Land of Love and Drowning: A Novel Read online

  “No, Eeona. My moon is full now.” Antoinette paused. “Right now.” And then the blood, the almost-baby, began to drain out of her.

  Though Eeona also bled, it was not with the command her mother seemed to have. Her bleeding came unexpectedly and left unexpectedly and was generally a nuisance. She stared at her mother with awe. She squeezed her thighs together, to hold her own brightness in.

  Antoinette’s face was set and cold as she pressed the rags between her own legs. Readying for the gurgle and the pulp. “Bleeding is not a curse,” she said to her daughter. “It is a blessing.” She checked the cloths and pressed them to herself again. “But it is only a blessing if you own it.”

  Eeona wanted to be brave. So she began to unbutton her dress. Beneath her dress Eeona was wearing pantaloons that puffed around her hips. She held her breath as she took those off. Then she waited for her mother to look at her.

  “Eeona,” Antoinette said, “soon you will have desires . . .” It was the beginning of a lesson. But Eeona would not sit. Instead she pushed her pelvis out.

  Antoinette looked. She had been trained to be a lady, so she knew how to retain her composure. Now she simply sucked in air. Then she reached out her hand to touch her daughter. She wasn’t quite sure of what she was seeing.

  Here was Eeona’s secret: The hair growing between her legs wasn’t brown and bushy like her mother’s. It wasn’t black and wiry like Miss Lady’s. It was gray and thin. Like an old lady’s. Like the little wisps at Papa’s temples. In Eeona’s mind they were from Papa. Their private secret in her secret private place. No one had seen, except Papa. He had told her then that it meant wisdom, just before they’d stood on the ledge of The Homecoming together like castaways and dived into the sea.

  “Let me see,” Antoinette now said sternly. “Let me see what is wrong.” Perhaps it was just ash, the mother thought madly, as though the daughter might be smoldering in her intimate places. But no, the gray color did not come off in Antoinette’s hands.

  Eeona sucked in her own breath. Since she could remember, only her father had ever touched her there.

  Mama Antoinette forgot her own body. She pitched her blood-spotted cloths into the sea and scooped seawater into buckets. With fresh rags she rubbed a log of soap into suds. She spread Eeona’s legs and began to wash her there. “What have you done, Eeona? Why did this happen?” She dipped the cloth into the bucket again. Eeona said nothing. Perhaps her mother would get the gray off. The girl didn’t want it gray, despite what Papa said. She wanted hers dark like Mama’s or Miss Lady’s. She also wondered.

  Oh, but she knew. She knew. She had liked it when Papa kissed her there. She knew she shouldn’t, but she had. Now, she would shrivel into an old lady all over. Or she would become plump at the belly—forever pregnant like Mama. Eeona just stood there as Antoinette scrubbed harder. Eeona wanted to tell Mama that the scrubbing hurt, but she didn’t. The cloths Antoinette had cast out were gone, but Eeona stared at the spot where they had settled into the sea as her mother went at her as if Eeona were the deck of a boat.

  Eeona’s skin became raw until the color that came on the cloth was the dark rust of blood. Antoinette had forgotten her own bleeding, which had slowed, which had stopped, the child inside her no longer in danger.

  “This cannot be real,” Antoinette whispered softly. The hair had not revealed itself to be brown or black or even a saving yellow.

  Instead, the hair between Eeona’s legs now glittered clean like silver and Eeona felt her mother’s breath on her like a lover’s. Now Eeona found the silver curiously beautiful, but she knew she should be ashamed of this thought. She held her breath and tried to drown the feeling. And in a way this is how she would be for long after. Either trying to bury herself under a foot of earth or trying to burst free from under a foot of water.

  Above them on the deck was the ship’s matron. At this moment her job was to guard this side of the boat so that Madame Bradshaw and Miss Bradshaw could bathe without the men stealing a peek at them from the deck. Now Owen Arthur approached and looked to walk past her. “Captain, the ladies are bathing.”

  He nodded and stepped forward.

  “Captain.”

  The matron was not large, but she was wiry and younger than Captain Bradshaw, who stepped again.

