Land of Love and Drowning: A Novel (8 page)

Rebekah McKenzie was watching her sons swim in the sea. The beach was called Coki and was famous for its undercurrent. Infamous for swallowing
people down its thirty-foot drop. Rebekah chose this beach because not many other people would be there. Parents still did not bring their small children to this beach. No one had claimed ownership since an American Navy man drowned a generation ago, and it still seemed a place of solitude. The water was rough and beautiful, and the bay was far away from civilization. Rebekah would not go in the water unless she must. She would never take off her high-laced boots or her long white dress. She sat on the beach, her legs bent under her, her back erect, and watched them. Her boys. Glints of gold in the ocean.

Up the beach, another woman had brought her girl. She also did not want to be seen. But not because she was afraid of revealing her body’s silver secret. The bathing suits of the time were modest, but she wasn’t even wearing one of those. She wore light cotton short pants and a matching shirt, which she could bathe in if needed. She simply wanted some peace from her male admirers and their envious women. There was no one else on this beach; well, no one but that one other family who were kind enough to stay down the other end. That family was just flecks of brown far away in the sun.

Anette had been begging and begging for a beach day. All the other children went, why couldn’t she? On St. Thomas there were many calm, children-friendly beaches. But Eeona did not allow her little sister into the water at all, so the rough waves did not matter.

“You may slip your feet into the water, but nothing more,” Eeona told her. She didn’t need to say this, since she’d said it so many times before. “The sea will kill you, as it killed Papa.” Little Anette did not know that she already knew how to swim. And Eeona was not teaching or telling. Instead, Eeona was sitting on the beach, struggling through needlepoint—a skill her mother had been expert at.

Anette was in a sack of a dress, something Eeona had patched together with scraps of red. Her hair, as always, was shooting off her head like flames. The little red girl stooped to put her face in the ripple of a wave
when her sister wasn’t looking. She quickly scooted herself back up the shore and sat on the beach to collect shells. Next to her sister, the shells were the prettiest thing on the beach. Anette didn’t remember being on this beach and learning to swim. She didn’t remember her mother holding a conch shell to her ear. But now she picked up such a shell and ran it over to Eeona. Eeona put down her stitching. She clenched her fist and pressed her ankles together. Perhaps her own episodes were coming on. Either way, she was ready to leave. Ready to scream at the child for harassing her. The smell of the saltwater. The sand under her feet. Anette, so uncomely compared to what Eeona had been. It all made Eeona miss her father and her mother and even Louis Moreau.

“A conch shell,” Anette declared.

“More specifically,” Eeona said tensely, “this is a queen conch.”

Eeona grabbed the pink shell from Anette and held it to Anette’s ear. Now Anette’s eyes opened wide. She listened intently as though being given directions or told a secret.

“Be quiet and you will hear the ocean,” Eeona said, which is what Papa had taught her.

“I hear Papa in the shell,” said Anette.

Eeona looked at Anette as though the child had spoken another language, one with sharp screeches for vowels. “Pardon me?” Eeona asked, alarmed. But Anette only looked far off and seemed to continue to listen intently. “Anette, it is time we make our way back to town.”

It was the red dress that caught little Jacob’s eye from the other end of the beach. The girl’s dress was an awkwardly long length, like his mother’s. And the girl had a burn of red hair on her head. Red like stewed cherries. The little girl was wandering toward him, while the lady with her packed up their things. The girl was safely away from the ocean, but Jacob had this sudden feeling of wanting to save her. He knew how to swim, a gift his mother had bestowed. Early on she had considered drowning him
and so had pitched him in the sea at six weeks old. But newborn Jacob had been young enough to remember the womb. Swimming was not only natural but immediate. Rebekah had taken it as a final sign, a final witchery the world had won—she would love the boy and let him live. But Jacob also wanted to save the girl because Jacob had those saving tendencies. They would flare up later when he was an Army man and then again when he was pressed to choose between love and life. Now he ran toward the girl who was carrying the big shell.

Eeona was packing them up quickly. Rushing to leave, leave, leave. She didn’t see the little boy with the sand-colored skin approach Anette.

Jacob had run to the girl, but now that he was before her, he didn’t know why. “You might drown,” he said, as though it was impending.

“I know,” Anette said, without looking up at him.

Anette was almost eight. And Jacob was only just eight. She was wearing red. And red was his favorite color.

