Left at the Mango Tree (14 page)

Precisely because magic didn’t bother Puymute, who concerned himself as exclusively and as passionately with his humble collection of rainbow notes as Raoul did with his plain-as-noses-on-faces philosophies, he never thought twice about making Gustave Vilder his general manager. Gustave could mix up all the potions and cook up all the spells he wanted on his own time, as long as he kept the plantation up and running. But, Puymute now realized, stomping every square inch of two acres from sun-up to sundown was about as far from up-and-running as you could get.

“Shoulda listened,” he said, and shook his head. “Shoulda listened.”

The islanders had tried to warn him that hiring Gustave to manage his affairs and his fruit was unwise, but Puymute hadn’t paid attention. And, he had to admit, up to now—and a good ten years had passed so far—Gustave had done as decent a job as anyone could have.

“Barely get a car on this island that’ll run you that long,” Puymute stomped. “Guess a breakdown was due.”

At ten years and two days, quite a respectable breakdown it was. Not only did Puymute (like the other growers on Oh) grow pineapples for pitiful profits, which was bad enough, but now he had trouble with the law, too. Or maybe with a swindling ghost.

He shook his head again. “Shoulda listened.”

In Mr. Puymute’s defense, that was easier said than done. Gustave had acted cleverly when he sought the plantation post,
calling on the owner at just the right time, when his general manager, Agustín Boe, was dead.

“Snakebite,” Puymute told him, and jostled his head from side to side.

Not one to dodge the benefits of another’s misfortune, Gustave had presented himself at the salmon-colored manor house that set off the green-gold sea below it and the light blue sky above. He told Puymute that the pickers were drinking beer in the patch, that a new manager must be installed straight away. He didn’t tell Puymute that he himself had delivered the beer, instructing the men—on Puymute’s behalf—to drink to the dead general manager’s health.

Puymute, anxious for the plantation to be up and running again, and sober, did as Gustave said. So before poor Agustín was even buried, he was replaced, his shoes and his teacup filled. Gustave sipped from it and looked out the first-story window of that same room in which, years later, he would receive the accusing, fist-pounding Officer Orlean. He took his place in the chair behind the desk and propped his feet on top of it, on the cardboard cover of an account book stained with Mr. Boe’s inky fingerprints. Then he grinned and lit a celebratory cigar. In the patch below, the bloated pickers tossed aside their empty beer bottles and returned to their work.

Gustave’s hiring had been hasty, no question about it. Puymute saw that now.

And yet.

Most of the workers feared Gustave so, and for so long, that they didn’t dare turn up late or sleep on the job or argue when their salaries were sliced thinner than the pineapples Bang chopped up at the airport. Not even Edouard, the island’s strongest man—who
could lift four crates of pineapples at once, and high up over his head—dared to refuse Gustave a favor or to ignore one of his orders. Hmm. (Puymute stomped on an empty bottle that shattered under his weight; no hard evidence there.) Maybe the islanders were wrong, after all, Puymute rebutted. Maybe Gustave Vilder was a fine general manager, who happened to have run into a spot of bad luck.

“Oy! Mr. Puymute. Oy there!” Puymute’s rebuttals were interrupted by one Pedro Bunch, still carrying walking-stick and sack of cassava. “Fancy finding yourself here!”

“What? On my own property?” Puymute felt about Pedro the way everybody on Oh did. All you could do was to cross yourself and hope the storm would soon pass.

“What’s that you’re doing, Mr. Puymute?”

“I’m missing two acres’ worth and I’m looking for clues. What’s it look like I’m doing?” Puymute stomped with intensified rigor.

“Didn’t look to me like you were looking for clues. Looks like you’re stomping. You don’t have ants in your shoes, do you?”

Puymute turned to stare at Pedro. He opened his mouth to speak and then thought better of it. No slow storm ever blew by faster because you yelled at it. He shut his mouth and turned back to the ground and his search.

“What kind of clue you think you’ll find, then, Mr. Puymute?”

