Children of Paradise: A Novel (35 page)

Eric, the captain, and the first mate look up and see them, and Eric suggests it is time for the captain and his first mate to leave, and the captain thinks so, too, when he spots the woman and her daughter and recognizes both of them right away but hides this from his first mate, who hides it from his captain in case the sight of the mother and child makes the captain lose his head. The captain shakes Eric’s hand and departs. Joyce and Trina run after pigs and do their looking without seeming to, which is quite dangerous while on the move. Surely he can see me now, thinks Joyce. How much more of an exhibition do I have to make of myself? Two more guards come on the scene to help out, and Kevin has to stop pretending to catch the pigs and really try to catch them, and so do Joyce and Trina, and with the extra help, the job is done in no time.

Eric shouts at the captain and first mate that the next time they stop, he would like to know about the significance of the boat’s painted colors. The captain promises to explain everything next time if Eric promises to greet them with a wave instead of an aimed rifle. Eric smiles and nods.

—Child, it was him. We have to find a way to get to him. The next time he turns up, we have to make our move. Help me to think, Trina.

—I’m thinking, Mother.

The rest of the afternoon flies by as they work with half a mind on their task, which can be dangerous around pigs notorious for never missing an opportunity to bite a careless hand or foot. Piglets jump at the chance to chew on the end of a dress. Fortunately for Joyce and Trina, the piglets beat the sow and boar to the tape of mischief, and Joyce feels a tug on her dress and tugs back, thinking it must be Trina playing with her, and the tug gets stronger, which makes her look behind her, and she sees the three little pigs, each with a bit of her dress in their mouths, pulling and chewing at the same time, and she tugs back harder and shakes her dress and the piglets hang on and squeal and Joyce screams and Kevin runs to help drag them off her dress and Trina tries to help as well. Another piglet rushes at the open gate and another guard uses his stick to block the piglet’s path. Kevin helps Joyce to free her dress, but she loses three chunks from it, and the piglets chew and swallow their little cotton treat. Kevin, Joyce, and Trina do all they can to stop themselves from laughing; they wipe their faces in their hands to snuff the flame of a smile and avoid each other’s eyes, since one look can spark the next into a smile, and once the eyes surrender, the mouth follows and the face and torso contracts and converts the throat into a trumpet. They pretend to cough a volley of coughs and study the patch of ground in front of them but stay to share the collective restraint and the shared joke in a place where such things are frowned upon.

On the walk back to the buildings, Joyce and Trina hold hands and want to skip along but keep their walk to a trudge to match the other farmworkers’. Joyce offers to give Trina a piggyback, since they are leaving the piggy farm. Trina holds her canvas shoes and points at her sore foot and even hops a couple of steps to indicate pain or blister, in case a guard or prefect is looking. Then she climbs aboard. The piggyback is as close as she comes to hugging her mother to celebrate the fact that the captain showed up. Joyce walks slowly with her daughter on her back. She tells herself she will get them both away from this place and the captain will be there to help them. And if she fails, then this act of carrying her daughter will be the last thing they do. If she has to join a commune line to drink along with her daughter, she promises herself to find a way to carry her just like this, and if the preacher is right about paradise, then this walk will never end.

—That was her, wasn’t it?

The first mate puts this to the captain as they steer the boat back into deeper water.

—To whom do you refer, señor?

—The Princess and the Pea.

The captain straightens his hat and stares ahead with a smile and replies in his best faux Australian:

—No idea what you’re talking about, mate.

The first mate slaps his captain on the arm and takes his hand and keeps hold of it.

—Captain, that was Joyce and Trina up on that hill, chasing those pigs for the world to see, well, a world with just you in it. That was the two of them!

—Yes, oh yes, that was my Joyce and Trina.

And right there the two men grab each other and perform a little jig, sticking out their legs and circling by linking arms, before they check themselves and run back to their stations in case the boat drifts into a sandbank. They talk about how many guards were on the scene and how far away Joyce and Trina were from the wharf and how long it would take to reach them or for them to make it down to the boat. The captain asks his first mate to forget that they are relatives for a moment and forget that he is the captain and tell him honestly, man to man, if the idea of devising a plan to rescue Joyce and Trina from the commune strikes him as a madcap notion.

