englishman’s country. They were among the favored few.
He has stopped at the edge of the pond. He slaps his hands together and flecks of the brown nuggets caught between his fingers sprinkle down on the water. Baby fish pushed to the outskirts of the pond in the feeding frenzy turn and zoom toward the tiny particles floating on the surface. “Good,” he says. “Now they have all eaten.”
“Dog food,” she says.
“I won’t deny it’s frustrating. My God, if we can have dog food on the island, why can’t we have fish food? I tell you, it’s all about money and corruption. The more things change …”
“… the more they stay the same.”
“Human nature is the same no matter the color of your skin,” he continues. “When the oil came back, money flowed on the island. We had our independence then. The English weren’t in control here. So who do you think got the money? Not the people for sure. The politicians and their cronies. They pocketed the money. And the politicians were not English. None of them. Ma-chiavelli was right. People are greedy. They always want more, and then more is never enough. They cheat and steal to have what they can never possibly use, not in the one lifetime given to them. They don’t care if the medical equipment in the hospitals is inferior so long as when they are sick, they have money to fly to New York to go to a hospital there. Who cares about the ones who can’t afford to fly to New York?”
There are no more crumbs of dog food left on her father’s hands, but he is still standing at the edge of the pond, staring into the water.
“Do you know why we have dog food and no fish food?” he asks.
Anna shakes her head.
“Because on this island we need dogs. People with money need dogs to protect them from the people who have no money. The man in the street finds it hard to understand why, in a country that has so much money from oil, he has to live on a pittance. So he becomes Robin Hood. He steals from the rich.”
But this Robin Hood keeps what he steals. He doesn’t share it with the poor, Anna thinks. There is no need to say this to her father; he knows it well. He protects his home. He does not have dogs, but he has all the rest—the electric iron gate at the entrance of the house, the wrought iron door at the end of the corridor, between his bedroom and the dining room, that they lock at night, a heavy mahogany door outside of the kitchen that they bolt twice. They are thinking of installing an alarm system, her mother told her.
If she should mention these measures he has taken to ensure the safety of his family, her father will still offer a defense for the poor. He will talk about the drug lords who have turned poor people into addicts and criminals.
“Who needs fish food?” he asks her. “Fish can’t stop a thief from breaking into the vault in your house. Dogs can. I’ll tell you something.” He jabs his finger in the air over the water, punctuating his words. “Henry Bishop was different. I admired him. He was a union man, a leader. He could have had a lot of power, but he put the interest of the people before himself. Now his son is a big-time doctor.”
A fish, sensing the moving shadow of her father’s hand and supposing he is about to feed it again, surfaces on the water, its head alone. It opens its mouth and sucks in air.
“Enough for the day,” her father says, but other fish have gathered.
“Are they still hungry?” Anna asks.
“No, but they’ll still reach for more.”
And are the Sinclairs among the wealthy who have enough but still reach for more? Her mother has a choice. Money has given her the luxury of choice. She need not take the risk of surgery in a hospital where the equipment the doctor needs is not available. They have the money for her to go to America.
“Mummy must go to the States,” Anna says.
“Yes.”
“You have to make her, Daddy.”
He groans.
“You must, you know, Daddy.” Anna’s voice vibrates with urgency.
“I haven’t been able to make your mother do anything she does not want to do.”
“Dr. Ramdoolal says she’ll die if she doesn’t go.”
Her father walks away from her to where he has left the bag with the picture of the golden retriever on it. He bends over and folds the top down.
“This is serious, Daddy.” She is standing behind him.
“Maybe,” he says, then straightens up. “Maybe for a son of Henry Bishop. Maybe for him your mother will change her mind.”
The oil had not dried up as the Englishmen had supposed when they hired her father to smooth over their exit from the island. Not long after the Europeans left, the Americans came with newfangled drills that cut through the hard rock as easily as if it were limestone. Oil gushed out; wells started pumping again. The island went giddy with an oil boom that freed pent-up imaginations in a wild explosion of construction never before seen on the island. In the sedate residential area where the Sinclairs built their replica of an American ranch house, all sorts of architectural wonders mushroomed. A prosperous merchant constructed his vision of a Mexican compound, a scattering of adobes, one for each of his family members, with the requisite clay statues posted at each entranceway. The island, too small for Indians to be segregated into Hindu and Muslim enclaves, saw the two groups competing with each other in a show of religious fervor. Hindus flew colorful flags and built elaborate temples on their front lawns with their gods inside sitting cross-legged and intimidating, visible through the concrete latticework. Muslims, not to be outdone, molded their roofs into domes, painted them a glittering gold and placed the crescent and star on their tops. One family recreated a European medieval castle complete with moat and movable bridge. The movie
Jaws
had just been released and an architect designed a
Jaws
house for several of his clients. The front was shaped like the wide-open mouth of the shark, with pillars rising from a cavernous veranda in imitation of the teeth. The veranda, meant to represent the bottom jaw of the shark, slanted upward and was overshadowed by a smooth, solid mass—the shark’s head apparently—punctured by two large windows, its eyes. Probably because it was impossible to carry the conceit much further without blocking out both light and air, the rest of the house resembled the hull of a ship with many portholes. Another man arranged his garage along the full length of the front of his house so he could display his Rolls Royces. He had five, each a different color: gold, silver, black, red, and blue.
