Swimming in the Volcano (32 page)

The men carried the unconscious girl back to her stepmother's,
and eased her into her narrow bed. The women undressed and washed her, thickening the shadows with prayer. As if she were an icon or the prostrate statue of a martyr, they stole kisses from the girl's waxen forehead. The oldest midwife on the island was summoned, a hag like a burnt, elfin wraith who had delivered hundreds of babies without ever losing a mother. She placed a poultice between the girl's legs, wedging it into her torn vagina, then crossed the legs tightly shut, right over left, and bound them together at the knees and ankles with strips of bedsheet. Finally, the priest came from the front room, where he had been swilling bush rum while the girl's stepmother argued out loud with herself for the benefit of all in earshot, that the girl was no good, that she had warned the girl to have nothing to do with men, that her dead husband would have beaten his daughter and locked her in her room if he were alive, to save her from turning into the green whore she had become; that this was a good house, until the girl had corrupted it with sin. The preacher knelt at Miss Diedra's bedside, tormented by his own devotion to the Black Venus, and begged Erzulie Mary to dismount the girl, but the saint mocked the priest by exchanging the suffering in the girl's face for a look of sensual beauty, moving the girl's right hand so that it clutched the nut of her left breast, and pulling the other hand down to plant its fingers in the wool of her pubic hair. The next day, a doctor arrived from St. Catherine on the afternoon ferry, carrying his soupy bags of plasma in an ice chest, but the transfusions only funneled life back into the girl's veins, not health or liberty, and she remained an angel trapped on earth, the living temple of the Lady of Sorrows, Erzulie Mary, bedridden in the house of her stepmother for five years, speaking infrequently and then only in the language of unutterable obscenity that composed the benedictions of her mistress. In due time, the priest of the Church of Christ of the Crossroads built a shrine in the girl's room, and fornicated with the goddess on Tuesdays and Thursdays, her chosen days, and with the stepmother, when she would have him. The baby, being nothing, was neither remembered nor forgotten, as if it had come no closer to the lives within the house than a shooting star.

Ten days after the birth of his son, Collymore returned to Cotton Island, his pockets full of money from a week-long expedition aboard a freezer ship, fishing grouper on the Leeward Banks, along the blue-water edge of the shoals. For two days and nights he feted himself in Mama Smallhorne's rum shop and, after sleeping straight through the third, visited the girl Diedra on the fourth to verify the jokes and
rumors that he had given the world another mouth to feed, again. One visit was enough, and more. The unwelcoming stepmother wanted to know who he was, and what business brought him to her door. “Mahn's business, eh?” he answered, and stepped around her. The girl herself revolted him, with her deflated body and swimming eyes, her odor of embalmment. She spoke in a rasping, throaty voice but made no sense, though there was not much sense to her to begin with, only a hunger he could clearly see had itself been devoured. Relieved she had no claim on him, he backed out the door, nodding all the while, as if she were telling him not to come back, and he was bravely agreeing to obey her wish. Then, with no regrets, he walked a mile down the road and another ten minutes down a gully path to the Quashie house, to get a look at the baby and get a feel for the extent to which he might be held responsible for its welfare. He filled the doorway of the small frame house on Hammon's Bight where the child had been carried the night of its birth, declining Emma Quashie's chilly invitation to step inside.

“You know I does fish fah me bread and buttah, Emma Quashie.”

The baby was wrapped in a clean yellow crib blanket. His open eyes were almost slanted, like Collymore's. Emma held the baby propped in her arms, displaying it like a vendor at the market. “Collymore, what you sayin, mahn? You ain tek you own baby?” The infant had colic; his raw umbilicus, infected, protruded from his gas-inflated stomach like a sausage; he cried throughout the night, throughout the day, and as if on cue, he began crying now, mucus streaming out of his eyes and miniature nostrils. Emma was accustomed to these tribulations of child-rearing, but never had she seen her husband Rupert so short-tempered and disapproving. He didn't like the time she gave to the church —he thought of the group as a cult of religious fanatics, backward-thinking, and told her so, told her to join a proper Baptist church. Told her, the night she came with the baby, “Here now, how you reach home wit pickaninny of a crazy gyurl! Womahn, you would let dog suck you titty.” For his benefit, Emma quickly discredited the vision of the epiphany that for a moment had bathed the beach in celestial light, but her superstitions were not easily dismissed. The child had survived a divine confrontation. If power were a Barbados lily, its pollen would have dusted the baby's eternal soul, from his brush against it. If this meant good fortune, she wanted to keep the child at whatever cost, but surely the infant could be cursed with bad luck too. Time would tell her so. Her maternal instinct, however confused and complicitous, made her righteous and bullish. She squared her shoulders, cocked her head at a
fierce angle, and raked Collymore with scorn, almost shrieking what she had to say. “Muddah won't come. Stepmuddah won't come. I try to help in crisis but who appreciate it! Now de faddah come and him useless, him shiftless, him assified, him a mahn who pay you back on Nebruary mornin, him a contriver and him just one more chupid nigger-buck wit roostah fah brains!”

