The New Moon's Arms (6 page)

Gene was spooned behind me, half-dozing. His chest hairs were damp against my naked back.

The booming of the sea sounded muffled. Light fog had rolled in.
Sea or advection fog.
So many years since Dadda would make me quote my lessons back to him, but I still remembered.
Occurs when a body of warm moist air moves over a cooler sea surface and is cooled to dew point, which is the temperature at which condensation takes place.
Cayaba had another name for it, though: jumbie breath. Was under cover of a night like this that Potoo Nelson and eighty-two other slaves climbed up the mountain and threw themselves off the cliffs into the sea at Rocky Bottom and drowned. In jumbie breath weather, people said the dead slaves came up out of the water and walked, looking for the man who had led them to their doom.

I could hear the branches of the coconut trees thrashing. The breeze had picked up little bit. The fog drifting past my window was tattered and shredding now.

Gene put his arm around my middle. My waist had gotten thicker these past two years. Even had a little overhang. Embarrassed, I pulled his arm higher, to under my breasts. He cupped one breast. We lay in that empty, floating bliss that comes after good sex. For the first time in days, my nerves didn’t feel stripped raw.

The clock radio on my bedside table clicked on. “Chuh,” I said. “I keep forgetting to unset that alarm.”

I felt Gene roll onto his back to look at it. “An alarm for nine o’clock at night?”

“Mm-hmm. Time for Dadda’s last medicine of the day.”

He grunted. We listened to the newswoman, her Cayaba accent clipped to near-BBC diction. Apparently Caroline Sookdeo-Grant had visited Holy Name Girls’ Secondary School yesterday. She had told them that women were half of Cayaba and the country needed their strength.

“You think she could win?” I asked Gene. Election day was in a few weeks. The campaigning was hotting up.

His grin was languid. “Over Johnson? You know he not going to lose any election he could buy.”

“Mm. I don’t pay much mind to politricks. Never met a politician who wouldn’t try to convince you that salt was sugar.” I rolled onto my stomach, propped myself up on my elbows.

The radio announcer continued:
“The government of Cayaba has been in negotiations with the American institution the FFWD, the Fiscal Foundation for Worldwide Development. Today, Cayaba Public Radio learned that completion of these critical negotiations over Cayaba’s debt repayment difficulties has been delayed for a month. Samuel Tanner, economic advisor to prime minister Garth Johnson, said the delay means that Cayaba will be tardy for its deadline to reach an accord on an economic management strategy with the FFWD. The interest alone on loans from the FFWD currently exceeds $750 million. Without concessions from the American foundation, the country faces falling further behind in its repayments.”

“Chuh,” I said. “Don’t need to be hearing that nonsense right now.” I reached over Gene and turned the radio off, enjoying the feeling of his chest hair tickling my breasts. Lazily, he stroked my arm.

I was feeling a little warm. No, I was very warm. Then way too fucking hot. “Woi.” The heat rushed up through me like when you know you’re going to puke. My cheeks were stinging, sweat popping out on my forehead. I sat and fanned myself with my hands. So I was looking right out the window when it happened. I saw it happen. My breath stopped in my throat. “Holy shit! You see that?”

“See what?”

I didn’t answer; couldn’t. I shoved myself off the bed and over to the window. Only wisps of fog left, and the crescent moon glowing down to help me see. I knew the distant silhouette in the window; knew it in my bones. “That wasn’t there before,” I said. My lips trembled as I spoke.

“What?” Gene was up out of the bed now. He joined me at the window.

I could only point. My extended hand shook. Rooted on the cliff as though it had always been there was the almond tree from my childhood. “That tree.”

“That tree?” Gene echoed.

“It just appeared out of nowhere.”

“It just appeared?”

Pique was better than terror. “What, like you turn Polly parrot?” I said, trying to sound teasing instead of scared no rass. “Yes, the tree. It just came there now. Wasn’t no tree there before.” I grabbed the window ledge to hide my shaking hands. I’d spent the morning up in that tree the day that Mumma was really gone for good. Now I was cold and shivering, damn it all to hell. I stepped into the lee of Gene’s body for some of his warmth.

Gene stared out the window, frowning. His face was creased with sleep and puffy with weeping. He looked like an old man. How I come to find myself knocking boots with a senior citizen?

