The Rhythm of the August Rain (17 page)

“There's someone else there?”

She stuck her phone back in her bag, trying to put out of her mind the multitude of emails that had downloaded after they'd left Largo. It had already been a trying morning, and they were still at ground zero about Katlyn. A visit to Port Morant Hospital had yielded no information. Apart from getting rained on as they ran to and from the taxi, they'd been told by a lethargic secretary that she didn't know where the old records were kept. They must have been thrown out long ago. Everything was wrong with the hospital, the woman had complained as if they cared, pointing to something on her computer monitor. The machines in the X-ray department were worn-out. They were almost as old as the records Shannon was looking for. And the hospital had two operating theaters, but only one anesthetic machine, and the equipment they had in the operating theater was so old—

“And the new equipment is too expensive, we know,” Shad had assured her, interrupting the monologue before they rushed out through the downpour, a rainy season warning.

Her frustration making her more determined, Shannon had instructed Carlton to go back to I-Verse's shack. He was their only connection to a Rastafarian camp so far, and maybe, just maybe, this time he'd open up and tell them something about the communities around Gordon Gap. If he didn't, they'd have to find another Rasta in the area who'd be more helpful.

Shannon jumped out of the car, shielding her head with her camera bag, and dashed toward the shack. I-Verse was nowhere around, and his stool was now occupied by a woman in a long, patterned dress. On her lap, a baby played with one of the sculptures. The woman, young, perhaps in her midtwenties, had thick, blond dreadlocks coiled above her tanned face.

Shannon ran around to the narrow opening at the back of the shack and ducked inside. “Hello, we were hoping to find I-Verse.”

Blue eyes looked back at her. “He not here and he don't say nothing,” the woman replied with a shake of the dreadlock-coiled head.

“We've come a long way—from Largo Bay on the east end.”

“You going to have to come back tomorrow.” A Southern accent hung over the patois like live-oak moss. The baby waved the sculpture and placed it on top of its curly, brown hair, looking up at the visitor, a golden-brown child with green eyes.

“Boy or girl?”

“Boy.” The woman touched one of her hoop earrings. “You buying something?”

“I hadn't planned to, but—they're so beautiful, maybe I will.” Shannon chose a bust of a man with a woebegone expression. “I'll take this one.” A lovely gift for Chantrelle.

The woman gave her a quick smile as if it went with the purchase. “Fifty US.”

“That's a little high, don't you think?” Shannon liked how it felt in her hand, the smoothness of the man's face and the roughness of his dreadlocks reassuring. The rain started pounding on the zinc roof.

“It take a long time to carve,” the woman yelled over the racket.

“Did I-Verse carve this?”

The woman took the carving, looked at the bottom, and shook her head.

“I have the money in the car,” Shannon said above the racket. “We'll have to wait until the rain dies down a bit.”

The baby looked up at the roof and cried out, and the woman said something to him in a low voice.

“My name is Shannon, by the way. I should introduce myself—if I'm going to be standing around in your place like this.”

“I'm Akasha.”

“That's beautiful. Does it mean something?”

The American Rasta tipped her head. “It mean ‘open air, space.' ” She frowned again. “Like freedom.”

The raindrops slowed, falling farther apart in space and time into the muddy puddles now surrounding the hut. Shannon started toward the opening. “I'll get the money out of the car.”

After she'd returned and paid for the sculpture—a little haggling until they got to $35—the woman looked up from making change. “Where you come from?”

“Toronto. I'm working here.”

“You a photographer?” Akasha said, gesturing with her chin to the camera bag as she handed over the change.

“Yes.”

“You take a picture of me and the baby and send it to me?” Shifting the baby to her other hip, the woman exhaled sharply, a criticism of someone. “I don't have no pictures to send my mother.”

“As long as I can use one for my article, I can give you one.” The woman nodded and Shannon took out a camera, squaring the two in the LCD screen. “Where does your mother live?”

“Alabama.”

