Swimming in the Volcano (25 page)

She hushed him, saying,
Yes, you were right, Mitchell. You were right to keep believing
.

They broke a window to get back into the house because Mitchell had lost his key in the water. She tugged off his wet clothes and directed him into his bed while he mumbled feeble protests, mistaking her intentions, before he passed out, breathing loudly through his slack mouth, his wounded nose packed with tissue paper because of its tendency to seep into the pillow at night, and then she doctored her own profuse flow in the bathroom, leaving coin-sized magenta drops on the scuffed wooden floorboards, a smear on the toilet seat, on the side of a stack of Kleenex so that the stain was layered deep into the calendar of the box and would be peeled away, day by day. She went to her own room and, after taking off her clothes, lowered herself into bed, but a few minutes later her stomach cramped violently and she got up from the mattress to go out on the veranda and sit in the hammock. Once she heard Mitchell lumber into the bathroom to cough and spit; when she went to check on him his door was open but he was back in bed asleep. For a while she looked in on him, disappointed that he wasn't awake, because it was time to tell him everything, to bring the tyranny of the past to a close and start over again one way or another, pure. She went back outside and rolled into the hammock, staring blankly at the canopy of stars, dipping into a crystalline packet with her fingernail.

Sometime before dawn, Mitchell dreamed about the elderly beggar at the airport, saw him walking around the bush, half starved, wearing the bloody shirt Mitchell had given him—the dream woke him up, and for a moment he thought the man was there in the room. He got up and went out on the veranda for air. Johnnie was rocking back and forth in the hammock, a braid of moonlight twisted on the bay, incandescent. She turned her head without a trace of disturbance or surprise, watching him come near her as if she had anticipated or even conjured his appearance. Her eyes were wide and wild in the thin blue
light. Suspended in the almost invisible web of the hammock, she seemed somehow at the center of the night, floating, a lone witness to the secrets of complete desolation. A
visitor
.

“What time is it?”

“I've lost track,” she said.

Their voices were feathers, falling leaves, water seeping into its table. He spoke with a gentleness he had been unable to express for a long time.

“What are you doing?”

“I've been singing.”

“Oh,” he said, still not fully conscious. He told her he didn't know any songs.

“It's easier late at night, when you're alone, to remember them.”

She shifted and spread the netting with her feet and arms, unfolding and opening, making room for him in the airy expanse of her solitude. He dipped his upper body over the hem and let himself fall, rolled in alongside her, adjusting themselves until they found the place where they were equally balanced, cocooned, harnessed, twins in utero.

At daybreak Mitchell was roused by the sounds of steady chopping, as mechanical as the
tock tock tock
of a metronome, the strokes issued with such hypnotic regularity that at first Mitchell thought, Tennis? as if he had been dreaming of two well-matched players engaged in an endless rally. He threw his legs out of the hammock and jerked upright in a clammy sweat of bad sleep and foreboding. He slipped out of the netting, and Johnnie, asleep slanted on her face with her hands above her, stayed put, seemingly undisturbed. She looked like something wild that had died, trying to claw its way out of a trap and it was with this awful sense of respect for the dead that he reached out and stayed the hammock's lullaby. Unwanted discoveries were on his mind.

He went quickly through the house to the front room and drew back the curtains. At the top of the drive a grizzled madman hacked at the trunk of the royal poinciana with a machete so sharp each double set of blows spit a melon-white wedge from the pulp of the tree. Mitchell stepped into a pair of gym shorts and dashed outside, shouting for the fellow to stop what he was doing.

Despite the man's age he appeared unaffected by his labor, it was no trouble to him to work with such hot effort, and he looked too bony and juiceless anyway to make a sweat rise to his ashy skin. His flashing strokes, overhand and then underhand, were clean and accurate and had already done irreparable damage to the girth of the poinciana. He acted as if he hadn't heard the order to cease and Mitchell was compelled to take his shoulder and pull him back out of his cricketeer's stance. With a final swipe he left the long blade of the machete sunk in the wood and turned, removing his straw hat with an obsequious flourish that dumped a padding of folded newspaper at Mitchell's feet.

“Is a fine mornin, mahn!” he said with the heartiness of a lifetime early riser. “God give we anudduh sweet dandy.”