“I don’t quite follow you,” Gene said. “That tree. You never see it before?”

I nodded, my mouth open. “I saw it,” I whispered. “It wasn’t there, and then it was. Is from Blessée. Went down when the island went down.”

Gene stepped completely away from me; turned and began gathering his clothes off the floor. “You need to get some rest,” he said.

“You think I imagined it!” I fought to keep my teeth from chattering. I was shuddering with the chill.

Gene stepped into his underwear, pulled up his pants. “You will feel different after a good night’s sleep. Grief make a person see and do strange things.” He zipped up.

I made myself turn my back to the window. “You mean like bringing some strange man home and screwing him in my father’s house?” I meant it to sound like a challenge, but the words came out trembly, half shame, half plea.

Gene stopped buttoning his shirt. He shook his head. “No, that’s normal.” His voice sounded so ordinary, the way you might say that of course it rains after the rain flies come out.

I glanced back out the window. Tree still there. “
Normal?
How you can say that what we just did was normal?”

“Funeral sex.”

“What?”

He came over to me, took my two hands in his. “I said, funeral sex. Never happen to you before?”

“No. People don’t drop dead on me regularly.”

He gave a wry smile and let me have my hands back. “You must be younger than me, then. Two strangers at the same funeral find themselves in bed right after. Don’t feel bad. It’s a thing grief does. I see it before.” I hated the compassion in his voice. “It just never happen to me before,” he said sadly.

I asked him, “You know what else never happen before?”

“What?”

“That tree, damn it! It wasn’t there before!”

“I know that’s what you believe.” He went and flicked on the light. I squinted in the sudden, painful brightness.

“
I know that’s what you believe,
” I mocked him. “You
don’t
know. Don’t you dare patronise me in that mealy-mouthed kind of way!” I found a nightie in my dresser, pulled it over my head. “You sound like Ifeoma. I didn’t see that tree before because it wasn’t there before!”

A hardness came over his face. “Calamity, you’re hallucinating.”

I strode over to the bedroom door, yanked it open. “And you are leaving.”

“Damned right.” He brushed past me. From the hallway he said, “Drink a lot of water and try to get a good night’s sleep.”

I leaned out the door and snapped, “Don’t you tell me what to do!”

He glared at me. Stomped out into the living room. I stood in my bedroom. Every time I looked towards the window, I got the shakes. Gene came back into the bedroom.

“I told you you could come back in here?”

He made a face, squared up his shoulders. “Sorry for trying to give you orders,” he said. “Bad habit.”

Just like that.

“You’re a strong woman. I can see that. Looking after Mr. Lambkin all those years. But who looking after Calamity?”

He wasn’t going to get around me by being nicey-nicey. “Calamity looking after Calamity. She one.”

He set his mouth hard. “So I see. Calamity don’t need nobody. You going to come and lock the front door behind me?”

I looked away from him. I didn’t reply.

“All right, then.”

I listened to the sound of his feet walking down the hallway and through the living room. I heard him open the front door, close it back with a deliberate gentleness. Little more time, I heard his car start up.

“That’s right,” I muttered. “Take your skinny behind away from my front yard.” I went and locked the front door. Returned to the bedroom and threw myself onto the bed. In the lighted room, the window was just a square of black. The blindness was worse than being able to see it. I leapt up again and outed the light. There was the tree, looming in the dark. “You don’t scare me,” I said to it. I lay back down. My pillow was damp and it smelled of sweat. I clutched a corner of it tightly. The rumpled top sheet was on the floor where we had kicked it. My funeral clothes were all over the floor, too. Fucking hell. That had been beyond the pale, even for me. Bury the father, come straight back to his house with a man, and…“I’m sorry, Dadda,” I whispered.

Oh, shit. The yam. It would rotten in the closed-up car. I sucked my teeth and got up again. I went out to the car. From the passenger side seat I picked up the piece of yellow yam. It was nearly as big as my head, its dark brown, rooty skin rough against my palms. I took it inside, to the kitchen. I put it on the kitchen counter.

Truth to tell, I wasn’t sleepy. By the clock set into the stove, it wasn’t even ten o’clock yet. And I didn’t want to go back to my bed to stare at the almond tree and try to figure out if I was finally going stark, staring mad.

