Left at the Mango Tree (19 page)

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Gustave replied, amused. “You underestimate your strength.” With that he picked up a crate and held it in front of his body. When he verified that each of them, too, had picked up a crate of his own, he walked toward the beach and soon was heard sloshing into the water where the shallow boats awaited.

“Just humor him till his back’s turned and then we’ll do a runner,” Bang ordered.

As it turned out, a runner wasn’t necessary. The three men followed Gustave and soon found themselves sloshing into the sea, Cougar first, followed by Nat, followed by Bang. They watched as Gustave passed a crate from his own hands into the dark, musty hands of a stranger, whose shadowed face they couldn’t see. They heard the clunk of wood on wood, slatted crate on slatted boat,
then Gustave, empty-handed, turned and emptied the hands of Cougar, who emptied those of Nat, who emptied those of Bang, until all four crates had been passed along to the stranger and had clunked inside his boat.

The passage complete, instinctively Bang turned and walked toward the waiting mountain of packed-up pineapples, his laceless sneakers full of water and his pant-legs heavy and stuck to his shins. Behind Bang, still incredulous in soggy sandaled feet and short pants, followed Nat. Behind Nat, barefoot so as not to ruin his calfskin shoes, and still directing objections (“Days!”), followed Cougar, who was followed finally by Gustave. But somewhere between the water’s edge and the pineapple-mountain’s, the original order re-established itself, as it is wont to do, and when the four set out on their second run, Gustave was again in the lead.

Again, too, Gustave passed his load to a waiting stranger’s hands, though whether the hands of the same stranger, the chums had no idea. Crates clunked, one, two, three, four. The passage once more complete. Like a music box whose melody never varies, the passage played out over and over (slosh, clunk, slosh clunk), while the four men waltzed in time (step, turn, pass). They danced throughout the night and as they did, the crates grew lighter and the mountain smaller. The strangers’ hands were sure and silent; their boats swift and strong. The wooden crafts glided back and forth from Oh to Killig as easily as the tide, emptying their cargo as if the crates were clouds that simply floated to their correct position in the sky. Cougar eventually stopped objecting; Nat remained incredulous, but for different reasons now; and Bang, he sang.

He couldn’t help it. The rhythm of the melody and the dance were too palpable and continuous to ignore. The leaves, which always sing on Oh, sang even louder suddenly, in harmony with the
cicadas and the hummingbirds who didn’t know if it was night or day. The combined song of man, sea, flora, and fauna crescendoed to a frantic, fevered buzz; it fell on top of the cheating chums, like a thick blanket that might smother them.

They could hear nothing for the noise that filled their ears, the living sound that seemed to populate the air around them. They moved in unison with the island’s tremble, lifting and turning, passing and pausing, four men dismantling a two-acre mountain and sending it adrift on the sea in sugary snippets. Confused, the chums tried to ignore the noise, tried to escape it by closing their eyes, but in the end they danced—step, turn, pass—as if unawares.

The magic moon laughed at their struggle. The leaves were too agitated, their chorus too loud. Loud enough to drown the chums’ collective conscience, which reminded them of Raoul. Had one of the three actually heard it, the heavy pockets of the other two would have brought him squarely back to earth.

The fracas finally culminated in a guttural human cry that confirmed a superhuman deed, a celebratory cheer born of the incidental fellowship created by common objective. The moon, without whose light Gustave and his fellows would never have completed their task, was pleased. Her hands had stripped a garden and carried off its fruit, yanked the roots from so deep within the earthly soil that one would hardly discern which seed had ever been planted there, pineapple, plantain, or almond.

In the dark, they walked home, the chums, now four instead of three. Fresh, cool, their limbs and spirits light. The euphoria of the night’s stolen minutes still wracked their bodies, while their minds (three of their minds) still struggled to understand how they had been seduced by the moon’s silver glow and the pastels of the island’s rainbow bills. The guilt of these same three would rise
with the sun on the following morning, a morning dressed up like any other (clear, new sky; fishcakes and herbal tea wafting from next-door Shirley’s), the cuckold ignorant of the previous night’s betrayal. Like dreamers waking from a hazy, pleasant dream and struggling to return to it, the chums would find instead the gnaw and suck of the truth that tore their edges and rent their middles, devoured them as Nat did the shiny transparent yellow hard candies he kept in his cab.

