Prospero's Daughter (14 page)

He meant the ixora plant I loved, with its bouquets of tiny red flowers clustered at the tips of stems crowded with dark green leaves; he meant the flaming wild poinsettia bush we called chaconia; he meant the chain of love, a vine with heart-shaped bright pink buds that looped over my father’s shed in the backyard. He meant the bright yellow buttercup flowers that Ariana threaded into garlands, passing her needle down the tube of each trumpet-shaped flower.

I supposed it was thinking to soothe us, having the unmitigated gall to believe we could be compensated for the destruction he had wrought, that Gardner added, “I’ll clean up the lawn in front of the house, too. I’ll make it green.”

We had not thought of the front yard as a lawn, but that was what he called it before he made it a reality.

“And when will you do the repairs on the house?” Lucinda asked. He had put up a makeshift board against the hole in my bedroom wall where the chennette tree had fallen, but he had done nothing else.

“Soon,” he said. “Soon.”

Soon never seemed to come. When we were not standing in the yard, me crying, Lucinda wringing her hands, we were busy cleaning the house. It was my father with his fanciful ideas about house construction that was to blame for all the work we had to do. None of the rooms followed any sort of logic that would be recognizable in an ordinary home. (This, too, Gardner would rectify.) The drawing room faced the back of the house and my parents’ bedroom, the front. My mother said it made no sense to her that the most important room in the house, the place where she and my father spent most of their time together, where I was conceived and born (and where in the end she died), should be in the back where the bushes were. She wanted to see the sun in the morning, so her room faced the east and all the other rooms followed, zigzagging haphazardly, one to the side of the other, separated by a long corridor. My room came first, since I was their son, then Lucinda and Ariana’s room a little to the right of it, but not directly, and to the left, the room we used as a playroom, and finally the kitchen, which had its own door to the outside and partially shared a wall and beams with the drawing room.

Air flowed equally through all the rooms, for my father had a carpenter cut into the top two feet of the wood panels separating each room and carve out flat sculptures of birds and flowers. My father wanted to remind us that the island where we lived belonged first to the flora and fauna we found here. It was this effort he made to teach me to love and respect nature that was the cause of most of our problems after the storm. The wind had been able to sweep unhampered through room after room, tunneling through the spaces in the carvings, dumping debris everywhere.

While Gardner chopped down trees, Lucinda and I packed garbage bags with water-soaked leaves and twigs, scraped mud off the floors, swept and mopped. On the third day, exhausted and irritable from all the cleaning and scrubbing, Lucinda dragged Ariana out of the room where she was sitting on the bed with Virginia. Ariana whined and cried and tried to pull away, insisting that Dr. Gardner had told her to stay with Virginia. She was afraid of disobeying Gardner, but Lucinda lost her patience. “Dr. Gardner be damned!” she said.

Though the three of us cleaned and scrubbed, the house remained a mess. Finally, frustrated, Lucinda reminded Gardner again of his promise. “Carlos can’t continue to sleep in his room the way it is,” she said. “Your
soon
will be too long for him.”

It had rained twice that week, and in spite of the planks of wood Dr. Gardner had leaned against the hole in my wall, water leaked through the spaces at the sides and soaked my floorboards.

“In time, in time,” Gardner said. “There’s no hurry for the house. I’ll get to it when I’m finished with the trees.”

Having not the faintest suspicions of the intensity of Dr. Gardner’s revulsion of leprosy, though his hatred for disease should have prepared her, Lucinda said defiantly, “Then I’ll ask the lepers to help us.”

A deep, guttural, animal roar rose up Gardner’s throat. A tiger about to pounce on its prey. “No-o-o-o!” he shouted.

Startled, Lucinda stumbled backward and grabbed onto a chair nearby. I remained transfixed to the ground. But, then, suddenly, before my eyes, like the chameleon, Gardner’s skin changed. The red stain that had rushed up his neck and spread over his face subsided. The fire went out in his eyes. He stretched out his hand and helped Lucinda steady herself on her feet. “My daughter,” he said softly. “For my daughter’s sake, we cannot have the lepers.”

Whether he was truly sorry for frightening us or whether he had been kind because he knew Lucinda was dying and it would not be long before he would not have to contend with her, I could not tell. What was certain was that the lepers would no longer be permitted to come to our house. What was clear to me was that the carrot and stick he had used with Lucinda was beginning to work, for never again did she oppose him.

Yet Gardner did in fact stop what he was doing that day and began to build a proper wall for my room. When he was finished with the wall, he went back to his garden, and when he had finished digging the rows and rows of beds in which he would plant his flowers—it took two months—Lucinda was dead.