I wasn’t in the mood for tv. I opened the freezer and took out the two books I had in there, knotted into separate plastic bags. I squinted in the low light from the open fridge, trying to make out their titles. Oh, yes:
Buxton Spice
and
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil.
The books had been in my freezerversity nearly three months now; more than enough time to kill a full life cycle of bookworm. Hadn’t read much in Dadda’s last few weeks. In the evenings after I’d fed him and got him to take his medicine, my mind had been too fretful for book learning.

I put one book on the kitchen table. Took the other one out of its plastic and cracked it open. But I wasn’t really seeing the words. I put it down, looked around the kitchen. My eye lighted on the piece of yam. I grinned. Night picnic on the beach. Like old times.

I found matches, lit a hurricane lamp and took it into the pantry. Its yellow-brown light set shadows to flickering on the pantry walls. My shadow did a devil-girl dance in the light.

On a shelf in the pantry stood two lonely bottles of store-bought cashew liqueur. Our pantry in Blessée used to have shelves full of cashew wine and liqueur; gallon bottles. Dadda had managed to save a few when Blessée blew away. He used them to bribe the Coast Guard rescuers to let him off at Dolorosse instead of taking him to a shelter on the big island like everybody else. They’d probably thought he was crazy to take the chance. They had probably been right. He had camped out right there on the beach for a day in the wind and the rain with the few possessions he had left. The Coast Guard was coming to remove him forcibly when Mr. Kite had taken him in. Mr. Kite was a weird old white guy from Germany. Came to Cayaba and went native.

I hooked two fingers through the handle of one of the liqueur bottles. Took it out to the kitchen table. Back in my room I stood off to one side so I couldn’t see out the window. I peeled out of my nightie and tossed it on the bed. No need to dirty more clothes; I just put on back the underwear and the skirt and blouse I had thrown on the floor before jumping into bed with Gene. Nobody to see how they were wrinkled. The panty hose were crumpled up and lying beside the bed. The translucent fabric looked like shed skin. One leg was laddered. I tossed them into the waste basket.

Back in the kitchen, one of the big cloth shopping bags hanging under the sink held the yam, the salt and pepper, and a stick of butter from the fridge. I slung the bag handles over my arm and hooked the liqueur bottle by its handle again. The hurricane lamp went into the other hand, to light my way. Barefoot, bare-legged, I went down the front steps and took the road to the beach.

The rockstones and the sticks on the path jooked my feet. So long I hadn’t walked on hard ground with no shoes. When I got so big and grown up, wearing shoes all the time?

The sea smelled salty and meaty tonight, like dinner. Once I reached the first stretch of beach sand with its scrub grass, the warm sand was soothing under my feet. The waves slushed at me in rhythm, like an old person puffing as she dozed.

In the dark, the hurricane lamp threw a protective circle of light around me. Grandmother Sea was snoring in her sleep, and I was feeling better already.

I set down the shopping bag and searched the beach until I’d found enough driftwood. I buried the yam in the sand. Over it, I piled the sticks, used flame from the lamp to get a fire going. I dug a shallow hole nearby, waited for it to fill from the bottom with sea water. The butter went into that, so it wouldn’t melt in the warm air. I stood the bottle in the sand, close to the fire. The heat would warm the liqueur a little.

Fuck. What I was going to sit on? I had forgotten about that. Walk all the way back to the house? If I went, I probably wouldn’t come out again tonight.

I had a naughty idea. I checked the beach up and down. Nobody. I pulled off my skirt and laid it on the sand. I felt so wicked, with the sea breeze blowing through my legs! But now I had a picnic blanket. I sat on my skirt and stared into the fire. It chuckled as it burned. I reached for the bottle of cashew liqueur, put the bottle of warm, sweet alcohol to my lips, and drank. With no dinner in my belly yet, I began to feel the booze one time. So I had more. The sea made its warm whooshing noise. I crooned to it, “The moonlight, the music, and you…” and took another gulp. I tucked the bottle into the cradle made by my knees and thighs. The cool glass felt good against my skin. Up in the sky the new moon swung, yellow and sickled as a banana. A round shadow sat inside its horns. “Old moon sitting in the new moon’s arms,” I whispered to it; a phrase I’d learned from my freezerversity. I picked up the bottle, took three long pulls at it. I tucked its smooth roundness back against my pubic bone.