Mitchell clenched his teeth and pointed disbelievingly at the damage the man had done. “You're murdering this beautiful tree. What the fuck do you think you're doing?”

“Oh, ho!” Mitchell's anger seemed to take the old man by surprise, but his concern became a polite chuckle and he clapped his hands on the top of his legs, as if he were laughing at a joke Mitchell had not told well.

“Missy Bain say tek de tree out.” He gave a blameless look and shrugged. “Missy Bain mek a lettah to Missy Carlisle and say find Mistah Quiddley and tell him tek de tree out. Missy Bain say daht tree she have up by de road fulla bug, mahn, and—”

“What bugs?” Mitchell interrupted, baffled. “Who's Missy Bain? What in the hell are you talking about?”

“Well, sah, I ain seen no bug, ya know, but Missy Bain mek a lettah to Missy Carlisle and say find Mistah Quiddley and tell him tek de tree out daht stand by de road, it fulla bug and de bug gettin into de house and eatin up de place so best tek out de tree ‘fah de whole house fall down and de white mahn goes somewhere else and she lose daht money she need to send dem two gy-urls to school up dere where she livin, some place dem callin Toron-to, so Missy Carlisle come by to where I stayin wit me wife and say Missy Bain got a tree she doan want, Mistah Quiddley, and me wife say, Eh, doan boddah wit daht, mahn, St. Catherine fulla trees waitin to drop, but Missy Carlisle reach deep into daht red bag she carry and tek out twenny Uncle Sammys”—the old man fished around in the pocket of his trousers and produced the twenty-dollar bill in question—“and she give me dis same note you see here in me hand and say, Here's fah de trouble of chop-down, Mistah Quiddley, and Missy Bain say is all right to dig de coal pit right in de side by de drive, and—”

“Wait a minute,” Mitchell said. “This is inconceivable.”

“Eh?”

“Why wasn't I consulted about this? This tree is ruined.”

Mr. Quiddley scratched his ear thoughtfully. “I stop by, ya know, sah. I come by de ministry.” He maintained the merriest smile possible although his eyes darted, avoiding Mitchell's, as if he feared his explanation would be misconstrued as impudence and any second he'd end up knocked to the ground by the white man.

Mitchell was furious and unable to shake the conviction that he was being victimized by insensible directives from abroad. He stepped forward to the poinciana to give Mr. Quiddley back his cutlass
and send him on his way. The shaft had bit so deep that he had to use both hands to unlock the steel from the wood.

“I loved this tree,” Mitchell said. “No more cutting on it, please. I'm going to talk to Mrs. Carlisle.”

“Tree finish up,” Quiddley reminded him, still with his broad, obsequious grin that was making Mitchell feel irrelevant to the situation.

“Just leave it be,” he demanded. “There's no virtue in this sort of intervention.”

“Now, you lose me on daht, mahn,” Mr. Quiddley confessed, and grew sullen.

Mr. Quiddley had exhausted him, he wasn't going to talk to him anymore but went back into the house to prepare for town. He put water on to boil and took a cold shower. While juicing oranges in the kitchen, he heard a vehicle come to a stop in the gravel at the top of the drive, and then a persistent horn, calling him out. There was one of the ministry's olive-green Rovers. Godfred Ballantyne, the forest ranger, had his head out the driver's window, chatting up Mr. Quiddley who had squatted in the side yard using his machete to scoop a crater that was already knee-deep.

“Now what, Mister Quiddley,” Mitchell said, advancing. “I thought you went home.”

“Wukkin on de pit, mahn.”

We're not traveling on the same wavelength, Mitchell thought, surrendering. Not even close.

“Mek a few bagga coals,” said Quiddley.

Ballantyne honked the horn again, as if to change the subject. “I come fah you, Wilson,” he barked.

Mitchell went back in the house for his briefcase, ignored his tea but gulped his orange juice and wrote a note to Johnnie, asking her to go to the market in Augustine, and
wear a skirt in public, please
, that's the rule if you lived here,
no trashy women in residence!

All right
, Mitchell growled to himself as they drove off,
I see how it is now
. How easy it was for people to disrupt your home and environment, even from distant shores. No one seemed to need permission.