“Don’t know exactly. Some kind of hard evidence to take to the police so they’ll call off their Customs and Excise hounds, I hope. What brings you round here anyway, with such a heavy sack?”

What
had
brought Pedro into Puymute’s pineapple patch, onto his plantation, which lay at the bottom of Dante’s mountain, on the opposite side from that where his lonely house was situated?

“Felt like a climb up top,” Pedro replied. “View from up there don’t come any finer.”

“But why come down on this side, lugging your supper around?”

“Supper? My, no! This isn’t for supper. Have a stew all ready at home for that.”

While Puymute stomped, Pedro talked. He talked about his stew, and the pork snout he used to flavor it. He talked about his shoes (they were wearing thin) and about the Island Post (he was awaiting a package). He talked about cotton and cricket. About ginger and gin. Newsprint, nectarines, and nuns. About everything except the reason for which he happened to be on the plantation that day. When he started in on sea turtles, Puymute could take no more. He stopped his stomping and turned around, grappling for some way to break the speaker’s stride.

“Say, Pedro, you don’t recall seeing anything out of order here lately, do you?”

“Out of order?”

“Yes, you know, anything unusual.”

“Oh, no sirree. Nothing unusual around here. Not unless you count...,” Pedro paused for dramatic effect before continuing, “... no, that’s not so unusual. Hardly worth mentioning.”

“What isn’t?”

“Well,” Pedro started and stopped again. “Nah. Couldn’t mean a thing.”

“Now, he stops talking,” Puymute muttered under his breath. “What is it, Pedro?” he nearly shouted at the old man. “Let me be the judge of what it means.”

“Well,” Pedro started once more, “it’s just that I found Raoul Orlean sneaking around a bit ago. Spying from up top, sneaking his way back down. That’s why I—”

“Why you what?”

“Why I...why I...why I got distracted and came down the wrong side of the mountain. He nearly threatened me if I didn’t stop walking behind him. I was so scared I ran off and got turned around.”

Not hard evidence, but certainly a clue. Why, wondered Puymute, would Raoul Orlean be sneaking around, threatening the likes of Pedro Bunch, instead of conducting a proper up-front investigation? What, exactly, was he hiding?

In an instant the storm was gone and Puymute forgot all about the blathering Pedro. Puymute would have to pose these questions, and others, to his general manager Gustave. Off he went to do so, stomping and running at once, like an angry ostrich crossing a plain.

Back at the manor house, Gustave was just returning from his walk to town and his sighting of my little-more-than-newborn self at the market. He was worried and his head hurt. The mystery of me still weighed heavy on his mind, and even heavier weighed the agitation caused by Raoul’s investigation. There was too much magic in the air, even for Oh to handle, too much noise. The waves were too agitated, the wind too strong. Gustave sat behind his desk and propped his feet on top of it, the way he often did.

A cigar. That was what he needed. Something to savor while he mulled over his problems, figured out how he had fathered Almondine and how to stop the spotlight that followed his every move. On Oh it was Gustave who wielded the magic. Not the other way around. Magical deeds couldn’t just overlap and interfere with each other. Unknown variables did not belong in Gustave’s
simple maths. But he seemed to be faced with one now, one that had the islanders (and one taxman) breathing down his neck. How could he get rid of them? How could he cure their bellyaches and sweeten the bitter taste in their mouths?

Gustave, who didn’t see how he would ever answer such queries, searched the drawers of his desk for matches to light his cigar. From the first one he pulled a ball of string, a seashell, three marbles and a dead bug. From the second, a walnut, sunglasses, a fishhook, and some keys. And from the third, a bandage and a dirty magazine. Not a single match to light a cigar that he so desperately needed to savor. He was still worried and his head still hurt. He rubbed his temples and the bridge of his nose, closed his eyes and rubbed those, too. He opened them again, first right, then left, and sighed. Perhaps it was best to just call it a day.

