Prospero's Daughter (13 page)

“Carlos,” Ariana said. “He make me brave. He say, ‘I must eat my dinner.’ ”

“Dinner?”

“He don’t mean dinner. He tell me he mean he will take what Prospero do to him. He won’t say he sorry, like Prospero want him to. He say if you want to be free, you disobey him. I disobey him now, because I want to be free. I tell on him and take my punishment for the earrings.”

“Nobody will do anything to you for that, Ariana,” the matron said gently.

When he told her, as he had had to do before Ariana arrived, what Gardner had alleged, the matron was suspicious. Have you questioned the boy? she had asked him. Did you find out what he has to say for himself? Was it because Carlos was colored that she had been so ready to doubt Dr. Gardner? Was it because Ariana was black she was ready to take her word as the gospel truth?

“That was in the past,” the matron was saying. “A long time ago. You were a child, Ariana.”

“But I don’t want him to do me like he do Carlos.”

Mumsford got up. He had to put an end to this now. He didn’t want Ariana telling the matron about the prison behind Dr. Gardner’s house. If she had been suspicious when he told her of Gardner’s allegations, what would she think now if she knew about the mosquitoes, the stink, the blazing sun, the sores all over Carlos’s body? He couldn’t take the chance that what Gardner had done would be so repulsive to her, so inhumane, that her loyalties to the department would evaporate. What if she told the other police officers? What if the newspapers found out?

“The situation is under investigation.” He spoke directly to the matron. “The commissioner has assigned the case to me. I’ve been to Chacachacare. Until the matter about Carlos is settled, I don’t want any more discussion about him. Understand?”

But the matron was not interested in Carlos. It was to Ariana that her heart went out. “And the girl?” she asked him. “She can’t go back there.”

Mumsford allowed her the girl. He would put Ariana in her custody, he said, but there was to be no more talk about Carlos until the commissioner had given permission. All that was said in his office was confidential. She could be brought up on charges if she divulged any part of it. Then he told Ariana in his sternest voice that she was to say nothing more about Carlos, not even to the matron. He would help her. He would ask the commissioner to find her a place to stay, but only if she promised.

“But it have more for me to tell,” Ariana protested. “About Miss Virginia and Prospero.”

Mumsford held up his hand. “You’ve told enough for today,” he said.

It did not occur to him that she could have anything significant to tell him about Dr. Gardner and his daughter, and he was in no mood to listen to her complaints about some domestic dispute, about something he was sure either Dr. Gardner or his daughter had asked her to do, something like scrubbing the floor on her hands and knees, or redoing the washing when the clothes she claimed to have cleaned were still spotted with stains. What she had alleged was so despicable, so perverse, he could think of nothing else. He had before him a clear case of sexual abuse.
Child abuse.
He had to do something about it.

Mumsford was not a complicated man. His sense of morality left him no room for shades of good and evil. One was either good or one was evil. A good man did not commit evil acts; a bad man was never good. If Dr. Gardner had committed the sin Ariana had accused him of, then Dr. Gardner was a bad man, and he would have to conclude that the charges he had made against Carlos Codrington were untrue, that they were lies.

Yet he must have more proof, more assurances. He did not like Dr. Gardner—his air of superiority, his patronizing attitude toward the men on the force—but he balked at the idea of involving an Englishman in a scandal on the island. He would not be party to such a scandal. And yet what to do?

When the door closed behind Ariana and the matron, and he was alone, finally able to think calmly, he decided he would speak to Virginia. He would go to see her at Mrs. Burton’s. It was Dr. Gardner who had placed the injunction against questioning his daughter. He would tell the commissioner what Ariana had said. He would ask his permission to get Virginia’s side of the story. If Ariana was right, if Virginia and Carlos Codrington were friends (he could not bring himself to consider a relationship between them deeper than friendship), then he would make an offer to Dr. Gardner: Withdraw his charge against Carlos Codrington and he would see to it that Ariana kept her silence, that her story go no further than where it had reached—the matron’s ears and the ears of two white police officials who could be trusted. He closed his notebook, reached for his baton, and put on his policeman’s hat. Yes, he said to himself. That was what he would do.

