Left at the Mango Tree (13 page)

Now what?

He felt the puzzled stare of Miss Partridge on the line-up of trinkets he had constructed, and he sniffed the storm brooding beneath her eyelids. “What a fool I am,” he whispered. There was no advice from Mr. Stan Kalpi on what to do in a case like this, but Raoul figured full retreat was as good a tactic as any. He stood and
hiked up his trousers. Before he left he would return the volumes to their holes in the Sorcery shelf, to spare Miss Lila the climb on the stepladder and to curb her speculations as to what he was doing. Now, where had the stepladder got to?

Raoul stepped back from the table, about to turn away from it, and stopped. Something in the linear junkyard on its surface caught his eye. An arithmetic error, announced by the plum or the paperclip. Or the solution’s next logical step, suggested by the stopwatch or the tiny plastic shoe.

“I see it now,” he said. “I see it very clearly.”

8

T
he only dead bodies Gustave knew anything about were his parents’ and (unlike the ones in Raoul’s library book) those hadn’t dangled or oozed their deadly poison into pots. Theirs, rather, was a slow and subtle process of contamination that death had fettered, not unleashed: the Vilders’ poison wasn’t measured in droplets after the fact, but in a soft and terrible fog that had quietly deposited its mold into their growing son’s every pore, camouflaged cleverly though it was in loving pokes to the heart and turtle steaks for dinner.

Whether or not the poison determined those likes and dislikes specific to Gustave, no one could say for sure, though most of the islanders tried. Little matter, what they said. His likes and his dislikes were what they were. Among the former, the spicy fried sausages of his youth and an especially good vintage of pineapple wine; among the latter, calypso night at the Buddha’s Belly, and books.

Gustave hated to read. Ever since the days of “GRAMMAR IS FUN” and the fruitless spells he composed underneath its covers. No book had ever done for him what it had done for Raoul, filled the void in his heart or his head, furnished solace or escape
or even a recipe for fritters. There was nothing Miss Lila Partridge could show him in the shade of the Cookery shelf. And he most certainly had no use for the likes of Mr. Stan Kalpi and his variables, or for next-door Betty’s matins. Gustave’s maths were simple and his religion absolute, their sum total no less than his ultimate and exclusive salvation.

So the last thing he would have done that day, when Puymute was in the patch and Raoul drank tea with milk and accused Gustave of knowing about all those missing pineapples—the very last thing—was to run off to the library looking for answers and clues. Not that a clue wouldn’t have soon come in handy, for, like Raoul, Gustave was about to face a mystery of his own.

Oh, he knew what had happened to the pineapples. That was magic pure and simple, and he had cooked it up himself. The islanders were hungry for magic, always had been. Hungry for something to hope for or to blame, and the temptation to satisfy their cravings once in a while was one to which Gustave periodically succumbed, his seasonal sins a bitter tribute to his sweet, snake-bitten mum.

It wasn’t the pineapples that would pester Gustave. It was a white ribbon. A white ribbon that danced entangled in what he knew must be the softest yellow hair that ever was.

After Raoul left Gustave’s office at Puymute’s that day the two spoke, Gustave walked from the plantation to town, continuing in his head his argument with Officer Orlean. “Get
me
? Figure out what
I’ve
been up to? I’d like to see him try, damn fool that he is! Fed
my
version of the facts to the paper, did I? Whilst he’s putting adverts in the bloody
Morning Crier
about that brat of his? Puh!
That’s a cargo-shipful of nerve right there, it is.” His discourse and his path rambled, climbing and plunging, pulling first in one direction and then another, zigging and zagging their way over the holes and humps of the gritty surface that finally deposited Gustave in sight of the market square. He propped his palm against an almond tree, resting his case, and looked down at two stray dogs who sniffed at him in agreement. “That’s right,” he told them, adding a firm “humph” for emphasis.

Below, the market beckoned, a susurrus of flapping batiks, clanking balances, and tumbling melons whose hollow voices were lost in the rustle of the wind. Gustave kicked the dogs aside and as he neared the noisy space, the rustle sharpened into hello’s and how-much’s and have-a-breadfruit-won’t-you’s, two-for-ten. Its voice shattered, the wind wafted angry scents through the crowd of shoppers—cocoa, saffron, swordfish, sweat—who were used to such tantrums and paid the scents no mind. Their eyes, though, never did grow accustomed to the market’s assault, and they flitted from sandals, baskets, bananas, and drums, to carrots, squash, potatoes, brooms, and jars, from the shiny sun that pierced their pockets to the faded canopy of blue-green-yellow-red umbrellas under which their rainbow bills changed hands.

Among those accosted eyes that chased round the market square that day were my very own glassy rosebuds, for while Gustave puh-humph-ed his way to town and Raoul ahh-huh-huh-ed at the library under Miss Lila’s scrutinizing glare, my mother decided it was high time to take me for a walk. The islanders had all been so kind, making special trips to see me at home and bringing all those jams and jellies and blankets, but now the island itself awaited, Oh with its sandy wind and singing leaves, with its mangoes and its manchineel, to welcome its newest citizen.

At just two weeks old, quite a respectable citizen I had become, despite my Vilder eyeballs and the fuzzy blotch on my cheek. I was long and plump and quiet and smooth, with a soft disposition and a generous portion of velvety blond hair that had already grown well past the rim of the sunbonnet sewn for me by midwife Abigail Davies. The excess was gathered into a tiny ponytail tied with a long white ribbon, which the nimble wind twisted through my hair each time my mother lifted me from the pram. It was this windy maneuver that caught Gustave Vilder’s eye as he approached the market collage of greens and gourds.

