Pigeon Feathers (21 page)

The girls, and who’d blame them, are in a hurry to get out, so I say “I quit” to Lengel quick enough for them to hear,
hoping they’ll stop and watch me, their unsuspected hero. They keep right on going, into the electric eye; the door flies open and they flicker across the lot to their car, Queenie and Plaid and Big Tall Goony-Goony (not that as raw material she was so bad), leaving me with Lengel and a kink in his eyebrow.

“Did you say something, Sammy?”

“I said I quit.”

“I thought you did.”

“You didn’t have to embarrass them.”

“It was they who were embarrassing us.”

I started to say something that came out “Fiddle-de-doo.” It’s a saying of my grandmother’s, and I know she would have been pleased.

“I don’t think you know what you’re saying,” Lengel said.

“I know you don’t,” I said. “But I do.” I pull the bow at the back of my apron and start shrugging it off my shoulders. A couple customers that had been heading for my slot begin to knock against each other, like scared pigs in a chute.

Lengel sighs and begins to look very patient and old and gray. He’s been a friend of my parents for years. “Sammy, you don’t want to do this to your mom and dad,” he tells me. It’s true, I don’t. But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it’s fatal not to go through with it. I fold the apron, “Sammy” stitched in red on the pocket, and put it on the counter, and drop the bow tie on top of it. The bow tie is theirs, if you’ve ever wondered. “You’ll feel this for the rest of your life,” Lengel says, and I know that’s true, too, but remembering how he made that pretty girl blush makes me so scrunchy inside I punch the No Sale tab and the machine whirs “
pee
-pul” and the drawer splats out. One advantage to this scene taking place in summer, I can follow it up with a clean exit, there’s no
fumbling around getting your coat and galoshes, I just saunter into the electric eye in my white shirt that my mother ironed the night before, and the door heaves itself open, and outside the sunshine is skating around on the asphalt.

I look around for my girls, but they’re gone, of course. There wasn’t anybody but some young married screaming with her children about some candy they didn’t get by the door of a powder-blue Falcon station wagon. Looking back in the big windows, over the bags of peat moss and aluminum lawn furniture stacked on the pavement, I could see Lengel in my place in the second slot, checking the sheep through. His face was dark gray and his back stiff, as if he’d just had an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me from here on in.

The Doctor’s Wife

“S
HARKS
?” The tip of the doctor’s wife’s freckled nose seemed to sharpen in the sparkling air. Her eyes, momentarily rendered colorless by thought, took up the green of the Caribbean; the plane of the water intersected her throat. “Yes, we have some. Big dark fellows, too.”

Ralph, hanging beside her, squatting on buoyance, straightened up, splashing, and tried to survey the beryl depths around him. His sudden movements rendered even the immediate water opaque. The doctor’s wife’s surprisingly young laughter rang out.

“You Americans,” she said, “so nervy,” and with complacence pushed a little deeper into the sea, floating backward while the water gently bubbled around her mouth. She had a small face, gone freckled and rosy in this climate; her stringy auburn hair had been bleached by daily sea-bathing. “They rarely come in this far,” she said, tilting her face upward and speaking to the sky. “Only in the turtle-killing season, when the blood draws them in. We’re fortunate. Our beaches go out shallowly. Over in St. Martin, now, the offshore water is deep, and they must be careful.”

She turned and, with the casual paddling stroke of a plump
woman who floats easily, swam smiling toward him. “A shame,” she said, her voice strained by the effort of curving her throat to keep her lips free, “Vic Johnson is gone. He was a dear soul. The old Anglican vicar.” She pronounced “vicar” rather harshly, perhaps humorously. She stood up beside Ralph and pointed to the horizon. “Now,
he
,” she said, “used to swim far out into the bay, he and his great black dog, Cato. Vic would swim straight out, until he couldn’t move a muscle, and then he would float, and grab Cato’s tail, and the dog would pull him in. Honestly, it was a sight, this fat old Englishman, his white hair streaming, coming in on the tail of a dog. He never gave a thought to sharks. Oh, he’d swim
way
out, until he was just a dot.”

