May 102013
 

Stephen Henighan

A little parable about race, narrow opinions, false assumptions and having your head so far up your own ass you can’t see the woods for the trees (to mix my clichés). Stephen Henighan is a world traveler, translator, activist, scholar and fiction writer extraordinaire. I put him in Best Canadian Stories when I used to edit that estimable annual volume. The characters here are mostly low end manual labour doing the traditional low end Canadian job of pulling young trees for replanting. Grading is the act of evaluating, of deciding which trees to keep and which to leave behind. Ah, yes, but in life, with people, we are always deciding which to keep and which to leave behind — it’s an ugly aspect of human society; mostly we congratulate ourselves on not being too obvious (this is called being polite). In his fiction, Stephen Henighan has an awkward (brutally honest) habit of poking holes in that facade of politeness, culture and sophistication.

dg

And me spit out by the city and slung down on my knees in the cold dirt. I thought I’d done everything right: got some education, learned some French – the whole nine yards. But no matter how  tightly you latch  yourself into the city, you can always end up back  in the countryside you came from, pulling trees for quick cash.

They pay us fifteen dollars for a thousand trees. The cedar I’m pulling has roots matted tighter than the threads of my grandma’s old  wool blanket.  You have to rip and tear to  get  each  tree loose. The grading—deciding which trees you keep for your bundle and which ones you toss—is supposed to go quickly since  cedars are nearly impossible to kill. But by the time you’ve yanked the tree clear of its woven carpet of roots and checked for hockey-stick  trunk, half the morning’s gone past. To top it  off,  they did  a shitty job lifting the flats. The old bugger driving  the International 84 Hydro shook each long flap of earth like he was knocking  dust  out of a blanket. The moment you  walk  into  the field, you see the white flashes of split  roots  and  slashed trunks. With that much grade in the furrows, you can forget about making good money.

There’s no escaping grade around here. I don’t know where they find these guys. Local high school drop-outs wearing  baseball caps  that  say I Live for Chev; lads whose only basis for  judging another member of  the community is: “What’s  he  drive?”   And girls,  too. Gert, the roving-eyed young woman next to  me,  complains all day about the boyfriend who jilted her for a loose little  hoo-er  he  met at the village’s new video arcade.  The wedding is next month. Gert plans to get cut,  swing  into the church and puke on the bride’s wedding dress.

Don’t  get me wrong, I’m not making fun of these folks. A  few short years ago I used to hang out with people like this. Then  I moved into Ottawa and got a job and a modern efficiency apartment with garbage disposal and central vac.  The people at the office came from all over the world, and on Fridays we all went out for drinks together after work. When the job  disappeared, so did the apartment. Now I’m country-poor, still the  proud owner of  a Chevrolet, but boxed up in a spare  room over the old fire hall that my uncle got me for free. I work in lowlife jobs. What I can’t get over is how I feel centuries away from my own home town.  From a financial point of view, I’m no better off than anybody else in this field; but an invisible shield separates me from the grade.  I’m not alone in this. There are women here paying the family mortgage, students saving for university. We all show up regularly and earn good money. The others put in a few days’ work, get smashed  on  their  first pay cheques and  never come back.  Every Monday a fresh gang ambles in. The ten or twelve of us who are regulars run a jaundiced eye over them to pick out the one or two who might still be here at the end of the week.

“Too much grade!”  the crew boss yells, closing the fingers of her work gloves around some of the white-slashed shit that  the lads are dumping on the tables.

I  bend forward, pulling like a piston. The odour of soil  and fertilizer blends in my nostrils. You’re never  so  close  to shifts in weather as when you’re hunkered down against the ground. It’s the beginning of April and we’ve worked in snow, in rain, in stinking heat that makes you peel off your shirt. The cold is the worst. It penetrates and paralyzes. Sitting on my knees,  ripping apart  trees at waist height, I spill cold soil down my legs  and shiver  as  it trickles over my workpants. If I don’t  brush  the soil away, my teeth begin to chatter. Some days my toes freeze up in  the  early morning and stay cold and numb inside  my  boots until  I  get home, no matter how hard the  afternoon  sun  beats down.

The  cedar pulls like molasses: the totals the tallyman  reads out  are pathetic. On a good day I can make  over a hundred bucks, but today I’m going to be lucky to hit sixty.  The crew boss, a Forestry woman with ruddy cheeks, tightly  curled  blond hair and a hoarse, cackling voice, tries to calm the punters  by promising that tomorrow we will be pulling white spruce.

