The Sea Grape Tree (4 page)

Before Naomi's outburst, Sarah had been mulling what the new eggs-in-dirt series should be called. It had to be a name signifying fertility and the unity of all life—the idea of baby chicks taking the place of grass. Both eggs and dirt would have to be safe and contained, of course. Otherwise the viewer would think about the crushing of eggs and the resulting slimy yolks. And like all her other paintings, each piece would be small, exactly four inches by four inches.

Sarah painted nothing but miniature canvases. They had become part of her personal style and no one had questioned her choice in the last eight years, not since her father had died.

“Why not try it even once?” he'd suggested while he was driving her to her job one day. “Try sketching, just take a big sheet of paper and let things flow, as they say nowadays.”

The very thought of a large piece of paper always resulted in a knot in Sarah's stomach, the way it had when she was forced to do it in art school, and she'd ignored her father's advice. The unfettering of self that came with painting large, the unveiling to others, left her far too vulnerable. Her paintings remained small, the ornate frames more than double the size.

The subject of an eggs-in-dirt series hadn't been raised with her mother, who'd never been particularly interested in her work.

“Hello, my dear,” she'd always say, pressing her cheek to her daughter's, when Sarah paid her monthly visit. Arthritis-­bowed spine pushing through the back of the sweater set, her mother usually launched into descriptions of her latest ailments as soon as they sat down. The subject of her only child's art never took longer than two minutes of the one-hour visit and, over the years, the artist had gotten used to nursing her work within the privacy of her own breast.

There was even some pride, admittedly, in knowing that few people understood the minuscule, surrealistic paintings. Only a buyer with an unusual eye would appreciate mermaids lying before church altars or the safety offered to an egg by warm, brown earth. But the egg series was to be put on hold, thanks to Roper's invitation, and a Jamaican series was to take its place.

“A free vacation.” Penny snorted. “I'm totally green, you know, thinking of you being in the Caribbean in the middle of winter.”

“And the sea's right there, at the end of a path.”

“How'd you get this invitation, anyway? I know you mentioned it, but—”

“I don't know why I tell you anything, Penny Clutterbuck.” Sarah took a slow sip of tea, relishing the suspense she had few opportunities to create.

“Get on with it.”

“Naomi represents Roper in the UK, and he was in the gallery one day and we started chatting. Actually, he was chatting and I was listening. He kept looking at my paintings and asking me if I didn't want to paint something larger than four-by-fours, like a bloody teacher or something, and I finally got upset because he kept pressing me, and as I was walking away he called out something about paying my ticket to Jamaica and putting me up if I painted one large painting.
You can't paint Jamaica small,
he said. Had a rather arrogant tone, too.” Sarah shrugged. “I said no, thank you, of course, but Naomi was standing right there. She started going on about how wonderful a Jamaican series would be.” Sarah drained her cup and filled it again from the teapot. “No way out, really.”

“Lucky bugger, you are. Don't even know the man's full name and he's paying for your ticket,
plus
board and lodging.”

“Yes, but it's sort of like holding me hostage, isn't it? No return ticket until he approves of one of my paintings.”

“Suppose he doesn't approve of anything and you're
stuck
?”

Sarah ran a finger around the lip of her teacup. “He's rather a character, I think, but he strikes me as a fair sort. When I've had my holiday and painted what I want to paint, I'll just give him the painting
he
wants and get done with it. In the meanwhile, my expenses will be taken care of in Jamaica, and your cousin will be renting my room here until I come back. No harm done.” She hunched her shoulders forward and hugged her arms. “The great adventure, right?”

CHAPTER FOUR

S
ay that again!” Shad said. He pushed himself up on one elbow, Beth's arm still on his hip. The unexpected evening of romance had descended into a web of manipulation.

“So that is why you left the sandwich on the dinette table—”

“With the crust cut off, the way you like it.”

“—and the nightgown and perfume, because
you want to work in Port Antonio
?”

“What wrong with that?” Beth asked, almost innocently.

“Just because Jamaica get a woman prime minister, all you women think you can—”

“Why you going on so?”

“You have four children to look after, a baby to nurse, Ashanti with her problems, a garden in the back to tend, market on Saturday to sell your vegetables—and you want to get a job? You don't have enough work to do here?”

He dropped back on the pillow, his head on his arm. Above him, the ceiling was streaked by the neighbor's porch light sneaking in above the curtains. “Who going to take care of the children? I working mornings at Mistah Eric's bar and evening shift until all hours, so I can't take care of no children, if that what you thinking. You going to spend almost one hour each way to Port Antonio in the route taxi every day. It don't make no sense.”