Collymore had heard too much of this in his life and had learned to be amused by it, though on the sea each day, he rehearsed his revenge against all who had no time for him, a hardworking fisherman, he obliterated their images and their judgments and their lack of respect. With superior mind power and superior muscle power, he conquered their shadows. This Emma Quashie, he knew her from way-back, another hungry, grab-a-bwoy island girl, before she married the Guyanese cop, and take airs. He knew her when she but a girl hung with rags, her new bubbies sore like bee sting, poking carrot up her pee-pee to joke the boys. She saw how he smiled at her, and smirked back at his arrogance, but now that they recognized themselves in each other again, top to bottom, now that that was clear, Collymore set his mouth and became serious.

“When he pull a line, he cy-ahn come by me, eh?”

“Bwoy, you sit in de hot sun too long. Me ain feedin no pickaninny to send by you when he raise up. Step down from my stoop, Collymore.”

“Here now,” he bargained, “you ain tek fish fah you pot?”

Emma Quashie wouldn't soften her manner, for fear of seeming pleased with this arrangement. “Send a piece
each time you reach
, nuh?” she said with strict precision.
“Each time.”
As if she wanted the buyer to verify the quality of his purchase, she held the baby out in front of her, indifferent to the infant's pathetic bleats, the void of comfort in which he writhed and squirmed. “You wish to hold de child?”

Collymore snorted. “Soon enough,” he said, and so the deal was struck.

In those days, the colonial administration still rotated the members of its police force throughout the West Indies, and Rupert Quashie, from British Guiana, had been assigned a year's duty to out-of-the-way Cotton on the principle that outsiders, by nature, would never get in too thick with the locals, who were gaining a reputation as interisland smugglers. But Quashie married a Cotton Islander, and gave her two children, both girls. He savored the tranquility of the breezy island, the illusion of its expanse and the snugness of its insularity,
after having known only the slums of Georgetown. So much so that when he was scheduled for promotion and transfer to Antigua, and his hard-headed wife announced she wouldn't live in a country that operated gambling houses —an objection he knew masked her inability to forfeit control over her life —Rupert decided not to argue with her about getting ahead in the world, because now it seemed that getting ahead actually meant going past a good thing. In this small place, his aspirations were not being denied him —he had a family, a house, respect from the community, extra money from being on the take with the contraband runners —and because he had married Emma, and was an outwardly honest and obedient policeman, he was allowed to stay where he was, though his promotion was indefinitely deferred.

Once his anger at his wife's impulsiveness subsided, and the mad fires lit by obeah flickered out within her eyes, he saw the hopelessness of the baby's situation, how grim and unwelcoming his deliverance, and granted the child a home under his roof, and then within his own healthy heart. It was Emma who named the child Cassius, after the priest in her church; it was Emma who nursed and changed him, washed him, then later took him to the markets and every Sunday noon to the one-room church on the hill above town, but it was also Emma who filled his head with a chaotic pantheon of white gods and black ones, of saints that could at any moment turn tyrant, and of an almost-visible underworld about to burst though the doors and windows of the house and fill it with galloping, darting, merciless devils. The river of her fantastic whisperings eroded into the child's consciousness, as it did with his two sisters, and made the Quashie children famous among their playmates for being easily spooked, with imaginations as fertile as volcanic soil. As for his sisters, they treated Cassius no differently than they did one another, with no more meanness, and no less affection, and he loved them without ever thinking about it, and with no notion of what any mirror would try to tell him, that he was not their brother.