I cannot say he killed her. She was in agony. She would stuff the sheets into her mouth and bite down hard when pain cut through her body. When I saw her like that, her teeth sunk into the sheets, her eyes popping out of their sockets, I pleaded with him to help her. “Anything. Do anything,” I begged him, tears rolling down my cheeks. “Make it stop.”

He would go to his room and return with a syringe filled with morphine, and he would inject it deep in her arm. She would grow quiet then, and the light in her eyes would dim.

It was hard for me to look at her after Gardner gave her morphine. I hated to see her lifeless eyes, glazed like the eyes of dead fish. But I preferred her so to writhing and thrashing on the bed, her fingers digging frantically into the edge of the mattress, her knuckles straining against the thin skin on her hands that, like the rest of her body, had turned a sickly yellow.

Sometimes, in the haze of the morphine, she forgot my name and she would call me by my mother’s name or by my father’s name. She would plead with me to forgive her. She had done her best, she would say. “He promised. He will help him. He will be good to him.” I knew she was speaking of Gardner, and though I did not believe what I said, I placed my hand over hers and tried to comfort her. “Don’t cry, Lucinda. He will keep his promise. He will help me.”

So I cannot say Gardner killed her. Morphine probably caused her death. She suffered unbearably. When the morphine wore off, terrible tremors erupted through her body and she called out to God, her dead mother and father, anyone, to help her, to put an end to her torture.

After she died, Gardner made changes inside the house. When he was done, the house was no longer mine.

SEVEN

FIRST, HE BURNED my mother’s bed. Only a week had passed since we buried Lucinda. He must have figured out— it wouldn’t have been difficult for him to do, what with my blue eyes and freckles and my brown skin so much lighter than Lucinda’s or Ariana’s—that some blood other than African ran in my veins. He may have asked Lucinda before she died and she may have said to him that it was from my mother I got my eyes. So he burned her bed. A slut, he called her, for lying down with a black man.

I will never forget that fire nor what he did that day. From the moment he picked up the ax, an aura of evil shadowed the house. He struck the headboard first and I grabbed his shirt, pulling and tugging at it to drag him away. He turned and slapped me.

I did not think he intended to slap me in front of Virginia. She was standing near the doorway and when I cried out in pain, she screamed. He left me at once and ran to her. On his knees, speaking in the gentlest of tones, he said to her that there was something bad in the bed. He had to destroy it. For her sake, he said. For
our
sake: his, mine, and Ariana’s. For our safety’s sake. He had not meant to hit me. He merely wanted to get me out of the way. Then he told Ariana to take Virginia to his room. When I turned to go also, he said, in a voice that made my heart flutter, “Not you. You stay.”

He wanted me to witness the end of my mother. That was what he said, his eyes shooting darts at me, evil and menacing. “She’s finished. Nothing in here belongs to her now. All is mine. I am lord of it all.”

He dragged the mattress off the bed frame. Over and over his ax went down on the headboard and on the board at the foot of the bed. I had quieted down—I did not want to be struck again—but every time his ax cut into the bed frame, breaking apart the place where my mother had slept, where, before she became catatonic with grief over the death of my father, I had spent my happiest hours curled into her arms, my heart broke into pieces, too, and tears poured heavily down my cheeks and into my mouth. My mother’s bed had become my bed since her death, her room my room. He was demolishing her bed, but he was also demolishing mine.

When Gardner was finally done chopping up the bed frame, he picked up the pieces and carried them, armfuls at a time, to the backyard. At one point, returning to the bedroom for the larger pieces, he looked over to me. I was standing in the spot where my mother’s bed used to be, still whimpering. He ordered me to help him. “Stop crying like a little girl. Be a man. Hold that end.” He pointed to a large plank of wood. I had no other choice but to help him.

After the pieces of my mother’s bed were stacked in the backyard, he went to the shed for the can of kerosene we kept there for those nights when our oil supply was low and we needed it to fuel the wicks in the lamps. He put the kerosene next to me and warned me not to move. Then he returned to the house. When he came out again, he had changed his clothes. He was wearing black pants and a black T-shirt, and over them, a cloak draped across his shoulders and his arms, falling down to his ankles. It was not an ordinary cloak. I had seen nothing like it before. It was red, made of a thick velvet material that deepened and lightened in color when he moved. Gold stars were scattered over it, and at the collar was a gold string, which he had tied in a bow at his neck.