He had almost reached Cordelia’s table of spices and marmalade, where Nat was telling Cordelia about a lady passenger who had lost her typewriter keys, when a flicker on the market’s other side jumped into Gustave’s view. The sun had somehow mixed itself up in the wind’s coiffing of my velvety locks, and the shine from one had entwined with that of the other. Like a spark before a fire, this familiar glint ignited in Gustave a flame that lay hidden inside him, a homecoming somewhere in his soul that crushed his guilt and puffed his chest, sloughed off the droop his shoulders still sometimes assumed. Only Miss Peacock ever made him feel this way, or close to it, but she was nowhere near. And this urge, though as primal as the ones she inspired, was to protect, not to procure.

Gustave’s eyes moved from the shiny light at the tip of my ponytail to my fresh, white doughy face. My mouth was agape in a laugh, the inside of it as deeply red as both his eyes and mine. Gustave’s mouth gaped, then, too and he stumbled backward. Only a step or two, but enough to topple a pyramid of pale green coconuts that Harold Ticker had assembled at his feet next to a faded and illegible hand-painted sign.

To the music of Harold’s angry shouts, the coconuts danced from one end of the square to the other. They waltzed under Cordelia’s table of spices and marmalade, which overturned when Harold dashed under it to recover his wares. They tangoed over the toes of brothers Jake and Stu Mutter, who mistook them for scurrying rats and scurried themselves. They merengued with old Sonia Susa, who jumped to avoid them, giggling like a girl at her first marimba-contest dance. Everyone else stood and scratched their heads, wondering what the scurrying and giggling and shouting was about, and how on earth the cautious Cordelia had managed to overturn her table.

It was bound to happen, small as Oh is—not that Cordelia should overturn her table (though long had it wobbled), but that Gustave should spot Edda with me in her arms. When Gustave’s eyes moved from mine to hers, he instantly appreciated the weight of Raoul’s ad and the heights that the island gossip must have reached.

He tried to reassure himself. So Edda’s baby looked like him. So what? He knew he had never touched her. The islanders just needed a helping of magic stew and they had served up Almondine. Soon enough their silly talk would cease. Unfortunate, Gustave thought, that they should satisfy their craving just then, though. Too much magic meant a bellyache and left a bitter taste, and what he had yet cooked up for Puymute’s pineapples could not be postponed. Once certain forces were in motion, it was impossible to stop them.

Gustave could no more undo all he had done than Raoul could un-place his ad or un-see what he saw when he lined up his variables at the library. And Edda could no more take back her baby than I could undo who I was, or un-tell you what you know of my story.

Likewise, the “silly talk” turned out to be as unstoppable a force as the one Gustave had cooked up, for it did not cease as he predicted. The islanders’ bellyache grew, as Edda’s belly had some ten months before. It was proving to be too much. On Oh they tolerated, even savored, Gustave’s poison, but only in small doses. Any more than that and their tolerance, even approval, turned into indignant hatred. Which Gustave had learned to accept, when he was at fault. But to suffer their rebuffs for something he hadn’t done, well that was too much, too.

Up to then, he hadn’t understood the islanders’ readiness to blame him for Edda’s baby, but after seeing me in my mother’s arms, he saw why they couldn’t do otherwise, and was soon part of the island faction that accepted Edda’s puzzled denials of the events leading up to her pregnancy, for puzzling they were indeed. Had Gustave seen Edda somewhere, admired her, and imagined himself in her arms? Had he wished himself inside her like he had wished his mother dead? Had she stumbled into the seedy port bar unrecognized and fallen under his spell, landed in his bed? Perhaps he had dreamed Almondine into being.

Wherever the truth lay, it was perhaps unfair before to suggest that Gustave would not have been interested in bringing it to light, that he and Raoul should have differed on the matter of looking for answers and clues. The mystery of
me
is most definitely one that Gustave would have wished to solve. That I belonged to the Vilder family tree, and he was convinced that I did, bothered him little. What worried him was that he had no recollection of planting any such seed. Either the forces he commanded were greater than even he had ever dreamed, or he found himself at odds with forces over which he had no command whatsoever. Both prospects frightened him. So, too, did the idea that his every move now
was under the islanders’ scrutiny: not
all
mysteries were meant to be solved.

At the plantation, meanwhile, Cyrus Puymute stomped around, looking for clues in the patch. They were in high demand that day on Oh, clues were. Had any of the islanders had a few to sell, it would have meant a handsome bundle of rainbow bills.

“And you don’t recall seeing anything out of order?” Puymute asked, hands on hips and head tipped upward to meet the blank faces of three of his pickers. “Anything at all?”

“No sir.”

“Nope.”

“Not a thing, sir.”

Puymute shaded his eyes from the sun and looked from one member of the trio to the next and back again. “Fine kettle of something
this
is,” he said and continued his stomping. He had been scouring that part of his property from which the pineapples went missing ever since the day before, when the police had appeared, found not a single clue, formulated not a single theory, and deduced that Puymute was a pineapple smuggler. They would have arrested him on the spot had they been able to unearth a shred of evidence, but lacking as much, they settled for shaking their index fingers at him and called in Customs and Excise.

The shred of evidence the police had overlooked must surely still be there, Puymute decided, so he had single-handedly, or footedly, undertaken an inspection of the two acres in question, hoping his shoes might land on some rock-hard evidence that could clear his name. What the clue would point to, a pineapple
pincher or a poltergeist, Puymute didn’t know. And he didn’t care. Crime didn’t bother him, and neither did magic. But paying the tax on those missing goods sure did. So he would stomp from sun-up to sundown, if necessary, until he found something that would save him his money.