Gustave stood and stepped back from the desk, about to turn away from it, and stopped. Something in the linear junkyard on its surface caught his eye. An arithmetic error announced by the string or the seashell. Or the solution’s next logical step, suggested by the fishhook or the dirty magazine.

“I see it now,” he said. “I see it very clearly.”

9

L
ike a piece of shiny hard candy gnawed and sucked by the mouth of the sea, Oh’s sandy shore dissolves. Its contours thin and grow jagged, its edges tear, its heart a plaything for the watery tongue that prods its rent middle then, with healing laps, smoothes the cracks and gashes until the next wave’s assault. Harboring no grudge or rancor alongside its few bobbing crafts, the gritty floor yields and folds, compliant and pliable host to the tide that leaves its threshold bare. In turn, the palm and the bougainvillea, the loofah and the lily, bare themselves before the advances of the wind, rain, and sun—the billowing, pelting, and parching—their surrender and resilience witness to the lessons gleaned from the example of the supple shore.

To the forces that prey upon it—meteorological, magical, or otherwise—the island has only ever known surrender, for what sense is there in trying to contain the uncontainable? Hex or hurricane, certain forces once set in motion took on a life of their own and Oh knew better than to resist them. Resistance required energy better spent saved, for when the forces set in motion were done and the island could recover in their wake. After the drought, the banana bears fruit; after the downpour, the almond flowers. After the moon’s meddling, the leaves repair their song.

Pliable like the island’s almonds or its bananas, and equally resilient, the islanders mimicked the landscape, learning by example and recovering quickly from the bites of the indiscriminate jaws of fate. Droughts and downpours were temporary; tides could not dissolve their desires. When the wind toppled the stand where Raleigh Bello sold fried seaweed, he rebuilt it. When the rain sent Alejandro Creek’s motorbike tumbling down a hill in a mudslide, he retrieved it. And when the sun dried up Lullaby Peet’s bed of buttercups and orchids, she replanted. The people of Oh would not be gnawed and sucked like shiny candies, and Raleigh, Alejandro, and Lullaby of this were proof positive. As was Abigail Davies, who had perfected the art of withstanding the advances of the elements, and those of the islanders as well.

Abigail is as near a grandmother as I have, on the island, anyway. From the time she delivered me (she was, and still is, Oh’s most practiced midwife, as you’re about to hear), she took it upon herself to defend my interests, and a fine job of it she did. My real grandmother, Emma Patrice, was Abigail’s closest girlhood friend and long gone by the time I was born, already swallowed up by her snowy mountain. In her absence—or because of it—Abigail felt as protective of me as if I were her own.

Her path to midwifery began when her girlhood came to an almost-overnight close at the age of fifteen, as her body began to press itself with more and more insistence against her taut clothing. She was tall and full and quick and smooth, and before long it was all her mother could do to contain Abigail’s breasts, which demonstrated a tendency to spill over the top of any frock her mother stitched her. As Abigail blossomed, the rest of the Davies family withered, for the money her father made building small fishing boats was quickly turned into bolts of cloth from the market,
Abigail’s mother sewing all the patterns she could think of to try and keep the girl covered. There was little money left for shrimp and cheese and ham, so the family got by on vegetable broth, containing little more than two plump onions that bobbed mockingly in all the salted water the family pot could hold.

When Abigail turned sixteen, the rest of the Davies family, no longer willing to withstand the insult of the bosomy stew, decided to marry her off. She was a catch after all. Any of her father’s customers would have attested to it. She had black eyes and black hair (like all the islanders), which she braided and piled on top of her head, and her disposition was spicy. Perhaps a little too much so, for though all the fishermen wanted a taste, no one wanted to marry her. They offered her ice cream or whiskey or lacy socks to entice her onto their bobbing crafts, but when she returned ashore at the end of the day she had not-so-much as a portion of the day’s catch to show for herself. Faced nightly with the sight of her thinning parents and siblings, while the fishermen’s offerings kept her plump, she often hid in her father’s unfinished boats and cried herself to sleep.