—Man to man?

—Yes. Plain, no varnish.

The first mate says if the captain forgets about Joyce and Trina and does nothing but pretend the river is his life and life is the river and everything else a distraction, he will be one first mate short and one cousin fewer and will have one less friend in the world to watch his back. Aubrey cannot leave his captain’s post, as he dearly wants to right then, so he waves a raised fist in the direction of Anthony, his first mate, his cousin, his friend. Both men scratch their itchy new beards.

The first mate asks the captain, if he could be one thing in this life, what would that be. Aubrey takes no time to reply:

—Water, of course. How about you?

The first mate says wood.

—Wood?

—Yep. I start as a tree, and I turn into practical things like this.

He slaps the boat.

—What made you ask that?

The first mate says partly because he loves the boat and river and working with the captain, he would not want to be too far away from that trio. The captain bows and waves his fist in a gesture of solidarity with the first mate. They steer
Many Waters
down the middle of a bend enclosed by trees that funnel the boat through a green-lit bottleneck. The river opens into a straight; on both banks a panorama of rolling savannah tilts into the distance all the way up to greet the horizon, and the two banks blend with the surroundings and with the sky to become a river somehow lifted into space.

Today the water appears smooth, its usual wrinkles ironed out by the sun. Almost as if thinking aloud, the captain says that the way the river flows with a quiet power tells him a thing or two, that for power to do real good, it need only be deployed quietly.

Captain says there are places, ports, jetties, whatever, all along the river for people to board and disembark as they choose.

—And sometimes those arrivals and departures are chosen for us.

Aubrey pauses and Anthony rolls his hand in small circles for Aubrey to elaborate.

—The river grinds a stone to dust and washes bones clean. It runs but it can fly to great heights and fall to great depths. If that isn’t a library for a lifetime’s study I don’t know what is.

The first mate nods, but says nothing, can say nothing, looks at the expanse of water in front of him and wipes his eyes.

Ryan thinks as he is conveyed from cave to bush to clearing.

Wind to the left and to the right blows away things stuck in the eye of the sun. Sun eye open but moon eye shut and the two share the same face. And birds fall, one for each teardrop from the bright eye of the sun and the darker eye of the moon, from the bearded face of sky, from cotton wool squeezed dry and swiped to the left and to the right until those two eyes become clear. Clean sun eye shine and dull moon eye, too. Sky face shines bright and blue.

Ryan keeps looking up as he is carried, and his head that is too heavy for his neck hangs and lolls and lollops to another’s bounds and strides.

Joyce volunteers to work at the bakery to get some extra baked goods squirreled away at short notice in case she and Trina need them. She wants to see how things work during the night. Since most of the sermons occur at night and run very late on many occasions, it is entirely probable that the final communal drink could fall during an evening, in which case Joyce wants to know that she can secure some rations in a hurry for a fast exit. As she mixes flour and water and begins kneading dough and greasing pans, she wonders if Trina can sleep with so much to store in her young head. She asks herself what kind of a mother gets herself and her daughter into a situation like this.

Her tears fall into the dough that she mixes even as she dabs her eyes on her sleeves and tells herself that she is stupid to cry over a situation that needs her resolve, not her tears. She leans in to the bread mixture with all her strength and rolls and twists it. The table creaks and shakes under her weight and she turns over the dough with the same, slamming it down again with a loud thump that causes loose flour to flare upward like smoke from a blast, and she keeps doing this over and over. Then she tears the dough to pieces and forces those portions into baking pans. And from flour, water, baking powder, and a pinch of salt mixed and forced around in this way, she makes bread. Just like the preacher made a disciple of her and everyone around her.

