The New Moon's Arms (36 page)

He smiled a little. “The bat was the best,” he said. “It was right down low, close to the water. But I didn’t sink the glider.”

“I’m very proud of you.”

We had to walk past the orchard on the way to the house. It was rioting out of control. Branches had extended themselves, looping into sideways knots and tangles that defied gravity. Every morning I found that new shoots had thrown themselves skywards overnight, to fight with their predecessors for light and air. The trees were clotted with blossoms and with fruit in all stages of development; in the early afternoon heat, the perfumed stench of both was cloying. Even the tiny saplings were bearing before their time. Overripe fruit fell constantly as we watched, to smash against others already on the ground. The unharvested cashew apples rotted within a day; the air below the trees buzzed thick with blue-bottle flies, drunk on fermenting cashew ichor. The trees bore and bore and bore. In the space of a week, some of them were already dying. The prodigious growth had started when Agway went from me.

Ife took Stanley’s other hand as we sidled past the mad orchard.

Men’s voices rumbled from the kitchen. Good smells, too: coffee brewing, fish, spices. I peeked in. Orso and Hector, cooking up a storm. I couldn’t face Hector just yet. “Where you found the truck?” I asked Stanley.

“In here.” He led me into the bedroom that had been Agway’s, and Dadda’s. The Aqua Man sheet I’d bought was still on the bed. Dumpy lay on the pillow. Stanley ran and picked it up, brought it, held out, towards me.

“It was under the bed,” he said. His face was crumpling into sadness again. I reached for the truck, but he cried out and threw it at me. He missed. It smashed through the window glass. I heard exclamations from the kitchen; chairs being pushed back; feet running in our direction. “Why you had to take him out on the water like that!” sobbed Stanley. “It’s your fault!”

“Stanley!” said Ife.

“No, let him say it. It’s the same thing all of allyou thinking, anyway.”

Stanley hugged himself and cried. I bent and picked up the truck, over the protests of my back and both knees. “Agway used to throw it like that,” I told Stanley. “Will you let me hold you?”

He threw his arms around my legs.

That wake nearly killed me. Then they could have just waked for two. Mrs. Soledad accepted many refills of white rum, and told stories about the cute things Agway had done that I had missed because I was at work. Stanley taught us Agway’s words for man, and boy, and goodbye, and told us that his name was—had been—Chichi. Silence fell when he said that. Three chi-chi men of a different kind right here in the room. I looked at the floor. That writer guy was right; God
is
an irony. When Hector, a catch in his voice, launched into the story about Agway eating raw shrimps, I excused myself and went out onto the porch. If I’d stayed in there any longer, I’d have broken and written myself a ticket straight to the madhouse by informing them all that Agway was a mermaid who had gone back to his home in the sea. So I sat and breathed, and watched the cashews ripen and fall, fall, fall.

Ife came outside and sat beside me. She said, “Don’t watch the news for the next little while, okay?”

“I can just imagine what they’re saying about me.”

Her dress was shapeless as usual, but this time it was a
stylish
shapeless, in a nubbly indigo silk that brought out her colouring. Even her sandals were pretty. “You looking good,” I said. She raised her eyebrows. I ignored it. “Like breaking up with Clifton is suiting you?”

She looked down at her hands. “It has its advantages.” She wasn’t wearing her wedding rings. “But I still miss him. Half of me wants to work things out with him, and half of me wants to leave.”

“Something I never told you.”

“What?” she asked, her tone wary.

Push on, Calamity. “You right; I didn’t want to have you.”

Ife pressed her lips together and made to stand up. I was doing it all wrong. I took her hand. “Please wait, Ife. Just hear me out.”

She sat back down, her face unhappy.

“Over the months of carrying you,” I said, “I got used to having you right next to my heart. Could put my arms around you any time I wanted. Then time came I had to push you out. Finally got to meet the prettiest baby in the world.”

She gave me a sad, surprised smile.

“And looking after you was the hardest thing I ever did in my life. Plenty of times I hated it. Plenty of times I wanted to stop. Give you up for adoption. Something.

“But then I got to know
you
. A mischievous little girl with a curious mind. A dreamy, impatient young woman who was always looking for magic. Fuck. I’m not saying this right.”

“I think I’m kind of liking it,” she replied. “Keep trying.”

“I didn’t start out loving you. I had to learn to love you. It was like an arranged marriage, you know? Only not.”

She was half-laughing now. “You say the strangest things, Mummy.”

“Calamity. And I not finished.”

“What else?”

“I had to learn to love you for who you are. About half the time I screw it up.”