In his haversack, Ballantyne had two fresh loaves of bread, still hot from the bakery oven, and a sixpenny cake of guava cheese wrapped in a sheet of newsprint. Mitchell felt light-headed with hunger the second he smelled them, as shameless as a street urchin inhaling fully, his eyes closed in appreciation.
Eat
, Ballantyne ordered. He loved
issuing commands.
Eat. Run
, quelling any thought of disobedience. Where had he been educated? Mitchell wondered. Were there Jesuits on the island? Greedily, Mitchell tore apart a spongy loaf, crumbling the cake of guava cheese and pressing its pieces into the fragrant center of each hunk. Once his mouth was as full as he could get it, he refocused on the world, chewing more and more pensively as he realized something was not quite right, then faster, once he understood, so he could swallow and speak.

“Where are we going?'

“Leeward.”

“Take me back,” said Mitchell. His neck tightened and he heard an unnecessary urgency in his voice. “I can't go to leeward this morning. There's a staff meeting. I have to be there.”

Ballantyne kept his eyes on the road. “No you don't,” he said. They were speeding along the flat, goat-gnawed coast of Bambarra. Ballantyne turned on the windshield wipers to smear the film of salt exclaimed into the air by the dangerous waves pounding the emptiness of the beaches. The Rover's engine made an oceanic roar, the rhythmic crash of the sea was like a demolition machine crunching down.

“Ballantyne, what's going on? Why do I feel like this is not a friendly act, you picking me up?”

Ballantyne snorted and looked over, his eyes a mystery yet nevertheless playful. Clearly, it put him in a good humor to make his passenger uncomfortable. “You too nervous, Wilson. Dey postpone it, you know.”

“Why?”

“Who am I, mahn? Dem big shots ain goin tell me.”

“So why are we headed to leeward?”

“Kingsley.”

Mitchell sat back, giving this idea solemn consideration, both flattered and wary that he was being summoned to an audience with the honorable minister—the crackpot, the tyrant, the has-been. Well, okay, good; he had something to say to Kingsley and it was this: Listen, I'm one of the planet's last humanitarians, I'm a ready-made fairy godmother, but I don't know what the fuck I'm doing, I don't know who wants what, why don't you tell me what to do? He put another piece of bread in his mouth and chewed. Ahead of them, not far inland, a bulldozer nuzzled the pale saline-drenched crown of a modest hill, pushing dirt around in a pretense that this stretch of forsaken littoral was somehow livable. There had once been an ancient Arawak village up there, Mitchell had seen the shards during the survey,
and now it was being turned like a thin compost, the infertile clay hidden under a sedimentary blanket of volcanic ash and goat droppings and useless minerals now exposed and yellowing under the wet sun. It was a Public Lands Development project: peasants from one of the northwest estates would be resettled here, he had heard. Mitchell didn't have to be a soil expert to know that unless the newcomers were given livestock to graze they would be better off in Scuffletown, since they would not survive here, let alone prosper. Nobody ever had and nobody ever would grow anything on this coastal plain, pressed so hard by the Atlantic. He had recommended the peasants remain where they were until a more forgiving site could be identified and purchased, if need be, and although the chief agricultural officer agreed, there was nothing to be done about it because now the coalition was insisting on the relocation—turning people off good land and marrying them to bad. The last bite of bread in his mouth turned to mud, and he could not swallow.

“What do you know about this,” he finally asked the forest ranger, driven by the need to have an ally.

“You get mixed up wit some shit is all I know.”

It was not what Mitchell had expected to hear.

The coast changed. The land convulsed upward, the spine of a mountain snapped off into the sea and beyond that another giant opened wide, spreading its spurs like two burly legs, the white cascade of a river dribbling from the crotch into the ecstatic blue of a bay. Still not in view but not far now was the old town of Ferguson, once a thriving sugar port but now barely inhabited. There they would turn off the coastal highway onto the inland track that serpentined down into the valley named after the seedbed of civilization, Sumeria, and then over to the leeward village of Cape Molasses, so christened in 1743 in remembrance of a family of French settlers boiled alive by the Black Caribs in raw cane syrup the previous year, on land that would one day be known as Jack Dawes Estate.