Carlos

SIX

I CALL IT the Miranda test. Pass it and I believe you. Fail it and all you say about the races being equal, that character, not color, is what matters, becomes theoretical.

It had never occurred to Dr. Gardner, of course, to conceive of me as an equal, but he taught me as if I were an equal, as if he believed I could learn as well as any Englishman. But I was an experiment to him, and when, in my own way (which I am prepared to say was not the best way), I declared my love for his daughter, my intention to marry her (for I had not conceived of having children with her without marriage), he hollered rape and threw me in the prison in his backyard.

I will begin at the beginning.

The house we lived in was my mother’s house. She left it to me when she died, but Gardner used his cunning to cheat me out of it. He appeared one morning, after a terrible rainstorm, with his daughter, Virginia. I was six then. I lived with Lucinda, my mother’s housekeeper, and her daughter, Ariana, who was nine at the time. Though we were shadowed always by the dark cloud of my parents’ deaths (both had died within a year of each other), we were reasonably happy and wanted for nothing. My mother had many very expensive jewels. After she died, Lucinda needed only to sell a few of them to buy us food and things for the house.

It was a big house. It had many rooms: a drawing room, a dining room, a large kitchen, and four bedrooms. I had my own room, Ariana and her mother slept in another, and we used the other two bedrooms to store things or to play games when the sun was too hot to go outside, or when it rained. If we needed anything, the lepers helped us. They lived on the other side of the bay, far away from us, and though there was a narrow dirt path behind our house that led to their colony, we rarely used it, Lucinda preferring to send messages to them by the boatman, who did errands for us on the mainland. They always came. They never refused us. They would row over in their pirogues, whenever Lucinda asked, to fix our roof when it leaked, to repair the toilet when it got clogged, to sweep the yard when it was covered with leaves, or to cut back the bushes when they grew thick in the rainy season.

I was not afraid of them. I did not find them repulsive. I was accustomed to their deformities. I had known them from birth. To me they were simply different, their limbs shaped in another way from mine, but just as human, in every other way just as normal.

If I ever felt any unhappiness in those days it was because of my memories of my mother and my father, and because sometimes, when Lucinda thought I was not looking, I would see her crouched on the floor clutching her stomach. Whenever I asked her what was the matter, she would brush me away. Ariana told me her mother was dying. Cancer, she said it was.

So when Dr. Gardner came that morning, Lucinda had more than one reason to believe he was sent to her by God. I thought he looked like the devil, with his long red hair draped down to his shoulders and a branch in his hand that was forked at the top. Only the sight of his daughter, whose eyes reminded me of my mother’s, made me not insist that he leave our yard, as I could have done. For the house was my mother’s and so mine, and Lucinda would have followed my wishes.

We had had a terrible storm the night before and in the morning the sky had turned white with salt that powerful winds had blown from the sea and dropped on the clouds. But behind the whiteness was a glorious light. It gilded the horizon and sent rays of gold streaking up the white sky. God’s miracle, Lucinda said it was. Which was why, even before she knew what Gardner had to offer, Lucinda was certain he had been sent by God. And why, that evening, when I sat in Inspector Mumsford’s car, looking straight in front of me, determined not to move my head nor speak a word to him, knowing that no matter what I said he would not believe me, I weakened. For the light that lined the black clouds above the sunset that day on Mount St. Benedict reminded me of the shimmering gold that edged that salt-filled sky the morning after the storm, and I pressed my face against the car window as much in awe of it as in fear of what it could portend.

It is impossible for me to forget the night that brought us that strange sky the next morning. Rain had slashed down from the sky in torrents, whipping through our yard with a force as sharp and lethal as the blade of a machete. At any time, it seemed, it would slice through the roof. When the thunder came roaring in rapid succession, Ariana and I scrambled under the bed for cover. The house shook and shuddered with each blast, and we feared that at any moment it would collapse and fall on us. Then the lightning left the ocean. It was pitch-black outside but when lightning struck inland, each bolt brighter and eerier than the last, it set the house ablaze, making it seem like daylight, as if the sun were high and bright in the sky. Then came the big one. It split the sky in two and pitched a fiery fork of light into the chennette tree near my window. One half of the tree fell against the side of the house and broke into my bedroom wall, close to the spot where Ariana and I were huddled together, trembling.