Trina looks around her dormitory and wonders what will become of all the children. Not like Ryan. She realizes that her family extends to everyone in the room and on the compound, and for them to die would mean the end of her family. What will become of Adam? Is Ryan alive or dead? She faces the wall and keeps very still and tries to sleep. She counts the times she talked with Ryan and thought their time together would never end. His legs to help her run in the game he played so well. His bread in her mouth. She hears Ryan call her name. She wants to turn around and whisper to him for a while about whatever he chooses to talk about, but she knows he is not really there. He calls her name again. Without changing her position, she whispers that he should shut his mouth and his eyes.

Another voice, Rose’s this time:

—Yes, go to sleep.

And another and another and Trina adds her yes to the chain and they begin to giggle and become noisy and Ryan begs them to stop and sleep or they will get him into trouble and he will get another beating. And all the children jump up with Trina and Rose and leap on Ryan. He falls to the floor and they cover him with hugs, and under the pile, Trina’s face ends up near his.

—Why didn’t you answer me the first time?

T
he captain and his first mate spend the night at an indigenous Indian village carved out of the forest a short walk from the river. Hammocks slung between trees hold dozing adults or children in pairs or a parent rocking a sleeping infant. Huts fenced in by logs form a semicircle, and a central clearing supports a large fire with a roast turning on a spit attended by a couple of men and a woman. The first mate pulls off his cap and puts it on the head of a child, and the other children chase the child to take a turn. The next child to get the hat runs off with it on his head, pursued by the group of children.

The captain talks with the elders, Sid among them, about ways to persuade the commune to stop polluting the river. The commune, it emerges, is the principal culprit but not the sole one. The international logging companies’ alarming rates of deforestation add their share of bad practices. Sid shares the joke with the captain about his unarmed indigenous council taking on a truckload of armed commune guards and how the guards retreated from the scene, shouting the names of clothes, blouses, skirts, trousers, and panties. Sid asks the captain if he knows the significance of the items. The captain shakes his head and says that the commune works in mysterious ways. Sid and the elders laugh. The talk returns to logging. They knock around ideas about how to control the numbers of loggers, since their machinery clears so many trees so fast that they create massive dead zones in the forest. Those responsible happen to be foreign companies, blessed by the government. They talk about saving the country from itself before the entire rain forest ends up parceled off and sold to the highest bidder from overseas.

The cooks add pieces of the roast to a large pot of vegetable stew and ladle the stew into wood bowls and pass around cassava bread that everyone tears and dips into the stew. Wooden cups of warm rice wine never seem to get more than half empty before being refilled. Neither the captain nor the first mate smoke, but as the pipe comes around the circle and it reaches the captain, he takes a symbolic puff and coughs, which draws laughter, and his first mate puffs and does not cough even once, which earns him cheers. They join in a dance around the fire to drums and chants, and their dances make the shapes of birds and animals of the forest. Perhaps it is the wine and the smoke, but the moment of circling the fire slows, overtaken by a faster spin of the dark and the shadows of flames licking the leaves and rubbing against the trunks of trees. The captain and the first mate feel indistinguishable from their surroundings. The captain thinks he moves because the person in front of him and his first mate behind him move, that he can stop only if they stop and the forest and the darkness in a faster spin stop at the same time. The chanting and the drums match the flames. The people and the forest shape the dark. All of them move in concert. None of them wants to be the first to stop the dance.

They sleep in a guest hut on beds made of grass and leaves, and the room smells of baked clay. They remove their shoes and their hats, and the moment their heads touch the bedding, they drift off. The forest can be a noisy place at night if a person listens to it, but the ears get tired just like the body, and though ears remain open, they stop being consciously receptive. The captain and his first mate hear monkeys and frogs, but in their end-of-a-long-day state, they cease putting names to sounds and therefore stop hearing the names. Their bodies join the shadows of a dying fire. They hear but do not listen to the drum of their hearts and they feel a stranger’s heart as it synchronizes with their own. They dance but with wings for arms, which makes their gyrations weightless, freeing them from the limits of their bodies and casting them into the air above the trees. And instead of falling they simply drift with no up and no down and with stars all around them that they can reach out and touch if they have the energy or inclination.