In one hand he carried a book bound in red leather and embossed with gold letters, and in the other a cane. I would see him with this cane and book many, many times afterward, when he worked in his garden. It was gnarled, coarse knots protruding on the polished dark brown wood, ending just below the top, which was covered with a silver cap. Later, when I had the chance to look at it closely, I saw that there were tiny figures engraved on the cap, centaurs, four of them in a ring, holding hands, dancing. I shuddered when I saw those smiling bare-chested men, their horses’ legs raised in the air.

Gardner made a pyre of the pieces of my mother’s bed, doused it with the kerosene, and lit it. Immediately, my mother’s bed burst into a roaring fire. He opened his book, shook his cane over the fire, and began to chant words I did not understand. The higher the fire grew, the more violently he shook his cane and the louder he chanted. His face turned to a red the color of dried blood. The wood snapped and crackled, embers shot into the air and fell in a shower of sparks. He began to prance now, like a horse, round and round the flames, his cloak flying behind him, his red hair, like the fire itself, rising and falling as he galloped around the pyre.

From time to time he paused to douse more kerosene on the fire. Each time the flames roared higher, he cursed my mother. A witch, he called her. He would exorcise the evil spirits she had allowed in the house. “Whore! Slut! Witch! Blue-eyed hag!” He shouted out these curses as orange flames licked the night sky. He put his cane into the flames. It did not catch fire.

Ariana must have heard him when he began to pray. For at night she used to frighten me with his words. “Elves with printless feet will chase you if you do not keep quiet,” she used to whisper to me. “Midnight mushrooms will smother you.” But the threat I feared the most was the one I partially remembered: “I command the graves to open and wake their sleepers. Let them come forth!” Gardner had said.

I have been told that only black people in the Caribbean do obeah. That night I saw a white man call on the spirits, and he had learned his art not here, not in the Caribbean, but there, in England.

After the fire died down, Gardner sent me to bed in Lucinda’s room. My mother’s room was now his room, he said, my room Virginia’s room. Ariana would sleep in the playroom.

I fell asleep with Gardner’s chants ringing in my ears, his curses against my mother bombarding my dreams. Several times I woke up in fright, remembering it all again:
Whore! Slut! Witch! Blue-eyed hag!

For weeks afterward, Gardner continued to curse my mother. He called me a bastard. My mother did not know who had fathered her child, he said, giving me the full force of his embittered eyes. But he was wrong. My mother knew my father. She loved my father. They did not marry, but my father had given me his name: Carlos.

My mother told me (Lucinda reinforced the bits I remembered) that my father was a fisherman. He saved her from drowning when, on a dare, as the cruise ship she had boarded in Algiers approached Trinidad, she dove into the swollen waters.

When Gardner was told the same story, he called my mother a party girl. He said she was hired by the ship to amuse the sailors and when they were done with her, they dropped her here. But my mother did not need to amuse the ship’s crew for money. My mother was rich. She had her own money.

My mother said she hit the water with such force, she broke a rib. When she surfaced, she could barely breathe. The crewmen laughed at her. She was pretending, they said, yelling out for show. She had boasted that she was a champion swimmer (which she was), but the waves were mountainous and the undertow insistent. When she went under for the third time, believing it was for the last time, two arms scooped her to the surface. They were my father’s arms. He had been fishing that day and saw the whole thing: the dive from so high up he thought she would die. He pulled the string on the rusty motor of his pirogue and sped to her.

My mother never forgave the crew. She returned to the ship, took her things—her money and her jewels—and left that day with my father, who had no home to take her to, for he was already in hiding from the men who ultimately killed him, and was living on the beach, off the coast of Manzanilla, in a shed he had made out of dried coconut fronds and branches from sea-almond trees.

My father was a poet and a dreamer in a country where people thought that what he did, writing poems endlessly on bits of paper, was an excuse for indolence. He had finished secondary school and passed exams for an entry-level position in the post office, but he could not get the sorting and filing right. Not that he lacked the skill to do this fairly simple job, but his mind often drifted, and he inevitably did things like filing surface mail in the airmail box or sending mail to Europe in the bag for China. But each time he did such things, a poem emerged from his head, whole, intact, beautifully formed. His bosses, however, were not impressed.

When one day he was offered the chance to bring flour and rice from Venezuela on his pirogue to the market in Trinidad, he thought he had found an end to his troubles. He did not know then that the men who offered him this job were part of a drug ring that trafficked in heroin in Venezuela. He thought he was lucky.

