Eden Burning (34 page)

“Yeah,” Will said.

“Hop in back, then. I’ve got a crate of chickens on the front seat. Holler when you want to drop off.”

“How’ll we get back?” Tom whispered as they started out of town.

“I don’t know. Get another lift, maybe. Or walk if I have to. Anyway, I’m in no hurry to get home.”

The words were careless and grand. Tom looked at him with respect.

The truck, an open pickup, careened through the countryside, through tunnels of trees; the headlights, like two feelers, pierced the night ahead. Behind lay only darkness, dark sky over darker land. The wind raced through Will’s hair; it seemed to him that he was flying, that he was powerful and could go anywhere, do anything.

At a crossroads, the driver slowed and craned his head around.

“Look there! Jesus, they sure broke that up!”

The police station had been smashed. The door had been kicked in and lay now on the grass along with a little pile of broken desks and chairs. Just beyond, where a row of cabins stretched on both sides, lights were on and people were gathered outside, far past the hour at which such villages were usually asleep. Will was wide awake.

“What’s going on?” he called to the driver.

“Folks got mad, is all. You’ll see two, three more like that along this road. And burned-out cane, probably too dark to see.”

Tom wanted to know how far they were going. Scared, Will thought contemptuously.

Suddenly they stopped. “Hey, look there!”

At the edge of the road, half in the deep ditch, a truck lay on its side, its load of bananas flung into the road.

“I heard about that,” the driver said. “Happened this morning. Fellow near here up at Eleuthera hired some Caribs off the reservation to carry his bananas to the boat.” He laughed. “Straightened them out, all right.”

Eleuthera. Lawns and flowers and pride.

“I turn off here, boys, road to Myrtle. You two didn’t say how far you’re going.”

Something decided itself in Will. He could not have said why. Simply, it clicked. “I’ll get off now. Got a friend lives just down the road.”

“Let’s go on to Myrtle,” Tom said. “We can get a ride back from there. Come on with me, Will. It’s late. I want to get home.”

But Will had already swung down, so Tom followed. When the truck had turned out of sight, Will reversed his direction, toward Eleuthera. Plodding along through the empty night he struggled with his thoughts. Something had happened there today between Patrick and Mr. Luther; he wondered whether the overturned banana truck had anything to do with it. Patrick being the easygoing fool he was, most likely the argument was Luther’s fault, he reflected. But however it had been, it was no concern of his.

“Where the heck you going, Will?” Tom complained. “I’m tired.”

“Nobody asked you to come, did they? So put up or shut up, will you?”

The night was soft. The commotion in Covetown might have been taking place in another world. When Will’s foot kicked a little stone, its clatter startled the silence. Alongside the road, behind a wire fence, he could make out the shapes of resting cattle. The air smelled sweetly of vanilla and hay. Stopping, he took a long, long breath. He walked on, with Tom padding silently behind. Still he did not know why he was walking, why he had come here.

A few minutes later he rounded a bend. And there it lay. To his right on a little knoll stood the house; for an instant, as the moon struck through dark and mounting clouds, its white columns glistened. Once when Patrick had brought him, he’d been given lemonade on that veranda. He remembered the woman of the house; she’d worn a lace collar and had been polite, but he had hated her. He stood there now, remembering.

A wind rose suddenly, making a sea sound in the trees. Below on his left the sea was making wind sounds; pale gray it gleamed; in a shaft of moonlight he saw a wave shatter itself upon the distant rocks. It was more beautiful than anything he had ever seen: beautiful, all of it, the water, the wind, the fragrance, and the stillness. Beauty like that could give you pain. And it could make you angry at yourself for feeling so. Angry. Angry.

Now again, clouds covered all the silver. It is going to storm, Will thought. In the house there were no lights. Yes, one, in an upstairs window. Bastards getting ready for bed. He stood looking at the window. Then he walked slowly up the path. He had no idea why, or what he wanted except just to look. Between hibiscus hedges he moved nearer.

A dog barked and another joined in. You could tell by the yapping that they were little dogs, some sort of silly pets.

“Quiet!” he heard a man’s voice say. It was so still that the voice carried clearly over the rustling wind.