Beth rolled onto her back. “Joella have to finish high school in Port Antonio, like how she want to start dental assistant school next year, right? She going to take taxi there every day, starting September. Like how she don't know the place, and I come from Port Antonio and know it good, and we nervous about her traveling with all the boys on the bus, I can travel with her. You know what can happen if we let her go on her own? You said it yourself. Next thing she end up pregnant and the studying gone through the window.”

Shad rolled his eyes in the dark, hearing what Beth was not saying, that her own downfall had started on a Port Antonio bus when she'd smiled coyly at him, the new bus conductor, and five months later had agreed to go back to his room behind the butcher shop and lie down on his old iron bed.

“What about Joshua?” Shad argued, changing direction. “He still breast-feeding—who going to take care of him?”

“He gone one and a half years now, time to stop the feeding. Miss Livingston say she will look after him in the daytime and I will pick him up when I come home.”

“But who going to look after Ashanti, like how she so difficult with the autism? Nobody going to want to take care of her.”

“They have a school in Port Antonio for children like her, and that is another reason I want to work there. I call the number on the pamphlet the doctor gave us, remember the one? They say that they have a day school for children like her, children with
disabilities,
that's what they call it. They say that since she going on five, she should start school now, and when Joella start school in September, she can help me with her in the taxi coming and going.”

“And Rickia? She can't stay by herself when she come home from school. And I can't be here to make sure she do homework and everything.”

“She going over to Miss Livingston after school and help with the baby. She always good about her homework, anyway, so she can do it there.”

“Miss Livingston agree to this?”

“I tell her I will pay her little money and she say yes. She need the money and she like the company.” A lot of thinking had gone into Beth's new plan, Shad realized. Without a word to him, she'd done her research and made calls and arrangements with other people, and he, a man who was known as a
sniffer and snuffer
(according to Miss Mac), a man who knew everything about everybody in Largo, had been clueless about his own woman's goings-on.

As hurtful as the news was to Shad, it was even more painful because he hadn't been consulted. Although he was unable to read and write beyond a fifth-grade level, Shad had established himself as Largo Bay's problem solver. The role had started from childhood when, as the self-appointed village messenger, he'd earned access to the villagers' lives. He'd seen who was sitting in the obeah man's waiting room when he paid a bill for Miss Hilda. He'd known who was coming from England when he delivered invitations to Mas Josiah's party, and overheard the pastor cursing his wife once when he went to collect his dollar.

With knowledge of their secrets, the little barefoot boy had morphed into the village's go-to man as an adult. Yet Shad was keenly aware that he was looked down on by many who were higher up the food chain—even while he was looked up to by his peers. He understood the social context in which he operated, understood the complexities of his people and how they thought. He was a man who observed, who analyzed, who hung back until it was time, and acted when it was. He was a man of street smarts, an Anansi—the African spider of folk tales that had traveled to the Caribbean with the enslaved thousands—a man who, in another time and place, would have been a financial genius.

“Stop right here,” Shad said as he turned on the bedside lamp. “What you planning to do with this money you going to make? I know you, and you always have a purpose for everything.”

Beth closed her eyes. “We can always use little extra, not true? Like how Joella going to high school—”

“I can manage that now, so what else?”

“What you mean?”

“Don't act so innocent. You want to buy a car? Another house? Talk to me.”

She took her time, followed by the crick-crack of her rollers as she turned to look at him. “You said we going to marry, right? But you say the—the wedding have to wait until we have the money. I was just thinking I could find little work, you know, cleaning house to pay for the wedding, and we wouldn't have to wait.”

Shad sat up, propping his elbows on his knees. “Everything going along nice-nice, and we about to build the new hotel. I going to have to work harder, supervising the hotel going up
and
running the bar. Everything already going to be in confusion, and you want to cause more confusion by traveling to Port Antonio, twenty miles each way, every day—just for a wedding? It going to mean that you coming home late, that dinner going to be cooked late, that nobody here when I come home for my lunch—”

“Shad,” Beth said, sitting up beside him, “I tired of being your woman. All these years we together, seventeen, going on eighteen years now, and I just your common-law wife. We have four children—not one, not two, not even three—
four
children.” She held up her fingers one by one.

“When you lost the conductor work and you start to rob people purses, it was
me
who tell you to stop the foolishness, and when they catch you and put you in the Pen for the year, it was
me
traveling to Kingston every week and taking food for you, with my belly getting bigger with Joella. And after you get out, is
me
make you come to Largo to live with your grandmother, and when she was sick, is
me
taking care of her and the baby while you building the hotel. Then you start the bartending at the hotel, and is
me
start planting garden so we could have little extra money and eat fresh food.” Shad slid down to rest on the headboard, allowing her to get the memorized list off her chest, the way a woman had to.

