All about Skin (39 page)

Emanuel studied the woman carefully, how the long, loose, cotton dress she wore did not do much to hide her splendid figure. His eyes moved from her tiny waist, to the full round bottom, down to the curve of her legs and the ankles and feet resting solidly on the ground. Her hair was one long, thick plait down her back. She had the most beautiful complexion he'd ever seen, something that was a cross between honey and wild ginger. She was like a jewel, he thought, staring at her, something rich and dark, something you could spend the rest of your life looking at.

The woman slipped back inside the house and came out again, this time dragging a large white pail like the ones the women in the district washed their clothes in by the river.

He kept watching her. Why would she live so far away from everyone else, he asked himself ? Most of the other homes in the district were set back from the one badly paved road over which hardly any cars ran anymore. When had she moved into the district and onto “his” land? How come no one told him about, or talked about, this woman?

The woman began pinning clothes on the line all the while humming to herself. Something about her appealed to him, something he couldn't quite put his fingers on. Perhaps it was her quick, lithe movements. Or perhaps it was the thick black hair like a rope down her back. Indian hair. Hair like his wife had when they first got together. That was many years ago and Urmilla did not have hair like that anymore. Now her hair had thinned out and she no longer took time with it and just rolled it into a coil on the top of her head. Urmilla had changed so much, Emanuel thought miserably. Now she'd gained too much weight and her disappointments in life, chief among them her inability to conceive a child, hung off her like its own weight.

Friday night after returning home from the field he watched as she squatted over the wood fire, blowing it back to a blaze, to warm his dinner. How big her backside had gotten, he thought to himself, and how heavily veined her legs. When she looked over at him he immediately noticed the creases around her eyes and how bloodshot and tired they looked. No, she was no longer the woman he married so many years before.

Emanuel refocused his attentions on the woman in the yard. She was obviously alone in the house. She kept humming to herself, reaching into the pail, pulling out clothes, and hanging them on the line. Her back all the time was turned to him.

He decided to come from behind the tree and talk to her.

Removing his worn, brown felt hat and holding it in his hands, Emanuel approached the fence.

“Good morning, Ma'am,” he said to her and the woman stiffened. She did not answer him and she did not turn around.

“I hope I didn't frighten you much, Miss,” he continued, “but I sure was surprised to see a house in these parts. To see you in these parts.”

Still there was no answer.

“I works abouts here,” Emanuel said to the trembling back of the woman, “have worked abouts here all my life and I've never seen your place before.” He stopped, waiting for her to answer, or at least to turn around and acknowledge him in some way, but she still did not move.

“Well, most folks around here known me as Manuel, Mani for short. I live over there,” he said, pointing in the direction where he was just coming from. “But I have my fields over there.” He pointed deeper into the bushes. He stopped talking, waiting for her to say something, but still there was nothing. “It sure is a nice little place you have here, even though I'm not sure how you got it all up so fast. How
did
you get it up so fast?”

Emanuel began to shift uncomfortably when the woman still did not answer him and when she still did not turn around. He was close enough to see she was trembling slightly, to smell the bleach on the pail of white clothes she was washing, to see the tiny blue spots in the white shorts she'd hung on the line. Beads of sweat started collecting at the roots of her hair then running down her neck and shoulders and making small rivulets into her back.

He made to get closer to her, but the parrot began squawking loudly in protest, rapidly flapping its wings, doing everything, it seemed to Emanuel, to stave off the unwelcome visitor.

Emanuel took a few rapid steps backward, looking around for his machete. Were his eyes deceiving him? The bird actually seemed to be threatening him, even getting bigger and bigger!

“I wish you would say something, Miss,” he said, a touch of anxiety creeping into his voice. “Perhaps you don't know this, for you look to me to be a stranger to these parts, but around here everyone speaks to everyone else. The very least you can do is respond to a greeting!”

Still there was no answer.

The sun started climbing overhead and Emanuel decided he should be on his way to the field if he wanted to get any work done for the day. He turned around, collected his machete, reached for the lunch Urmilla had carefully prepared for him, and walked away from the house. He shook his head in disbelief at the bad manners of some people.

All day long as he worked the woman was all he could think about. As he dug into the soft, moist earth planting new banana suckers, and later, as he reached up, fingering his coffee beans to see how ripe they were, he wrestled with the image of the house, the bird, and the woman. There had been no talk of another person moving into the district and this was a place where everyone knew everyone else. The entire district was enclosed by dark-blue mountains and so shielded it seemed the outside world had forgotten about the place. Even the district's name, Nonsuch, added to its obscurity.

“You know how we come by that name?” his friend Robinson asked him one Friday night as they sat playing dominoes. They were both slightly drunk, although Robinson was more far-gone than he was.

“We were really None-such you know. None-such place on the map of the island.” Robinson started laughing hard at his own joke. “None-such, None-such, Non-such place.”

This actually made sense to Emanuel, especially since the district was never more isolated than it was these days. Tourists no longer passed in vans on Mondays and Wednesdays throwing coins at the children who waved hibiscus flowers at them. The big, blue bus no longer carried passengers to the bay, where the stores were. (The roads were too bad and the bus driver got tired of having to repair his bus.) Of the two vans that still made the journey through the district one of them always ended up with a busted pipe or tire because of the road. So how indeed had the woman moved there? The question obsessed him.

As he settled under the cocoa tree where he ate his lunch and took out the food his wife had prepared for him, Emanuel continued trying to piece together how it all happened. Sometime between Friday evening and early Monday morning the house was erected. It wasn't a fancy structure, so perhaps … but more puzzling were the flowers and the mango tree because those you could not grow overnight. Probably she had just stuck the plants in the ground.

