Away with the Fishes (35 page)

Abigail did show up at the port at three o’clock to meet Dagmore, but only to tell him that it was not agreeable to her to take tea with him or with any man, and to advise him to set his sights on some other fine girl, of which the island was overrun. Then she stormed off somewhat snootily, her hips bouncing to and fro in a way that made the Captain love her even more. He was determined to win her heart.

“Plan B, Mrs. Jaymes!” he announced coming into the kitchen after his failed rendezvous.

“What would that be?” she asked him.

“I’m not sure but we’ll figure it out.”

His use of the plural irked her at first, but when the Captain recounted how Abigail had rejected him and haughtily swung her hips, Mrs. Jaymes was miffed on the Captain’s account.

“How dare a girl like that turn her fanny to the likes of you!” Mrs. Jaymes exclaimed. “Why, she should thank her lucky stars that you ever laid eyes on her! You want Plan B?” she said to Dagmore. “You go back to that bus stop tomorrow and take her these buns. They’re full of raisins, just like she likes, and as light and airy as they come. Take her a poem, too. Go look through all
those books of yours and copy something about the moonlight or the stars. Go on!”

Dagmore did as he was told, and returned to the bus stop the following afternoon armed with pastry and poetry. When Abigail showed up, he presented her with Mrs. Jaymes’s buns and recited a poem comparing her eyes to the sun and her teeth to the twinkling stars. The bus pulled up just then and before Abigail could wag her hips at him and hop on, he invited her again, “Would you like to have tea tomorrow?”

“No, I would not,” she told him, “and I believe I said so yesterday.”

The Captain went home defeated, again, and reported what had happened. “The tongue on that child!” Mrs. Jaymes said, shaking her head.

Together they devised Plan C, cream made from honey, for Abigail’s skin (bought from the pharmacy in town), coupled with another poem. “A longer one, this time!” Mrs. Jaymes insisted.

Plan C proved no more effective than Plan B. When Dagmore invited her to tea the next day. She said, “I told you yesterday and the day before, I don’t want to have any tea.”

When the Captain returned home defeated for a third time, Mrs. Jaymes had a revelation. “I know what Abigail Davies is up to,” she said smugly and pointing her finger. “She’s playing hard to get, the greedy thing. We’ll have to raise the stakes.”

They came up with Plan D, a dress for Abigail that Mrs. Jaymes sewed herself. It took her over a week to finish it, but it was a stunning piece of island haberdashery. Its burgundy bodice was fitted, with flowing cap sleeves, its skirt full and flowered in petaled specimens of yellow and red, sliced here and there by leaves of dark and light green.

“It’s lovely, Mrs. Jaymes,” Dagmore praised her, and left for the bus stop, dragging the dress behind him. Although Abigail had accepted it and carried it onto the bus, she once more declined the Captain’s invitation, and, for her part, invited him to stop inviting her.

“Hmm,” Mrs. Jaymes said. “Perhaps the girl isn’t as greedy as I thought. Maybe you would do better to lavish her with your true feelings, instead of with lavish gifts. What if you wrote her a poem of your own?” Thus was hatched Plan E, or the Elegy to Abigail Davies on the Occasion of First Sighting Her at the Savings Bank.

Now,
this
was a hit at the bus stop! The passengers, who had rather begun to look forward to Dagmore’s antics, were enthralled by his lyrics and iambs. He depicted Abigail as a latter-day island Beatrice who alone could illumine the seaway that the adrift and mid-life Captain was meant to follow. Without her, his redemption was doomed to lie hidden amidst the waves.

“You’re very persistent,” Abigail admitted, but despite the standing ovation that the other riders felt moved to produce, Abigail still declined tea with Dagmore. She knew too well the trouble that men caused. It started with a cup of tea, then there was sugar and “Honey,” and before you knew it your belly was bursting. Abigail had had enough of that for now.

If his lofty words hadn’t quite done the trick, perhaps Abigail would be swayed by something more down-to-earth. Plan F was a basket of fruit. Mango, papaya, guava, banana, soursop, and a small-but-still-significantly sized watermelon. When Dagmore showed up with such abundance, Abigail was too stunned to speak. To Dagmore’s renewed invitation to tea, all she could manage in the form of refusal was a firm shake of the head.