But until then, they walked. Gustave in front and the others behind. It was Cougar’s turn at incredulity. “How do you suppose we managed it?” he asked, his feet dry now inside calfskin. Nat replied only with the squish of his soggy sandals. And Bang, he hummed, in key with the leaves that shuddered a broken battle cry and leaned in respectful nod to the pregnant moon.

As the moon waxed fuller and fuller, proud of the night’s doings on her favorite beach, Gustave waxed a bit proud himself. His plan to pull out all the stops was in full swing. Soon the islanders would be too scared to even look at him, let alone keep watch on his every move. Home in his bed, Raoul was happy, too, knowing it was only a matter of time before Gustave tripped himself up with all his boondoggling. The more magic the better, Raoul reflected, for the sooner Gustave would fall. (Had Raoul known already of that night’s caper, he would have been happier still.)

As the chums walked home to the song of the shuddering leaves and Bang’s hum, both Gustave and Raoul boasted a puffed-up aplomb. In fact, a good many things were puffed up that night: the last bloated boats of the smugglers, the stuffed pineapple depots on Killig, the bulging pockets of four cheating chums.

To say nothing of the swollen tide that assaulted Oh’s sandy shores; or the moon. The placid, gibbous moon.

12

T
here is no shortage of words on Oh. Bounteous as the mangoes or the rain, they are available to all the islanders indiscriminately, though not everyone indulges in them in equal measure. The appetites of some are insatiable, like those of the lonely Pedro Bunch; and of others, easily whetted, like those of the widow Corinna, whose words fall aimlessly from her tongue in the marketplace or in front of the Island Post. Some islanders (like Bang, Cougar, and Nat) prefer a healthy, robust diet; while others (like Raoul or Gustave) opt for slighter fare, their cravings best satisfied by private monologue.

Like legal tender the islanders exchange their words, in sympathy, solidarity, in jest. And in promise, as I’ve already said. This last part bears repeating, for promises are never contracts to be entered into lightly. Not anywhere. And especially not on Oh.

Abigail Davies and my grandmother Emma Patrice once shared a promise that forever changed the direction my life would take. It was long before my grandmother disappeared on that tall, snowy slope in Switzerland, leaving behind her pearl-handled sewing basket and her two-year-old baby girl. With the sharp edge of a cracked shell, she and Abigail sliced open the dainty brown tips
of their nine-year-old index fingers and pledged eternal allegiance, if not in so many words. They mixed their blood, smearing the hybrid droplet into the loops and whorls that distinguished the one girl from the other, declared themselves sisters—blood sisters—and promised to forever treat each other the way that sisters do.

Accordingly, their alliance took many shapes over the course of the years. Playmates turned confidantes, turned rivals, and back, and sometimes months went by during which the two girls never spoke. The reasons for their silences were many and varied, malicious and not: disagreements, distractions, Abigail’s pregnancies, Emma Patrice’s books. Even then they were her way of escaping, and both sisters must have suspected (known, really, though neither ever said it aloud) that the metaphorical escapes were a prelude to, and preparation for, a full-fledged breakout.

Despite the occasional hiatus, the sisterhood survived. When Raoul returned alone with baby Edda from that first real family holiday, Abigail felt anew the sting of the salty sea in which she and Emma Patrice had rinsed their bloody fingertips that day so many years before. Her sister was gone! No one knew for certain if Emma Patrice’s disappearance was willful or willed upon her, but Abigail was certain of the former, and so she chose to rejoice in her sister’s new-found freedom, rather than to mourn her demise.

Raoul saw matters in a different light. He, too, suspected a willful departure on the part of Emma Patrice, though he never said it aloud either, and he didn’t stop (or for a long time he didn’t) hoping she would have a change of heart. Silly Raoul, Abigail thought. He was a good man, as fine as any on Oh, if not better. But he would never have done for Emma Patrice. They should have figured that much before the two ever married. (In my grandfather’s defense, I don’t think anyone would “have done” for Emma Patrice and her
escapist tendencies.) Still, Raoul’s glum disposition caused Abigail to wonder if perhaps she shouldn’t be mourning a bit more than she was, just in case. After all, her blood sister’s departure didn’t change the fact that their blood had in fact been mixed. There’s no undoing a thing like that. Not even by running away.

