A Simple Distance (5 page)

My grandmother had to pay Mr. Williams the price of his goat, because Sommerset had been pivotal to my Uncle George’s political party, had helped bring it into striking range. But later we heard rumors that maybe the goat hadn’t died after all and that Mr. Williams had been able to heal its leg with salt water.

Her son not even cold in his grave and already Mama is starting this up again, telling Lil I can’t be trusted with Godwyn because of that damn man and his goat. Saying she’s to add Charles and Martin to the title.

What is Granny starting up again?

This business with the title to Godwyn—adding my brothers so neither of us can claim it.

Neither of “us” … So it’s not about the goat.

No, Jean. It’s not about the goat. You know damn well what it’s about. And you have to fix it. You have to undo what you’ve done.

My lungs leaked their air.

It was my mom and Granny on the deed to Godwyn: survivor take all. Adding my uncles to inherit Granny’s portion—my cousins would run my mom out in no time flat.

You should have kept your business to yourself
, she goaded.

I tried
. Still trying to remain calm.

You tried? Please, Jean. What kind of fool do you take me for? Mr. Henry lived his whole life in Baobique, led your uncle’s constituency at Port Commons. You think his wife and children don’t know about him carrying on with that man, that Trinidadian chef in Bato? You take us all for fools. But you’re the fool, Jean. Look at what you’ve cost us.

Jesus, Mom. You think I meant for it to happen? Uncle Martin snuck up on us!

I don’t need to hear the details! Just tell Granny you take it all back.

Take it all back? How?

Breath moving shallow and fast, shallow and fast, in and out of my lungs. I scanned my studio for somewhere to go. On the couch, my mother’s many bags. She hadn’t come to just rest for three weeks with the free plane ticket from my credit card company. She’d come to stay, to make her problem mine, until I took care of it.

I turned around, briefcase and house keys still in my hand from my arrival minutes earlier when I walked in on her and Auntie Lillian talking about me long distance, accruing some outrageous phone bill I’d have to pay, and I walked back out the door.

Don’t you walk out on me, young lady.

So I ran. I ran back out to the trendy street at the corner, down the block of restaurants, gourmet grocers, and upscale pet stores, ducked into the smallest coffee shop available, ordered a latte for comfort and disguise, should anyone wonder why I was there, in work clothes, in the middle of the day.

I knew my mom wouldn’t wander that far. She always stayed close to home.

CHAPTER 7

When uncle George’s tumors took a turn for the worse, I boarded a plane in San Francisco and for sixteen straight hours remembered why it was I didn’t visit Baobique more often.

I flew American. American is the only major carrier that flies to the island of Baobique, in the West Indies. One night, in late October, from 10:00 in the evening until 2:00 the next afternoon, I flew on American airplanes, ran through American terminals, wrote in my American notebook printed in Roaring Springs, Pennsylvania, the state in which I attended college, to get from San Francisco to the very un-American island of Baobique, where I hoped to be able to say goodbye to my Uncle George before he died.

The tumor he’d gone to Canada to shrink had grown back, as anticipated. I’d talked with him the day before, the day everyone on my mother’s side of the family started saying,
If you’re going to visit, visit now.

And so I flew all night, carried a week’s needs on my back, held my breath until I could let him know I wanted to see him alive more than I wanted to be one of those people who’d maybe make it out for the funeral.

* * *

When I was eight, the year of my country’s bicentennial, 1976, I visited Baobique with my mother for the first time. She cut my long hair short, short, taking a dull scissors to my head as I sat cross-legged at the kitchen table. She said it was too hot in Baobique, said I would overheat. But I knew she just didn’t want to be bothered with the burden of braiding my hair when she returned home. The job I did on my own in the mornings was good enough for my country, but not for hers.

After my haircut, the first thing I did was run to the grocery store for some Lipton tea and low-fat milk. I was halfway down the first aisle when an old lady stopped me, took my round brown face in her blanched white hand, and announced to the entire produce section what an adorable little boy I was.

* * *

My Uncle George was the reason I became a lawyer. It was a reaction of sorts, a statement of purpose: to stand for that which he did not.