“Can you swim?” Jacob asked.

Anette still didn’t look at him, for she didn’t like her answer. “My sister won’t teach me.”

“I can swim,” said Jacob. By which he meant, I can save you if you need saving. As the youngest child in his household, he had never been allowed to do that.

Now Anette turned. “You can swim!” she said. And she said it with determination as if, like a witch, she had wished it. Jacob nodded, receiving this. Then she offered the queen conch to his ear. “Do you want to listen to Papa in my shell?” Jacob leaned and let her press it against his ear. Anette liked how he did this. How she held this beauty for him and he didn’t recoil.

She lowered the heavy shell. Jacob smiled. “Mama say I come from the sea,” he said, not understanding himself. “That’s me in your shell.”

“Me, too,” Anette said.

Then Jacob’s mother and Anette’s sister saw them and ran to save them
each. Rebekah and Eeona knew each other immediately and so immediately knew the other’s child, as well. They snatched their respective eight-year-olds away as though the other woman and the other child were a disease.

“But Mama, I was just telling her what you tell me,” Jacob whined, as Rebekah dragged him by the waist of his shorts. He was a child, so he didn’t look back just then. He said the words to his mother. It wasn’t the little girl he really cared about, not yet. “I just tell her I from the sea,” he tried to explain.

“Not everything I tell you is for everyone else to hear,” Rebekah said, dragging him away and calling to the other boys.

“But she say she the same as me, Mama. That’s true?”

He asked again and again. But Rebekah understood the power of a flood, the power of dirt heaped down a hole, so she began to tell a story. One she hoped would push out the memory of that little girl and her little-girl words. It was meant to be a harmless story, but even stories that seem harmless are never without their danger.

“The Duene live in the sea.” (This little girl had not even swum in the sea.) “They have long hair.” (The little girl had picky red hair.) “They walk backwards.” (The girl had feet facing forward.) Rebekah told the myth as she gathered her sons one by one and marched them the long way home.

But before they left the sand and sea, Jacob did look back. Because his mother did not take him to church, he had not heard of the pillar of salt. It happened. He did not turn to salt exactly, but something in him did become preserved. He looked back and saw the little girl in the red dress being pulled away from him, but looking back at him as well. And from then on, it was clear what would be.

—

Back in Savan, Eeona decided she had to do something. Mama had said “watch out” for the boy and Anette. Perhaps the first thing she should do was to send Anette to the cousin in Tortola. This was honoring Mama’s
wish, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it a clean solution to all problems? The Tortola cousin was older, feeble even, but Eeona could say it was just for a visit and then a visit would turn into years. Or what of that bright-eyed Stemme woman in Anegada? But even if that woman took the child, all of St. Thomas would judge Eeona for sending her sister to Anegada to be a fisherman’s concubine. But there was also the orphanage on the less familiar island of St. Croix. Someone had written about it in the
Daily News
and it seemed a clean place. And St. Croix, Eeona had heard, was a large piece of land where no one would even know who little Anette Bradshaw really was and to whom she belonged.

And then Eeona would be able to start. Start over. In the meantime, the mentor Eeona had decided on was off island. She was rootless, that Liva. But this was fine, because Eeona had to sew herself a blue dress, which she knew caused women to calm in her presence.

Liva Lovernkrandt returned from her most recent New York visit just when Eeona was adding a lace hem.

The McKenzies of St. Thomas were all men. They were descendants of a Catholic slave owner who gave all his land to his one hairy bastard son. Y chromosomes were all that was ever passed down. The men were all huge, full of muscles before they made their tenth year. They could make baby boys from age nine to ninety. But this masculinity didn’t come free. In every litter there were a few who weren’t quite right.

The McKenzie oddness was a mysterious thing that made some of the McKenzie boys never learn to dance well or read even the simplest books. Still, there were those who could calculate your birthday and the hour you were born and then tell you when your world would end, or those who
could play any instrument you put their fingers to. McKenzies were hard to love, though, because they never hugged or smiled much or seemed to need anyone—not even one another. The women were all outsiders, mothers and wives. Breeders of a race of men.

The McKenzie men were never senators, were never doctors; they were never journalists, never major contributors to Caribbean or even Virgin Islands history. They had two truly extraordinary qualities—they always had sons and they always married well.