“It is the devil himself working his evil tonight,” Lucinda said.

I thought he came the next morning.

Water gushed through the hole where the tree had fallen and Lucinda pulled Ariana and me into the drawing room and shut the door behind us. But the water kept seeping under the door, rolling toward where we were standing. We watched, terrified, as it gathered and swelled. Soon it was no longer rolling, but climbing inch by inch, higher and higher, to my waist and then higher and higher to my chest. I thought I would drown, and I wrapped my legs around Lucinda’s waist and clutched her neck. She was praying and I began praying, too.
Our father, who art in heaven . . .

I have heard dogs howl at the moon many times since, but their cries were pitiful baying compared to the wailing of the wind that night. It was as though the gates of hell had opened and Cerberus himself, that three-headed monster, along with his minions, had been sent to devour us. Nothing was more terrible and frightening than that infernal howling. When it met with resistance, it growled like a thing alive, blowing out the Demerara shutters on one side of the house and butting its head against walls and the closed doors. Outside it had stripped the trees bare, and once inside, it hurled leaves and twigs on top of us, flinging its body here and there in every corner of the house, frantic for escape. When it abated, retreated, the rain, thunder, and lightning with it, Lucinda put me down. We were soaked to the bone, our clothes plastered to our bodies with mud and leaves, but alive, convinced that only by a miracle had we been saved.

Gardner came in the morning offering to help us. We had heard that a doctor from England and his young daughter had recently moved in with the old doctor who lived in the big house at the edge of the bay, but we had never seen them. It had seemed odd to us, with the leprosarium closing, that the old doctor would need additional help, and we were curious.

He could fix the house for us, Gardner said when Lucinda came out to greet him.

“How much?” she asked.

“Just room and board,” he said.

We should have been suspicious of him then. Indeed, Lucinda asked the question that was on all our minds: “Don’t you get room and board in the doctor’s house?”

“The doctor does not need me,” he replied.

There was nothing on our island except the leprosarium. Why would he want to stay if the doctor did not need him? But Lucinda was too polite to say the obvious: If the doctor did not need him, he should go back to Trinidad, and if not Trinidad, to England, where he came from.

He could see us hesitating. “Look at the damage,” he said, and pointed to my bedroom wall. “That hole cannot stay that way. And your roof needs fixing. I can repair them both.”

“The lepers can help us,” Lucinda said.

“But are they strong enough to lift that tree trunk out of your house?”

“They always help,” Lucinda said, but there was uncertainty in her voice and she had glanced down when she answered him. Gardner, his ears pricked up like a hunting dog, heard the slight inflection at the end of
help
and smelled her vulnerability.

“I would make the house like new. I would clean up the mud, sweep up the leaves, clean the yard.” His words flowed smoothly off his tongue, but I was not fooled. I did not trust his red hair, his forked stick. I tugged Lucinda’s skirts. “We don’t need his help,” I said to her.

“Better than new,” he said, his eyes on me.

“We like it the way it is,” I said, already brazen for my age.

“I can build you a porch,” he said to Lucinda.

I tugged harder at Lucinda’s skirt.

“Wouldn’t that be nice?” His syrupy voice repulsed me.

Lucinda patted my head. “It would be nice to have a porch. Not so, Carlos?”

“We don’t need a porch,” I whined.

“You can sit on your rocking chair, Miss Lucinda, and watch the moon climb the sky.”

It was the last time he called her Miss Lucinda and she never saw the moon from her rocking chair on the porch he eventually built.

Lucinda caved in. But first, out of respect for my mother, and so for me, she excused herself, and, leaving the strange white man in the yard with his daughter, I was already beginning to like, she took me into the house and gave me her reasons.

“We need the protection,” she said.

“Why?” I asked her.

“There are people who don’t like us. We don’t know if the men who killed your father would come for you next,” she said.