  “Captain, the women,” the matron said, this time sternly as though she was not speaking to the captain at all.

  Owen cleared his throat. “And whose women are bathing?” The matron looked at the captain. “Your women, sir,” she answered, understanding the intention of his question. He nodded and walked around her. She turned to see him go. He spoke back to her, without turning: “Keep your post.” The command was gentle and gruff at the same time. The matron turned, so that now she was guarding Mr. Bradshaw as well.

  Owen leaned over and peered down at his wife and daughter, the ship on one side of them, the sea on the other. His eyes filled with tears. “Christ Lord,” he whispered, and did not feel it was in vain. He wanted to call to his women. He wanted them to look up so he could see his wife’s breasts out in the open like this. So he could witness Eeona’s tight belly.

  Owen Arthur had not, after all, won the lucrative sugar shipping deal with Mr. Lovernkrandt. Instead, with liquor soon illegal, Captain Bradshaw had squeezed out some hauls of strange things—a shipping of shoes from Santo Domingo, bull bones from Ponce, oil in barrels from Port-of-Spain—the bones being his most frequent cargo. For now, his only faith was his love for his wife and daughter. But he knew there was something wicked in his wanting to see even a harmless part of his daughter’s body in the same way he wanted to see his wife’s.

  But perhaps it was not Eeona whom he lusted for at all. Antoinette, with her sewing, was not often obliging. Perhaps he just needed to visit Rebekah more often. Mrs. Rebekah McKenzie, the piano teacher and market lady. Her husband, a Navy man, had disappeared for good a few months ago. The meté was that Rebekah had disappeared him.

  Owen had been with Rebekah at times when her husband shipped out. He remembered how being with Rebekah had been like walking on the land after a month at sea. He’d even bought her the piano. It was made in Florida, and he’d picked it up on a haul to San Juan. But now, watching his daughter and wife, Owen felt somewhat calmed. He’d been with Rebekah recently. That time he’d tried to claim her. “Mine,” he’d said to her open legs, “Mine” to the smooth of her shoulder. He could do that. Own a woman. Look how easily he’d tugged Antoinette from that lobsterman on Anegada. Now he would own a woman who might bear a son for him, damn the American law and its rule of legitimacy.

  He looked down at the little boat one last time. He could see the bodies of his wife and daughter against each other’s like courtesans, then a glint of silver.

  Down below, in the small boat that did little to separate her from the ocean, Eeona had stopped crying. Now she looked hard at her mother and spoke harder. “Stop, Mama.” Antoinette finally ceased but her alarm solidified. Now the women faced each other, hard as mountains.

  5.

  EEONA

  My mother was jealous of me. Mama would often take me to her rooms where there was a mirror. She would bid me sit up straight beside her before the looking glass. She peered from my face to her own as if searching my face for a history of herself. She was very pretty, but I was the more lovely. I say that only because it was a fact.

  My mother also feared for me. She feared that I would become a woman who depended on her beauty and so did not develop her skills and talents. It was not enough to be beautiful, she said. A woman must be able to create beauty. Mama made sure I learned to weave straw, sew clothes, and crochet bags. These were all skills that might come in handy when beauty would not.

  I do believe, however, that Mama’s stories also had their power. Their telling was also a skill, albeit one only displayed for me. The story of the Duene was used to warn me. If a woman was not self-possessed, she was in danger of the wildness. I knew my mother suffered from thi
s. Episodes, we called them. Papa described the episodes as a bit of rebellion and impetuousness. My mother, as everyone knew, had run away from her island of Anegada to marry my father. She had barely known Papa. Mama had wild and wandering tendencies. I always knew I had the same.

  In order to tell her story, Mama would sit in her rocking chair. It was a fine rocker, made by hand from a strong stick of mahogany. It was one of the things I was most sorry to see go when the drowned lands took my father. In the big drawing room, lamps would flicker about us. Our shadows would reach long behind our backs. Often, Miss Lady stood over me braiding my hair for bed. My father would sip a short glass of rum and watch my hair being tamed. I have always known that my real skill is my own beauty, despite what Mama said.