It was a short portrait session, the young woman with a stiff smile and the baby cooing. When Shannon checked the shots, she could see that they would be gorgeous photographs of mother and son, their colorful garments and glowing skins radiating life and health. Akasha approved of the pictures, turning the baby around to see them.

“Let me have your email address and I can send them to you.”

“We don't have no email. You can print them and send them to me at an address?”

“Of course.” The address turned out to be a post office box in I-Verse's name, not as helpful as Shannon would have liked, but an opening nonetheless. “Are you I-Verse's wife?” she asked, putting the camera away, and Akasha said yes. “You make beautiful babies.”

“So everybody say.” The woman looked pleased.

“Where did you two meet—if you don't mind me asking? You don't often see—you know—you don't see a lot of foreign Rastas.”

“We met in Negril.” The young mother placed a basket on the stool. “I was working at a bar—Nick's Café, you know it?—and he was my manager there.”

Shannon tried and failed to picture I-Verse pacifying a complaining tourist. “Were you a Rasta before you met him?”

“Yes, ten years now.”

The rain poured down with renewed energy as Akasha packed up the sculpture. With the baby on one hip, she started wrapping it with one hand, rolling it in crumpled squares of newspaper and placing it in the basket.

“Can I hold him while you do that?”

The young woman handed the child over.

The guttural roar of a motorbike approached, veered toward the back of the shed, and cut off. A Rastafarian man in a yellow rain jacket ducked inside. “Rain coming down again like dog and cat.” He laughed. “I-Verse ask me to come for you.” A big man with big teeth, he had a scar on his forehead peeping out under the dripping hood.

When he raised one eyebrow at Shannon, Akasha said, “She just buy a statue.”

“You pack up yet?”

“Just finishing.”

“We can't leave now,” he said. “Rain too heavy for the baby.”

Shannon turned to Akasha with a warm smile. “Can we give you a ride home in the car?”

S
had crossed his arms in front of the seat belt, the Rasta woman and Shannon chatting away in the back of the taxi. The musky oil the woman had on was stinking up the whole car, making him sick to his stomach, and he couldn't open the window because it was raining too hard. Worse still, his hope of returning to Largo in time to see the bulldozer clear Miss Mac's land was evaporating. It would be after dark by the time they got back and work would have stopped.

Carlton was having a bad time of it, too. While they were waiting in the steamy car outside the sculpture shack, he'd been telling Shad about his love life, or the lack of it, and said he'd finally gotten a date with a nice girl and was supposed to meet her at three o'clock. So now he was driving through the rain with his jaw muscles tight. He'd already told Shad he was
'fraid Rastas
, so he'd be worried, too, about driving into one of their camps.

“How'd you get interested in Rastafari?” Shannon was asking Akasha, pretending to be casual, Shad could tell, but really interviewing the woman.

“In high school in Birmingham, one of my friends was a Rasta and he tell me about it.”

“What did you like about it?”

The woman sighed. “Rasta believe in living a healthy, good life, you know. They heart in the right place.”

“What did your parents think?”

The baby crowed and the woman played with his hand. “My father—he don't like it—and my mother—she follow my father. They is Baptists.” Her patois sounded phony to Shad, as if she was laying it on too thick. “I don't go home for a long time.” The quiet that settled over the car was interrupted only by the chirps of the child.

The sheets of rain stopped suddenly and Shad opened his window. They were driving farther into the hills, not like the tall Blue Mountains behind Largo, but the rolling knolls in the middle of the island. Cedar and mahogany trees lined the narrow road, releasing large drops of water onto the windshield.

“Is far now?” Shad asked.

“About two mile,” the woman answered.

Beth had never trusted white Rastas, said they had their own countries and cultures to follow, and they should be happy with that. “And I don't know why they want to dreadlocks up they good, good hair,” she'd once said. “God didn't give them no hair for locks.”

As the rain came to a stop, the road descended into a valley, the stretch of asphalt lined by bamboo. “Coming up here.” The woman pointed over Shad's shoulder. “See the gate there?”

