Eden Burning (20 page)

“You’re not going to sell beauty,” Marjorie said. “Here, I’ve got pencil and paper in my bag, let’s make notes. Now,” she told Kate, “it’s obvious you know how to run an estate. What would you do with this if it belonged to you?”

Kate spoke promptly. “I’d begin by planting trees. On the higher slopes you have deforestation. That’s pretty true all over the island, the result of improvident usage. From it you get soil erosion, droughts, and floods. As a matter of fact, we have been trying to educate the small farmer along those lines.”

“Without much success, I’ll bet,” Marjorie said.

“Education takes time,” Kate replied.

Francis was uncomfortable. Plainly, the two women disliked each other. He had no idea why or what to do about it.

And Kate continued, “After that, I’d plant bananas. Very little sugar, since you’d need too much new machinery for it. I would diversify with cattle, sheep, and fruit. And not just for export. There’s tremendous need right here. Do you know that this fertile island doesn’t even feed itself? It’s a disgrace! Children, when they drink it at all, drink canned, imported milk. The people are terribly undernourished. A disgrace!” Kate struck her fist into her palm.

Marjorie regarded her coolly. “Go on, please. I’m making notes.”

“I’d plant cocoa. This is the rainy side of the island, and it will do well here. Use the bananas as temporary shade when you set out new cocoa plants. And coconuts. We’ve a copra mill in town. The women here make cooking oil out of the
milk and the dried remains you keep for cattle fodder. Then there’s mace, which is the cloak on the nutmeg. You can raise that for export. See, there’s some over there by the bamboo fence. Have I given you a few ideas?”

Marjorie had been writing rapidly. “Yes, thanks. Although it occurs to me, anybody who’d even consider a place like this would know something about how to run it, wouldn’t he? These notes are probably unnecessary.”

“You can’t tell.”

Francis stood up. “You’re convincing, Kate. I should let you convince a buyer for me. By the way, have you any idea how I might go about finding one?”

“It won’t be easy. But you could try Atterbury and Shaw in Covetown. They deal in properties. Shall we go?”

He stood for a moment with his hand on the door of the car. Great cumulus clouds had wrapped the peak of Morne Bleue in cotton and washed the house in pearl-gray shadow.

Kate looked at him curiously. “It’s got to you, hasn’t it?”

“It’s a poem, as you said.”

She smiled without answering, showing the gap between her two front teeth. He thought irrelevantly, I don’t know why a gap between two teeth should be so charming.

   Upstairs in their room at Drummond Hall, Marjorie said, “You liked her.”

“Liked who?”

“Don’t play dumb,” she said pleasantly. “Kate, of course. Who else?”

“Well, she’s a very nice person. She went out of her way to be helpful.”

“I don’t mean that. You really liked her. You were attracted to her. You desire her.”

“You’re out of your head,” he said fondly.

“She’s your sort. Lusty and sexy,” Marjorie said, undoing her bra. Above her white breasts the tan made a heart-shaped curve.

“Sexy? She’s not even pretty. Well, not very.”

“She’s older than you are.”

“Half a year!”

“They’re not happy, couldn’t you see that?”

“I know. I’m sorry for them.”

“Yes, she’s your sort. Outdoors. Animals. Spiritual, too. And she undressed you with her eyes.”

“What!” he shouted.

“Yes, when she said that about how you look like your grandfather.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Yes, you do! She said you had your grandfather’s beaky nose.”

“Great-grandfather.”

“You see, you do remember!”

“Quit it, Marjorie.”

“It’s true, you desire her.”

She was settling her breasts into a fresh brassiere, two lace cups on black ribbons.

“Listen,” he said, “just wait till we get this damn dinner over and get back up here, I’ll show you something about desire.”

The pier glass reflected a supple girl with a quick, mobile mouth and clever eyes; the man beside her, although exactly her age, wore the soft look of a boy who is eager to please.

   “Well, now that you’ve seen decay at Eleuthera, let me show you a thriving enterprise,” Lionel offered one morning a week later. “Georgina’s Fancy is half again as large as when I took it over, I want you to know. I’ve added a lot of acreage.”

A tractor was loading cane stalks into carts, and some dark little boys, no older than eight or nine, were sweeping up the droppings.

“Shouldn’t they be in school?” Francis asked.

