Eden Burning (26 page)

As if she knew there was nothing more to be said on the subject, she sighed again. “I’m going in. Are you coming?”

“In a minute,” he answered.

She wanted sex tonight, he understood. It was not only because of her now-frantic need to become pregnant. It was her need to receive her due, proof that she was desirable and that their marriage was successful, according to the books. He couldn’t prove that this was so, but when he lay with her, his body knew it.

Something had happened, something had changed. And it was not just because they were living here; for here, as there or anywhere, one throve if all else were right. Neither was it her twinge of jealousy; he would give her, he vowed, no cause. He’d seen enough of that sort of thing with his father. Was it, then, simply because they had no children?

He became aware of an agitation in his chest, an altered heartbeat.

Far below, a sliver of sea gleam shone through the wilderness of leaves. A wind rose, moving through the high acomas. And Francis’ memory, drifting without direction, plucked through some association with this sound of wind, a picture of Marjorie, standing with her arm in his, laughing, struggling as a gust blew the wedding veil across her mouth.

When had it changed, and why? He didn’t know, he couldn’t say, only that it had. It occurred to him that such must be the regret you know when you are old. He felt a lonely, chilling sadness. And he stood quite still, waiting, willing it to pass.

Ah, well, only a fool expects to keep forever all those first, mysterious raptures!

Then, then, there was always this, which alone would never change: he flung his arms out to the breathing night.
All blue it was: the far pale stars were blue and the trees threw blue-black shadows on the grass. A bird, not yet sunk into sleep, called one clear, genial note and, falling still, stilled also some portion of the agitation in the young man’s heart.

And he, too, sighed as Marjorie had done and went in and closed the door.

“There’s so much to be done,” Nicholas urged, tipping back from a spacious desk on which papers were ordered with soldierly precision, “while you’re holed up in a village school, wasting yourself.”

Around him the office walls held shelves of law books and well-framed diplomas. Above the windows hung a long green-and-yellow banner which proclaimed with spirit, NEW DAY PROGRESSIVES FOR A BRIGHT TOMORROW.

Nicholas followed Patrick’s glance. “Like it?”

“It certainly catches the eye.”

“Well, have you thought any more about our last talk?”

Now Patrick had to play devil’s advocate. “No honest work is ever wasted. And I’ve always wanted to teach, you know that.”

“You also understand what I mean. We’ve discussed more than once your sense of futility at teaching children what they’ll never use.”

“Still, if you can reach just one, light a fire in just one—”

“I know, I know. Pious hopes, but someone else could do what you’re doing now. What I’m asking of you is far more demanding. You want to improve conditions? Then consider the power of the press! You write well, and our party needs a
paper that will express its point of view. The island needs a paper, as a matter of fact. Here, listen to this.” Nicholas picked up a copy of the
Clarion.
“Here’s the front page: ‘Miss Emmy Lou Grace was guest of honor at a party in celebration of her eighty-fifth birthday last Wednesday at the home of Mrs. Clara Pitt.’ And here’s what passes for an editorial: ‘We must deplore the condition of the square on market day … fish heads attracting stray cats!’” Laughing, he flung the paper down. “Pap like this! And nothing about schooling, nothing about housing, nothing even about independence, which can’t be more than two years away! Pap! Patrick, I’ve got money enough to start a paper and keep it going until it can support itself. When my father died last year he left much more than I knew he had. Look, I’m supporting this whole office, all this extra space I’ve taken for the party! I want you to take charge of a paper for me. I want to build a constituency before any of the other parties get ahead of us.”

“They don’t amount to anything. They’ve no real leadership, no programs except muttering discontent.”

“Exactly. But you can’t count on that forever. When independence comes—before it comes—we want to be in first place. You’re an idealist, but what good are ideals if all you do is talk about them? Here’s your chance to bring some of them to life.”

Patrick looked out the window, away from that pair of searching, vivid eyes. Across the cove an outboard skimmed, its wake a triangle drawn upon a clean page. Cathedral bells made a brief alto clatter and ceased. Sunday calm lay over the town, touching his ears and eyes with its languor, beguiling him away from the coiled energy of Nicholas and the decisions he was urging.

I am not a man of action, he thought again.