“Yeah!”  I  say. But Gert, alongside me, groans. White spruce are tall trees, with short roots that grip the earth like  leeches.  A  guy with big hands can whip them out of  the ground as fast as picking up sticks. But for a woman, unless her hands are unusually large, white spruce hardly pulls any quicker than  cedar.   Red  pine is the woman’s tree.  It’s  prickly and twisted  and shelters close to the earth; the  long roots fall together like horse hair when you clasp ten trees into a  bundle. A  woman with nimble fingers can pull eight thousand red  pine  a day.

“Tomorrow,” the crew boss shouts, “new pullers will be coming out from the city. Looks like we used up all the grade  around here.”

Pullers  from the city! The announcement  combs  through  the crouched hordes like a ripple of unwelcome wind. What will  these new pullers be like?

Next morning we see what they’re like: they’re black.  Or at least two of them are. Husky young guys with an easygoing,  jokey manner.  The burlier, friendlier lad is called Reg; his thinner, quieter friend is Deon. Having been away from the  country for a couple of years, I can’t believe the reaction they get.  In this stretch of eastern Ontario you can drive forty klicks without meeting anybody who isn’t Scots-Irish or French-Canadian or maybe Dutch or German. For the first two hours  the  flats  are silent.  Only  the croak of the tallyman and the honk  of  Canada geese  winging home overhead break the scuffle and grunt  of  men and big-handed women feasting on the fast cash offered by a field of white spruce.

The spruce grows amid knee-high grass that ruffles like  water when the wind kicks up. As the breeze reaches the edge  of  the clearing,  it unveils the light undersides of the leaves in the groves of mature poplar and maple. There are moments when you can feel happy to be working outside. Glancing up, I catch the  glint of  Gert’s dark eyes seeking out mine. I turn away,  exchanging grimaces with Reg. Gert has been sending too many long looks in my direction.  I  try to figure out how, without hurting her, I can make her see the differences between us. I’m not the same guy I used to be.  When I was working in Ottawa I had a girlfriend, a big-city girl who screwed me purple for ten months without ever breathing the word marriage.  Since I came home, the girls seem like grandmas in training, the wedding dress the main thing on their mind. Gert can’t be more than twenty; and even when I was growing up around here, would  I have given a hoot about a girl who hung out in arcades?

Gert, meanwhile, is busy ignoring an admirer of her own.  Kev is a lanky, long-jawed, red-haired lad who talks even more like a farmer than most of the people working here. He’s been smitten by Gert’s pushiness. The more mouthy she gets with him, the more he acts like her slave. He fetches her water bottle, he lobs spare  trees in  her direction; he’s even offered to carry her bundles to  the table. I had Kev pegged  as grade, expecting him to  vanish after a week; but love has transformed him into a hard worker. He arrives at the crack of seven each morning, his watery blue  eyes scanning the furrows for Gert.

We  pick  our way forward in closed  formation,  swabbing  the field clean with hungry hands. The crew boss’s yells clang in our ears; her bright, laundered blue jeans glint in the corner of  my eye.  Gert and I lead the pack of pullers. Kev is closing in  on Gert from the right; Reg and Deon head up the next row.

By mid-afternoon the silence is making me sick.  I figure it’s time to set an example by acting naturally. I go back  to teasing  Gert.  “I  bet you’re getting  thirsty,  Gert,”  I  say. “What’ll you do if you need your water bottle?”

“If I need my water bottle,” she says, with a savage  sidelong glance at Kev, “I’ll get my nigger to bring it to me.”

For  five  seconds not a single tree gets pulled.  Everybody stares at Reg and Deon. Reg and Deon look  at each other. In the distance, I hear Canada geese honking.

“That was a pretty ignorant thing to say, Gert,” I tell her.

“You  go fuck yourself. You just think you’re hot shit ’cause you  lived someplace else.”  She bows her head into the chest  of her jeans jacket, her cheeks shaking.

“Move  it!”   the crew boss shouts.  “Anybody who  doesn’t  pull forty-five hundred today is outa here.”