The last time I’d seen him, I had just graduated from college. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life, had liked political theory a lot. And at the time, Uncle George was Chief Minister of Baobique. I asked him if he could get me a job with the government for the summer, and he opened his home to me for as long as I wished.

That was the plan, anyway.

That whole summer, age twenty-two, I ran every morning. I was the only jogger in Baobique. To this day, there is still only one paved road that circles the island, a second that cuts through the interior at the mid-point. I’d run up the interior road, up past the construction workers who, because of my short, short hair and boyish build, would yell out,
Man or ’oman? Man or ’oman?
just after I crossed into view. Sending themselves into hysterics. I’d run up to the thin waterfall pouring out the side of the cliff, just past the little river where I saw for the first time that sideways-running hermit crab, looking like it was heading away from what it wanted, or maybe moving straight toward it and only seeming sideways. Sometimes I’d run all the way to the Hughes Estate, a bed-and-breakfast now, but once a big banana plantation.

I also walked a lot. Once, I walked all the way to Milieu, down the stretch of road called One-Mile, where my grandmother still owned fifty or sixty acres. It was a Wednesday and I saw the banana trucks headed past me to the port in Bato. But just past the orchid farm run by a couple of Canadians, my uncle’s law partner, Gerald, stopped me, turned me back, told me I’d
better not wander so far from home.

Gerald must have said something to Uncle George, because soon after that my uncle came home early from work, put me in his 1970 Toyota, its right-side drive, drove me around the entire island. An escort. From the car, the narrowness of that single road made the cliffs that dropped from its sides and the forests that crept over its top feel close, close.

We started out on the De Canne side of the closest mountain to the Bato coast. I had been jogging it daily and I knew each turn of the road on a more intimate level than my uncle assumed. Yet each of those turns, each stretch of new pavement, attached to some part of his life; the road itself, one of his recent accomplishments, was the product of a fruitful negotiation with the Japanese government.

We drove until we reached the Carib Reserve, a small area deemed to have symbolic importance now that there are so few Caribs left on the island. The Caribs came up from South America and killed off all of the original inhabitants of Baobique, the Arawaks. The Caribs were then almost completely killed off by or mixed in with those who came next, the Europeans and their imported African slaves. They are brown-skinned, with straight black hair and flat noses. They were extremely fierce before the Europeans came. Now they weave beautiful handicrafts for the tourists and a couple of them have very nice one-room hotels. My uncle and I stopped at one for a drink.

After we left the Carib Reserve, Uncle George pointed to an outcrop just before we reached Tete Queue, upon which stood an old house; he said that was where an American homosexual used to live, a man he had run off the island for corrupting the local boys with his disgusting practices.

At twenty-two, I didn’t know much, didn’t know what my future held in store. But my hands sunk underneath my legs as I sat in Uncle George’s passenger seat, fingers trembling, knowing I was one of those Americans my uncle would never voluntarily welcome into his home, drive around his island, or kiss goodnight. I also knew I was scared. I was scared for him to know. So I called the airline that night. Told them I needed to leave Baobique. Bought myself a three-legged ticket to California: Baobique to San Juan, San Juan to Houston, Houston to San Francisco, on American for safety. My future path turned out to be a silent statement of protest. I never could bring myself to be myself in his presence.

* * *

Cynthia told me she knew at twelve. Coming back from summer camp and her first kiss from another girl, her mother finding a love note folded into a square, stuck in with the laundry, and promptly sending Cynthia into therapy to get it, whatever it was, reversed. My first lover knew at fourteen, when she had her first affair, with a twenty-six-year-old female drummer in a local band, spending the next six years drunk, sober at twenty.

I only admitted I was gay at twenty-two, to myself, sitting in the passenger seat of my Uncle George’s Toyota, as he told me, through the story of a homosexual he ran off the island, that gay Americans were not safe in Baobique while he was around. He’d gone on to tell me he didn’t stop there, that he’d since established and enforced some of the strictest antisodomy laws in the Caribbean, with criminal penalties of five to ten years in prison for the touching of the wrong peoples’ privates. The kind of laws that make Americans call places like Baobique backward.

