Eden Burning (3 page)

“Well,” she said, wanting to break this gravity that verged on sadness, “well, ancestors are fascinating, don’t you think? You must wonder about yours”—and instantly flushed with the awareness of having said something awkward, something
out of place.
She apologized: “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—” making it worse.

“That’s all right, Miss Tee.” He picked up the chisel, setting to work again. “Yes, I wonder about mine. Not that it does any good.”

“You could be a teacher,” she said after a minute, wanting to make amends. “I think you know as much as my teachers know.”

“I left school too early. My mother got sick and couldn’t work, so I took to this trade.” He turned around, his shoulders gone proud. “There’s no shame in working with your hands, as middle-class people, even among my people, seem to think.”

“No, there certainly isn’t. And has your mother got well?”

“She died.”

“Oh. And your father?”

“I don’t know whether he’s alive or dead. I never saw him.”

“Oh. My father died when I was six. Would you believe I still think about him? I feel as if—I miss him, even though I couldn’t have known him well. I suppose it’s because I’m not very close to my mother.”

Clyde looked at her. His eyes were kind. “That’s a great loss for you. And for her.”

“She has two new babies and a new husband, so it probably doesn’t matter.” Her voice sounded bleak in her own ears.

“There have to be more reasons than that, Miss Tee.”

“Oh, there are! We’re very different, you see. My mother cares about clothes and entertaining and being invited places. She knows what families are important and who’s going to marry whom and who’s going abroad next month. But I don’t care about that sort of thing at all!”

“What do you care about, then?”

“Oh, books and dogs—all kinds of animals, actually, and riding, and of course I’d like to go abroad, too, not to see the fashions but—”

“To see how other people live. To see Rome and London, the crowds and the great buildings—Yes, I’d like all that, too! And I mean to do it, someday.”

“But then you’d want to come back here, wouldn’t you? I know I’d always come back. This is home.”

“It’s different for you than for me,” he said quietly.

Yes. Of course it was. His life and hers, both lived upon this little island, were different, indeed. And she had those queer feelings again: pity and a certain guilt—which was absurd; none of this was her fault!

Agnes remarked indignantly, “I never saw such an uppity boy, talking away with you by the hour—you’d think he was part of the family or something!”

“He isn’t ‘uppity,’ Agnes. He’s very polite. And he’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever known!”

“Hmph,” replied Agnes.

Agnes was jealous. Tee understood. Having no children of her own and having been scorned for it, Agnes had taken possession of Tee and couldn’t share her. Yes, she was jealous of Clyde.

How strange it was that, outside of Père, a person like Clyde should be the easiest friend she had ever made! At school she had no deep friendships; there had once been a girl who read poetry with her, but she had gone to live in England and now there was no one.

Clyde appreciated poetry.

“Listen to this,” she said. “It’s by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and it’s the loveliest of all, I think. Listen.

The room was very quiet. He had put down the tools. She was intensely aware of the quiet and the pure round tone of her own voice speaking.

“I wasn’t quite sure at first what she meant by ‘prison-wall,’ and then I realized she meant her loneliness.”

“She had a good deal of guilt, too. The family’s fortune came from the West Indies, you know, from slave labor. That didn’t disturb her father at all, but she was sensitive.”

Clyde’s face was soft. He’s quite different when Père isn’t here, Tee thought suddenly. Not stiff, nor humble either. Just probably himself.

“You read that very well,” he said.

“Yes, Mama says I read with expression. I often think, if I were better-looking, I might be an actress.”

“But there’s nothing wrong with you, Miss Tee! You—”

“Look at me—No, no, you’re not looking.” For he had glanced quickly once and turned away. “Don’t you see my nose? I’ve got my grandfather’s nose. Can’t you see?”

“I’ve never really looked at your grandfather’s nose.”

“Well, next time look at it carefully. Only I’d advise you not to let him know you’re doing it.”

The absurdity of this caution struck her then, and she began to laugh. Clyde standing there staring, measuring her grandfather’s nose! And now Clyde, having, no doubt, the same picture in mind, began laughing too.

“You know, Clyde, I’ll really miss you when you’ve finished these cabinets.”

“It’s good of you to say so.”

“Not ‘good’! True! I never say things I don’t mean. I wish we could stay friends. Maybe we will!”

He didn’t answer. Intent again on his work, he bent to refine the spreading petals of a wooden flower. She thought perhaps he hadn’t heard.

“I said I wish we might stay friends.”

“That would be nice, Miss Tee.”

“Clyde, you don’t have to call me Miss. Don’t you think that’s silly? We’re the same age, almost.”

“It’s the custom,” he answered, blowing the sawdust away.

“But a custom can be silly, can’t it?”

“You’re not going to change it, Miss Tee, even if you want to. You’ll only make trouble for yourself if you try.”

Now it was her turn not to answer. Instead, she stood over him, watching the chisel flow along the soft wood, shaping a vine. He was right, of course. There was a rigid order in this world. A person knew where he stood in that order and how he must behave, how he must speak. In their different ways each fell into his place at birth, whether it was Mama’s place or Père’s or Agnes’s. Money was part of it. Color was part of it. But—and this was very strange—mind, which should be most important of all, was not part of it.

A mind was a queer thing. Père had a book with a sketch
of a brain, a gray lump, ridged and corrugated; you would have expected a brain to be more colorful, more like a mosaic, patterned with the pictures that your particular life had printed on it. And it seemed to her as if Clyde’s mind and her own were of the same print, so that you could have set them beside each other in a continuous design, and there would be no jarring, no interruption.

Only their skins were different—and not all that different. Her sunburned hand, resting on the shelf a foot away from his working hand, was almost as dark as his.