I veer away from Gert and almost run into Reg. He and Deon are putting a broad patch of white spruce between themselves  and the  rest  of  us. As everybody else sinks into a silence even sicker than it was before, Reg and Deon can’t stop talking. They pull  like fury, exchanging stories in a jargon we can scarcely follow. Within thirty minutes a wheel of clean-picked dark  brown earth  has opened up around them. Trussed bundles lie  heaped  at their heels. They pull barehanded, the only workers in the  field not wearing gloves.

I glance across at Gert. She ignores me. Kev, put off  either by Gert’s rudeness or her tears, has drifted away to the  fringes of the field.

“Whoah!” the crew boss shouts. “You’re gettin’ way too  spread out. You’re missing good trees–  And you two,” she says, turning to  glare  down the laughing West Indians, “do you plan to shut your traps when I’m speaking?”

“No,  we  don’t,  ma’am,” Reg says. “We work  better when we talk.”

“You’re fired, mister,” she says. “It’s your fault this crew’s got screwed up today.” She plants her right hand on her hip  and gestures  with  her left for them to quit the field.  Red  blush-points break out high up on her cheeks.

The two men shrug their shoulders and saunter away towards the poplar grove.

“You’ll  be  paid for the work you’ve done,” she  hurls  after them. “Now the rest of yous get back to work or you’re next.”

Silence  splinters the crew. Nobody talks; nobody works  close to  anybody else. After more than a month of  pulling  trees  six days  a week, my body is aching all over. My joints creak and  my kneecaps click when I walk. My tiredness has outrun my ability to sleep  it off. At the end of the afternoon I stumble away  to  my Chev  without saying goodbye to Gert. Kev has  disappeared.  The sight of Gert kicking across the field, her head lowered and  her work gloves  dangling  from her fingers, tugs at my chest.  But  I recognize  the  tug  as guilt, not love. I turn the  key  in  the ignition.

My Chev rumbles over two kilometres of rutted dirt road winding between the fir plantations. When I turn onto the  highway, Reg  and Deon are standing holding their thumbs  out.  Reckoning that they must have been there for almost three hours,  I pull over onto the shoulder.

“I’m  only going ten minutes up the road,” I say, “but I’d  be happy to give you a lift.”

“Thanks,  but we need a ride into the city.”   Big Reg has slipped a woollen hat onto his head. Behind him, Deon issues  me a shy smile.

“I thought what she did to you was really shitty,” I say.  I take a breath. “Actually, I thought it was racist.”

“Aw,  we  knew we were rubbing that lady the wrong way,”  Reg says.  “If we’d really wanted the job, we would have  acted  more docile.  We just came out here today for fun.”

“Fun?”  I say.  “Don’t you need the work?”

For the first time Reg looks shy.  “We’re grad students in biology in Ottawa. We’ve got internships at a lab but it don’t start until two weeks from now and we were kind of bored.”

“We’d never seen the countryside,” Deon offers. “We always lived in cities.”

“I can’t believe how lazy people are out here,” Reg says. “Don’t they care about making something of themselves?”

The two of them stare down at me with the stare you save for a furrow full of slashed roots. Deon shakes his head.

“No offence to you,” Reg says.

“None  taken,” I reply.  “I know who I am.”   I roll up the window and  shift  my Chev into gear.

 —Stephen Henighan

——————————–

Stephen Henighan was born in Germany and grew up in rural eastern Ontario. He is the author of three novels, three short story collections and half a dozen books of non-fiction. His forthcoming titles include A Green Reef: The Impact of Climate Change (Linda Leith Publishing, 2013), Sandino’s Nation: Ernesto Cardenal and Sergio Ramírez Writing Nicaragua, 1940-2012 (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2014) and the English translation of Ondjaki’s Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret (Biblioasis, 2014).

m

m

m

m

Nov 162010
 

Henighan in Romania

Hot off the presses (actually not even off the presses yet), here is the first chapter of Mihail Sebastian’s novel The Accident, translated into English from Romanian for the first time by Stephen Henighan and about to be published by Biblioasis (in just a few weeks). Numéro Cinq readers are already familiar with Stephen’s fiction (see his story “After the Hurricane” earlier published on NC). He is also an indefatigable globetrotter, critic and translator. Here is his own short intro to the chapter that follows.

dg

Mihail Sebastian (1907-1945) was one of the major Central European writers of the 1930s. Born in southeastern Romania, he worked in Bucharest as a lawyer, journalist, novelist and playwright until anti-semitic legislation forced him to abandon his public career. His long-lost diary, Journal 1935-1944: The Fascist Years, was published in seven countries between 1996 and 2007, launching an international revival of his work. Sebastian’s novels and plays are available in translation throughout Europe, and also have been published in Chinese, Hindi, Bengali and Hebrew.

