Land of Love and Drowning: A Novel Read online

  “I’m not mistaken,” the woman went on. Her eyes pooled in her face. “I know a Stemme when I see one.”

  I wanted to correct her; I was a Bradshaw. I was my father’s child. My mother had been the Stemme.

  “You just like those Duene stories they tell the children,” the woman said. “Take this here,” and she passed me something the size of a baby wrapped in a clean rag. “Is like you arrive for mating season. Some Stemmes does leave for love, others does come.” I could not respond to such audacity, but this grown woman just patted the bundle she’d given me. “Don’t wait,” she said, before walking on.

  Moreau guided me towards the beach without making comment, though from his face I could see his bemusement. I opened the woman’s offering after a respectable distance. It was red and clawed, though its belly was bursting with meat. I came close to dropping it on the ground out of fright. “Lobster!” I exclaimed. I had not before had the opportunity to eat or touch one.

  “The people here are so pleasant,” Moreau said. “This was probably that poor woman’s lunch.”

  I nodded, not wanting to add anything more to that conversation in the event he began to envision me in men’s pants, leading a burro.

  We continued walking over ground that was not ground at all, but coral. It was as if we were walking on the bottom of the ocean. Mama had never spoken much about Anegada. “I cleaved to my spouse,” she had said, as though Papa were her new fatherland. If Papa had not whisked her away, perhaps I would have been like a Duene daughter, as it went in my mother’s stories. I would walk right into the ocean. I would walk on the coral bottom as if walking on land.

  Now Louis stretched out his long arm and gesticulated across the beach that was named Flash of Beauty. “Like you,” he said.

  The waves on the beach seemed thick, as though we were in the middle of the ocean, not simply sitting on the sand. I would not have been entirely surprised to see a lovely woman raise her head from those waves and come towards us with mangrove legs and backwards feet. I could not dream why my mother had left this place. Though even as I began to dream, I knew the reason. She left for Papa.

  The sea fans were bright purple. I stooped for one, and shaking it of its sand, I held it by its bulbous root and fanned myself. Far off into the water the waves stood tall and frothed white before crashing and then subduing. “The reef,” Louis said, pointing. “The Spanish named this island Anegada, the drowned land, because it has a history of drowning ships. Thousands of ships, and they remain here, under the ocean.” He pointed out to where the waves crashed far beyond the shore. “Unless you know where the reef begins, you will crash into it and sink your ship. When we own the land, people will only come if we show them how.”

  As we set our blanket down for the picnic, Moreau told me of his plans to build a golf course and resort on Anegada. He spoke of the entire land as if it were his already. I could not help but wonder what would become of the woman who had gifted me the lobster. “But Flash of Beauty,” he said, as if in conciliation, “we shall keep it as a refuge for women and fish.”

  I looked at him then. His hair was straight and his legs were long. His mustache curled towards his ears. His nose arched towards his mouth. I decided that I was going to marry him. He would be interesting to look at for a long time. With him I would have Villa by the Sea and perhaps have all of Anegada. I would be a generous madame and convince my husband to release another beach for men and arachnids. We would allow native people to trespass without permission. Yes, Moreau would do. Then I would do as I pleased.

  I did not see the point in waiting.

  With both my hands, I loosened my hair out of the bun that held it. My hair waved out around my face and crashed down over my shoulders. I drew close to Moreau until our faces were close and my hair touched his face.

  Perhaps he now leaned over me. Perhaps I leaned over him. It does not matter. Our mouths touched and his filled with the ends of my hair. My hair hid us like a wave. He reached into his damp breast pocket and pulled out a silk kerchief. Inside was my diamond-and-pearl engagement ring. “There has not been a marriage on Anegada for ten years,” he whispered.

  15.

  Jacob Esau McKenzie had been so young, not much more than three, that for his whole life he was convinced that the visit from the ship captain had not been for real. The memory came to him at odd times. When someone told him he was handsome, when dancing, when gazing on a picture of Anette Bradshaw.