As for Rupert, he was all the god that Cassius wanted, there and not there, occupied by the most vital events in Cotton's universe. His unpredictable appearances were profound and joyous, to look up from the yard, or from the kitchen table, or from the bed where he slept with his sisters to see the giant that was his father, to be successfully appraised by this power, the nighttime of his stern face dissolved by the waves of radiance that were his smiles, to see how handsomely he wore his fine uniform, how well he suited the justice of its red, the authority of its navy blues, to touch the high black polish
of its leather, the glory of its gold buttons and fastenings; and the most unnerving pleasure, to slide near enough to inhale the oiled metal of an absolute and forbidden marvel, the stone-heavy pistol strapped to its triangle of holster. It was the sight of the gun, and the sight of his father with it hung on his hip, that made the boy Cassius believe that the world had a place for its heroes, which was a conclusion he came to in full innocence, without a child's violent make-believe of the gun shooting or destroying, because Rupert Quashie wished to be a good father and a kind though wide-awake man, and he was. Meanwhile, day after day, Emma matter of factly described a parade of invisible horrors lurking about, indoctrinating the young Cassius to the philosophy of a volatile world, its dangers requiring years to enumerate, wholly vulnerable to catastrophe. It was in this way that she programmed a happy child for the future. And it was only a few months before his fifth birthday that the future showed itself, if only for an afternoon.

Miss Emma was sent word from Cassius' namesake —servant of God, minister of Jesus, priest of Legba and Erzulie —to come bring the boy to Miss Diedra's house, for she was fighting against death and needed their support. Emma was not eager to go, and sent a note in care of the driver of the island transport:
Tell me
, she scrawled,
how we can help keep dead from dying
, and within an hour, received a message she dreaded in reply:
the boy, son of Erzulie M
. She called the child in from the yard where he was batting rocks with a stick and dressed him in the Sunday suit handed down to him from a Quashie cousin. Cassius was runty and the suit baggy, the tip of the necktie tucked into the bunched waist of his pants, the socks hot and the hard shoes like buckets on his feet, but still it thrilled him to be made to look special, the knots combed out of his hair and his cheeks patted with his father's bay rum, his mother fretting over him like she did his sisters.

His mother cussed at his fidgeting, the parakeet-like energy of his excitement, his unanswerable questions. When she took him by the hand, he made sure their fingers interlocked, and together they walked around the harbor road, Emma tugging him onward when he slowed down to inspect a bug, a flower, a lizard, a grazing horse, an interesting piece of garbage, another child of this flake of paradise, until they came to a sandy yard and a path lined with conch shells that led to the place called Miss Diedra's, where sunlight faltered at the threshold as they stepped inside.

Emma's anxiety reared up and the boy sensed it, his grip tightening,
sweeping the shuttered dusk of the room with his worried looks. She had only come to this house twice since the night the boy was born, the first soon after to say the baby was well and come fetch it when Miss Diedra was feeling able, the second to pay her respects to the stepmother, dead two years past from a cancer. The hush that surrounded them was the same a sleeper awoke to in the middle of the night, having dreamt of an intruder.
Mommi?
the boy said, and Emma shook his arm to silence him.

“M'pé,”
she called into the shadowy depths of the house, shamed by the tremolo she heard weaken her voice. Foolish girl to come here, she thought, but twice as foolish to be afraid. “Faddah?” She listened but heard nothing. “Is we who you have summoned.”

From the back of the house they heard a man's baritone voice, hoarse and lilting, choked off by coughing before they could understand what he said. The coughing was like strangulation, then it lessened, punctuated by an ellipsis of wet growls, a rolling of phlegm that became an eerie creak of footsteps passing through the floorboards like the noise of rats. The colorless plastic ribbons dividing the front room from the hallway danced apart to frame the priest of the Church of Christ of the Crossroads, a short and once stout man now bloated by the countless bottles of rum of his grief, the sack of his stomach bouncing nakedly between his sleeveless undershirt and the dungaree trousers that sagged from his hips, meant to be buttoned around the waist of the man he once was, not the man he had become in his years of deceitful marriage to a girl —a child —who had lost her mind; not the man who had inherited a wife by divine plan, the way Satan inherited a doomed soul, and not the man who now worshiped far beyond salvation the most profane treasure, the unchallenged ownership of another's flesh.