The Accident is Sebastian’s first work of fiction to appear in English.

In spite of what his death date might suggest, Sebastian was not liquidated by the Iron Guard (Romania’s Nazis). He survived the Holocaust (in gruelling circumstances), resumed his public career in early 1945 and was run over by a truck in May 1945, at the age of thirty-seven, while on his way to give a lecture on Balzac. On the basis of the four novels and five plays he left behind, it’s hard not to conclude that Europe lost one of its major writers.

—Stephen Henighan

 

The Accident

By Mihail Sebastian

Translated from the Romanian by Stephen Henighan

 

Chapter 1

She didn’t know how much time had passed. A few seconds? A few long minutes?

She felt nothing. Around her she heard voices, footsteps, people calling out, but all muted and grey, like a sort of auditory paste, from which occasionally a tram bell or a shout shook loose with unexpected clarity, only to fade away again into the suffocated commotion.

They’ll say it’s an accident, she thought very calmly, almost with indifference.

The thought made her feel neither alarmed nor hurried. She had a very vague impression that she must be stretched out next to the sidewalk with her head in the snow. But she didn’t try to move.

A stupid, senseless question passed through her mind: What time is it?

She strained to listen to the tick-tock of her wristwatch, but couldn’t hear it. It must have been smashed. Then, in an effort to concentrate, as though immersed in herself, she observed that in fact she heard nothing of her own being; not her pulse, not her heart, not her breath.

I’m…, she reflected. I’m like a clock. And it seemed to her that she was smiling, although she couldn’t feel her lips, for whose outline she searched in vain somewhere in that familiar yet vanished space that was her unfeeling body.

Continue reading »

Sep 182010
 

Henighan

It’s a pleasure to introduce Stephen Henighan (pictured above in Cairo in August for the feast of Ramadan) to the pages of Numéro Cinq. Stephen is a prolific author, world-traveler, critic, translator and polemicist, a man who lives by his words or in his words. I put him in Best Canadian Stories when I edited that annual anthology. That’s what I think of his writing. Over the years his commentaries on Canadian literature and writers have been acute and revelatory. You should look him up. This story was previously published in the venerable Canadian literary magazine Grain.

dg

 

For thirteen hours, from the time the plane lifted off from London, crossed the Atlantic, landed at St. John’s, Antigua, then travelled the final hour over the Lesser Antilles –visible out the window as a trail of dark green bloodspots flowering on the translucent pale-blue slab of the sea–  up to the instant they landed at the little Cuban-built airport with a bump that woke the passengers who had lapsed into an alcoholic stupor, Philip waited for Doreen to speak.  She had uttered her last words in the departure lounge. When a flight attendant brought in the barrell kids –small children going home to visit their families,  their names written on bibs that hung across the fronts of their pink pinafores and white dress shirts–  Doreen exclaimed: “That was me! I grew up travelling like that. Except for me it was between Toronto and Jamaica.”

She remained silent as they picked up their luggage from the carousel and found their way outside where a beaming German couple held up a sign that said Philip & Doreen.  “Mitzi,” said the attractive wife, who looked older than her wiry husband. “This is Fred.” She smiled. “When people book on line, you never know what to expect.”

Doreen met his eyes.

They knew this reaction: the exuberance that camouflaged nervousness when people were uncertain how to respond to an interracial couple. As they climbed into the back seat of Fred and Mitzi’s jeep, Philip sensed Doreen’s disappointment.

The vacation had been her idea. She had persuaded him months ago, when they had realized that their business trips to England would overlap, that they should take advantage of the cheap deals available from London. She had overcome his resistance to package vacations by finding an on-line offer for a remote lodge: three holiday cabins on an isolated point overlooking a tiny bay on the island’s southeast shore.  With the bright-eyed girlishness she revved up whenever she was openly trying to twist his arm, Doreen enumerated the advantages: the private beach;  the outside world accessible only via a forty-five-minute vertical hike up the coastal mountains to the highway; a stash of tinned food strongly recommended; free airport pickup; a low price for a week’s accommodation on the condition that they tell their friends about the place when they got home.