  That night his mother was fixing up the house nice. Lemongrass bush arranged in vases as if it were flowers—the place smelling minty. She bathed Jacob special, soaked him like she was thawing him out. Dunking his head under again and again; singing what she did. A melody for the dipping. A hum for the scrubbing. His other brothers had been sent off on long errands with too much money so they would waste more time.

  “Jacob, the most loved,” Rebekah said, and finished drying the little boy down with a rough towel, clumps of vanilla bark in the cloth like burrs. “Your eldest sister studying in Tortola. The redhead sister stop suckling but still keeping she mother busy. So now your father coming back to we.” But Jacob didn’t have any sisters that he knew of, and so he didn’t pay his mother much mind. She was always whispering and humming things that had nothing at all to do with him.

  The father who came wasn’t the one from the Navy photo on the living room wall; “McKenzie” in black on a white rectangle over his chest. The father who came was tall with sea-gray eyes. He smelled of the ocean.

  This was Owen Arthur’s first time seeing the baby boy who was not a baby anymore but a boy.

  “Esau,” Rebekah said, as she presented him to Owen. “Because he is your beloved son.” His primary name was Jacob, but that was so he would be hers first.

  Owen had not been with Rebekah for all this time, but he had sent money for the son that was his. He had been distracted with his hurting business and the tightness of banks and with Eeona and with sending Eeona away. Now standing in front of him, his only son looked like a grain of sand. He’d so hoped Rebekah would give him a boy child, but now he wished it wasn’t a son after all. He needed another daughter. For already he knew that baby Anette, despite her pluck, was not diluting the ill love he had for Eeona. He noticed now that Esau and Anette looked alike. The same something in the mouth and around the eyes.

  Owen knew that this son could never openly inherit anything from him, that he could not carry on the Bradshaw name. But he would help Esau as the boy grew. He planned for the boy to come up knowing who his father really was; it would be one of the open secrets so easily kept on any island. When he died, he’d leave Esau all his experience and a third of his money. All this Owen would do once the shipping business became steady again. When Lovernkrandt or any someone put the proper faith in him and his ship. For now, he stared at Esau and then smiled at Rebekah. The faithful feeling of wanting Rebekah was coming over him and it was a relief. She was wearing her boots as always, though she would take them off to make love to him. She only took them off to do that magic.

  The two adults spent many minutes just looking at Jacob Esau and at each other. They sat in opposite chairs in the small sitting room. The shutters were closed so the red of the insides was given only to them; the muted white side exposed to those in the street. Rum was becoming near impossible to procure on island anymore, though Owen knew if anyone had a taste, it would be Rebekah. Still, he restrained himself and rubbed his earlobe instead. Rebekah sat erect, her long dress billowing out and covering the ground around her in all directions. The two adults had not made love with each other for three years.

  After tea was offered cautiously and rejected kindly, after his earlobes became raw, Owen finally reached out to touch Jacob Esau’s face. The man’s rough hands scuffed across Jacob’s nose and his eyelids. Cupped his jaw and traced his head.

  “You are very handsome, Esau,” the man said. “But of course, you would be.” And then the adults looked at each other. “Play for me,
Reba,” the man said.

  Jacob Esau’s mother went to the piano. She lifted its cover gently and sat on the bench. She let her fingers touch the keys first without sound. And then very quietly. Giving a sound almost like silence. Before the ears even knew the song was playing. Feeling it first just under the skin where the hair grows, Rebekah eased a pained song of sweetness into the room. She pressed the pedals only very lightly with the tip of her right foot in its black boot.

  Owen loved to hear her play. There wasn’t anyone on island who didn’t. He would never say it out loud, but Owen would have traded ten minutes of her piano playing for any one of the shirts Antoinette embroidered for him. Rebekah’s piano, which he’d had shipped from America for her, could sound like a drizzle, could sound like a storm. It was wet, her music. As a seaman, how could he want it any other way?

  Now Owen Arthur picked Jacob Esau up and began waltzing with him. Swinging him around until Jacob Esau laughed and laughed. He flashed this father all his teeth. The scene layered and lasted until Jacob Esau fell asleep in the arms of the ocean-dancing man. And when he woke, he was alone on the settee. He wandered around the small house quietly because there was only quiet in the house.

