A Simple Distance (17 page)

Returning to Tours the back way, through the kitchen, I mentioned the story to my mom. But she just laughed at the idea, said Polly wanted those keys so she could have access to Granny’s rum, said Polly was an alcoholic. Polly’s last name was Whitchell. Just remember the
witch
, Mom said.

* * *

They were waiting for me out on the front porch in the lawn chairs just this side of Granny’s stiff body: Uncle Charles and Uncle Martin, the family’s remaining patriarchs, new to the throne and still uncertain of its reach.

No one knows why, but the law says corpses are to be buried feet facing east. The logistics of the family’s plot made it so Uncle George’s headstone lay at the wrong end of his body. At the funeral, Uncle Charles was quick to remind guests to pay their respects to the dirt at his brother’s head, so Uncle George could hear.

I was avoiding them, back there in the kitchen. I did it very well. The only thing I did better in Baobique, actually, was obey. So I came when they called.

They called me, not my mom, to discuss the situation with her house. But she followed me as far as the living room, busied herself by stacking and restacking the silverware underneath the dish towel in the corner, close enough to hear our words.

With Uncle Martin, the lawyer, everything he says comes out like argument, awaits rebuttal. But with Uncle Charles, a physician like Grampy, like Susan, his words come out with an authority hard to question, as if straight from God’s lips. I know this is schooled, wouldn’t want my doctor second-guessing himself over something as important as my life. But still, it was unnerving.

When I was little, just after the divorce, before my mom sunk roots into her mattress, Uncle Charles brought us up to Canada for a long visit. He had a brand-new house in an area zoned for development, with a swimming pool and a two-car garage with a Jaguar inside. One evening he took me out on the front porch to look at all the land, empty of neighbors. He rested his hand on my shoulder like my dad would have, if my dad were Uncle Charles.

Look around you, Jean. Someday, all this land will be built up, with houses and schools and shops. All it takes is a little vision, a little foresight.

There is something about land to a Pascal, as if without it we’ve no ground.

I could see the wheels turning, turning inside his head. When he and George were little, they’d walk, hidden in the bush, through the piece of land upon which now sits the Australians’ half-built hotel, to the end and its steep drop to the Atlantic. Their sights, nearly two hundred degrees. So they could see almost everything. Almost. And they knew they were rich, in beauty alone, to have so much. Even though that land wasn’t Grampy’s, Charles and George would take it upon themselves to tear down makeshift shelters built by squatters. Creating their own consensus, they worked from underneath its authority alone—called it law: taking someone else’s home, fabricating entitlement.

I knew those men like my alter ego.

But Uncle Charles thought he knew more about law than he really did; he wasn’t George.

He told me, like he’d looked at my tonsils and they had to come out, calmly awaiting my agreement,
Jean, your granny has just died. We will bury her at Godwyn, of course, next to Grampy.

I knew that, agreed,
Of course
. But what was the catch?

Your Uncle Martin and I have been talking about Godwyn. And because it is becoming increasingly central to the family’s needs, with the burial plot, it needs to remain a family house—as Grampy intended.

I’m not sure I understand what you mean
. I wanted him to say it.

Now that the ice was broken, Uncle Martin chimed in, in terms I’d understand.
Title to Godwyn will go to all of us; not to your mother alone. It’s not fair for her to get the entire house to herself.

Uncle Charles:
You wouldn’t keep us from our mother’s grave, Jean. I’m sure of that.

Of course not, Uncle Charles.

Good. It’s settled, then. Martin will draw up the papers.

I was surprised my mom was staying out of it; I knew she’d heard. Maybe she just didn’t understand what her brothers were trying to pull. But I did. And I didn’t stay quiet.

The thing is, Uncle Charles, it’s not me that’s keeping anyone out of Godwyn. The family has always owned the burial plot. It doesn’t belong to my mom. The house, though, and that land adjacent to the graves, does belong to her. With Granny’s passing, the joint title they shared already transferred to my mom.

No!
He didn’t like my confidence.
I just told you. The title will remain with the family … Let me ask you, Jean, do you know what this family has meant to this island?