With the exception of Rebekah, the McKenzie wives and mothers were of the richest, highest families, which kept the family light-skinned—easy to pass for Portuguese or Sicilian when traveling to the U.S. So the McKenzie boys who at least learned to read continued to carry on these ultramale genes, matched with all the wealth and caste St. Thomas and the other Virgin Islands had to offer. Many of the men became successful—though never all on their own merit. Always with the help of a well-connected and rich-born wife.

Nowadays our McKenzies tend toward jobs such as police officer and security guard, fireman and military man. Those public jobs weren’t always available to natives, though Benjamin McKenzie, Rebekah’s husband and the legal father of all her sons, did manage to make it in the Navy. But still the McKenzies were always a family of class and coarseness. Every debutante sank her face into a silk-covered pillow and dreamed it was the hairy belly of a McKenzie man. Every businessman, black, white, mixed, Frenchy, or mulatto, longed for endless grandsons and so sold portions of his soul to see his daughters married and McKenzied.

With Rebekah, however, Benjamin McKenzie had not married well at all. He had married out of infatuation, which was rare among McKenzies and was most definitely the work of Rebekah’s enchantment. And when Benjamin left her with man children—we must say man children, and not boys, they were gruff those lads, even before puberty—Rebekah
did not despair. Indeed, most on St. Thomas assumed that Rebekah had sent him away on a wind—and they were correct. The other women who married McKenzies envied her. She had managed a hat trick. She had the McKenzie name and the McKenzie sons, but she had escaped the McKenzie man.

It must be said that Jacob Esau McKenzie became the favored child. He’d come of romantic longing, not a longing for security. Yes, she’d tried to kill him, but if you ask even we old wives, we’d say that was out of worry and love. The love mostly won. But still there was the worry. Rebekah made Jacob go barefoot so his toes would not fuse into clefts as hers did, which was an Athy trait, from Rebekah’s line. But the big worry was over Jacob Esau not really being a McKenzie. Would he go unsupported by the McKenzie uncles when the time came for him to go to college or get a job? Would he be denied the good match in a wife? True, not being a McKenzie meant Jacob Esau wouldn’t suffer the prepubescent hair and deep toddler voice of his brothers. He was hers and Owen’s, but for all Rebekah’s knowledge, she did not know really what this mix might mean. It was Owen who’d once told her the story of the Duene.

To be fair, it is all maddening. These myths that conflate and grow into one another. Do the Duene men only live on the land of St. Croix? Do the Duene women only live in the sea of Anegada? Even myths must have their rebellions. Even we old wives must have our secrets.

What Jacob Esau had was an incredible confidence that would later make him a leader in the Army and presumptuous with another man’s wife. He could play the piano. He loved stewed cherries for their taste (both sweet and tart) and their color (deep red). And more important, unlike any other McKenzie man, he would fall madly and obviously in love.

This last one Rebekah knew. After all, Jacob was not a McKenzie. He could love and be loved. And if a man can love, it is only a matter of living long enough before he does. Rebekah knew this, but she was determined
to prevent it. Her husband was gone. And her lover was gone. All she had were her sons. If she could help it, the only woman her Jacob would ever love would be her.

To this end, Rebekah kept all her sons away from the Roman Catholic Church, despite the McKenzie baptisms. In that church there were women. Lovely young women with veils on their heads, just waiting for some man to lift and kiss them. Worst, there was Mary. The Virgin dressed always and forever in blue. Rebekah hawked up and spat when she thought of this. Mary was no virgin. Mary had fucked before marriage and then had convinced everyone, even her clueless boyfriend, that God had impregnated her instead. There was also Jesus himself, with all his nakedness on the cross and lovelorn face begging.

“Don’t take a person into your mouth unless you are willing to commit,” Rebekah told Jacob when he begged to receive the Sacrament like his friends. “It’s called Communion for a reason. You
commune
.”

But these islands are just too beautiful. You walk out of your own front door into cathedrals. You step down your own stairs up toward an altar. God speaks from the bougainvillea bush, from Mountain Top. You go to the beach and swim in holy water. The beauty, like God’s face, is ubiquitous and it is blinding. Of course, Rebekah would lose. Jacob would commune without her say.

We sometimes say their love began with music, but as with all things, it began with water. And as with all things of importance to us, it began on a beach. It began that day when Jacob saw Anette in her stewed-cherry dress, and Anette put the shell to his ear, and they each heard their father speak the sea.