“Well, if you can’t stop them, you have to join them,” her mother says gaily, far too gaily for the woman Anna thinks she knows.
“She wanted to come,” her father says.
“I was curious,” her mother retorts.
“She missed me,” her father says.
“Oh, John, you say such silly things.”
They are bantering like teenagers. Anna is certain her mother batted her eyes. Her father plucks her mother’s blouse playfully. “Well, it’s the truth. You missed me.”
Anna cannot imagine her mother here, in this shed, in this dark forest. She cannot imagine her mother tramping through the bushes, dried twigs scraping her arms, nettles in her hair.
“I built the shed to protect your mother from the rain and the sun,” her father says.
“I helped,” her mother insists.
Above them the leaves rustle. Bright yellow plumes like tiny suns twinkle among the greens. Two birds. Semps. The violaceous euphonia, the sopranos of the forest. They fly one behind the other and vanish into the branches of another tree. Her father puts his finger on his lips. “Shh,” he says. They are quiet, still as statues. Then one bird whistles. Her father pulls his lips forward and emits a long, melodious trill. The bird answers. Her father whistles again. Another bird joins in, and another. Anna can barely distinguish where her father enters and the birds respond.
“He was always good at this,” her mother says. “He would put laglee on a tree branch and whistle until a bird came closer. The bird would think it’s another bird. They would whistle to each other, back and forth, and finally the bird would fly to the branch and its feet would get glued to the laglee.”
“I was young and foolish then,” her father says and scrapes the ground with the tip of his shoes.
“Foolish?” Anna raises her eyebrows.
“The semps are almost all gone now. We were lucky to hear them just now.”
“What did you do with them? The birds you caught?”
“Most of the time your father freed them,” her mother says.
“Not before I showed them to you.” Her father grins at her gratefully.
“And the ones you did not free?” Anna presses him.
“Only one. It wasn’t a semp. But it was so beautiful. Remember, Beatrice?”
“Hmmm.” Beatrice nods.
“I had never seen such pretty blue and yellow feathers. I kept it for a while in a cage and then I gave it to the zoo.”
“Your father is sentimental,” her mother says.
“I don’t know why you say so, Beatrice. You were the one who made me give the bird to the zoo. Telling me the poor thing needed room to fly.”
Her mother smiles shyly. “And the white lilies. Do you remember the white lilies we found, John?”
“Those were the good old days. Those lilies were huge. Big and bright white. We dug them up and took them back with us.”
“The ones at home next to the mango tree?” Anna asks.
“We didn’t take all.” Her mother is quick to defend her husband again. “We left most of them in the forest.”
“So they’re still there?”
“I’m sure. They grow wild here. But I don’t think we could find them now. We were lost that day we came upon them.”
“We had to spend the night in the shed,” her father says.
Her mother blushes.
“A whole night. Isn’t that so, Beatrice?” Her father nudges her mother’s arm.
But her mother is embarrassed by his talk about their night in the forest. “It’s time to go,” she announces abruptly. “We need to find a place where we can eat.”
Her father does not give up so easily. “It was so dark that night we could barely see each other. Not that we needed to. Right, Beatrice?” He winks at her.
Her mother is not amused. “Don’t forget I’m not well, John.” It is all she needs to say to return him to the present he has momentarily suspended.
They walk back to the car, her father supporting her mother by her elbow. They do not pause, they do not look back.
A few yards away from the car, they see a man peering through the window. He is tall and has to bend down low to look inside. He is scantily dressed: frayed dark shorts, a creamish-looking shirt that could have once been white. He is not wearing shoes. Even from where they are, Anna notices the muscles running down like rope along his chocolate brown arms and sturdy calves. He has a full head of tightly knotted hair sprinkled with gray. They do not see his face until Anna’s father calls out to him.
“Hey! You there! What are you doing?”
The man straightens up and turns around. “Johnny!”
His eyes are beads in their sockets. Bird’s eyes. They dart from side to side. His nose is wide, his lips thick, his skin leathered and tough.
“Bertie!”
For a moment the shock of recognition causes both men to remain bolted to the ground.
“Johnny!”
“Bertie!”