It wasn’t really a question. So I didn’t respond. Anything I’d say, he’d attack.

Uncle Martin sat back, understanding, perhaps better than Uncle Charles, that this was an argument, not a diagnosis, and that we were at an impasse that would not be crossed from our current posture.

It was crazy. Granny barely cold under cotton sheets in the next room; our hands should have been clawing the earth, digging her grave. Uncle Charles was wrong. He and his swimming pool, his Jaguar in Canada. I would not let him claim my mother’s only roof. He’d always thought her more buoyant than she really was.

* * *

My mom almost drowned when her brothers taught her to swim. She was seven. Granny wouldn’t have any of her children being scared of things as essential to life as the sea and thought it was time my mom and Auntie Clara learned to make their way in the water.

Grampy told the boys to see to it.

So Uncle George, Uncle Charles, and Uncle Martin rowed the girls out to the middle of the bay down at Champagne, where the water is warmed by radiated heat and gasses from volcanic activity bubbling up from porous rock and loose sand. The bright red coral just beyond is a national treasure now, protected by one of Uncle George’s laws, but back then merely a marker of an underwater drop so steep it’s still to be measured.

Uncle Charles, calm as the surgeon he’d later become, told the girls they couldn’t sink because the salt in the water would buoy their small bodies to the surface. Uncle Martin, having just learned the trick himself, told them,
Just look for the bubbles. Look for the bubbles. Follow them up
. Uncle George rowed and rowed.

My mom and Auntie Clara were scared, kept shouting,
Turn around! Turn around!

But the boys dropped anchor. Threw them in. And the girls went down against a flow of bubbles.

Uncle Charles was going to count to one hundred and twenty. But he only made it to ninety before George and Martin dove in after them, pulling their sisters back to the boat from the sandy bottom, willing their apologies light as air to breathe the life back in through Mom and Auntie Clara’s purple lips.

Sometimes he was simply wrong.

But we were both wrong to be warring right then. Uncle Martin reeled us in, but not without a jab of his own.

All right, gentlemen
, he said, addressing us both,
we will continue with this later. Charles and I have arrangements to make for Granny’s funeral.

CHAPTER 23

I needed some space from my uncles and I took it. I did not ask what I could do to help with the arrangements. And I didn’t ask my mom if she’d drive us back to Godwyn; I told her.

Let’s go, Mom. We’re leaving now.

In the car she lost her reticence. I got an unsolicited earful and started to see.

This was how things came around.

You should have been there for George’s funeral, Jean. You should have seen it. They wanted total control.

Who’s “they,” Mom?
I had to direct her line of thinking if I was to get any useful information.

Charles! Martin! Who else?! They wanted to let people inside the house. My house! They said they couldn’t ask Dame Devon to sit under a tent. But if I’d let her in, everyone would have started in. What do they take me for, na? A fool? I said no! I locked them all out.
Her eyes weren’t watching the road, they were watching the events of that afternoon: Dame Devon and Granny, come to pay their respects, pitched together under nothing but a tarp to protect themselves from the hot sun.

I reminded her where we were.
Mom, watch the road
. But I had to ask; didn’t want to have heard what I just did.
You didn’t let anyone in the house during Uncle George’s funeral? No one at all?

It’s my house, Jean! They would have overrun it. There were hundreds of people.

What if they needed to use the bathroom, Mom?

The state brought in the portable toilets. They trampled a whole section of my crotons! Look!
As we pulled up the drive, she pointed to the flattened area, overgrown with bush from so much recent rain.

My mother was out of control.
Loss
, I said.

What?
she yelled back.

Nothing.
We parked in the carport.

As if everyone in my family didn’t already have a head start, all that loss was making them crazy, bringing me right along.

Uncle Charles wanted Godwyn back because what he really wanted he couldn’t have: he wanted back his baby brother, whose cancer he couldn’t take away, and his mother, who died while he was on his way home. He wanted his family back, but all that was left was rotting cedar and a small patch of dirt upon which to lay their bodies, face their feet east.

Maybe it was me who needed to dig in my heels, stop our downward slide.