He came to the end of the vine, curling it upward into a joyous flourish.

“There, how do you like that?”

“It’s lovely. You’re an artist, Clyde.”

“Not really. I wish I were.” But he was pleased. “There’s a man in Spain, Antonio Gaudi, who does these flowers in stone. He’s building a cathedral in Barcelona, all leaves and vines and even animal faces, a whole forest in stone…. The world’s full of beautiful things.”

How did he know of such things? He must have lived, must still live, in some village hut a world removed from Covetown, let alone Barcelona! And a soft compassion moved in Tee.

“That’s all for today,” he said, putting the tools away.

“See you tomorrow, then?”

“See you tomorrow.”

So the weeks passed, and Tee was curiously happy, not lonely at all anymore. In the mornings at her bedroom window she watched the crows descending from the mountain to eat the
palmiche
of Père’s royal palms along the driveway. The calm days stretched ahead. In the warm evenings after rain she stood at the window in her nightdress and heard the toads singing in the tree tops. She was so peacefully happy! She had no idea why. She did not even question why.

The hammock rocked gently between two acoma trees behind the house; so tall were they that their tremendous tops were shaken by a breeze, although at ground level the burning air was still. Yawning, Tee laid the book facedown on her lap; in the house Père was taking his long Sunday nap; the whole world dozed.

She came awake. On the path beyond the rose beds Clyde was walking fast, swinging a bamboo birdcage.

“What have you got there?” she called.

“A parrot,” he called back.

“Let me see!”

He set the cage down beside the hammock. In it stood an enormous parrot, two feet tail, a king of birds, marked splendidly in amethyst and emerald.

“Sisseron,” he said proudly. “The imperial parrot.”

“Where did you find him?”

“Caught him this morning. It was some job to catch him, I can tell you.”

“What are you going to do with him?”

“I have a buyer. A sailor on an Italian ship, due back this month. I promised to get one for him, last time he was here.”

The bird raised its wings and, there being no room in the cage to extend them, wearily dropped them again to stand in an attitude of patient waiting. Yet its round, alert, and curious eye seemed to respond to Tee’s attention, and this aliveness was piteous, as though through the eye alone a plea were being communicated.

“He’s so quiet,” she said.

“He’s not used to the cage yet. He’s frightened.”

“It’s awfully sad, don’t you think?”

“In a way, Miss Tee.”

“When you think of how fast they can fly, how they love to fly! … They can live to be sixty years old, Père says.”

“That’s true. This is a young one. Two years, no more.”

“So then … He has maybe fifty-eight years to spend in prison!”

Clyde looked down at the parrot, then looked away across the lawn.

“How much did the sailor promise to pay you?”

“I’m not sure. But a good price.”

“Whatever he’ll give, I’ll give more.”

“But—you want this parrot?”

“Yes. I want to buy him and let him go free.”

Clyde was troubled. “If you feel that way about it, I’ll let him go now, right here. I don’t want any money.”

“No, I’ll pay. It wouldn’t be fair otherwise. And we mustn’t let him out here. We must take him home.”

“He’ll find his own way. Its just up the Morne.”

“I want to see where they nest.”

“They nest high up, in old palm trees. See his strong beak? He can bore a hole with that in a couple of minutes.”

“I know. But I want to see where.”

Clyde said reluctantly, “It’s an awfully hard climb.”

“You don’t want to go? Then I’ll go alone. Here, give me the cage.”

“Miss Tee, you can’t climb up there all by yourself. You’d get lost or fall or something.”

“Come with me, then.”

The way narrowed through ragged banana groves, then mounted steeply among palms and tree ferns which, fanning and crowning into the upper light, formed a crowd of green umbrellas under the sky. In somber shade, the path lay underfoot, dark as the bottom of the ocean. Tee climbed and stumbled. Ahead, Clyde strode easily, swinging the cage.

“I’ll have to rest a minute!” she called.

He waited while she leaned against a tree.

“You know what kind of tree that is, Miss Tee? They call it candlewood because you can make a good torch with it for night fishing.”

“Père says you’re an expert fisherman.”

“I like to fish, that’s all. I like the sea.”

“You like a lot of things. I wish I knew as much as you do, especially about this place where we live.”

“Well, I do know this mountain like the back of my hand, anyway. I could show you things! I’ll bet you’ve never seen the fresh water lake in the crater. Right inside the volcano. I’ve seen it.”

“I haven’t.”

“And there’s a pond not far from here, too hard a climb for you, though. A pond full of blind fish. It’s in a cave. I went there with my teacher. There’s a film on the water that looks like ice—my teacher’s been in Canada so he knows—only it isn’t ice, it’s lime dissolving from the roof. You crack this film and you can see the fish beneath. Hundreds of them. They’re blind because it’s pitch dark in there and they’ve been there for generations. Come on, are you rested enough?”

Some minutes later there came a change, a feeling of great height. Coolness rippled through the air; the ground was wet and the rocks were covered with moss.

Clyde pointed. “Just about here is where the cane stopped. You can still see some of it, run wild.”

“Cane, up here?”

“Oh, yes! In slavery days the cane covered the islands, halfway up the mountainsides. But now grass and jungle have grown back over whole plantations, whole islands even. Little out islands like Galatea and Pyramid, places like that, where they only pasture sheep today.”

“What a wicked thing that was!” Tee cried.

“Wicked? What?”

“Why, slavery, of course! To own another human being! When I can’t even bear to see this parrot locked up!”

“You’re softhearted, Miss Tee. Don’t you know there are people even today who wouldn’t lift a finger to abolish slavery if it still existed?”

“I can’t believe that! I can’t think who would! Can you?”