Left at the Mango Tree (5 page)

Wilbur’s fascination with leafy melodies began when he was a boy. He would hide, cross-legged, under a mango tree in the soft green brush a stone’s throw from the edge of the sea, and lose himself in the leaves’ sighs. It wasn’t just their sighs, however, that drew him to his favorite hiding spot one particular warm and
windy afternoon when his school day was done. What drew him that day was a simple—soundless—white ribbon. A white ribbon that danced entangled in what he knew must be the softest black hair that ever was.

It was draped around a petite, plain face adorned with eyes equally as black—eyes unremarkable on Oh, where everyone’s eyes are as black as his (or her) skin. But to Wilbur they shone like the gelatinous bulbs of the iguana that slunk around his front porch every morning and in which he had once seen his whole face reflected. Below the eyes a similarly unremarkable nose was positioned some inch or so above duly pinkish lips and a perfectly average chin.

The column on which this capital sat was narrow and smooth under flared cotton dresses that anticipated curves but revealed in the meantime two straight sticks of leg. Edda’s legs. Wilbur watched her with her friends as they threw shoes, socks, grammar books and pencil cases into a pile in the sand and ran parallel to the slippery tide, careful not to get their school clothes wet. Not so wet, at least, that they wouldn’t dry before the girls reached their homes and began their adverb exercises to the accompaniment of sweetened goat’s milk and pineapple tartlets. Wilbur fingered the corner of his own grammar book, mauve with black gridlines on the front, “GRAMMAR IS FUN” mathematically distributed in block letters between them, and imagined it there, on the pile, where hers was, mingled with her thin knee-socks, or pressed against shoe buckles that had touched her fingers.

Sometimes the girls would just sit and draw pictures in the sand, and talk. On those occasions Wilbur would strain to hear their words over the leaves’ rhythms. (Usually he was forced to content himself with little more than mumbles and rustling.) At first
Wilbur didn’t know why he watched Edda after school, just that he wanted to—and for as long as he could remember. So watch her he did, from the time she wore empty cotton dresses to the time her body began pressing itself against her taut clothing. From the time he didn’t know why he watched, to the time he sensed it had something to do with what was under Edda’s tightening skirts and blouses.

Before we go any further with my father’s story, though, you should know something more about the infamous Gustave Vilder. For me, the lives of these two men go hand in hand—ever since one moonlit night, close to that very spot where we leave Wilbur to contemplate his Edda.

While Wilbur stumbled dumbly through adolescence from his hiding place under the mango near the beach, and Edda tiptoed through hers to keep her schoolclothes dry, Gustave Vilder just tried to grow up. It wasn’t easy being a Vilder on Oh, especially not a small one. Like all children, Gustave just wanted to fit in. He wanted invitations to birthday parties and someone to swap sandwich halves with him at lunchtime on the wooden benches outside the school, his fresh purpled octopus for slices of wild pig, or his mother’s peanut butter and pineapple jam for papaya and soft cheese. Ambrose Jou made a trade every day. But then Ambrose Jou was dark, like all the natives of Oh: dark skin, dark hair, dark eyes. And more than that, there wasn’t a magical hair to be found on his head. (I too would have liked invitations, and
my
Ambrose Jou was an ebony Olinda Berch, who collected balls of bubble gum from every boy in class.)

Gustave, on the other hand, was as pale as the goat cheese on a papaya sandwich. His whole family was. And though you’d be sorely pressed to find a group of elementary-schoolers requiring more than that to alienate a classmate, imagine what the likes of a young Gustave must have endured: stuck in his doughy face were two Vilder eyes of an otherworldly red and the very same distinctive hairy birthmark that branded every Vilder cheek. Gustave tried a slew of remedies to get rid of the mark, so desperately did he wish to narrow the gap that separated him from the others. He scrubbed it with seawater and steel-wool pads. He shaved it and plucked it. For a while he even covered it with a bandage. But he couldn’t hide who he was. No one can, especially not here.

I still don’t know exactly how or when the Vilders came to Oh, how many of them there were, or why so few were left right about the time that Gustave was scrubbing his birthmark and eating octopus sandwiches alone. I don’t think anybody does. The rumors are rampant and purport such actors as a lost Nordic fishing god with forty fairy wives, and such theories as inbreeding and devil worship. I can tell you some of them later, if you want, but they don’t change anything. What life isn’t a composite of the deaths and sins that preceded it, of tales twisted by time? For now, just know that the stories, perpetuated through island lore and island lay, entangled to create a hazy legend of evildoing and distrust that the Vilders’ frightening appearance only served to cement.

How evil or powerful the Vilders’ evil powers really were remains as mysterious as their origin. The Vilders didn’t chant or poke pins into voodoo dolls. But if a Vilder was cheated or poked fun at, the cheater or poker almost always lost his job or his wife or his money or his fishing rod. Except of course when he simply fell ill and died. For his part, Gustave never believed in his family’s
magic. Had they really possessed any, surely they would have used it to clean up their moles and their eyes, made themselves just like everybody else, undetectable, and even more powerful. He tried to compose incantations to the effect, in the gridded pages of his own copy of “GRAMMAR IS FUN”, but they worked no better than the steel-wool pads. He guessed that once he got old enough his mother would tell him how to tap his evil, magic energies, and when she did, his first feat would be to remove the telltale mole. In the meantime, he waited.