“Not a single word of complaint?” Mrs. Jaymes asked, delighted. “A good sign. A very good sign.”

Plans G and H were executed in tandem, fresh grouper and a fresh hen, respectively, which Mrs. Jaymes herself went to the fish and poultry markets to purchase. So as not to arrive with sweaty fish and chicken, Dagmore had left it a bit late and almost missed Abigail. When she saw him coming, she quickly jumped on the bus that had stopped in front her. She urged the driver to leave, but he, along with the other regular passengers, had taken an interest in the business of Captain Dagmore (there being little else of interest on his daily route), and he insisted they all hear Dagmore out.

“Abigail,” he huffed, tired from running to get to her in time. “How are you today?” There had grown a strange familiarity between them in spite of themselves, owing to the constancy of Dagmore’s efforts to court her. She nodded at him through the open door of the bus but didn’t say anything. He gave her the grouper and the hen and again invited her to join him for tea at the villa. She accepted the gifts, said “no, thank you,” then took her seat and stared straight ahead, making it clear that her transaction with Dagmore was done.

As the bus pulled onto the road, the riders’ tongues loosened and they bothered Abigail about the kindly Captain Bowles. The men were annoyed that Abigail was making a fool of an island man, and jealous of all the free food she was getting; the women were appalled by her snobbish pride, and jealous that such a distinguished and wealthy man as Dagmore sought Abigail’s hand, not theirs. By the time Abigail got off the bus, her fellow riders were in such a lather that the “good night” she uttered was met with hostile indifference and all but ignored.

This got her to worrying. Abigail’s midwifery business was doing well enough, but it wasn’t booming, despite the islanders’ enthusiastic love-making. The midwife market was saturated with ladies older and better known (though not more talented) than she. Her income depended on the locals’ acceptance of her as a humble and compassionate being. If word of this Dagmore business spread, it was likely to jeopardize her work. She decided then and there, though it pleased her little, that the next time the Captain showed up at the bus stop, she would publicly accept his invitation to tea, and then deal with him in private at the villa.

How dare he compromise her bread and butter with his fowl and big, stinking fish?

“So Abigail finally went to the villa for tea?” Raoul asked Mrs. Jaymes.

“Even better. He got her on a picnic. Eventually. That’s when she told him she only accepted to protect her reputation.”

Mrs. Jaymes explained that the day of the failed fish and fowl, Dagmore had come home especially downhearted and had taken out his fishing boat. He rarely put it in the water, as much as he loved it, and when he did, he always let it bob close to home. That day, though, the smooth, quiet sea had beckoned.

“Dagmore felt the sky overhead and the sea underneath and it calmed him,” Mrs. Jaymes said. “He breathed in the sea air and thought of his sea-faring father. He rowed up the coastline and even went ashore.”

She leaned closer to Raoul and added, by way of aside, “He hadn’t been exploring in years, you know. He still hadn’t learned to live on Oh, although he could imagine himself nowhere else.”

“How does Abigail fit into all this?” Raoul wondered aloud.

“She fits in because when the Captain went ashore, he found an enormous jacaranda tree, thick with purple blossoms. He remembered seeing Abigail admire jacarandas when she passed them, and he remembered the purple flowers on her dress the first time they met. Maybe tea in a fancy villa was too stifling for a girl as free and strong and modest as Abigail, he figured. Maybe she would prefer a simple picnic out of doors. Soon after that, he went to the bus stop and said to her very directly, straight from his heart, ‘Would you like to go on a picnic? There’s a beach not far from me with a beautiful jacaranda tree. I can take you there in my boat.’ And she made a big show of saying ‘Thank you for your invitation. Let’s go on Sunday’—.”

“—because she wanted everyone around to know she hadn’t refused him,” Raoul chimed in.

“Yes,” Mrs. Jaymes confirmed. “The Captain thought his heartfelt words had done it. Or his jacaranda Plan J. But that one failed as miserably as his Ice-cream Plan before it.”

