{ I didn't either when my father taught me. You'll get used to it. }
{ Won't, } Henri mindspeaks.
Althea visits us just before landing. I stifle a sigh when she crouches next to me, hands me a folded piece of paper. I've already found her tempting. I'd hoped she wouldn't make resisting her any harder.
“I live in Kingston,” she says. “But I'll be visiting my parents for a few days, in Wakefield, about thirty miles from Montego Bay.” She lets out a small laugh. “It's dead around there at night, so if you'd like company, someone to show you around in the evening, you'd be doing me a favor. I'll be glad to drive to town and meet you, Mr. DelaSangre.”
“Peter,” I say, taking the note, tucking it in my pants pocket, wondering if I'll have the strength to throw it away later. “But I'm staying inland, near the Good Hope Estate. ...”
“That's great!” she says. “You're not far from me at all. We can meet at their hotel for drinks.”
“It depends. We'll just be settling in. I'm not sure if I can leave the boy.”
She leans closer, looks in my eyes, her perfume light but musky, her breath sweet and warm on my face as she says, “Try.”
Â
The smell of her stays with me after we leave the plane, after we go through customs. As soon as Henri and I walk outside Sangster International Airport's arrival doors, I sniff the air, both to cleanse myself of Althea's scent and to smell Jamaica once again. The breeze carries the usual mix of aromas â sea salt, tropical plants and car exhaust, nothing out of the ordinary.
I hadn't expected otherwise. I know it will be months if not more than a year before I will encounter any trace of cinnamon and musk in the air. I feel for Althea's note in my pocket, consider balling it up and discarding it. Instead, I shrug, pat it and leave it in place. I can always throw it away later.
The two red-capped porters whom I've hired to carry our bags, stop behind us as I look around for the man and the Land Rover Ian Tindall promised would meet us at the airport. I shake my head when I see the bright yellow car parked a few dozen yards away at the curb, stifle a laugh. Tindall must have searched this whole island and maybe more to find a Land Rover with this garish a color. How he must have gloated when he bought it.
My fault really, I think. I should have told the man exactly what I wanted.
Any hope the car might be waiting for someone else dies when I look at the large black man leaning against the car's hood and see the small homemade sign he holds with his right hand, dangling it by his side. Even from that angle I can make out the name printed in bold hand lettering â DELASANGRE.
The Jamaican is too busy gawking and grinning at three female flight attendants getting into a cab to hold it up â or to notice our approach. Bald-headed, mahogany dark and thick-framed, with a belly that hangs over a pair of too tight jeans, he looks like a heavyweight boxer five years past his last fight.
His wide grin makes me feel like smiling along with him, even though he should know he has better things to do than leer at women. But the way I've found myself looking at women today, I wonder if I have any right to judge his obvious lechery.
I just wish the man had bothered to meet us inside the terminal or at least to have been watching out for us. Walking up to the Jamaican, I try to keep any irritation out of my voice when I say, “Mr. Morrison?”
He swivels his head toward me. “Yah, mon?” Then he sees Henri beside me and stands straight. “You Mr. DelaSangre?”
I nod.
Belatedly raising the sign to his chest, he flashes his grin at me. “Sorry about that.” Where the flight attendant had Americanized her speech, giving only a hint of her background, the man's accent is thick, his words lilting. He looks back toward the cab, the doors now closed, the women out of sight. “Three hotties in one car.” (Tree hotties inna one cyah.) The man shakes his head and laughs. “Too many I think for this one mon. My friends call me Granny,” he says. “So do everyone else.”
Henri can't stop staring at the man. { He talks funny, Papa, } he mindspeaks.
{ It's just a Jamaican accent, } I say. { I'm glad you remembered to mask your thoughts. }
My son smiles, says out loud, “What's a âhottie'?”
The man laughs, drops the sign through the driver's window, then leans over and picks up Henri, swooping him up so quickly the boy has little chance to react. He holds him high over his head, looking up at him, grinning. “You should ask your da that question.” He turns toward me. “Fine-looking boy you got.”