To their left was a closed iron gate beside which were red, yellow, and green flags drooping from bamboo sticks. The dirt road inside the gate disappeared behind eucalyptus trees, looking as if they belonged in a movie with their ghoulish, gray leaves and bark.

“You want us to drive in?” Shad queried, testing the waters.

“Yes, like how the baby and the basket heavy.”

Carlton halted in front of the gate and Shad opened it. After he'd climbed back into the car, he turned around. “Maybe we can find somebody—”

“Tell me something, Akasha,” Shannon interrupted. “Do you have some people who've been here for thirty-five years or so?”

The woman blinked a few times. “Maybe.”

A twisting quarter of a mile on, the eucalyptus-lined driveway ended at several small concrete-block buildings. A pickup truck was parked at the entrance to the settlement, and Carlton stopped beside it.

“Thank you for the drive.” Akasha opened the car door. She heaved the basket onto her shoulder and got out.

“I'll mail you the photos,” Shannon said.

“Thank you for that. And I going to ask them now for you.”

She returned after a while, walking behind three Rastafarian men, one of them a cross-looking I-Verse, a kerchief tied around his throat, a tam on his head. Shad could see Carlton's hands tighten on the steering wheel. The three men walked side by side in long, loose garments, the old man to the right of I-Verse thin and short. His shiny face was deeply lined, and from a receded hairline hung locks that were almost white. He was carrying a brown book of some kind, as if he'd been reading and didn't want to stop. The third man was large, very large, a delicately crocheted tam with a red, zigzag pattern topping thick locks and curious eyes.

“Act friendly,” Shad muttered to Carlton, and started smiling as the group approached.

I-Verse walked around to Shad's side of the car. The two men stood behind him, Akasha stopping in front of the car. Smelling of eucalyptus oil, the tall carver put his hand on the car door like a man in charge.

“I and I don't tell you not to bother us?” he said to Shad sharply.

“The dead woman's family want to know what happen to her. If one of your children disappear, you wouldn't want to know what happen?”

I-Verse's eyes swung from the little bartender to Akasha, and his forehead eased a little. “What you really want? You say you writing an article for a Canadian magazine, but you—”

“We need to speak to a Rastafarian who's been around Gordon Gap a long time,” Shannon said as she leaned between the front seats.

“You want to meet one of the brethren who around a long time.” I-Verse turned slowly to the old man behind him. “See one here, he name Ras Redemption.”

The elderly man stepped forward, he and I-Verse crowding the window. “Who want to talk to I-man?”

“Greetings,” said Shad. “A lady from Canada—her name Shannon—she in the back—want to ask about a friend of hers—”

“Not exactly a friend of mine,” Shannon corrected him.

“—who long time ago used to live with a Rasta man. I name Shad, and this is Carlton. She want to just have little time with you, won't take long.”

The three men looked at each other with silent messages, while Akasha swung the baby back and forth.

“Come, nuh?” Redemption said abruptly. He started walking back to the buildings, and the other two men followed him.

“You ready?” Shad asked Shannon.

“Can I bring my cameras?”

“Leave them for now. Let me do the talking, you hear?”

“I have to ask him questions, so I have to do the talking, too.”

Akasha walked up to the driver's window, patting the baby on the back, her eyes on the retreating trio. “You coming or what?”

Carlton sank a few inches lower in his seat. “I staying here.”

“We coming, we coming,” Shad said, and he and Shannon climbed out, following Akasha as she jumped over the puddles in the compound. The place looked bare and unembroidered, as if every penny went into food and shelter. A few men and women with locks of different lengths had come out after the rain, some attending to a cooking shed with a brick stove. They stopped what they were doing to examine the visitors. Inside an open building with a table of unfinished sculptures, two youths were carving and chatting.

“Irie,”
Shad hailed them when they looked up. The young men nodded, one touching his heart, and followed them with their eyes.

When Akasha came to a cottage, she gestured that they should enter. Several pairs of sandals were clustered around the entrance, and they took off their sneakers, Shannon almost toppling over. Shad lined up their muddy shoes side by side.