Life comes to their feet and they hurry to each other. They grasp hands and pump their arms up and down, up and down, vigorously. Their eyes sparkle, their smiles radiate across their faces.
Anna stands next to her mother, watching.
“And de lady of de house? Dat’s her, Johnny?” They have released each other and Bertie is looking past his old friend’s shoulder.
“Come.” Anna’s father slaps Bertie on his back and walks with him toward his wife.
“You still beautiful as ever,” Bertie says and makes an elaborate bow before Beatrice, raising his arm and swinging it across his waist. His arm catches the hem of his shirt and exposes a naked stomach, flat and hard.
“Same old Bertie,” Beatrice says.
“And my daughter,” John Sinclair says.
“Sweet mango don’t fall far from de tree.” Bertie makes the same bow before Anna.
“He was my hunting partner,” John Sinclair explains to his daughter.
“Still hunting,” Bertie says. He is looking steadily at Beatrice when he says this. His lips are smiling, but not his eyes.
“Isn’t it time you settled down?” Beatrice says sharply.
“Will have time enough when dey trow dirt in my face.”
The glare from his eyes is too strong for her mother. She turns away from him.
“Your fadder and me use to be boys together,” Bertie says to Anna. “We use to hunt together, even when we get big. But Beatrice didn’t like her Johnny to hunt.”
“Same old Bertie,” Beatrice says again.
Contempt is too strong a word, Anna thinks, to characterize her mother’s attitude toward this man. She seems sympathetic even, though condescendingly so. But it is Bertie who has the upper hand here. If time has stood still for him, it has marched on for his friend. He looks younger than her father. It is not only his full head of hair that makes him look so, or the muscles in his arms and legs. Her father is almost bald, but his muscles are firm. There is something else about Bertie and Anna struggles to identify it. Next to him her father is the essence of refinement, a man remade through nurture. Bertie is a creature of nature, a man of the earth.
Salt of
the earth.
This is the phrase she has been searching for. Her father wears shoes. Bertie’s feet are unshod; his toes grab the dirt and keep him steady. Fallen branches, protruding twigs, nettles, none of these will harm him.
“Your fadder is a good man,” Bertie says to Anna. “De bestest of all de best men.”
Her father takes out his handkerchief and wipes the sweat dripping down the sides of his face. Anna is perspiring too. Her blouse is wet and clings to her skin.
“It’s hot,” her mother says. She fans her face with her hand. “I need to get out of the sun.”
“Car have air condition?” Bertie asks. His face is dry. His shirt falls loosely over his body. It does not cling to his skin.
“My wife’s not feeling well,” John Sinclair says.
Beatrice frowns at her husband. It is the only signal he needs. He quickly revises his explanation to Bertie. “The heat,” he says.
“Since when heat get to you, Beatrice?” Bertie comes closer to her. “You born and bred here.”
“John!” Beatrice appeals to her husband for his intervention.
“Of course Beatrice was born and bred here. You know that, Bertie. Stop teasing her.”
“Dis not England, you know, Beatrice.”
“I need to get in the car.” Beatrice puts her hand to her forehead and shades her eyes.
“The car is air-conditioned,” John explains, but this is not enough to still Bertie’s suspicions. His beady eyes inspect Beatrice. Her face is damp, the skin ashy. “You sick, Beatrice?”
“Beatrice just needs to cool off,” John says.
“Dat’s it?” Bertie’s eyes do not leave Beatrice’s face.
“Tired,” she says.
“Tired?”
Beatrice nods. “I’m not as young as I used to be. Not like in the old days.”
“You look de same to me, Beatrice,” he says softly. “Always pretty. Still pretty.”
Beatrice rewards him with a wan smile.
John Sinclair places a firm hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Well, we must be going. I’m really glad to see you, Bertie, but we have to go.”
Bertie’s eyes linger a second more on Beatrice. They narrow and darken. “You eating right, Beatrice?” he asks.
“She’s really tired,” John says and tugs Bertie’s shirt.
Bertie backs away. “When you come back, Johnny?”
“We’ll catch up.”
“When?
“Soon, Bertie, soon.”
“We used to have some good old days,” Bertie says.
Beatrice coughs.