He took down the blanket for his afternoon nap out of the branch of a cocoa tree, shook it out, and laid it out under the tree. Before long he felt drowsy and though he wasn't quite awake, he wasn't asleep either when he began to see the parrot with the fantastic green plumage. It was a yellow-billed parrot, a species found only in Jamaica. A few months before, some government officials came and talked to the people in the district, explaining to them that the bird was threatened with extinction and it was now illegal to hunt the bird. Periodic checks would be carried out and anyone found hunting the birds, even if they were tourists, would face stiff penalties.

If tourists couldn't hunt the bird and everyone knew how the government bent over backward to please the tourists then this was serious.

After they left, he and Robinson laughed at it all. Imagine being told not to hunt the birds in one's own backyard! What were the government people going to tell them not to do next? Why didn't they come and fix the roads instead of worrying themselves over some measly birds?

But Emanuel was very fond of that bird in particular. He took great pleasure in the fantastic green plumage of the bird's lower body and the royal-blue feathers under its wings. In his mind's eye he carried a picture of the bird's hooked, yellow bill, paler at the tips, its hazel eyes, the rosepink edged in gray of the bird's throat and neck. Such a beautiful, beautiful bird, he thought.

He always loved beautiful things and when he was younger kept a yellow-billed parrot in a cage on his verandah. He liked having the bird, rare even then, to show off to his friends. He taught the parrot all sorts of new and wonderful tricks: how to talk to him and only him; what embarrassing things to say about his friends when they came to visit; how to scream his name and
only
his name if someone troubled it. He kept the bird like that for years, letting it out every now and again to “stretch its wings.” He had in fact clipped the bird's wings so it could not fly too far out of his reach. One day, however, after letting the bird out, it did fly out of his reach. The bird circled the house twice before heading to the hills from which it had been taken. For three days he saw nothing of the bird but many others did. Some said they saw the bird looking for its lost flock; others reported its lonesome cry; some even talked about the sadness surrounding the bird like a dark-blue cloak. On the third day after again searching the woods frantically for the bird he eventually found it, tired and worn out and fluttering on the ground. He took the parrot home and tended to it assiduously, but to no use. The parrot never recovered and died shortly after being returned to its cage.

Urmilla's body seemed heavier than usual to Emanuel that night and eventually he gave up the idea of lifting her legs over his. Instead, he kept thinking of the woman in the bushes. How young and slender she was. When he first met Urmilla she'd been that slender. A shy, slender school girl he would watch as she made her way home from school in the afternoons. He liked the fact that she did not have too many friends, that she was so shy and soft-spoken, that she always walked home alone.

But what he especially liked about Urmilla were the times she dressed up in the colorful, silky cloth she wrapped tightly around her body. Saris—that was what these clothes were called, he found out. Emanuel remembered the times he would steal onto her father's property at night just to get a glimpse of Urmilla in her saris. He especially liked to watch as she got ready for one of the Indian ceremonies she and her father went to once a month in Kingston. After putting a pasty yellow base on her face she would paint a dark-red spot between her eyes, gold bangles adorned her ankles and her arms, earrings in her ears and nose, and she would slip intricately embroidered slippers on her feet.

She lived with her father in the largest house in the district. Rumor had it her mother had died on her way to Jamaica from India when Urmilla was still a baby. The father never remarried, never had any other children, and Urmilla was forced to grow up alone. The father, it was further rumored, forbade Urmilla to be friends with anyone in the district, insisting they would be going back to India soon. “India” to the minds of most people in the district was some far-off place covered in a curry-yellow haze.

From the first time he'd seen her as a young woman in one of her saris, Emanuel was intrigued and he made up his mind that somehow and by some means he would get her. She would become the replacement for the bird he'd lost. His opportunity came faster than even he himself could have imagined, for, one Saturday, on one of their visits to Kingston, Urmilla's father complained of a tightness in his chest and was just able to pull to the side of the road before he slumped over in his car and died of a heart attack.

By then Emanuel was in his midtwenties and he sprang into action immediately. He dropped the woman he'd been seeing for a few years, Mavis, and, with the entire district looking on in astonishment, arranged a proper church wedding for himself and the griefstricken Urmilla. And no sooner were they married than Emanuel started imaging what their children would look like. Their mixed-race children. They would have Urmilla's hair of course and a pale-brown complexion, for he wasn't that dark. His children with Urmilla would make up for all the years people called him black and ugly to his face and behind his back. He would show them, by his children, who was black and ugly. He would show all the people of Nonsuch district!

The next morning, on his way to the fields, Emanuel had great difficulty finding the house. He was sure it wasn't too far from the breadfruit tree, yet he could not find it. He kept pacing back and forth from the breadfruit tree to where he was certain the house was yesterday, close to the flamboyant tree; still it was not there. For the longest time he wandered around in a circle, trying to locate the house. Perhaps he'd imagined it all, he said to himself after a while. Perhaps there had been no house, no woman, no yellow-billed parrot. He was just beginning to believe this when he saw it, the house, further along the path, tangled and almost hidden in the bushes. He noticed immediately that the vines had thickened into the fence, as if trying to keep prying eyes out. That the bushes were greener, denser. Some part of him knew that the vines should not have fattened and thickened like that overnight, that he should stay away from the house and its occupant, but he could not help himself. He had to see her again, the beautiful young woman with the yellow-billed parrot about her.

He started struggling with the vines until he forced an opening. The dark-haired woman was squatting in the yard, tending to the flowers in her garden. Her back was to him as before. He watched as she worked slowly, assiduously, humming a song he knew but the words of which he could not remember. The bird was there too, hovering around, flying low and coming close to the woman, before flying away again. It seemed to Emanuel as he watched the woman and the parrot that they were one and the same thing. That the bird was not a parrot at all but some wild, untamed aspect of the woman, both of them so spectacularly beautiful.