LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

she would never say that, because she stopped speaking once Troy was gone, and because I would never tell her where I’d been. Except in my imaginings: when I sat on a wall and collected her next to me, a ghost girl with old eyes, sucking the thiflae flower for sweetness. I never liked it, this red bud that felt like fabric in your mouth, until I saw all the kids at the resort—couldn’t keep their mouths from taking on the colors of their suckers. All sticky. Thwuck, thwuck sucking. Made me see that we had to work our mouths a little for our sweetness, and it was a sweetness that grew on your tongue, didn’t just spike your mouth. Made me see who I was a little bit.

      Mother would be right, though, that only tourists went inland. The resort had cleared a path to a ruin that looked like a house—the only one that looked like anything—and took packs of guests up to see its walls. They didn’t tell the tourists what the walls had been a part of, what they sat on. Just an old house, just a formation of stone to pose yourself against. Stone spangling in the sun until it was cooked into something else. I didn’t know exactly what they told the tourists, their path off-limits to me. I could see only the ruins still shrouded in the brush that shrouded me, too.

      The resort owned most all the inland. No one was allowed to go among the ruins beyond this little tourist patch. The ruins of the estate that all of us on the island, way, way back, came from—now a trap of trespass. I waded through the brush like a ghost, a nocturnal animal, a thief.

      Except for the house they’d claimed for the tourists, all I could find remaining from the plantation: these stones and stones and stones piping the hills, holding themselves against the overwhelming brush.

      I pictured what it must have been like moving down from the inland to the edges of the island. I pictured everyone moving all at once, like an exodus, though I knew it wasn’t really like that. I pictured every single family creeping down the same ways I went up, carrying sacks of all they owned—not much—the ones in front swinging their machetes. Reverse invasion, I thought, a dispersal. Moving from the center out, out, finding space between all of them, to set up where they could actually see the sky and the sea. The brush filling in behind them almost as soon as they passed through. Almost like water, how you couldn’t keep it from taking any little space you might try to carve out for yourself around here. This tiny oval, quiet and loud at once.

      Most of those very first houses had been abandoned. People just left whole houses behind, took what they could carry. There was a piano in one of them. We used to have parties there when I was a little younger. Somewhere to sit and get out of the sun, hear someone plucking at the keys. Even if my friend Hebbie was the only one who really knew how to play, it was something to hear besides the dogs bickering on the road, the scribbling sound of the waves reclaiming sand. Mother hated when people would go in those deserted houses to take stuff, practical though she was about us collecting trash on the beach to use at our house. Just didn’t like the idea of transplanting some piece of that loneliness into your own space. Me: couldn’t get enough of the memories of things. Everything I touched dripped with the syrup of the past, even at the resort where the brand new strapped over everything like duct tape.

      Last year, just a few months after Troy had joined him in the capital, our dad was dead, and Troy briefly back among us for the funeral. (Not a real funeral, since Dad’s body had been buried in the capital—who could pay for otherwise?—but what Mother wanted anyway. Mr. Ken came on behalf of the funeral committee. I walked the perimeter of the house while they sat across from each other at our wobbly table. Took walking only nine of those small squares for them to settle the details of the grave marker without a grave. The empty that would be inside of it heavier than his body had ever been.) Two days, that visit, and then Troy was off again, and the night before he left he didn’t even come home. Out with friends all night. Miss Philene had given me a ride to work that morning, and I saw him standing, waiting for the boat to the airstrip. Saw his back and one knee leaning toward the other, unsure. Turtled with his overstuffed red backpack; one frayed strap hung limp. Someone else also waiting stepped into my view, blocked him out entirely.

      Right before Troy left he managed to run our cousin’s car through the fence and let the cows out. Used to be his best friend Andre’d keep him reined in those nights out, but they’d gone to the capital together, and only Troy had come back that trip.

      Guessed Lionel felt bad it had been his truck that did the wrecking, since he offered to take me inland to search the path of broken brush the cows had stomped out. We gathered the machetes our fathers had used for gardening and headed up. Or in. The middle of our island was a big hump you couldn’t really see unless you got way out to sea in a boat or way up in the air in a plane. From the road and the sandy strip around the island we lived on, it was just a hill of snarly brush we sometimes dipped a hand into to pluck leaves for teas.

      The cows were so big, how could they hide? So big, how could we not hear them? So big, roaming the inland like they themselves were the ghosts that lived up there.

      First time I fell over a stone wall was when we were searching for those cows. Thicket so dense I didn’t see a two-foot-tall wall in front of my legs. Fell over and got a ridge of red scrapes on my knees.

      Lionel was only four years older than I was, but he kicked the wall as if he’d known something, lived in a different time when people told you what the walls were for, when you could walk inland for something other than chasing your food. A different time when you could walk inland to add background to the whispering of the elders who’d been around long enough to have their grandparents’ memories of moving down and letting the inland seal itself behind them. There was a time, Ole Mr. Vit had told me, that time I was young enough to ask, before my time, when folks knew who was or wasn’t Africa born and when folks recalled moving down from the estate and calling themselves “stateless.” Then people didn’t want to talk about that anymore. Didn’t want their little ones strapped with sandbags while trying to wade across this life. Then he’d stopped talking, too, and nothing you could do to open those lips again. Sent me on my way.

      “Why’d you do that: kick?”

      Lionel looked at me like I was a stupid kid, putting him on with my ignorance. “These used to keep cattle in anyway,” he said.

      The walls were intact in some spots but mostly crumbling and intermittent. There were so many breaks where the cows could have gotten through. He rolled his eyes at me. I didn’t think he’d say more, but he did.

      “We’re on the estate, Myrna, don’t you know that much? These walls were built by slaves.”

      Word like a bogeyman. Something in the past or in the darkness or in nightmares. Bogeyman Slavery. Worse than a yeho, a monster. Monster of death who knew what he was doing. Bogeyman whose name wasn’t said. Sandbags we all wore but didn’t see.

      Only talk of the inland my whole life was when I was a kid too young to really understand much of what I heard, and when I was a little older, the residual trickle of gossip. About the night Miss Philene’s youngest son, Jimmy, never came home. His body was found somewhere inland. Came out later that Minister Callaghan had found some teenagers drinking up among the stones. And when Jimmy refused to get going, the minister spun himself into a rage. Beat him, left him bleeding, took his flashlight. Jimmy never found his way out and never went anywhere again, inland or otherwise. No one talked about it that much after it was all settled. Only remembered Jimmy’s death same as a person who died in hospital or from old, old age. Seemed like it had always just been the way it was: Jimmy and the minister both gone from the island in different ways, the minister’s wife, Miss Wayida, barely coming out of her church, and neither Miss Philene nor Mr. Ken speaking much about their youngest, long gone now. Then as now, that rage about the inland that grabbed the minister? Was a mystery to me the size of the ocean. Felt its depth each step I took through this brush.

      And I was also coming to understand something about confusing swirls of anger that could gather in my own gut. Like what I felt when news of Dad’s heart attack came to us.

      We kept walking, inching along behind our machetes. Thorny branches scraped the tops of my arms, leaving thin lines of white. It was the dry season, and the haulback had lost its leaves. Just gray branches now like

Скачать книгу