They were waist-deep in the sea, and at a motion from Ralph they walked toward shore together. The calm warm water leaped from their strides. She was small beside him, and her voice piped at his shoulder. “I’m sorry he’s gone,” she said. “He was a lovely old gentleman. He had been here forty years. He loved the island.”

“I can see why he would,” Ralph said. He turned his head to review the crescent of landscape around the beach, as if through his fresh eyes the doctor’s wife could renew—what seemed to him to need renewing—her sense of the island’s beauty. The white beach was empty. The natives used it only as a path. Their homes were set behind the ragged hedge of sea grape that rimmed the sand. Bits of tarpaper, pink-painted cement, corrugated roofing reddened by rust, wooden walls weathered to silver and patched by flattened kerosene tins, shacks on stilts, and unfinished cinder-block shells peeped above the dull, low foliage. There were few flowers. This was January. But the clusters of coconuts nested under the shuffling branches of the palms, and the high small puffy clouds,
like the quick clouds of spring in his own climate, suggested that here the season of bloom and the season of harvest were parallel and perpetual: germination and fruition ceaselessly intertwined. There were no mountains in the view. The island was low; when they came in on the airplane, it seemed a two-dimensional twin, or sketch, of St. Martin, which thrust from the sea like a set of Vermont mountaintops. There, the beaches were steep and dangerous; here, they were safe. There, Dutchmen and Frenchmen built bustling hotels and restaurants to entice American dollars; here, strangers rarely came. Here, even the place names were bestowed without enterprise or effort. East End, West End, The Road, The Forest—thus the island was geographically divided. The uninhabited ridge of scrub and coral rubble that formed one side of the bay was named High Hill. The village was called The Bay. The orange cliffs on the other side of the bay were called The Cliffs. During these short winter days the sun set on a diagonal above them and, between six and seven o’clock, touched the sea at the fingertips of the most distant arm of land. Yet, after the sun had drowned, light, itself lazy, lingered among the huts and the oleander bushes. Now it was late afternoon; the tiny tropical sun, not yet swollen to red, patiently poured white brilliance down through the hushed air. The air was as soft, as kind, as the water; there was no hostility in either. The two elements, as Ralph came out of one into the other, seemed tints of a single enveloping benevolence.

“Oh, yes, but not merely that,” the doctor’s wife said. “He loved the people. He built them three churches and, oh, did all manner of good works. We’re talking of Reverend Johnson,” she explained to Eve, who had remained on the beach with the children. “The Anglican padre. He retired last year and went back to England. Sussex, I think.”

“He loved the people?” Eve asked. She had heard. Voices carried well in the air, disturbed, during the day, by only the whispering beat of the surf and infrequent voices calling in English made musical by an unintelligible lilt.

The doctor’s wife dropped down on the sand. “These are my children,” she intoned gruffly. She chased the abrupt parody away with her sharp laughter. “Oh, yes, he loved them. He gave his life to them.” The youthful excitement of her voice and the innocent clarity of her eyes went queerly with her body, which was middle-aged. Her plump legs had gone lumpy and sodden, and her small face was finely wrinkled, each wrinkle accented by a line of white where the pinched skin had evaded the sun. “He didn’t have any children of his own,” she thought to add. “Just this dreadful dog Cato. Such a funny old man. You might have liked him. I’m sure you never see his kind in America.”

“I know we would have liked him,” Eve said. “Hannah often mentions Reverend Johnson.” Hannah was their cook, a woman of over thirty yet as shy and subtle as a girl. Her skin was always shining as if in embarrassment, but she had a jaunty way of crooning hymns to herself in the kitchen. The children, at first timid of her color, adored her, and listened with eyes rounded by delight when she held up a two-tone forefinger and told them to be good. Goodness had never before been presented to them seriously.