  When Mama began to tell a story, Papa would rise and take a turn around the room. This would be terribly distracting to me. The sound of his sipping his drink made me want to place my own finger in his mouth. Now that I understand envy, I understand that perhaps he was jealous of this time that Mama had with me. With his free hand Papa would stroke his earlobe. When on his stroll, he would arrive at the door and lean against the chest where Mama displayed her treasured porcelain figurines. Then he would slip out of the room.

  Mama never asked if I wanted to hear a story. She would be unassumingly sewing an accent onto a dress and then she would look up at me. She began with the female Duene who live in the sea of the Anegada Passage. They sink ships with their singing. They are tall with thin angular legs that push like fish through the water. On parts of their bodies they have scales the colours of precious metal. This hides a bit of their bursting beauty when they come to land.

  The men live only on the land of our sister island, St. Croix. The males are as chiseled as stones and as brown as bark. They wait on the land for the mating season when the women come to them. The Duene men live mostly in Frederiksted, where the inkberry trees grow wild and hide them. They do not swim. Sometimes Mama would say that the men hide extra legs in their breasts. That they are arachnids, like Anancy. Sometimes she would say that they hide wings in their shoulders, and that they fly.

  There is only one thing the men and the women have in common. Their feet face backwards. This is so it is difficult for humans to track them. The Duene do not want us to follow them because they protect the wild things from our destruction. The women protect the sea. The men protect the land.

  Mama said that even when you see the Duene you cannot tell which way they are going. They will seem to be running away from you just as they are rushing forwards to chop you down. Though the Duene will not harm humans who do not harm the land or the sea, it is best to avoid them because one does not always know when one is doing harm. The Duene have no mercy. They will drag you by your hair into the sea. They will pluck your extremities from your body as we pluck petals from a flower for love-me, love-me-not. The Duene do not love us. They love only themselves and the wildness, Mama said.

  Here, she would pause in her sewing to look directly at me. “The wildness is many things besides a gathering of trees or a pooling of water.”

  I came to understand that the wildness could be inside of me.

  6.

  Madame Antoinette Bradshaw, wife of Owen Arthur, mother of Eeona, was at the Lovernkrandt house for a ladies’ tea party. Mrs. Liva Lovernkrandt, the wife of the former rum maker, had just returned from a month in America. At the tea she wore a large floppy hat made of what Mrs. Lovernkrandt called felt. Everyone had to lean forward to get a better view of her. She was also wearing a dress without a girdle, which caused her to resemble a sack of yams. Later the women would giggle at her behind her back. But not Antoinette.

  “New York,” Mrs. Lovernkrandt began, pausing to sip her tea, “is the classy capital of this new world.” She rested her teacup into its saucer. “Look, ladies. Look at these classy fashions.” She retrieved an armful of magazines and spread them out on her new coffee table. The other women hurriedly picked up their teacups to make room. The magazines were glossy, with bright colors. The women on the covers wore lipstick that was red, and smiled with big straight teeth all showing. Their skin looked all one pale color, like a skinless Irish potato. They wore high heels. They exposed not just their ankles, but their entire calves, their entire knees. On one cover the words “Snag Mr. Right!” were written along the bottom. The model on that cover was displaying a little box held with a garter against her thigh. She was retrieving an actual cigarette out of the box. It looked like she might set the words on fire.

  The women at tea leaned over the magazines but didn’t touch them or open them. Mrs. Lovernkrandt leaned back and gave her guests her floppy gaze. She smiled, but with her mouth closed, more demure than the American women. Then she called for her own maid to bring out the “animal.” It took two people. The maid carried it by one arm and the Lovernkrandt’s man-about-the-house led it by the other. The ladies around the table gasped: “Oh my. Is it alive? Keep it away from me!” But Mrs. Lovernkrandt stood and walked up to the furry specimen. She slipped her arms into its body.

  “Imagine!” she exclaimed. “A coat made from little soft animals. You feel like a Viking lady gliding across the Arctic. And you need one of these with how cold it is in New York City. Colder than Denmark, I’m sure.”