Obsidian glint to those eyes. “Go on.”

“So from now on, I want you to tell me right away when I get it wrong. Don’t save it up for thirty-eight years.”

She took that in, and nodded. “Sound good,” she said. My spirits started to lift. “But one pretty speech not going to fix it.”

I bit back the ready barb and waited for her to finish. “You have to walk the talk for a while before I’m going to trust you,” she told me. “You on sufferance.”

“Christ. You and Orso been comparing notes, or something?”

She nodded. “Something like that.” We watched the cashews fall. Ife said, “You know, I never told you the wish Dadda made at the wishing tree.”

“Not sure I want to know.”

“He wished for Mumma to forgive him and come back. He said even if not for him, that you had suffered enough.”

Then she hugged me and went back inside. She still wasn’t wearing a bra.

So now Granny decide to get rid of the devil baby. She yank it off her shoulders and she throw it hard as she could. She pitch that devil baby into the sea. And the minute it land up in the water, the devil baby start to laugh, and to swell: big as a pumpkin; big as a grouper fish; big as a whale, and then bigger. That devil baby turn into the devil woman of the sea with her blue skin, and her sharp teeth, and her long, long arms for dragging ships down. “THANK YOU, GRANNY, DO,” the devil woman say. “FOR YOU JUST GIVE ME EXACTLY WHAT I WANT.” Her voice make Granny’s ears ache.

Then the devil woman fling a handful of gold pieces at Granny. One land on her face; till her dying day, you could still see the mark. “FOR YOUR TROUBLE,” the devil woman say. And she dive down to go and wait for a ship for her dinner. Granny hear her laughing all the way down to the bottom.

I crashed gratefully down onto the lounge chair out on the porch. “I’m so glad everybody gone home, I can’t tell you!”

“Sound like it wasn’t fun.” Gene gestured at the plate in his lap. “What is this I eating?”

“Ackee and saltfish. Some Jamaican thing Hector make.”

“It’s strange. Like if scrambled eggs was a vegetable.”

“He still vexed with me. Hector.”

“Yeah, I could see that. I wouldn’t brook nobody speaking to me like that neither.”

“Duly noted, Mr. Meeks.”

He put the half-finished plate of food down on the floor. “I have to run. Working tonight.”

“You want a lift down to the dock?”

“Sure.”

I got an idea. “All right. Just hang on a second.”

Dumpy was still on the floor in Dadda’s room. I fished it out of the broken glass.

In the night air, the rankness of the cashews was less. But you could still hear the gentle
plop
of fruit after fruit throwing itself from the branch. The sickle moon looked fresh and clean, wearing one coy wisp of cloud.

I let Gene into the car. We headed for the dock.

“Mrs. Winter gave me bereavement leave.”

“Ouch.”

“Who knew she had a heart?” I pulled up at the dock. “You have a few minutes? You could take me out a little way in your boat and then back?”

“You mean I get to spend a few more minutes with you?”

“Sweet-talker.”

“My middle name. Come.” He opened the car door, but before he got out, he took a shaky breath and said, “You know that night, when I found you?”

“Yeah. What about it?”

Gene had gotten my half-hysterical phone message about Agway’s mother being alive. He came rushing over right after work to find us both gone, and me not answering my phone. He dashed back to the dock, thinking he’d go out on the water and search for us. He’d found me lying on the dock in the rain, half-dead from hypothermia.

“As I laid eyes on you on the dock the other night, I hear a big splash, like something went into the water.”

“I know. I told you what happened. And if you tell me I was hallucinating, I swear—”

He shook his head. “I think I saw shapes swimming away under the water.”

“Fuck me! A part of me been wondering if I didn’t just make it all up. So I wouldn’t feel guilty about letting Agway fall over the side.”

“But I saw them too. Never seen them alive before.” His smile was soft and wondering. “What a miraculous world, nuh true?”

We went out in his launch. When we were out of sight of Dolorosse, I yelled, “Right here!” over the sound of the engine. Gene cut the power and we rocked in silence on the sea. I held Dumpy in my hands one final time. Then I dropped it over the side.
Drop your scarf in the water
. I blew a kiss after it.

She couldn’t say how she did it; for her safety, she’d never tried to describe it to anyone. She liked to think it was a bit like how it might feel when a baby pulled at your breast with its hungry mouth to make the milk come. But she didn’t know that sensation. To her, it was like letting go finally when you’d long been wanting to piss, and feeling the hot wetness splash out of you and keep coming like it would never stop. It was like that, and yet it was nothing at all like that.
Bring us home,
she begged, of Uhamiri, of her gift; as she tried to keep her balance it was all getting confused in her mind. She was a sluice, and power surged through her. She tried to guide it as it flowed. It was like holding back the seas with a winnowing basket, but the dada-hair lady shaped her power as best she might.