45

I
t was Saturday afternoon at the Orleans, and, like every Saturday, Ms. Lila was preparing one of Raoul’s favorite meals, minced beef in mango and beer, with a side of fried plantains. On Saturdays they always ate an early dinner, after which they took a stroll to the Loyal Cinema for the early showing. Ms. Lila was in the kitchen, busy peeling and slicing, when Raoul returned home from his most recent tête-à-tête with Mrs. Jaymes.

“Any luck?” she asked him, quickly adding, “did you ever pick up the paint?”

“No,” he sighed, then added, “I ordered it but have to pick it up next week.”

“Mrs. Jaymes didn’t tell you anything about Abigail?”

“She told me, alright,” he said. “Try making heads or tails out of any of it.”

“Oh, dear. Is she losing her mind? She
is
well past ninety,” Ms. Lila said.

“Her mind is sharp as a tack! The problem is Dagmore’s story. It only skirts the issues. Fishing boats, Abigail. None of it connects
and none of it has anything to do with Rena Baker. Mrs. Jaymes is certain that the Captain didn’t even
know
a Baker on Oh.”

“Well, what did she tell you?” Ms. Lila asked. “You’ve been there the better part of a day.”

While Ms. Lila saw to her starches and minced her meat, Raoul pulled out his notebook and relayed to her all that Mrs. Jaymes had relayed to him. He told her about the Savings Bank and Abigail’s bursting bosoms, about Mrs. Jaymes’s doubts and Dagmore’s insistence. He told her about the Captain’s plans to win Abigail’s heart, from his very first declined invitation to failed plans B through J.

“So the jacaranda plan didn’t work either,” Mrs. Lila remarked as she stewed. “What happened? You said Abigail agreed to a picnic, if for all the wrong reasons.”

“Let’s see,” Raoul said, fishing in his bag for his notes. “Mrs. Jaymes had so much to say I could barely get it all down.” He opened up what was now the third notebook filled with the facts of Dagmore’s life and began to read aloud.

Mrs. Jaymes had been trying to get the Captain on a picnic with a pretty girl for longer than she cared to remember. When he came home on a Friday evening, however, announcing his Sunday plans with Abigail, she had second thoughts. Now that Abigail’s visit was nigh, her doubts about the girl’s suitability came back—as did her twitching instincts, which told her that things were not destined to end happily. Because she didn’t know what to do to fix them, in an unusual departure from her custom, Mrs. Jaymes kept her doubts to herself and prepared a potato pie for the picnic.
Dagmore asked her to stew some plums, too, to bread and fry some snapper, and to ice some bush tea. For his part, he spent all of Saturday cleaning the beach and polishing his boat. Everything had to be perfect if he was to propose to Abigail that they wed.

Despite the Captain’s careful plans—or because of them, Mrs. Jaymes would have argued—there was to be no proposal that Sunday. Close to twelve o’clock on Saturday night, the skies erupted in a loud and pounding rain that drenched the island nonstop until dawn. The sky seemed to clear as the sun came up, but by lunchtime the clouds had overtaken it again.

“She’s not going to come on a picnic with all this rain,” Mrs. Jaymes gently warned the Captain.

And she didn’t.

Though Abigail assured the Captain, at the bus stop the next day, that she still had every intention of joining him for an outing (where she planned to tell him in no uncertain terms to leave her alone), every time they tried to meet after that, their plans were thwarted. If they scheduled a picnic, it rained; an afternoon tea, then one of her children came down with a cough; a picture show, and the current went. Abigail got some new clients, too, with precarious pregnancies that demanded her attention twenty-four hours a day. Months went by during which Dagmore wasn’t able to reach her to reschedule their latest rescheduling. When Abigail finally had time on her hands, Dagmore was so discouraged and depressed that he couldn’t muster the will to call on her, and by the time he snapped out of his funk, she was busy again, with her clients, her babies, her clients’ babies, or with Easter, Christmas, All Saints Day or Guy Fawkes Night. Before Dagmore knew it, a year had gone by, then two. Abigail must have thought she had rid herself of him for good.