Before I fled his island, I sat with him in his living room while he hosted a white Californian eco-tourist that one of my cousins brought by. The tourist didn’t know he was talking to the Chief Minister, and proceeded, as many do, to tell my uncle exactly how his country should be run. I was embarrassed, disgusted by the tourist and any of him I might have inside me for also being an American, relishing the moment my cousin explained to the mortified tourist who my uncle was like I have relished few others in my life.

Still, my plan was to steal some of his power. If he was there to make laws that made people like me illegal, I’d be somewhere else fighting back.

Problem was he’d scared me, and I wanted his love too much.

When I left my uncle’s house that trip, running back to my United States so the part of me that was gay could think straight, I left behind the part that was Baobiquen, as if removing one layer of myself to save another. It was as if I was choosing sides without knowing it, as if I was taking sides against myself.

I went to law school in San Francisco, where I felt safe. And I practiced civil rights beyond his reach.

Civil rights? They don’t need civil rights in San Francisco. They have too many already,
he’d tease on the phone. But I knew he was proud of me for following him into law. Trusting him with my life’s choices, like that.

I hadn’t the courage to go back for nearly a decade. And only then because Uncle George was dying. It was he, it seemed, who kept me coming and going, coming and going.

When Uncle George found out he had brain cancer, my Uncle Charles, a doctor in Canada, made him fly up to North America for chemotherapy. Baobique’s medical advancements have been few. Its hospital, understaffed and overcrowded, had started using wooden pallets for beds, lining them up on the floor in rows.

So Uncle George went to Canada to have his tumor shrunk. And in the cold, colorless land of modern medicine, Uncle George shrank right along with it. When he talked at all, he talked of rowing his dingy in the sea for exercise. Eventually, he told his brother that when the next round of chemotherapy was finished, he was going back home, to Baobique. He knew the tumor would come back. The day before I flew to see him, its bulk pressed up against the part of his brain that controlled his right side, paralyzing his leg, his arm, and half his face, so he slurred his words a bit when we spoke on the phone and he asked
when
I was coming. They later called it, the resultant paralysis, a
mass effect
.

Before I landed in Baobique to see him, Beckford Hall being heavily trafficked for the funeral of the late Prime Minister, my plane circled the island twice. And from the air Baobique looked, as it always does, newly sprouted out of the seas—on one side the Atlantic, on the other the Caribbean—a solid mass of green sticking straight up and held there by the top of a volcano anchored deep below, like a gigantic Chia pet, dark green, combed back by winds coming, maybe, all the way from Africa, continuing, maybe, all the way to San Francisco.

I had never seen so many cars at Beckford Hall. They spilled over the small lot and onto the tarmac. Dignitaries from our plane and others right behind would be driven into Bato, the capital, for the weekend. They would pass the Hill Estate on the way, the family home of the late Prime Minister, the Socialist, who would be buried there against his wishes.

At customs, a victory of sorts. The young officer didn’t check my overstuffed backpack after I told him I was on island to visit my sick uncle, George Pascal, and was staying with my mom, his sister, at Godwyn. A victory of sorts, because I had no explanation for the five electronic rodent traps my mom had asked me to bring.

My mom and Auntie Clara picked me up in the jeep. On the way to Tours, both of them at once, explaining something to me.

Tours is my grandmother’s house, built for her by my grandfather after their children had all grown and left the family home at Godwyn. It is more yard than house, the house more functional than beautiful. To look at, it is not much; it is not pretty like my mom’s Godwyn, or Uncle George’s house in De Canne with his wall of windows looking out onto the sea.

Tours is simple: cement blocks painted white on the outside, off-white on the inside; one story, three bedrooms spun off a central dining and living area; kitchen in back. My grandmother, after the big hurricane in the ’70s, walled in half the front porch with more of the cinder blocks, unpainted, meant to let air through but not much light. The other half she secured with wrought iron bars, painted brown. The porch is where we gathered, mostly because that is where my grandmother could always be found, on her lawn chair, staring outside through the bars.