  In his mother’s room he saw this other father leaning over the high bed. His mother’s arms were meeting and crossing at the top of the man’s back. He knew her arms well. But there were her legs at the lower part of the man’s back. One perfect smooth brown foot. The toes pointing and flexing into the air silently. And the other foot was not a foot at all. But a hoof. A hoof all the way up to what should be his mother’s ankle. A bone-colored cleft in place of toes. Thick brown hair all the way up to the knee. And this foot did not touch the father’s skin or move at all, but remained stiff just over this father’s tight back.

  Jacob, who was never called Esau except today, eased out of the room. Chanting in his head, “You are not real. You are not real. You are not real.” And lay back down on the sofa in the sitting room. Waiting to fall back asleep and wake into his real life.

  Did his mother know that he saw? Did her instructions as he grew up to keep his head high and his eyes to the ceiling show that she knew? But in time, Jacob forgot that he really knew. Forgot that it wasn’t a bad dream. Forgot that his real-real father was not Benjamin McKenzie. Forgot his mother’s hoof foot. Forgot that he had any sisters at all.

  16.

  Eeona had been only seventeen when she became engaged to Louis Moreau III, the son of a landowner from the countryside of Guadeloupe and a woman from the seaside of Nice. He would take Eeona back to his Guadeloupe and let her finish her studies before babies came. It would be important that his wife speak both French and English comfortably—especially if she was to be an asset with the wives of the men patronizing the golf course he would build on Anegada.

  A month after the furtive proposal, Eeona was still seventeen when her parents finally paid her a visit on Tortola. Mama brought lace doilies for her cousin as a gift. Little Anette hid behind Mama’s dress, shy of this lovely older sister she barely remembered. The cousin coaxed Anette into the kitchen with sweets. Then the parents shut themselves up with Eeona in the sitting room and asked if she was still a virgin. They had heard about the clandestine visit to Anegada and the beach called Flash of Beauty. We all had. Eeona had looked at her father sitting with both his hands tugging on his earlobes. She had sobbed then, forced tears about being deflowered by Louis Moreau on the small Anegada. It was a lie, but during Eeona’s entire performance, she kept her teary eyes on her father. Did he see that she was a woman now? Fit to be a madame? Was he jealous?

  As far as the Moreau boy was concerned, Antoinette wasn’t concerned at all. The mother wanted the daughter married off. Period. Perhaps young Moreau would even love Eeona. Then Eeona would be saved from her irascible beauty. And Antoinette would only have little Anette left between her and her real life. The recent one in her womb was already washed away. Easy this time.

  What Antoinette worried about was her daughter’s silver secret and how a premarital lover might respond. Eeona was secretive but her mother knew she also tended to the silver with a soft baby brush—she might be silly enough to flaunt it. Perhaps the Frenchman had kept his eyes closed out of fear or modesty during their first knowing? Oh, but he would soon become bold and wide-eyed and he would see. He might assume the silver hair suggested infertility. Or an overly mature nature. Either way, it was a risk to marriage and the mother knew she must keep her daughter away from the lusty fiancé until they were sanctified.

  When the parents finally opened the parlor door, little Anette walked cautiously to her sister and began babbling incoherently.

  “I’ve taught her a few Latin phrases,” said the cousin proudly. “She’s a natural with language.”

  Eeona pursed her lips, for her own French progressed slowly. She didn’t bother to embrace her baby sister, but instead stood and went to her room. Anette could be heard crying, then Mama was comforting. The parents took both their daughters back to St. Thomas the next morning.

  The evening they returned to Frenchtown, Owen Arthur came to Eeona’s room. This was something he had not done since she had left the nursery. This was not a thing that fathers did. He didn’t knock. He simply opened the door and there was Eeona sitting at the edge of the bed in her flowing nightgown. The hair on her head bursting around her like a halo. Owen would have stopped and run. Stopped and kneeled. Either one, if he were a lesser man or a better man. Instead: “I’ve tried other waters,” and he was walking toward her. “But I need,” and he was close to her now.