“They leave in crop time to help out. They need the
money.” And as Francis made no comment, Lionel added, “Trouble is, these people have too many kids; they can’t possibly support them all.

“We’ve got a central mill in town now, a big change from the days when each estate had its own mill. If the island were large enough, we could have a railway to get the stuff there faster. You can’t let the stalks lie in the sun a minute too long or the juice will ferment, and then it’s no good.”

At the farthest boundary of the property lay the village, like all of them that Francis had seen. He had a quick impression of rotting wood, bare dirt, chickens and goats, before they moved on.

“I’ve got a tip-top manager, but even so, it’s not the same as when you’re on the job. Oh, I could get myself a house in town or on the beach and drive out here every couple of days, but I like to keep an eye on the ball myself. And my dad does the same. That’s why he survived when so many others went under. You’ve got to know business, too, dealing with commission merchants; they take options on your crop and then at the last minute decide they’ve overbought and turn you down. It’s tough.” Lionel sighed.

I don’t see him married to Kate, Francis thought, surprised that this intrusive thought should have come into his head, when actually he had been listening with real interest to all this information, so new and different from anything he had ever known.

They trudged on. “Yes, that’s why you have to have at least two export crops to make it pay. Bananas are the best. They require very little care except pruning. Of course, nothing’s perfect! There’s a pesky little animal, the taltuza, something like a rat, that eats the roots. And we’ve had Panama disease—that’s a fungus—but for once the government acted promptly and we wiped it out with lime.”

They had walked uphill away from the cane toward the Great House. Two fawn-colored horses whinnied delicately behind a fence.

“Kate’s pets. She’s an expert horsewoman, but she treats those two like lap dogs. Comes of having no children, I suppose.”

Francis was silent.

“The doctor says she can’t have any. Took her ovaries out after the last miscarriage.”

“I’m sorry,” Francis said.

“Yes. Well. So, we were talking about bananas. It looks easier than it is, let me tell you. You’re at the mercy of world markets, depressions, and wars. During the war you couldn’t ship, at all, naturally. Now sometimes the ship is overloaded; you’ve got your load on the dock and they won’t take it on. So you leave it there for the goats. And sometimes the inspectors reject your stuff—when there’s nothing wrong with it, mind you; it’s just that they’ve got too much and they want to keep the price up on the other side. Tough. Yes, we’ve had some hard times here. And now there’s all this talk of independence. I tell you, your head can swim. Still, it’s home, it gets under your skin. I wouldn’t leave. At least, I don’t think I ever would.”

“You’ll be managing Drummond Hall for your father when he goes?”

“Yes, Kate will help me. She’ll keep the books, ride over and look around. Another pair of eyes.” They reached the steps. “I’ll drive you back to Father’s. I’d ask you to stay to lunch but Kate’s in town. I’m to meet her at half past twelve.”

Francis felt the sinking of slight disappointment. Ridiculous! “That’s all right. You’ve given us a lot of your busy time. It was especially nice of Kate to take us to Eleuthera that day.”

“Oh, she loved it! She loves traveling around, showing things to visitors. She’s a good girl, Kate is. You know,” Lionel said, with embarrassment sitting oddly on his bulk, “the other night at the wedding, maybe you thought I was a little hard on her…. You don’t have to say whether you
did or not. We get along fairly well, she and I, only her problem is she’s a bleeding heart and it’s going to get her into trouble some day. That’s the fact of it, and it makes me sore as hell.”

He did not want to see Kate exposed. And he repeated, awkwardly, “Well, you’ve all been very good to us.”

“Anything we can do, just ask. Anything worrying you, just speak up.”

“Nothing worrying us, except Marjorie’s being afraid she hasn’t brought enough clothes for all the hospitality!”

“That’s no problem. Try Da Cunha’s. They’ve got French dresses and what-all stuck away in the back. Marjorie could outfit herself for two years to come.”

“We shan’t be here that long, I’m afraid.”

“You’ll be here longer than you think. Unless you just want to go and leave things in the hands of Atterbury and Shaw.”

“I may have to do that. But what I’d really like is to have a nibble before I leave. And I think—it’s nothing short of miraculous—but I think we may possibly have one. I don’t know whether he’s a land speculator or what. Fellow from Puerto Rico. Well, we’ve cut the price to the bone, that’s probably the reason.”

Lionel nodded. “It’s the only way.”