“Have you talked about me to your father-in-law?”

“Oh, yes.” Patrick smiled mischievously. “He says to tell
you he doesn’t resent you because you wear fine suits and speak with an Englishman’s accent.”

Nicholas laughed. “So he approves?”

“Well, you know he wants a government that will represent labor. He says if you can do that he will certainly support you.”

“Good. And what about the paper?”

“Obviously, it’s important to have access to the press. The planters will no doubt fight all the way.”

“Except Francis Luther and maybe a couple of other mavericks.”

Patrick said slowly, “Clarence isn’t even sure he trusts Francis. Needless to say, I don’t agree!”

“Not trust him!” Nicholas exclaimed.

“Well, Clarence is getting older and has seen too much. He admits he’s probably too cynical.”

“He certainly is. Listen, it’s our job to point out conditions that are insupportable, that can’t go on. We need to persuade. It’s stupid to assume that because a man is a planter and has white skin he’s unteachable, or a natural enemy. And now there’s something I haven’t told you. I just found it out yesterday. Kate Tarbox wants to join you.”

“How so?”

“She’s left her husband. Finally. Should have done it long ago, or so the gossip goes.” Nicholas shrugged. “Anyway, she’s moved back into a house she had from her father. It’s an unpretentious place, down that alley at the foot of Library Hill. And she wants to earn some money. She’d like to work on the paper, maybe even write something, under a pseudonym, if necessary.”

Patrick whistled softly. Could this move of hers have anything to do with Francis? At once he decided not.

“Well, what do you think? It would be pleasant, I should imagine, to work with her.” Nicholas looked at his watch.

Patrick stood at once. “Let me mull it over some more.”

He went downstairs and got into his car, feeling the weight
of Nicholas’s pressure. The offer was complimentary, to be sure. Also, it had its temptations—chiefly, more money. Désirée would be pleased with that! A small knot gathered on his forehead. Deliberately, he smoothed it. No use fretting! She had a strong taste for luxury, and this taste had been encouraged since Doris had married Nicholas and come here to live. Doris, by Désirée’s standards, perhaps by anyone’s, was a sophisticate, a connoisseur of good things to wear and eat and be surrounded by. Doris and Nicholas were living in the house that had been his father’s, but there was talk now, so Désirée reported wistfully, of their building a waterfront house on a hill about two miles from town. Very modern, it was to be, with much glass and open space. In the style of Le Corbusier, she had explained. She had very likely never heard of Le Corbusier until now, but she was an apt student.

His mind slid back to the paper and Kate Tarbox, who had walked away from a splendor which would have dazzled Désirée…. And his mind slid back to Agnes. She had sold the store and was ready to leave. He’d worried: What sort of place was it where she was going? What sort of house?

“Wattle and daub,” she’d told him. “One of my cousins’ husbands built it.”

“But you’ve had running water here, you aren’t used to that,” he’d objected.

Her earrings had swung. “Why not? I was born under wattle and daub. I’m not too high and mighty to live under it again.”

Funny how some people wanted things and wanted so badly, while others didn’t care!

As for himself, he was comfortable, cleanly housed, and well fed. He was, for the most part, doing what he liked. And with a twinge he thought of “his” children, certain faces appearing to mind according to the bench they occupied. There was Rafael, restless and cunning as a monkey; just lately Patrick had begun to see some settling of his mood.
Then Tabitha, a stammerer who, he was certain, had been beaten since infancy. And Charlotte, with a head for numbers more competent than Patrick’s own by far. No, he was not about to abandon them! He could not! They challenged him and held his sympathies in their bare hands; they angered him, they tried his patience, and they loved him. Well, some of them did, anyway!

What Nicholas wanted was, moreover, a step into the dark. If it didn’t work out, he would have forfeited his place in the school system. And if it did work out, he had no illusions about what it would lead to. Involvement in a tough political struggle, that’s what. He had no taste for it, none at all.

And yet perhaps it was a grown man’s duty to involve himself?

He thought, I really need to talk to someone. Almost at once, his car turned off the shore road, back up through the foothills, curving leftward toward Eleuthera. He wouldn’t mind, Francis wouldn’t; he might even be pleased to know that someone felt the need of his counsel.