Will waited. For a moment or two a woman’s shape appeared at the window, too far away to be recognizable, if he had known her. All he could sense was remoteness; beyond reach, in some long pale garment, cloud-white, flower-white, she stood high. Perfumed, he thought, cushioned like one of those jewels in a velvet box in Da Cunha’s window. And his brain, which was so keen tonight, so filled with jumping images, brought him inexplicably the smell of kerosene burning in a battered lamp on an oilcloth-covered table in a littered hut. What would that woman up there know or care about that hut?

And he stood there, leaning against a tree, with his hands thrust into his pockets, watching that window even after she had gone. One pocket held a broken cigarette, left over from a secret smoking session in the shed. Also, there was a full book of matches. These he took out, turning them over in his hand. He fondled them. Then he had a queer thought, which he pushed away. The thought came back. It jumped in his head. And the tingling began again, just as it had in Covetown earlier, when he’d been running and the ambulance had clanged and glass had shattered. Once more his feet danced; hot excitement poured; it was wild, it was joyous, it was angry. Why not? Oh, why not? Be damned to everything. Why not?

And laughing now, laughing silently from deep in his chest, keeping out of the path of light that beamed from the bedroom, he crept toward the house. There was here, unmistakably, the smell of fresh paint. Under a downstairs window, which was ajar, a couple of painters’ cloths had been left lying on the grass. He picked them up to smell them. Yes, turpentine and paint.

It was so easy! Some of the biggest things you could do were sometimes so ridiculously easy! Just shove the cloths in at the windows where they would touch the blowing curtains, then strike the match. That’s all you had to do.

Frightened and fascinated, Tom watched. “What are you doing, Will? What are you doing that for?”

“Because I want to, fool. And if you ever,” he whispered fiercely, “if you ever open your mouth I’ll say we planned this together and you’ll be—”

“Will, Will! You can trust me! What do you think I am? I swear I’ll never—”

The fire ran up the edge of the curtain. Too bad they couldn’t stay to watch! They sped down the driveway. Three or four miles down the coast, past the junction to Moorhead, they could probably pick up a lift. If anyone should ask, it would be plausible to say they’d been at Moorhead. And that
was all there was to it. The last thing they heard when they reached the end of the drive was the shrill commotion of the dogs.

“Useless little things, Pekingese,” Richard says. “I wish they’d stop yapping downstairs.” He waits for a comment.

“I suppose they miss Marjorie,” Tee replies.

She has gone to bed early because of a headache. Richard offers aspirin, and thanking him, she takes it. But aspirin will not assuage this ache. This is a terrible, terrible pain. She does not recognize herself through the chaos of such pain.

She is wracked with shame. Shame because of having borne him or because of having denied him? Truly, she does not know. She is heavy with pity for his young pride, the pride of Patrick Courzon. But her mouth is dry with fear. She scourges herself for her fear. Yet it is there all the same.

He’ll come back into your life,
Agnes told me.
Someday,
she said. Wise and good. Honest and strong. Agnes, who saved me.

Cursed, she thinks, oh cursed, like the island itself that I loved so much, as Père loved it, as Francis does and as now, so it seems, does—he!

How tough he was this afternoon! Tough and solid as Père. Everything intensifies in this isolation, this extravagance of light and heat. Anger is harder, grief is sharper and desire more keen.

Strange it is, although one’s heard it often enough, that nothing can ever be forgotten. One buries and covers over, layer upon layer, but in the end it is no use. There are all those secret cells in the brain which remember even when one doesn’t want to. Now, not piece by gradual piece, but instantly, “as in a blinding light,” one sees …

Rape, you say? Attack? Yes, and also no. The happiness of that summer! Sun and wind and poetry. The astonishment of discovering one’s own mind reflected in another’s. How ignorant, how wise, how daring, and how young!

She took his hand and held it. The parrot, flashing royal blue and emerald and gold, fled upward into noontime silence. “I’ll never forget you for this,”
she said, or something like that. She took his hand, she looked with tenderness into his face.

Attack, you say?

And that is what happened when she was fifteen, knowing nothing, but feeling everything, feeling what she had never felt before, or since.