“I think so.”
Granny throws Henri into the air, catches him, then laughing, does it again. To my surprise, Henri laughs along with him. “Velda and me never had none,” he says, putting the boy down, facing him. “You'll like it at Bartlet House. We got a pool for you to swim in and a river for fishing and, if your dad's willing, there are caves nearby to go exploring in. ...”
“Not all in the same day, I hope,” I say.
“And horses too?” Henri says.
The Jamaican looks at me.
I nod.
“Not yet,” he says to Henri, “but soon come.”
Granny drives. To my surprise, rather than travel down A1, the coastal road, to Falmouth and then turn inland from there, he takes us through Montego Bay, toward the interior of the island.
Once we're out of town, I tell him to turn off the air-conditioning and lower the windows. Breathing in the lush smell of the Jamaican countryside, I point out the trees and birds Henri's never seen, the sheep and goats kept on the side of many of the small rural homes. But by the time we take the right fork in the road at Adelphi, the warm air and the movement of the Land Rover are too much for the boy. His eyes close and his head drops as he falls off to sleep.
I've never driven in this section of the country and I pay close attention to the road as it narrows and rises, the turns we take at the small towns of Lima and Somerton, so I can find the way by myself. Just before Hampden, we come into a large valley, the sides of the road walled by sugarcane fields.
“Queen of Spain Valley,” Granny says.
I nod, but it's not the valley that has my attention, it's the green-covered, conical hills far away, at the other side. My heart speeds up. If I could, I would go there now. “Cockpit Country,” I say, wondering where Chloe is, what she's doing at this moment.
The Jamaican frowns, shakes his head. “Never go there, mon. Bad things happen there.”
“It's just another place.”
“No, mon. I had friends of mine, they used to hunt and camp in them hills. One day, they never came back.”
“But people hike from Windsor to Troy all the time, don't they?” I say.
“Fool tourists do,” Granny says. “Some of them, that don't pay for guides, come up missing too. It's no place I ever want to go.”
I'm just as happy to hear him say that. The more most Jamaicans avoid the inhospitable terrain of Cockpit Country, the longer Chloe's family and their home in Morgan's Hole can remain undisturbed. I can imagine how displeased the Bloods would be if the area ever became popular with tourists, how furious Charles Blood would be if helicopters started touring over his valley.
We pass by stone buildings and churches, sugarcane fields and towering stands of bamboos, the road narrowing even more, turning rough. I continue to pay attention to the road and the sights, but I can't keep my eyes from drifting to the hilltops of Cockpit Country. I wonder how long I can stand to wait.
Henri's head lolls, his body sways with the bumps and jolts of the Land Rover. Not even the roughest motion disturbs his sleep. The Jamaican points ahead. “Past Bunker's Hill, the road gets even bumpier, mon.”
“I”ve been out here before,” I say, smiling, remembering my first jarring ride into Cockpit Country. “I've seen worse.”
True to the Jamaican's promise, the road turns to mostly dirt. Granny slows the car, works the wheel, avoiding the worst potholes and puddles when he can. We pass a stone ruin on top of a small hill overlooking a river. “That's the Martha Brae,” Granny says. “The Good Hope Estate's across that. They're your neighbor.”
We go through a crossing with a ramshackle shop and yet another stone church and turn left shortly after that, passing through a cut-stone gateway onto a single-lane road â more tire ruts actually than roadway. Trees crowd the side of the road, obscure any view of what lies ahead; bushes scratch against the car's side.
“Home, mon,” Granny says.
As bad as the road is, as much as it twists and turns, it's only minutes before we come to the clearing where the main house, the guest cottages and the stables are located. Granny pulls up to the front door, honks the horn.
Even that noise and the cessation of movement do nothing to wake my son. I get out of the car, lean in and pick him up, holding him against my chest, his legs dangling, his head resting on my shoulder. When he's like this, sleep warm, breathing against my neck, I'm always conflicted between waking him and holding him longer. I know the day will come, far sooner than I wish, that he'll be too grown to accept such attention.