“I have Rickia just before your granny dead,” she continued, “and I sew the dress for Granny to bury in with the baby nursing at my breast. You lose the work when the hotel mash up in the hurricane, and we live off the garden and your fishing, barely making it. Then the bar build back and you bringing in steady money, and I have Ashanti and Joshua.” She exhaled hard and short, a train letting out steam. “I done now with the baby making, you hear me, and is my time now, my time to bring in steady money—like you.”

Shad stroked her arm. “We have enough money, even added on a second bedroom for the children last year. I don't know what you talking about, Beth. We making it, we making it.”

“But you need little help, and the wedding—you told me last year to set a date, and I set it for July this year. Then you tell me to hold off because we don't have the money for no wedding.”

“Like how you was sewing wedding dress and soaking fruit and talking about invitations, you sound like some English princess. You make me afraid of the whole thing. That kind of wedding cost plenty money.”

“I just saying we should have a good-good wedding—after all this time. We need to set a example. We need to show the children that we respectable and married.”

“You mean we not respectable now? We don't need no wedding to show that.”

“Talk the truth, Shadrack Myers.” Her voice had gone cool, chilling him already. “You don't want to marry me.”

“I want to married to you, sweetness, but we don't have to rush it.”

“Four children and eighteen years, and we—”

“I love you until sun don't shine, you know that.”

The mother of his children lay down again, straightening her nightgown under the sheet, her face to the wall.

“Beth,” he reasoned with her back, “how many people you see married in Largo Bay, apart from the Delgados and pastor? Miss Alice and Mistah Jethro is the onliest ones, and they only marry right before Jethro died, because pastor tell him he going straight to hell when he dead.” Above the sheet he could see the baby hairs on the back of her neck and resisted the urge to stroke them.

“
Boonoonoonoos,
” he said, calling her by the name Granny called him when she was in a good mood. “People in Jamaica don't get married, you know that. It feel like bondage, from way back, from slavery days. Is only when these ministers start to come and say that we living in sin that it shame us, but you and I not living in sin. We don't sleep with nobody else but us, you know that. The Bible say we shouldn't commit adultery, but show me where it say we must marry in long dress and suit with a minister and plenty people in a church, and that we must feed all of them afterward.”

Her voice was muffled. “Corinthians say every man should have his wife and every woman should have her husband.”

An old argument that was beginning to get stale, one that even he was getting tired of, the wedding question had intensified over the past year. It had all started with the last minister, a self-righteous man who had departed over a matter related to sexual preference, but now the new minister had taken up the slack. Like all the other villagers, Beth at first had ignored the threats of hellfire for the unmarried, even though her own parents had been married. But she'd finally concluded that she and Shad were doomed and she'd been planning a wedding since late the year before. A contributing factor, Shad suspected, was that she saw that the island's well-to-do families were headed by married parents and, since middle-class people were respected, and since she was an ambitious woman, Beth had decided to claim her place among them by becoming a married woman.

Whenever he raised the topic of marriage, Shad had received advice to the contrary from several local residents, including his own boss.

“Stay away from it as long as you can,” Eric had remarked once. “If it doesn't drive you to divorce, it will drive you to drink. A wedding ring makes a woman go crazy, I'm telling you. She suddenly thinks she can run your life.” Eric had been reading a newspaper when he said it and Shad still remembered the black eyebrows above the paper.

Shad touched Beth on the shoulder. “Name me one thing that marriage is good for,” he said.

“Com-mitment.” She pronounced the word carefully, as if she'd heard it on one of the soap operas she watched while cooking dinner.

“We not committed now?”

“No. You can go off any time and leave me with the children and—”

“I come home every night to you for sixteen years now. I don't love another woman for more than eighteen years. What you call that, not commitment? I bring home all my money, all my tips. I don't spend a penny on another woman, on nothing outside the house, not even on liquor. I buy you a television, a refrigerator, and me and Frank put on the back room last year. You don't call that love?”

Beth turned over. “I know you love me, and I know you will think about it
because
you love me. If you can't afford to pay for a nice wedding, like you say, you will understand that I need to have a job so we can have a nice wedding. Now get your rest, because Miss Livingston's cock going to crow soon.” He felt for the lamp switch without looking, turned it off, and reached for her.

“One more thing,” she said, rolling away from him. “No sex before marriage, so Pastor say.”