This is what happened in the Sinclairs’ neighborhood. But in the north of the city, flat land was scarce so developers dumped truckloads of soil and rock in the marshlands bordering the sea. Within a blink of an eye, they shut out the sun with towering apartment buildings. They tore down trees to make room for gated residential communities, setting down concrete houses cheek by jowl which they painted in pretty pastel colors mimicking a Disney World already perfectly mimicked in Bermuda. “Just give them time,” the old people said, clucking their teeth and issuing a warning: “The sea and swamp will soon take back what belongs to the sea and the swamp. Matter of time.”
The mountains too were not spared. Where there was green, there are now many colors, none of them from flowering trees, none from the flame of the forest, the frangipani, the lignum vitae, the pink poui, the flamboyant, the powder puff. The pinks, reds, oranges, yellows, blues, purples that now dot the mountains are solid and stiff, fashioned out of painted concrete, brick, clay, slate, and galvanize. These colors do not shimmer with a breeze, they do not flutter to the ground and curl in the sun. No matter the season, wet or dry, they remain the same, always blooming, fading sometimes with the rain and sun, but never dying, never disappearing altogether to bud and bloom again later except when repainted.
But before all this, before the oil boom, before the Americans came, the Europeans, supposing that that they had taken most of what they wanted out of the ground, and not having the stomach for a fight with natives clamoring for independence, began preparations for their escape. They would maintain the few wells that were still producing oil, but they would essentially close down the company. Most of the workers would have to be terminated.
A union man came from the city and fired up the workers with talk about slavery and colonial oppression. White people had used them to make money, he said. Now that they had almost drained the oil fields, they were getting ready to run back to their countries with their pockets full of money they made from the back-breaking sweat of black people. “Is
we
money, not
dey
money. Is we oil dey tief. And dey so greedy, dey want to keep making more and more money. I say if dey can’t keep all the workers, all de workers should leave the oil fields. Why we go work de wells dey want to keep pumping and make more money for dem? I say we shut down dey whole production.”
Only one man, Henry Bishop, had the kind of influence on the workers to shut down the whole production. The people loved him and would follow him anywhere. He had a golden tongue and was capable, the people said, of selling snow cones in Siberia. He was barely literate, however. Written contracts and agreements were impossible for him to decipher.
The union man said he would do all the reading for Henry Bishop if Bishop got the workers to go on strike. Henry Bishop agreed. Every day he and the union man gathered the workers in front of Chin’s grocery shop and laid out their case for a strike. By the end of the week most of the workers had walked off the oil fields.
The directors of the oil company called on their man John Sinclair. He would diffuse the strike. He would speak to Henry Bishop, local man to local man, and drive sense into his hard head.
John Sinclair said there had to be compensation, severance pay for the workers the company had retrenched. “You have to give them something,” he argued. “They will shut you down completely if you don’t.”
Three weeks of strike and heavy financial losses finally persuaded the company bosses. They gave John Sinclair a budget and the authority to determine how much severance pay each worker would get.
Anna knows the barest details about the agreement between Henry Bishop and her father. He told her that Henry Bishop was a reasonable man. He understood that if there was no more oil on the island, there could be no more work for the workers. “Now some of you have work,” John Sinclair said to Henry Bishop, “but if all of you go on strike, none of you will have jobs and none of you will get compensation.”
John Sinclair was a reasonable man too and Henry Bishop’s counter argument made sense to him: Why should the Europeans take all the profit out of the company and the workers not get a share? Why should they get millions and we get pennies?
John Sinclair went back to his bosses. More weeks of strike, more losses and tough negotiations made them concede that the severance budget they had allotted to John Sinclair was not enough. It had to be increased tenfold.
John Sinclair had one condition for Henry Bishop: no severance paycheck would be issued solely in the name of a male worker. Checks would have to be made in the name of the worker and his wife. The bank would be instructed not to cash a check unless the worker’s wife was present. The same rule applied for unmarried workers. They could not draw from their checks until a percentage was paid to the unmarried mothers of their children, or to women who could prove that they lived in a common law relationship with the men.