“Henri,” I whisper in his ear as I gently joggle him. “We're here.”
The boy burrows his head into my shoulder, wraps his arms around me and squeezes. “We're here,” I say, joggling him again.
He sighs, raises his head. Rubs one eye with one hand as he stares at the house. “It's big, Papa.”
I look at the two-story, cut-stone building. Noting that it, the stables and the cottages seem freshly coated in white paint, I nod, both at what Henri had said and the obvious care given in preparing the house for our arrival.
It takes two more horn blasts before the Jamaican's wife and her two helpers appear at the front door. While she's no taller than the others and dressed no differently, there's no doubt which one is Velda as soon as she opens her mouth. “What are you doing, you claat fool? Think we couldn't hear you the first time? We been busy getting the house ready for this mon and his boy while all you been doing is driving and yapping your mouth.”
Granny smiles at her. “Don't be rude with me, woman. Come greet our boss.”
She's thinner than I expected, lighter skinned and far more formal than her husband. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. DelaSangre,” she says, shaking my hand, her intonation still Jamaican but without any trace of the patois Granny and she had been using. “And you, Henri.” She shakes the hand he offers her. “Welcome to Bartlet House.”
Henri squirms and I let him down.
She introduces the other two women, her cousins, she explains, Charlotte and Margaret. While both look younger, neither has the fine cheekbones or graceful lips that accentuate Velda's face.
Granny hands me the keys to the car and the house. “There's a spare car key in a plastic box inside the wheel well.” He pats the outside of the car's front driver's side fender. “It's held there by a magnet â in case you ever lose your keys.”
Velda escorts us into the house as her husband and the others unload the car. To my relief, the rattan furniture in the great room is well placed, the colors subdued and matching. Tindall's petty rebellion seems limited to the car itself.
While I inspect the rest of the downstairs with Velda, Henri rushes to the staircase, scampers up to the second floor. “Which is my bedroom?” he shouts.
“Don't yell!” I shout back.
Velda grins. “It's the one closest to yours,” she says to me. “The door just across from the staircase.”
{ We'll be up in a minute, } I mindspeak. { We'll show you then. }
Henri doesn't answer, but from below we hear the sounds of every door being opened and closed. By the time Velda and I get to the top of the stairs, Henri is sitting on the bed in the room across from us. “I want this one,” he says.
“It's yours.”
The boy beams. I walk across his room, look out the window. Across the lawn, beyond the trees I can see a glimpse of Cockpit Country. “Come here, son,” I say. “Look.” I point to the green egg-shaped hilltops. “That's where your mother's family lives.”
He stares through the window, his mouth open, his eyes wide and I realize, except for TV, he's never known anything but the endlessly flat terrain of South Florida.
Henri nods. “We're going there?”
“Just not anytime soon,” I say, wishing it were otherwise.
9
As per my instructions, Granny and Velda and the rest leave shortly before five. With them gone, the house turns silent. Henri stays close to me, watching as I put the last of his things away in his dresser and closet. He follows me into my room and stares as I do the same with my clothes.
I'm tempted to send him off to play, but I understand his unease. As well-laid out as the house is, as comfortable our rooms, we're used to living in our home. On our ten acres of land here, we're as cut off from the rest of the world as we were on our island, but nothing looks or feels the same. Here no ocean sounds can be heard, no seabirds, no dogs, no drone of motors from closely passing boats.
Only the distant blat of a lone goat, the raucous squawks of a flock of green parakeets passing overhead, the occasional rustling of unseen animals making their way through the brush on the perimeter of our lawn, break the quiet of the late afternoon. The strange sounds and the otherwise calmness of our surroundings weigh on me as I'm sure they do on Henri. I find myself wishing the wind would pick up so we could hear the constant rush and moan of it playing through the trees. I decide to tell Granny to purchase some watchdogs for us. I miss the barks and yelps that always filled the air on my island. I miss the ocean smells too.