Ralph and Eve had not expected a servant. Prepared to rough it on a family vacation, they had picked the most obscure island they could find. But Hannah came with the house; the owner, a svelte widow who had children in Florida, Peru, and Antigua, assumed they would need her. As it turned out, they did. They could never have unravelled alone all the riddles of this novel world. Eve could never have managed the shopping, which was
carried on by gossip—invisible voices as liquid as the wind, telling who had just slaughtered a pig, and whose fishing boat had come in with a catch. The village was full of stores; almost every shack at least sold—for disturbingly discrepant prices—American cigarettes smuggled from St. Martin. But even the business hours of the most official store, a cement corridor of shelves attached to the customs office, had proved a mystery the Americans were unable to crack. They always found barred the large green door bearing in wobbly chalk script the ancient announcement “Attention Members! Attention Friends! This Store will be CLOSED Thursday afternoon.”

“Oh, Hannah. She’s a good girl,” the doctor’s wife said, and rolled over on her stomach. The corrugated backs of her thighs were frosted with sand like wet sugar.

“She is, you know,” Eve said. “She’s lovely. I think they’re all lovely. They’ve all been lovely to us.” Such insistence was unlike his wife. Ralph wondered what was between the two women, who had just met a day ago. “I can see why Reverend Johnson loved the people,” Eve added in a deliberate, though cautiously soft, voice. “The people” were all around them; their huts came down to the edge of the sand, and, windows shuttered, the patched walls seemed to be listening.

The doctor’s wife rolled over again and returned to a sitting position. What was making her so restless?

“Yes,” she said, and an especially heavy curl of surf foamed up the white slope and soaked in just short of their feet. The sand was porous; innumerable punctures dotted it, the breathing holes of crabs. The doctor’s wife’s eyes fixed on the horizon and became, from the side, colorless lenses. Her nose in profile turned sharp. “They’re simple souls,” she said.

The doctor’s wife was a queen here. She was the only fully white woman resident on the island. When the rare British official and the rarer, fantastically minor member of royalty came to grace this most remote and docile scrap of empire with a visit, she was the hostess. When she roared along the dirt roads in her spattered English Ford—its muffler had long ago rotted away—the older natives touched their foreheads ironically and the children flapped their arms in her wake of dust. When she and the doctor condescended to call upon the American family staying three weeks in The Bay, Hannah had trembled with pride and broken a cup in the kitchen. The doctor was a slight, rapid-voiced man with a witty air of failure. His fingertips were dyed deep yellow by smuggled cigarettes. He preferred Camels, but Chesterfields were all that were coming through now. Camels had more scratch in them. He had never seen a filtered cigarette. He and his wife had been ten years in the tropics—B.G., Trinidad, Barbados, now this. He had some vague scheme of getting to America and making a fortune and retiring to a Yorkshire village. He was off for the day to St. Martin.

“In America, now,” the doctor’s wife said, vehemently brushing sand from her knees, “are the coloreds well cared for?”

“How do you mean?” Eve asked.

“Are they well off?”

“Not really,” Ralph said, because he sensed that it would be better if he, rather than Eve, answered. “In some parts better than others. In the South, of course, they’re openly discriminated against; in the North they by and large have to live in the city slums but at least they have full legal rights.”

“Oh, dear,” the doctor’s wife said. “It is a problem, isn’t it?”

Eve’s face flashed up from studying a shell. “Whose problem?” she asked. She was a graduate of one of those female
colleges where only a member of a racial minority or a physically handicapped person is ever elected class president. News from South Africa made her voice thrash, and she was for anyone—Castro, Ben-Gurion, Martin Luther King—who in her mind represented an oppressed race.

The doctor’s wife returned her gaze to the horizon, and Ralph wondered if they had been rude. In the woman’s pointed profile there was a certain purposely silent thrust. But, the hostess, she relented and tried to make the conversation go again. She turned her head, shading her eyes with a quick hand and exposing her neat white teeth in a tense smile. “The schools,” she said. “Can they go to your schools?”