It was the strongest flow she’d ever felt, frightening in its force.

The boss man was yelling orders in the shouting and the screaming and the running about, but few were listening. His two desperate eyes made four with the dada-hair lady’s own. If she were a Momi Wata, he’d be foolish to stare at her like that. She stood tall and looked right back at him.

The first thing that happened was that any of her people still standing fell to the decks. Not her; she remained upright. She nodded and smiled. “We are leaving now!” she shouted in Igbo, for those who could understand. Some of those raised up a cheer, which became a high piping. The people were changing! That startled her. But the ocean strength of blood would not be held back. The dada-hair lady accepted it. That is how it would be. Then let it be.

The people’s arms flattened out into flexible flippers. The shackles slipped off their wrists. The two women who had been chained to her flopped away, free, but the dada-hair lady remained unchanged and shackled. The little boy in her arms was transforming, though. He lifted one hand and spread his fingers to investigate the webbing that now extended between them. Some of the people who had been forced back into the holds were making their way out, now that their shackles had slid off. The ship was so far tilted that they didn’t have to climb; just clamber up the shallow incline that led to the hatch.

The people’s bodies grew thick and fat. Legs melted together. The little boy chuckled, a sound she’d not heard from him before this. The chuckle became a high-pitched call.

The people’s faces swelled and transformed: round heads with snouts. Big, liquid eyes. Would she not change, too? Was this Uhamiri’s price?

The sailors had been dodging them, too terrified to pay attention to what was happening. Many sailors had already leapt over the side. A mast snapped and crashed down, killing sailors and destroying more of the ship. The weight of the mast pulled the ship over even further on its side. The captain rushed to the cracked stump and yelled, likely for an axe to cut the mast free. He was ignored. The ship began to go down. The captain glared at the dada-hair lady as though she were responsible. He braced himself against the stump of the mast, pulled out his pistol, and shot at her. The jerking of the ship threw his shot wide. He started picking off her people, one by one, even as they grew thick, protective coatings of fat and fur sprouted on their bodies. “Over the side!” the dada-hair lady yelled at them. “Go into the water!” The sound became a deep, urgent bubbling noise. The dada-hair lady was changing too. Uhamiri would not abandon her!

The gift roared through her. She threw the boy from her, into the sea, just before her arms became flippers. She swelled large as an ox. She flopped to the deck, landing heavily beside one of the white sailors. He went even whiter as he saw her alter. He backed away, pulling at his pistol as he tried to get it free of his belt.

The dada-hair lady started working her body clumsily to the ship’s railing. Others of the people were already there, levering themselves up and over, into the sea. The splashing, the shouting, the strange animal calls; all was confusion, and the gift was burning through her so hard she could barely see.

The captain roared at her and took aim again. The dada-hair lady lumped her heavy body against the ship’s side. She reared up against the railing, which creaked with her weight. The changed people who had made it into the water were swimming clumsily away from the ship, learning the use of their new limbs as they worked them.

A shot winged by her ear. The dada-hair lady looked back. A few of the people lay broken on the deck, shot midway through the change. The dada-hair lady’s heart broke to see that Belite was one of the dead, but she had no time to stop; the captain was taking aim again. She tumbled herself over the side. As she fell towards the welcoming sea, a bright pain exploded in her foot. With a belching roar, she splashed into the water, and down. She looked. A thread of blood followed her down, trailing from her flipper. The captain had shot a hole clean through it. The frightening wound and the salty sting of the sea searing it made the dada-hair lady gasp. She took in water, coughed it out again, flailed with her new front limbs. Blood. She had to be giving blood to the earth in order to find a thing lost. But now she gave her blood to the sea. She had asked Uhamiri to bring them home. The gods almost never gave you exactly what you’d asked for.

Where was her boy? There! He must be that one, that little one, who swam so vigorously towards her, pushing his way through the other sleek, fat bodies. He came. She nuzzled him, urged him with her flipper to swim on ahead of her. Driven by the sound of the ship cracking apart and the danger of falling debris, she followed, learning her limbs as she went, trying not to faint away from the pain of the injured one. The sea was blue and held them on its breast. They were no longer lost.

And with that, the dada-hair lady felt the gift leave her. Not stop, as it had every time before; leave. She had used all her blood power to bring the people home. They were bahari now. The sea was where they would live.