He dozed against the door as warm air flooded the jeep. Fred was driving through deep gulleys where a dozen shades of green vied for the sunlight. Tall, droop-leafed coffee plants grew close to the road. As they climbed, houses on stilts bobbed up above the vegetation at the tops of the ridges like gravity-defying cubicles rising towards heaven.

On a cliff-face cleared of undergrowth, red spray-paint announced: Cuba and Grenada. Friends forever.

“After the hurricane, they couldn’t rescue people because the roads were blocked with fallen trees. The Cubans came and cleared the roads.”

“Some of the same Cubans who were here under socialism in the 1980s came back,” Mitzi said. “People welcomed them like they’d returned from the dead. When the international aid organizations arrived their job was easy because the roads were clear.”

“I work in international aid,” Philip said.

“Mitzi,” Fred said, “we shouldn’t talk about politics with our guests.”

“It’s all right.” Philip repeated the formula he had been obliged to utter a dozen times during his days in London: “We’re not American, we’re Canadian…. We took our vacation in Cuba last year.”

Doreen, looking out the window at the construction workers in their white T-shirts and black hard hats, nodded.

Clinging like a contour line to the flank of the mountains, the two-lane blacktop road hurtled them past abundant greenery speckled with little white houses. Here and there, a village clustered around a greystone church that looked as though it had been airlifted from a meadow in rural England; vendors cooked snacks on primus stoves at the edge of the road. Fred turned off the blacktop and geared down. The jeep crawled over huge ruts. By the time they emerged onto the point darkness was falling and  they caught only a glimpse of Fred and Mitzi’s white stucco house looking out over the dull sea and the three wooden cabins facing the bay. Fred crossed the yard  and disappeared into a shed. A generator came on. The roar of the sea in Philip’s ears and the air’s moisture made the glow of the  lamps strung from wires around the yard feel as fragile as life itself.

He hugged Doreen. “You’re not regretting this?” he murmured. “You don’t think we should have cancelled?”

“I couldn’t be doing nothin’ else now,” she said.

“You are the only guests,” Mitzi announced, leading them towards the cabin closest to the stucco house.  She offered to cook them supper.  Philip said that they were tired and would go to bed. In the cabin, where the bed was enclosed in a tent-shaped mosquito net,  they hung their plastic bags full of crackers, tinned sardines and tuna from wooden pegs in the bathroom and tied themselves up in the net. The surf smashed on the beach.  He opened his mouth to ask Doreen whether she was going to be able to sleep. Then he was awake and it was bright daylight. The room felt like a box vaulted up into the sky and shot through with light. It was barely five-thirty in the morning, but there were no curtains on the broad windows overlooking the sea and the sunlight was warming their bed; the roar of the waves sounded louder. When he slipped out from under the mosquito net, the whiteness of the surf hurt his eyes. Doreen got up, the strap of her rumpled nightgown twisted on her shoulder. Her hair was a mess. Not Afro enough to remain short and tight,  yet too Afro to fall into an elegant shape as it grew out, Doreen’s hair  was her constant preoccupation. Seeing it clustered into two beehive-like bunches, one halfway down the back of each side of her head, made him feel a horrible sadness. He hugged and kissed her.

“If you think we’re gonna get up to any monkey business with these windows you can forget it.”  She sidestepped him and scanned the beach.  “Look! A fishing boat come in!”

Before he could move, she had opened her suitcase and begun to dress. She raked her hair into shape in front of a mirror and was out the door and hurrying down the path to the beach, Fred and Mitzi’s dog bounding at her heels.  On the sand, a man was lifting plastic buckets out of a small boat. Two large women were walking towards him.  By the time Philip dressed and got to the beach, the women were bargaining with the fisherman for his catch.

“You want one that’s skinny like me,” he said, “or one that’s fat like you?”

“Fat like me!” a woman said. Their voices were as rhythmic as the waves, but they spoke standard English, a  relief to Philip, who struggled to understand the Jamaican patois of Doreen’s sisters.

As soon as the fish changed hands, Doreen stepped forward to scrutinize the contents of the buckets. “That one!” she said, pointing.

“That one cost nine,” the fisherman said.

“M’give you six,” Doreen said, her patois surfacing.

“Eight and he’s yours.”

“Seven an’ I don’ go no higher.”

“For a pretty woman  I go to seven.”

“Sweetie,” Doreen said to Philip.  “You got some money? What money it have here anyway?”