So with no blood sister left on whom to lavish her devotion, she turned her attention to the next best thing, her blood sister’s baby, Edda. Abigail promised the absent Emma Patrice that Edda would always be happy, that Abigail herself would see to it.

Like her earlier alliance with Emma Patrice, Abigail’s relationship with Edda, too, took many shapes over the years. Babysitter turned auntie turned tutor and back, to the extent that Raoul would allow. (She reminded him too much of his missing wife, or rather, of the fact that his wife was missing.) Although Abigail’s help was wanted less and less as time went on, she kept her thumb on the pulse of Raoul’s parenting—discreetly, from a distance. Keeping tabs from afar is easy on Oh, if you have a knack for it, as some of us do. Midwife Abigail managed it quite well indeed, for her connections and savvy had only increased with each pregnancy she saw to. When they told her it would soon be my mother’s turn to deliver, her once-pricked finger tingled and she summoned Raoul.

“Now about your...services,” Raoul stammered, seated in Abigail’s kitchen. “How would it work?”

“Don’t you worry about the details,” Abigail replied. “I’ll fix everything with Edda, and she’ll be well looked after. I can promise you that.”

Raoul wanted to ask further questions of this midwife into whose hands he was about to place the future of his first and only grandchild, but ignorance and embarrassment conspired to keep him quiet. That, and the fact that Abigail had always intimidated
him just a little bit. He was sure she blamed him for Emma Patrice’s disappearance. Not for losing her there on the slope, but for driving her to go. Abigail was the last person he wanted around, but she was Oh’s best midwife, and my welfare (and Edda’s), thankfully, trumped his pride. He finally stood, resigned if not convinced, and thanked Abigail for taking the time to speak with him, though it was she who had invited him round.

“She’ll be well looked after,” Abigail repeated, cupping her two hands around the one Raoul had extended to her. “I can promise you that.” It was agreed that Abigail would go to see my mother the very next day to discuss the “arrangements” and with that, Raoul left her small but comfortable house. When he had reached the road that bordered Abigail’s garden, he almost turned back to inquire about the midwife’s fee. He wasn’t sure, however, if etiquette allowed for such negotiations, so he kept quiet again, confident (almost) that he would get his money’s worth, whatever the cost. Then he headed for Edda’s, to tell her the news.

Abigail could not have been more pleased by the outcome of Raoul’s visit. She had waited a long time to have a hand again in Edda’s happiness. Over the years Raoul kept Edda seemingly
perfectly
happy, leaving nothing for Abigail to do. He taught her to cook and to sew, taught her manners and good posture, even taught her to braid her hair. And in Bang, Cougar, and Nat, she had three of the most doting uncles a young girl on Oh could want. Added to that, Abigail had been pregnant with problems of her own much of the time, and her pledge to Emma Patrice, though never forgotten, had intermittently fallen by the wayside. Until now. Now that Edda was pregnant herself, and Abigail was pregnant no longer, the blood-sister promise could be properly fulfilled.

As agreed, the day after her conversation with Raoul, Abigail paid my mother a visit. She explained that Raoul had engaged her services (as if she would have had it any other way), and she assured Edda that there was nothing to be afraid of. Abigail had training and she could manage the most troublesome of pregnancies, the most delicate of deliveries.

Though it would take some months more to confirm the veracity of Abigail’s boasts, she was off to a very good start. My mother was well looked after indeed, better than any pregnant woman that Abigail had attended to before. She devoted herself to Edda and her growing baby, spending almost every day in Edda’s company while Wilbur delivered the island post. She sang to her and helped her clean the house, told her stories about her mother Emma Patrice (never mentioning her escapist tendencies), and in between she prepared Edda’s meals. This was the hardest part of Abigail’s job, for as Edda’s belly grew, it grew capricious. Some days her appetite was healthy, robust, and she voraciously satisfied her body’s cravings for fresh purpled octopus, sandwiches with peanut butter and pineapple jam, spicy sausages, and turtle steaks; other days her diet was slighter and functional, intolerant of purpled or pineappled dishes, and best satisfied by simpler fare, a mango or bowlful of beans.