  The other women looked skeptical but Antoinette leaned forward. “What kind of animal is it?”

  “Fur,” said Mrs. Lovernkrandt, and she ran her hand down the front of the coat.

  “What does a fur look like?”

  Liva Lovernkrandt was ready for Antoinette. She knew it was Madame Bradshaw who would be the most curious, the most envious. “A mongoose, Antoinette. Just like a mongoose.” But, oh dear, she was beginning to sweat underneath the coat. Liva slipped out of it and gestured for it to be taken away. “And they have shoes made of snake’s skin and eyeglasses rimmed with the backs of turtles,” she continued, now dabbing her perspiring brow with a handkerchief. “Antoinette, you can only dream. Perhaps next time I depart, I should take the gloves you embroidered for me.”

  The other women turned to nibble the imported digestive crackers and sip the tea, for they were all aware that Antoinette Bradshaw had never been to America, and wouldn’t it be something if her gloves got there and she never did? But Antoinette’s mind was already dreaming. Oh, it was unfair that women could dream at all. There she was, the very Madame Antoinette Bradshaw, wondering what it would take to create coats of mongoose hair. Would American women wear that? Might she convince Liva Lovernkrandt to take more than one pair of gloves, perhaps a chest of gloves, to give as gifts to stylish New York ladies? The gloves might serve as a kind of announcement. Or perhaps Antoinette and Owen would, after all, send Eeona to the States for a fancy finishing school. Antoinette would insist, absolutely insist, on accompanying her daughter. Then Nettie would invent a reason to stay for a while. First, she must master mongoose coats. Then the women who wore her gloves would commission her. Later she would make garters rimmed with the backs of sea turtles. Ones that every woman of class would want to wrap around her thigh. Now Antoinette looked down at the woman on the magazine, the one ready to blaze. Mr. Right was not the only thing worth snagging. When Nettie left the Lovernkrandt house, she went to take the hot-pepper tea so this damn hardheaded baby would finally burn out of her.

  7.

  ANETTE

  Let me tell you something I know about Anegada. Because I learn plenty somethings with this hard head of mine. I don’t remember nothing of my life before I turn four years old. But I don’t need memory. A historian, that’s me after all. I ain never been Anegada, but I know enough.

  In all my years I have never want to chase a child. I had want every child I ever conceive. But not every woman have that in she. I can’t speak for those women. But I know that Anegada wasn’t no place to do nothing except make love. I mean, you know the place? You seen even a postcard of Anegada? It too pretty. Like heaven and hell marry up and birth all the beauty goodness and badness
could possibly make. You hearing me? When you raise up in that place, like how Mama had raise up in that place, you only know about beauty and how to make it. And lovemaking is a beauty making.

  So it ain nothing to imagine that Antoinette Stemme had come pregnant when she young. Probably for a nice boy, a lobster fisherman, who have legs like bronze. And if this is so, you can’t blame she. Everybody loving and beautifying and the man sweet and tender. Besides they have maybe fifteen girls and fifteen boys on the whole island. Of course, they going to meet up and mix up and mate up. And all of them is the most beautiful people you ever dream.

  And we could just imagine what is they life back then. Fishing is life. Eating lobster twice a day is life. Swimming is life. That sound like leisure for any of we in the big city of Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas. But for them then? No. Because there ain no hospital in Anegada. No doctors. If you deading, you going to dead. Can’t blame nobody. No police, no lawyers, no court. Because that’s the place. Perfection but with a hole in the middle. Is not a island really. Is a atoll. You listening?

  So when a young captain get he young ship catch on the coral . . . what? Even if we just making this story up, we could easy say that is like the Anegada girl named Antoinette is a siren. And her mother and father love she like the land and they want the best for she. They done realize the girl have vision for she self beyond what the atoll know how to manage. So they convince the captain, and it don’t take much for the young captain Bradshaw. Sure, he know that she have the other boy baby in she body. But the girl sweeter than lobster. The captain, he know ’bout bush. He the kind of man know all about woman things. Swift as anything captain and girl wash that other man baby away. The captain ain know that he teach his wife the very thing she going use against him for the entirety of they marriage.