“Eastern Caribbean dollar,” Philip said. He laughed. “I like the way you bargain when you don’t even know what the money is.”

He paid the fisherman, who looked Doreen up and down. “Where you come from?”

“Jamaica,” Doreen said, supplying the answer she gave to black people who asked her this question. When white people asked, she said, “Toronto.”

The fisherman’s lean ribs pressed against his skin in the gap where his shirt hung open. “The Jamaican woman she have a nice shape.”

As Doreen took the fish, Philip laid his arm around her shoulders.

“A Jamaican girl she live up the hill here,” the fisherman said. “She marry a man from here. You go see her. She be wanting company from home.”

As they climbed the path, the dog trotting in front of them and panting at the fish,  Doreen whispered: “Man, the people here look like they just got off the boat from Africa! They’re not mixed at all!”

He followed her, his feet slipping on the path.  Doreen was as proud of her upturned Hindu eyes, long Arawak jawline, half-Scottish great-grandfather and one-quarter Chinese grandmother, as she was of her African heritage. She said she felt most comfortable in places like Jamaica and Cuba, where there was a language to talk about people like her, or cities like Toronto, where mixing was the daily business. Worried about how she felt here, he said: “At least they appreciate the Jamaican woman’s nice shape.”

“You sure put your arm around me fast! ‘Nobody’s touchin’ my woman.’  And you say you’re not possessive!”

Daylight lent the point a ragged appearance. Long grass entwined with creepers was encroaching on the yard beneath the wires where the lamps hung.  Fred, dressed in a floppy-brimmed sunhat that threw his face into shadow, was swinging a scythe at the undergrowth. They went around the corner of the house and found Mitzi on the covered patio, clearing up the breakfast dishes. Through an open doorway they saw a local woman sweeping the floor of an industrial-sized kitchen. “This is Georgina,” Mitzi said.  “When we have tour groups, Georgina and I cook for twelve!”  She crossed the tiles and wrested the fish from Doreen’s hands.  “You want me to freeze it?”

“Thank you, Mitzi. I’ll cook it the last night.”

“Georgina, put this body in the freezer!”  Mitzi said with a laugh.

Philip couldn’t look at Doreen.

“Mitzi,” he heard her say in a level voice, “do you know if I can get a flight to Jamaica from here? I might have to go for family business.”
Mitzi frowned. “There are not many flights between islands…. You’re not leaving?”

“If I go, it only for two-three days. Philip stay here.”

“You know there is a Jamaican girl who lives up the hill on the other side of the beach?”

“The fisherman told us,” Philip said.

“She cuts hair,” Mitzi said. “She studied this in Jamaica.”

“Until Macey come, there’s no one around here who cuts hair,” Georgina said from the kitchen.

Mitzi nodded. “This is such a small island that people don’t have the opportunity to learn a trade.”

“That’s why we came here,” Philip said. “They said there was nothing to do.”  He still couldn’t look at Doreen. “I guess we’ll go back to our cabin now.”

*

They woke at five-thirty to the sound of the waves. No matter how hard they tried at night to kill the saboteur mosquitoes that slipped inside the net, each morning they found fresh bites on their shins. By the third day, in spite of the fact that his skin was so light and hers so dark, matching reddish scabs shielded  the space between their ankles and their knees  like the greaves of  centurions who belonged to the same expeditionary force. They prepared their meals of crackers and tinned sardines on the balcony, sweeping the crumbs over the edge to discourage the ants which crossed the planks in tiny swarms that moved as fast as a tropical storm running in over the sea.  Each day they had a morning swim and an afternoon swim. The water was warmer in the afternoon, but the weather was more turbulent. Big black clouds built up over the mountains. Between swims, they read paperbacks on the balcony and took walks uphill, where trees brought down by the hurricane blocked the clipped English lanes that ran through the tropical undergrowth. They skirted  slack-bellied brown cattle that grazed in groups of two or three,  and tiny shepherd boys sleeping in the grass. Their customary non-stop banter about politics slowed.  He struggled to convey to Doreen his sensation of being in a place where nothing more could happen. Fred and Mitzi talked about the revolutionary government, the Cubans, the  American invasion, the next twenty years of slow decline, then the hurricane, which knocked over the nutmeg trees, the core of the island’s  economy, like men shot dead.