And they drove back to Drummond Hall.

   Mr. Atterbury saw Francis to the door. “My man expects to hear pretty quickly from his lawyers in Puerto Rico. I think it’s fairly safe to say we’ve got a sale, Mr. Luther.”

Francis, thanking him, held up two crossed fingers. He had left the borrowed car parked in the back of the building, but for some reason he did not feel like returning yet to the tennis-and-lunch regime at Drummond Hall, and he went on down Wharf Street, past the classic Georgian facade of Barclay’s Bank to the square.

It was market day, and the town bustled with real life: he
had already drawn a distinction between the “real” life of the island and the suave amenities of his relatives’ homes. Busses from the country were still bringing people in, barefoot women wearing home-woven straw hats and cotton dresses in every imaginable electric color. Children of every age darted among mounds of bananas, breadfruit, fish, and coconuts. Yellow dogs—all the dogs here seemed to be of one variety so that, although they were mongrels, they had almost evolved into a breed—prowled in the shade and scratched at their mange.

Francis stood for a while observing this animation, then walked around the corner. At the orphanage he stopped to listen to a rehearsal of the children’s choir; he had heard them sing on the previous Sunday at the cathedral service. The orphanage was opposite a cemetery. He walked across the street and leaned over the railing, thinking that this would be, after all, an agreeable place in which to spend eternity! Date palms and palmettos framed the space; the graves were elaborately trimmed with conch shells. In the cool, fragrant morning air, the pure child voices sang “Now Thank We All Our God.” And feeling a pleasure serene as a beatitude, he waited until the hymn had ended.

Now quite familiar with the map of the little town, he turned into the arcades. The leaning houses with their narrow windows and crumbling iron lace balustrades might, were it not for the deep black shade of the fig trees in the yards, have been standing on the Place des Vosges in Paris. At the next small square he paused before a round bronze plaque set in the middle of the pavement. It was still legible: “In this place on the eleventh of July in the year 1802 Samuel Vernon, late a member of His Majesty’s Council, died by hanging for the murder of his Negro slave Plato.”

“Gruesome, isn’t it?”

Kate Tarbox smiled from under a large native straw hat. “This one went a little too far. It amused him to watch men being beaten to death. Even his peers got disgusted with him, finally. So they tried him and hanged him.”

Francis shook his head. “A very complex society!”

“Oh, yes! And it still is. What are you doing in town?”

“Just ambling about. And you?”

“I have a little office over there. The Family Counseling Service. Yes, I know it’s like trying to empty the ocean with a soup spoon. I saw your raised eyebrow.”

“Did I raise it? I didn’t mean to.”

There followed then that moment of indecision during which one can either speak the few graceful words necessary to terminate the meeting or else take up another subject which will prolong it.

Francis said, “I was thinking, as long as I’m here, I might pick up a few presents to bring home. I thought maybe, do you—would you make a suggestion?”

“There’s always Da Cunha’s. I don’t know what you want to spend.”

“Something middling, let’s say. A pin or some beads, maybe.”

“Da Cunha’s, then.”

They walked back through the market square. Francis felt conspicuous; he was so tall beside her, and he was used to walking next to Marjorie, who was almost his height. In high heels she was even with him; they were known as a handsome couple.

He needed to say something. “I don’t recognize half these vegetables. Those are beets and cabbage, of course, but what’s that stuff?”

“Akee. That’s cassava. Those are pomegranates next to the melons.”

“Pomegranates? Like the Bible?”

“Like the Bible. Those are tamarinds, that’s sour sop. And plantains, they taste like bananas, but we serve them hot. And there’s breadfruit.”

“As in
Mutiny on the Bounty.”

“Right! Captain Bligh brought it from Tahiti. Easy feeding for the slaves. You can practically live on it. Here’s Da Cunha’s.”

An exotic black girl with waist-length hair came forward.

“Désirée,” Kate said, “this is my friend—no, my nephew. I’m his aunt by marriage, isn’t that ridiculous? Anyway, this is Mr. Luther. He needs to buy some presents.”

The thick, arched walls were of the eighteenth century. The ceiling fans, placidly whirring, were of the nineteenth. Singapore and Somerset Maugham, Francis thought. Liquor and crystal, porcelain and silver, made a lavish sparkle. In a glass-covered case lay a discreet selection of diamond watches.