  Eeona stared at her father and did not move. What she missed those months in Tortola was here, but now she was afraid. “Papa,” she said, keeping her voice steady. Would he really own her now? With Mama just on the other side of the house? Would he not wait until they could sail away together? Leave Moreau and Antoinette the house and the Anegada golf course. Owen held his hand up flat, as if to say “Stop,” or as if to say “I praise you.” Instead: “I need you to marry this man and go away with him,” and then he shook his head as though he did not believe himself. “I always wanted Europe for you. They say there are others like you in Paris. Women of splendor. Your own beauty will not be such a burden.”

  “But Papa, there are no others like me.” She controlled her voice, for that, too, was part of her beauty. “Do not send me away, Papa.”

  “My own, I already have.” He turned to the door.

  The things in her that Eeona understood receded, the things in her that she did not understand seeped in—her episodes, they would be called later. “But Owen,” she said like a woman, “what about the silver? You always said it was yours.”

  Owen did not turn back to face her. Instead: “Your mother has almost finished your wedding dress.”

  Eeona stood up and embraced his back. He turned to her. Their faces too near. In this way he could not remain composed. In this way the woman whose lips were close could not have been his child. How could he send her away? The skin on his cheeks was tingling. He took her waist in his hands. “We have always known that this is not the way of a good father or of a good daughter,” he said.

  Eeona was barely a woman, really. She was a child. Her mind was storming. Would Papa kiss the silver? Right here in her mother’s own house? Eeona took his face in her palms, feeling her strangeness rising like a tide.

  Owen Arthur’s heart beat so slowly he thought he might die right there. “There is nothing good I can give you,” he said. “For your own sake. There can be no more of this.”

  Eeona’s heart beat so hard she could feel the pulse between her legs. “Then I wish you would die, Papa. I wish you would just die.”

  And then Owen, released as though from a shackle, streamed from the room.

  The telegram came the following evening: “Homecoming wrecked on Anegada reef. Two survivors. Captain not among them.”

  As simple as that.

  17.

  The Homecoming went down
on a day that had been bright and young. What they said happened to the ship was something that could happen to any ship ringing the coral atoll of Anegada. Except that this captain knew Anegada well; after all, it was where he had found his wife.

  Every family of note from the U.S. Virgin Islands and the British Virgin Islands had a relation who went down with the ship. More than one family lost their breadwinner. More than one woman lost a lover. Eeona, still seventeen, lost both. Instead of planning a wedding, she helped her mother plan Papa’s funeral. Anette could not have understood, but still she played quietly, tending the doll her mother had made her. Feeding it, dressing it, holding it to her chest, putting it gently to bed. In general, giving it the love no one had time to give her those days.

  —

  The two deckhands who survived the wreck were pulled ashore by the lobstermen of Anegada. The deckhands told the stories of how in the past the captain had always sighted Anegada in the distance because he said it looked like the flat chest of a child floating in the water. But this time the captain must have been called to the island, as though by a siren. “That does happen,” so the living men said. The Homecoming, which had shipped rum, which had shipped the food that fed St. Thomas, shipped the money that floated Tortola, had been shipping nothing more than a cargo of bones. A ship full of bones and all of it sunk to the shallow sea bottom.

  We can imagine what will happen to the cargo on The Homecoming. How the bones will be released from their sacks by nibbling fish. How for years fishermen will pull up mandibles with their lobster catch. How for generations children will find femurs in the sand.

  Eeona’s pearl-and-diamond engagement ring was returned to Moreau—whose father now forbade him to marry Eeona as it was clearly a burdensome financial venture. Moreau saved the ring and put it on the finger of a full-bred French woman whom he followed back to Nice—abandoning his Anegada dreams. Whenever Louis Moreau sat alone in a quiet place to drink a bottle of wine, he tasted Eeona in it. In company, he would whisper her name into champagne flutes, for she was that color—champagne. A muted color and mysterious for that. Even his pretty French wife thought he was mad. She never knew who Eeona was, though she heard the name often.