Richard comes in from the bathroom to ask again how she is.

“Better,” she lies, for her head is hot, and under the blanket she is shivering. She turns and twists on the pillow, her cheek rubbing her spread hair.
Aphrodisiac, said Anatole.

“A very attractive room,” Richard remarks.

“Red and white,” she says. “Cheerful.” He expects an answer. Yet it is good to keep talking of easy, banal things; it is a way to keep rooted in reality, as, when someone is hideously dying in the house, it helps to make coffee and slice bread.

“Not red and white,” Richard corrects. He has such a fine, critical eye! “It’s far more subtle. Crimson and cream. Those are Chinese peonies, you know.”

He picks up the telephone and shakes it. There is neither hum nor buzz. “Seems to have gone dead. I’ve been trying it downstairs for the last half hour. I suppose it has something to do with the strike.”

“I suppose.”

“I’d like to know what’s happening at the hospital. Our first grandchild,” he says, with marvel in his voice.

Gone domestic now, in middle age, she thinks, not unkindly. Reformed. All the zest gone out of him, just leaked away. I never knew him, really. Maybe there was never much to know. He was always thinking of something else, someplace else, when you tried to talk to him. Only art moves him. I
never did. Maybe it was my fault. But maybe no one else ever moved him, either.

“Francis says the doctor’s excellent, trained in London. The first child is the hardest, of course. Although yours took no time at all, did it? But then, you were so young.”

Lived a whole life like two strangers, he and I, and had all those children. A pair of friendly strangers, living side by side, but separately. Yes, for a long time I tried to make a union of us two, something solid and warm. I wanted it. I needed it. Only it didn’t happen. So we speak now of common, daily things and I have known quiet happiness of a sort, yet there is always the silence, the secret silence, which he is not even aware of.

What if he were to be told
who I am?

“Survive,” Marcelle said. Hers was a lesson of cunning and courage. It has served well. Yet there is another courage that goes not with cunning but with truth.

“Richard,” I shall say, “Richard, listen to me, there is something I must tell you—”

He is taking off his shoes. The room has gone pink in the lamplight. If I should speak those words, the peonies would explode into shredded petals on the floor and the lamps would shatter.

“I was thinking about that speech this afternoon,” Richard says, taking off his shoes. “The fellow was eloquent, wasn’t he? Must have had a fine education. In England, I imagine, on account of the accent. He was practically white, too. Must be hard for a person like that.”

She thinks, Surely he had Père’s nose, as Agnes said? Surely he looks a little bit like Francis?

Something dares her. Maybe she is losing her mind. But she walks to the edge of the precipice.

“Did you think he looked something like our family? My family?”

“Good God, no! What kind of an idea is that?”

“I thought maybe he did.” It is like playing Russian
roulette. Shall I? Shall I wait till morning or shall I never at all?

“You need to have your eyes examined.” Richard yawns. “What are those two ridiculous dogs yapping at again?”

“The barn cats’ prowling, I guess.”

He calls the dogs upstairs. He strokes them and quiets them, then he gets into bed.

“That wind!” he complains. “I didn’t know it could blow like that here.”

“It’s a northeast trade. I’ll lower the windows a bit.”

She gets up and stands for a moment looking northward to the Big Dipper.

“Eerie,” she says, thinking aloud.

“What did you say? Eerie?”

“Yes. The way the night just drops down.”

She goes back to bed. By his breathing she knows that Richard has fallen asleep at once. She is sorry for him because of what she must—might?—do to him in the morning. To him and all of them. If only there were some way of knowing what was right to do! It is this island that is at fault; one can’t even think straight here!

The sad wind cries in the trees. She remembers these nights, the croak and peep and shrill of forest life, the sudden squeal of a small wild creature seized in bloody terror by some larger creature; all these have stayed with her except the sadness of the wind. She has forgotten how it blows all night off the Morne.

This will be a night without sleep. She does not even try to coax it. When morning flickers on the ceiling and birds rustle, she will be still awake. Perhaps, by that time, an answer will have been given her. She prays mercy for all who lie awake hoping for an answer by morning.