CHAPTER 24

At Godwyn we were cooled by intermittent showers, maybe reaching to Tours, maybe not. My mother disappeared again into the gardens. But I didn’t give chase. I sat on the covered porch, watched the rain, listened to it come and go under corrugated tin.

The flamboyant. The baobab. The guava. The plum. And me. All of us rooted there, growing.

With two beeps for notice, Susan’s muddy Subaru turned off the road and up the drive, parked under a cedar. Rising from my seat, I saw she was not alone. A tall, long-limbed man, with even longer dreds, exited opposite her. He was beaming, boyish, in jeans and a polo shirt.

Together, they walked along my mother’s croton hedge, the Jacob’s Coat, its two-toned leaves, soft and fuzzy, some more purple than green, some more green than purple. His hand resting lightly at the small of her back. Susan looked straight at me; smiled, too, but stiffly.

Hello,
I greeted them cautiously, politely from the porch.

Jean, this is Marcus Greene. He’s a freshman in the assembly and has practically kidnapped me to come meet you.

Hello, Jean
. His voice was confident but not arrogant. He took his hand from Susan’s back and reached out to me. We shook and he continued,
I was a great admirer of your Uncle George. I followed his political career quite closely. I was so sorry when he passed … I’m sorry, too, about your Granny. That is certainly a lot for one family to bear.

Wonderful. I looked to Susan for an explanation.

Marcus came with me to George’s funeral,
she offered.

We all looked to the ground, away from each other, for a split second.

Fine. They were standing in my mother’s yard, I had to say something. So I did.
It’s nice to meet you, Marcus. I’m sorry for their deaths, as well … But I’m afraid I’m not like my uncle, politically, at all. I’m sure I’d disappoint you if you knew me.
I wasn’t feeling friendly toward this man with his hands all over Susan.

He was not troubled by my tone, threw back his head and laughed. Clapped a couple of times to some funny joke only he’d understood.
I know, Jean. I know.

I asked,
What’s so funny?

Marcus confided,
Jean, I admired your uncle’s abilities, not his platform. He was much too conservative for the new Baobique.

The new Baobique?
I was curious.

Susan rolled her eyes, sighed.
Please, please! Don’t get him started. I’m only on a lunch break. We just came to say hello, not to give O.O.F.I. speeches.

O.O.F.I.?
Still curious, but not just about politics. Mostly, I wanted to know why Marcus could touch her so easily, why she rolled her eyes at him like they were an old married couple, and why his smile was so big by her side.

The only explanation I got, though, was the politics. Marcus was a member of the island’s newest party, Free Islands. Free Islands was grabbing at the reigns of control with new ideas of banding together with other small islands, gaining strength through numbers in the international arena as an organized political unit—O.O.F.I., they call themselves, the Organization of Free Islands.

It was getting increasingly difficult for the island to gain revenue with no land tax and the bulk of its workable soil still tied up in private estates, owned by just a handful of families, as if no time at all had passed since the Europeans left Baobique to run itself.

Marcus told me all of that in mock confidence, pretending to keep the secret from Susan, shielding her side of his mouth with his hand, bending in my direction.

Weed that I was, I was green with envy at their interplay.

I will see you later, Jean
, Susan assured me, as she initiated their departure, pulled away.

Marcus waved his long arms, called to me out the window,
I hope she will let us meet again, Pascal!
Happy, like a man with the world at his feet.

* * *

Jean! Jean … come!

My mom was out back by Grampy’s grave, where the cliff dropped, steep, to rocks and a salty sea, clearing space for Granny. Never mind her brothers’ threats, the situation’s volatility. I do believe, honestly, that my mother will never change; always planting herself before it’s time.

But Susan was right when she’d laid it out for me the day before. It was time I stopped asking my mother to be someone other than herself; time I met her where she was, instead of where I kept wanting her to be.

She waved me over with her machete, past the star fruit tree, the cherry guava, the larger, grafted guava. I cut my ankle on a low-lying pineapple plant, its long serrated leaves like a bread knife on my skin, drawing that blood the mosquitoes drank like rum.