They drove Philip and Doreen  up the coast to see the empty nutmeg factory in Grenville,  where a bitter foreman waved at the echoing factory floor where hundreds had worked. “They’re all gone,” he said. That evening, the conversation Philip had imagined them having about the island’s problems failed to happen. As soon as night fell, Doreen undressed and went to bed. It surprised him that she, who under normal circumstances refused to kiss him if there were a finger’s-width crack between two curtains in a hotel room, took off her clothes with unflinching confidence in this cabin where broad bare windows exposed them on two sides. Doreen was right, of course, that there was no one out there, that in the all-engulfing darkness of the rural night no one could see anyone else; yet her abandon suggested a change in her mood, even a shift in her personality. He felt  one step behind. He toiled to catch up to her in the hot fury of her beautiful slender black body.  At each climax he felt gripped by the need to go deeper inside her.  He wanted, with a rage that unnerved him, to give her a child, as though this fusion of their beings might break down her silence.

Fearing the mosquitoes, neither of them went to the bathroom after lovemaking. He eased off his condom, tied it around the neck and wrapped it in  toilet paper. In the violent suddenness of the dawn, he woke to see the twisted nub of latex-bulged tissue paper glowing with the luminosity of a recently evolved life form.

On the fourth day they walked to the village at the top of the hill. The coastal highway ran through the centre of town. Soaked with sweat from the climb, they found a corner store where they could buy soft drinks. The woman behind the counter offered a computer where they could check email. Against their judgement, they agreed to break the spell of their removal from the world.  The sight of dozens of work-related messages make Philip feel irritable.  He logged out. Doreen studied her messages in silence, read a few of them and  offered no comment during the long downhill walk to the beach.  Her reserve persisted into the next day. In the afternoon, as he watched her emerge from the water in a tan-coloured bikini,  her unruly hair rolling on her shoulders in the wind, he handed her the towel she had draped across the trunk of a fallen palm tree. As she smiled into his face, he said: “You don’t want to talk about it?”

“Nothing I can say’s going to change anything.”

“But, Doreen, isn’t it better– ?”

“I don’t feel like talking.”

On their fifth night, feeling penned in by the small bay,  they splurged on a cooked dinner on Fred and Mitzi’s balcony.  That afternoon a group of young people had driven two jeeps down through the bush and set a bonfire in the short, goat-gnawed grass which began just above the brown sand. As Philip and Doreen watched from their balcony, two of the young men felled a tapered coconut tree. Doreen winced as the tree hit the ground. To the sound of gangsta rap, the young men stripped the tree of its coconuts and sat down with their girlfriends to drink rum, eat coconuts and roast hot dogs. An hour later, when  they drove away, they hurled jeers in the direction of the point  and left their bonfire burning. The evening breeze skimmed in off the sea, driving the fire across the short grass in the direction of the bush.

Fred appeared, hurling curses at the empty beach. A bucket in his hand, he descended the path in jerky leaps. He opened a faucet at the end of a long, rickety pipe and filled the bucket with water. He emptied the bucket over the flames, returned to the faucet and filled the bucket a second time, then a third.  By the  fifth  dousing, the fire was hissing into submission.  Fred continued pouring water over the charred logs and scorched grass long after the fire had gone out.

That evening, as they  ate their steaks and corn on the balcony, where the breeze had grown cool enough for Doreen to drape a long-sleeved shirt over her tanktop, Fred was raging.  “People here used to have a culture of living with their island! They climbed up the tree to get coconuts. Now every time they want a coconut they cut down a tree!”
“Young people think they can have everything lickety-split like on TV,” Georgina said.

“That’s what we came here to get away from!” Mitzi said.  “Since the hurricane everything is worse.” She looked at Doreen, whose loose-sprung curls were falling into her face.
“Macey isn’t like that. I think that in Jamaica they teach people to work.”

“Lots of Jamaicans have two jobs,” Doreen said, growing animated. “But it have lazy people like everywhere else.”

“Tomorrow you must visit Macey,” Mitzi said.   “You won’t have time on your last day because we must drive to the airport. I will give you directions!” she said, stepping into the kitchen for paper.

Next day, after their lunch of water biscuits and sardines, Philip said: “Do you want to  visit the Jamaican girl?”

“I guess.”

“Are you thinking about the trip to London?”

“I’m trying not to think about anything.  Let’s visit the Jamaican girl,” she said, getting to her feet.