I remembered my father, his bloodied body on the dining room table. But Lucinda had sat many nights by my bed convincing me that we had nothing to fear. If my father had not gone fishing so far out in the sea, they never would have caught him, she said. “They too ’fraid they catch leprosy.” Now she was trying to persuade me otherwise.

“They could come and the lepers can’t do nothing to protect us. They can’t protect themselves,” she said.

“I don’t want him here.” I stamped my foot hard on the ground.

She grabbed my arms. Lucinda was a broad-shouldered, high-waisted woman with big breasts. Whenever she pulled me to her, I always felt shadowed by all that generous flesh. But this time was different. She had never held me so tightly before. “Stop it, Carlos!” She shook me so hard, my cheeks flapped and jiggled above my jaw. When I finally quieted down, the creases on her brown face, tanned beyond its natural biscuit brown by the sun she loved, softened, and she loosened her hold on me. “I am sick, Carlos,” she said. Lucinda was a kind woman, with the gentlest eyes, but now they drilled into mine. “We’ll need his help. He’s a doctor.”

Dr. Gardner moved into my house the very next day.

The first thing he did was to cut down the chennette tree. He went into the shed in the backyard where my father stored the tools he used when he was building our house and took out the saw and the wheel of rope hanging on the wall. Then he climbed up the tree and began sawing off the branches. Chennettes rained on the ground and scattered everywhere. I screamed. Lucinda put her arms around my shoulders and drew me to her. I yelled at Gardner to stop. He sawed another branch. More chennettes rained on the ground. “Stop! Stop!” I was inconsolable.

Lucinda called out to him for my sake. “They his favorite fruit. Don’t cut it down, Doctor.”

Gardner was patient in the beginning, almost kind. He climbed down the tree, and stooping next to me, he took my hand and explained. “If I don’t cut it down, Carlos,” he said gently, “the other half will fall with the next big wind.”

But he did not stop with the branches. The next morning he hollered out to a fisherman who was passing in his boat across the bay, close to our shore, and offered him money to help him saw off the trunk. The next day, again engaging the fisherman’s help, he attacked the chataigne tree. Every day, for one week, the fisherman came, and from sunrise to sunset, he and Gardner sawed and roped down branches and tree trunks. When they were done, not a single one of the trees my father had planted was left standing: not the coconut tree, the breadfruit tree, the chataigne tree, or the avocado tree, and not one of the fruit trees, neither the plum, orange, grapefruit, sapodilla, sour-sop nor the two mango trees that were in our yard.

As each tree went down, the fruits I loved tumbling to the ground when the branches were lopped off, I bawled as if my life itself were threatened.

“Disease,” Gardner hollered. “Fruits attract flies and bats. Flies and bats carry disease. Disease will kill us.”

Lucinda tried to fight back for me. “But Carlos likes fruits,” she pleaded with Gardner. “Leave him one tree, for God’s sake.”

“They have worms,” he declared and, dismissing her, signaled the fisherman to keep on sawing.

We could not make out what he said after that. His face was a mass of frowns and grimaces. Once in a while he would shout out something.
Disease
was the only word we heard clearly.

During that week, he confined Virginia to his bedroom and asked Ariana to keep her company, though it seemed to me, and it turned out that Ariana thought so also, he ordered, rather than asked, her to do it. I saw him frequently, but I rarely saw his daughter. Lucinda made meals for all of us, but we did not eat them together. Virginia and Gardner ate apart from us, in their bedroom. And, in truth, I did not mind, for I felt ashamed of my babyish behavior. I had made up my mind to be a man when my mother died, and I had failed. I did not want Virginia to know that I had blubbered like a weakling.

When all the trees were down and the yard was a mess of chopped tree trunks, branches, and leaves, Gardner told us that he was ready to build his garden.

Lucinda was as shocked as I. “Garden?” He had destroyed all the fruit trees and with them the flowering shrubs that grew in patches around them. He had trampled on them or cut them down. “I thought you didn’t want garden,” Lucinda said.

“Ah, but the flowers I am going to grow won’t get diseased,” he said. “Not like your flowers.”