It was a shiny day when Wilbur first decided to speak to Edda alone. The light fell from the sun onto the water that rippled and refracted it in every direction, and from his hiding place in the brush under the mango tree, Wilbur saw the beach laid out before him, a series of wavy golden reflections. They bounced off the sea, the sand, and Edda’s black hair. Edda wasn’t a girl anymore (nor Wilbur a boy), though she maintained many of her girlhood habits, like her afternoon walks in the tide. Her hair was no longer restrained by the white ribbon that had first lured Wilbur to watch her from the brush. It fell loose over her bare shoulders and over her arms, naked and defined and bent at her sides as she cradled some blossom or seashell or tiny orange crab in her palms. Her skirts were longer, barely revealing the bones of Edda’s ankles, but they were gauzy and transparent, and Wilbur preferred them to the short, thicker ones of her youth.

Edda walked alone now. Her friends preferred the tourist beaches and hotel bars where they could flirt with men wearing gold rings and clean shoes. She walked and dug her toes in the
sand, wet gray globs of it clumping onto the tops of her feet as she dragged them along. It wasn’t the first time Wilbur had seen Edda on the beach alone, but he had never before this time found the courage to speak to her. He waited until she had passed the spot in the brush where he hid, then he crept from under the mango, removed his shoes, and walked behind her in the water.

“Edda!” He called out to her, but the singing leaves swallowed up his shy, hesitant voice. “Edda!” again, louder. She turned toward the sound of her name. She remembered this face from school. This quiet, polite boy.

“Wilbur. What are you doing here?”

“May I walk with you?”

Edda didn’t say yes or no. She just looked at him, her hand in a lax salute to block the sun, one of her unremarkable eyes half-closed, and finally resumed her stroll. They walked in silence, though not uncomfortably so, until Wilbur broke it. “Not many people know about this place.”

“No,” she smiled. “Thank heavens for that.” Wilbur let Edda walk straight on while he turned and moved a bit into the sea. He bent down and filled his cupped hands with water. He emptied and filled them twice more, then he finally stood and grinned.

“Edda! Wait! Look!” He rushed to catch up with her, his hands out in front of him, water oozing from between his fingers. She put her face over them and saw a tiny silver fish darting between his palms. It was no bigger than one of Edda’s slight fingernails. She smiled again, not just out of politeness this time, and they laughed, looking alternately from each other to the glittering little swimmer. Edda poked her finger into the water in Wilbur’s hands, watched the fish swim round and round it. In Edda’s black eyes, Wilbur watched the fish’s shiny, darting image.

Wilbur and Edda met often on the beach after that day. They walked barefoot and told each other secrets. Wilbur caught her butterflies and Edda let her hips drift nearer to his as she sashayed alongside him. Sometimes they sat in the sand and played tic-tac-toe with their fingers or built lazy, crooked castles. Soon they began to hold hands. One day, Edda let Wilbur kiss her cheek. Before long he had discovered what was under her blouse.

They were a perfect match, Wilbur and Edda. Though she didn’t know it exactly, in so many words, all Edda ever really wanted was a family of her own. And all Wilbur had ever really wanted was Edda. So when on that same beach one day Wilbur asked her to marry him, Edda said yes at once, not knowing why, knowing only that it was the right thing to do. They were married at the Town Hall on a late Saturday morning, from where Uncle Nat accompanied them in his washed and waxed Renault to the Sincero, hooting the horn all the way. There, Uncle Cougar offered a lavish wedding lunch, “seeing as how there are just a few of us,” and Uncle Bang entertained.

At dusk, as the daylight and Cougar’s largesse began to wane, Edda pecked her father Raoul on the cheek, squeezed him in a tight hug and left with her new husband. She took him to the empty beach where they had met and courted, and as the moon bathed the cool damp sand with its light, on a white crocheted coverlet Wilbur would at last discover what lay past Edda’s hem.

During
his
schooldays Gustave’s only companions were the Vilder legends that flew around the island like hummingbirds—those, and perhaps the hummingbirds themselves. Like the rest of
his family he was forced to keep to himself, and he hated it. And them. He often wished his parents dead. They kept their magic from him, forcing him to suffer the insults and the whispers of the other kids. They wouldn’t teach him to hide his birthmark or to ruin with rain all the football matches he was excluded from, or to make the air seep slowly out of the tires on Ambrose Jou’s bike. Gustave urged his mother every morning at breakfast, “Today, can I learn something magic, Ma, can I?”

But every morning the response was the same, “How can I tell you what you already know? All the magic you need is right here.” And she would poke at his heart with her worn and shiny pink fingertip, until he yelled out in discomfort, if not exactly pain.

“There’s nothing in there! I want the magic the kids whisper about so I can play tricks on everybody who hates me.”