They walked the length of the beach and found the path described in Mitzi’s directions: a bald zigzag that climbed through the undergrowth at an angle so steep that they had to grip the bushes and haul themselves up hand over hand. Sweating and gasping, they emerged onto a sloping headland and followed a broader path, worn wide by cattle and clipped by goats, past ruined one-room houses, the sheet metal torn from their roofs glinting in thickets of long grass. Turning around to catch their breath, they saw the point where they were staying projecting out into the sea like the tapered  blade of a shovel laid on the dark blue water. They followed  the path until it intersected with a steep  single-lane blacktop road.

When they got to the top of the hill, a long-legged young woman wearing a white T-shirt and short twisted dreadlocks came out to greet them. “How are you, Doreen? Finally, you reach! Every day, I ask m’self why that Doreen don’ come visit me?”

“You knew I was here?”

“Girl,” Macey said, lowering her voice, “on this island, everybody know everything. I can’t say a word to your boyfriend here unless you keep right in the middle of the
conversation.  Oh, these small-island people are suspicious! Sometimes I wish I back in Kingston where nobody know my business.”

She waved them towards her house. Grey rooftiles had been hammered to the front of the porch.  The three of them sat down on the steps. Macey’s skin was of a lighter brown than that of the Grenadians; her face was round, with a wide mouth and a strong chin.  “I thought I miss my family here. Instead I miss my privacy.”

“You can’t forget your family,” Doreen said.

“But I gotta say I like it here. It peaceful. In Kingston you got to watch your back.” Looking at Doreen, she said: “Girl, you need a haircut. Why don’ you come see me the day you reach?”

“I wasn’t ready.”

“You ready now?”

Doreen gripped Philip’s arm. “I ready.”

Macey got to her feet. “Why kind of haircut you want?”

“I want straightenin’,” Doreen said, standing up.

“Straightenin’ gonna cost you.  I go into St. George’s to get the solution. For straightening, I charge fifty EC dollar.”

“Sweetie,” Doreen said. “We got fifty EC dollar?”

“I think so.”  Astonished by Doreen’s compliance, Philip wondered whether Macey’s offer had contained a cultural signal, indiscernible to his eye, which ruled out bargaining. He found fifty EC dollars and handed them to Macey. The young woman took the money and disappeared into the house. “Straightening cost twice that much in Toronto,” Doreen said in a whisper. Macey returned carrying a towel, a bucket and a container of straightening solution. She wore white gloves like a pathologist. She sat Doreen down on a plastic chair on the porch and wrapped the towel around her shoulders.  As Macey set to work, Philip backed away. The scabs on his shins itched in the heat. At the side of Macey’s house,  the frame of a black chest of drawers, stripped of its innards, sat tumbled on its back among scattered pieces of lathe fanned out across red-brown earth.

“Why you come here?” Macey said. She doused and lathered Doreen’s hair. She dragged Doreen to her feet and bent her forward.  Doreen braced her elbows on the rail of the porch. She made Doreen lean over the rail  until she was staring down at the hurricane wreckage. The wood and cardboard had half-sunk into the earth, becoming one with the soil in a coarse humus. “Why you come to Grenada?” Macey lathered and rubbed until she was hauling Doreen’s head up and down. “Why don’ you go to Jamaica to see your family?”

Doreen gasped. Suds ran across her cheeks. “I go to Jamaica next week for my brother funeral!” she shouted.  She stood up and burst into tears. A man on the other side of the road stared at them.  Doreen shook herself out of Macey’s grip.  Philip rushed up the steps and hugged her trembling body. Her hair crushed by lather, Doreen’s  head shone forth in its strong dark roundness as her lips nuzzled his shoulder.

She turned around and let Macey’s hug receive her. “We book this vacation, then they murder my brother in Kingston.  They going to do an autopsy so they put him on ice so I decide to go on vacation anyway. I think maybe being around West Indian people do me good.”

The two women rocked together like coconut trees whose suppleness belied the force of the wind. “It be all right, Doreen,”  Macey said. “I happy you come and see me.”

Doreen gave Macey a squeeze, as though she were the one offering comfort. She stood up, strong and independent as she had always been and yet, Philip sensed, older.

“Straighten my hair good, Macey! My hair gotta shine for my brother funeral. And try to do it quickly, please. Philip and me goin’  to Fred and Mitzi’s place. Tonight I’m cookin’  a fish dinner.”

—Stephen Henighan

/
/
/