My father was a lover of nature. More than anything, he loved the sea. What he loved best was its vast openness, the seemingly infinite stretch of water, canopied by an equally endless sky. It was there, on the sea that he wrote his best poetry. He used to go alone in his pirogue, but after he found my mother (she was like a mermaid descending into the deep, he said), he took her with him whenever he went. She came to him as a gift, a present from the gods, he believed. That she was a champion swimmer and loved the sea was all he needed to know to have no doubt she would be his life companion.

On his way back from Venezuela, with his very first load to deliver in Trinidad, something white spilled out from one of the burlap bags. Supposing it was flour, he bent down to put it back and was struck by its texture. He slit another bag. It was rice this time, but something among the rice grains caught his eye. Then another bag, a smaller one. He opened it and white powder spilled from its insides.

He should have known better, of course. Any other person but a dreamer would have been suspicious from the start. Why would two well-dressed Venezuelans approach a lone fisherman with an offer of a month’s wages at the post office for four runs a month to Venezuela? But to my father their offer was a chance in a lifetime.

It was my mother’s idea that they go to Chacachacare. My father had told her about the leper colony. She persuaded him that no one would look for him there. One year later, they began building their house behind the doctor’s quarters. Every day my mother would take the ferry to the mainland to shop for building materials—wood, cement, galvanized nails, hammers, screwdrivers—things like that, and, as the house began to take shape, she added tiles, pipes, sinks, shower-heads, furniture for the interior.

Our house, before Gardner came and claimed he was going to save us and bring us out of the dark ages, was not without modern facilities. We had a small generator, a Delco, which powered a pump that brought water into the house from two huge water tanks in the backyard where my father collected rainwater. Even today, all it would take would be the rhythmic drumming of rain on the rooftop to remind me of those days, of the tick, ticking of the Delco that used to lull me to sleep.

We did not have electric lights. Gardner rightly could take credit for that. At night oil lamps lit our house, but I preferred the soft light from the oil lamps we had to the harshness of the light from the electric bulbs when Gardner installed a more powerful generator and wired the house. Gardner thought I should have been pleased, but it was hard for me to show my gratitude. I had not forgotten the games I played with my father at night when he folded his hands into shapes that seemed unremarkable until struck by the lamplight. Then all sorts of creatures—dogs, cats, agouti, manicou, iguana—leapt across the walls, the shadows of my father’s fingers and palms moving in a multitude of directions to please me.

It was the construction of our house that probably helped my father’s killers track him down. Every delivery of the goods my mother had ordered must have been an occasion for much excitement on our little island, and not just for the small band of inhabitants who lived around the bay opposite to ours. My mother was pregnant with me when they were building the house, and I imagine it had to have been a strange sight for the men from Trinidad who unloaded our cargo to see a blue-eyed blond woman, her belly swollen with child, locked arm in arm with a black man who gave them orders.

Lucinda said that what she most admired about my mother was her thoughtfulness, her consideration for my father’s pride. His manhood, she said emphatically. She explained that my mother never gave the slightest hint to anyone that the money was hers and my father was financially dependent on her. Which was why, when the news went back to Trinidad that my father was building a big, big house for a white, blue-eyed woman, it made sense that the drug lords would conclude that there could only be one way that my father could have got the money: He had siphoned off the white powder, sold it for a fortune.

There is not much I remember about my father. I remember that he had bushy eyebrows and a thin mustache that he cut every day. I remember that his nappy hair was so thick I could lose my fingers in it. I remember that he used to let me stand on his shoulders to reach the ripe mangoes on the mango tree. I remember that he taught me not to fear the iguana or the horsewhip green snake, or the white-tailed night-jar that made hooting sounds in the night and used to frighten me. I remember his joy, how it filled his eyes and, it seemed to me, every part of his body. I have this memory of him hopping from one spot to the other, his hand extended, his finger pointing to something he wanted me to see—a butterfly, flowers clustered on the branches of a tall tree—or, suddenly, in the midst of saying something to me, lowering his voice to a whisper: “Listen. Listen.” Then puckering his lips, he would whistle, each time a trill so distinct that the bird he imitated would respond, and no other: a yellow keskidee, a gray long-tailed mockingbird, a yellow-headed green parrot. I would twist my head from right to left, like a weather vane, from him to the trees and back again, not knowing from where the sweet sounds came, so perfect was his imitation.

I remember, too, how happy he was when he had the carpenter carve birds, flowers, and animals into the wood panels above our walls. But those are the good memories. For I also remember his lifeless body stretched across the dining room table, blood congealed around the gashes the drug lords had cut across his chest and on his head.