In a state of heightened emotion, he was so intent upon himself that, as he was later to remark, it was a miracle he had observed anything beyond that self and the few feet of road ahead of the car. Indeed, he had actually driven some way past what his eyes had seen before the sight registered in his brain, so that he was not really sure he had seen it; something caused him to stop the car, to back it up over the narrow, twisting road, to find out whether he had imagined what he had seen.

No. It was quite real. Some feet back from the road, a child, a boy of nine or ten years, was standing, slumped and standing, tied by wrists and ankles to a tree. Patrick rubbed his eyes and shook his head. He got out of the car.

“What is it? What happened?” he cried. The boy must long ago have stopped crying. His eyes were dry. His lips were bleeding; he had been trying to gnaw through the coarse, frayed ropes that bound him.

Patrick knelt and, with his pocketknife, cut the ropes. He took the child in his arms. The boy had wet his pants; his tight black curls were sweaty; Patrick held him close.

“Who are you? Where do you live? Who did this?”

The boy struggled, not wanting to be held, perhaps in terror of being held, and Patrick released him.

“Tell me, tell me,” he whispered. “What’s your name?”

“Will. And I’m thirsty. I’m hungry.” Still he did not cry.

“Get in the car there, Will. We’ll find a place down the road and get you something to eat right away.”

The boy climbed in beside Patrick. He sat quite erect and still, with two fists clenched on his knees. It would have seemed more natural if he had been hysterical, Patrick thought, but then, he was no psychologist.

“Who did this to you, Will?” he asked, very quietly.

“Bert did.”

“Who’s Bert?”

“Where I live. Bert.”

“With your mother and”—he hesitated—“father?”

“I got no mother and father.”

“Grandmother, then?” For that, of course, was a normal family pattern.

“No. She died.”

“Brothers? Sisters? Who?”

“I had an uncle, but he went away. Took all my stuff with him, too.”

“He did? What stuff?”

“I had pots. And I had two donkeys my grandma gave me. He stole them. Sold them and went away.”

“I see,” said Patrick. This tale of the abandoned child was not unfamiliar, only a more horrendous version of it than was usual.

“I want to eat, mister.”

“You can call me Mr. Courzon. No,” he said, looking down sideways at the dirty little fists so strangely knotted, as if to challenge the unfeeling world, “no, I’ll tell you what:
call me Uncle Patrick. I’ll be your uncle, your good uncle, for today. Here’s a store. I’ll see what I can find to eat.”

The store, actually the front room of a sagging house, had a few shelves of canned goods, some bags of rice and flour and sundries. He bought a chocolate bar, bananas, and a can of soda.

“Not the best lunch in the world,” he said, with a cheerfulness he did not feel, “but it will hold you till we can get something better.”

Will stuffed the food down. When he had finished, Patrick began again.

“Now tell me where you live, Will. I’m going to take you back. I’m going to ask a few questions, too, when we get there,” he said grimly.

“Delicia. That’s the place.”

“Delicia! I ought to have asked before, oughtn’t I?”

They had been traveling in the wrong direction. He wouldn’t get to Eleuthera today, but first things first. He turned the car about and off onto a rutted track, not far from where he had found Will on the main road. I might have figured that out, he thought, irritated with himself.

“We’ll have to put some salve on your arms and legs,” he said. “Does it hurt very badly?”

“Some,” Will said.

He was either too frightened to talk or too tired. My God, Patrick thought, swallowing outrage and pity, quite literally lumped together in his throat.

Delicia, he recalled now, having been there once when he’d got lost, was a remote and meager cluster of shacks in a humid wilderness of bananas. He could have written its history, he thought, stopping now at the place Will pointed out. There would be a core of strong and faithful women who remained to grow old on the estate, caring for the scattered children of the young who went off-island to work and seldom came back to claim them, or perhaps claimed two or three and left the rest or gave them away. There would be the
men, the itinerants who stayed just long enough to father a brood and leave it; there would be those who, staying, had only cruel discipline or, at best, neglect for the children whom they or other men had fathered. A beggarly place, this, far removed from a village like Sweet Apple, for poverty, like wealth, had layers and levels: poor, poorer, poorest. Delicia was poorest.