“Anna!” John Sinclair catches her attention and inclines his head toward Bertie. “Anna, say goodbye to Bertie.”
“You come by this way soon again, Johnny?” Bertie is clearly not ready to part from his friend.
“I promise.”
“All we days count now, Johnny.”
“I know. I know.”
“We not getting any—”
“John!” Beatrice does not mask her impatience.
“Bertie, we can’t stay. Beatrice …”
“I know, I know. She tired.”
John Sinclair opens up his arms and spreads out the palms of his hands in surrender.
“Go, go,” Bertie says.
Anna extends her hand. Bertie takes it and brings it to his lips.
“
You have de bestest fadder, pretty girl. When my boys was in school, is your fadder pay dey school fees.”
In the car, Beatrice slumps down on her seat. She is angry with her husband. “You don’t have to tell the whole world about my business,” she says.
“I didn’t tell the whole world. That was only Bertie and all I said was that you were tired.”
“And not feeling well. You didn’t have to tell him that. Did you see the way he looked at me? He knew.”
“And if he knew, or he guessed, what does it matter, Beatrice?”
“I don’t want pity,” she says.
The air is tense between them. Her father has allowed Bertie to penetrate their privacy. He has exposed her mother to his pity.
They drive further down the mountain. Her father attempts an apology. “Don’t worry, Beatrice. Bertie is an old friend.”
Her mother grimaces. “Friend? What do you think he meant by telling me this was not England? Like I don’t know this is not England.”
“Bertie meant nothing by that, Beatrice.”
“He just wants to blame me for everything. As if I was the one who stopped you from being friends with him.”
“Bertie was just being Bertie. He was teasing you.”
“Well, I didn’t like it.”
“He likes you. If you ask me, he’s jealous of me for having you as my wife. Did you hear what he said?
Always
pretty, still pretty.
You really can’t think he has anything against you.”
Beatrice clasps her lips together.
Her husband makes another attempt to placate her. “What about lunch? Don’t forget we have a picnic hamper in the boot of the car, Beatrice. I could find a quiet spot for us to stop and eat.”
No, her mother says. She has had enough for one day. She has pushed herself too hard. She wants to go back home. They are hardly off the mountain before her head rolls back on the headrest and she falls fast asleep.
In the quiet of the car Anna asks her father about Bertie. Is it true he paid the school fees for Bertie’s children?
That was a long time ago, her father says. He keeps his eyes on the road.
But is it true?
Her father groans. “It’ll take Bertie to remember that,” he says.
D
e bestest of all de best men. The bestest fadder.
Didn’t she herself give him a pen and pencil set inscribed with the words:
To the best Father in the World.
Love, Anna
Twenty-six years ago. She is fourteen. She is with her father. A little girl chimes: “You are the bestest godfather in the world.” Behind her, a chorus of tiny voices. “Mr. Sinclair is the best godfather in the whole wide world.”
John Sinclair is not the little girl’s godfather. He is not the godfather of this gaggle of boys and girls.
They are at the gates of the Catholic orphanage. Her father has asked her to come here with him. They are carrying baskets heavy with ripe mangoes. It is the year of a strange fecundity. A hundred babies born in one week on an island of less than a million, forty abandoned at the orphanage. The nuns have their hands full with crying babies needing feeding and burping, needing diapers changed and washed. They have left the toddlers in the care of the older children, the ones now running toward Anna and her father.
That morning Anna helped her father pick the mangoes. Twice in this fecund year the mango trees have borne fruit. Mangoes lie rotting on the ground in their backyard, most of them without a blemish or the sign that they have been pecked by birds. For in the trees the birds sit drowsy-eyed, their bellies glutted with mango juice, ballast weighing them down.
Her father has parked the car in the street and they have walked to the orphanage. Two boys open the gates for them. The children who sing out the greeting eye the baskets of mangoes but do not ask for them.
Three brown-skinned nuns appear. They are local women accustomed to the sun, but the mid-afternoon heat is unbearable. Their faces, framed by long white veils that cut across their foreheads, are moist with sweat. One of the nuns signals to the boys to take the baskets. “We are so grateful to you, Mr. Sinclair,” she says. “The children look out for you every day.”