The Empty Hammock (3 page)

Her mother grinned and waved as she got out of the car. “You must have driven like all the demons of hell were at your back to get here,” she laughed. “You are early.”

She hugged her mother tightly and breathed deeply.

“It’s good to be home, Ma.”

“Bout time,” her brother said, walking down the steps his lithe form encased in jeans. He was broad in shoulder and narrow of hip, a real charmer, his straight hair was slicked back and his glasses made him look like a schoolmaster. His chocolate brown eyes were laughing at her behind the frames and she suddenly wished that they were children again.

He grabbed her from their mother in a body tackle and hugged her.

“I missed you, Little Ana,” he said, laughing. “I have been here a day now and have no one to take the cussing when mama decides to dish it out.” His tall frame towered over hers as he stared down at her.

“Oh stop it,” Clara Méndez said, as she turned off the garden hose. “I only use my stern voice to give wise counsel.”

“Are you on vacation Carey?” Ana asked as she looked at the house. It was situated at the top of a hill, on two acres of very fertile land, overlooking the sea. It was surrounded by greenery, mostly palm trees. Ana could see that the mango trees were heavy with fruit and the pear and breadfruit trees were covered in blossoms.

“I'm now in private practice with Lawrence and Paulson, so no more traveling between hospitals; I want stability and more money. I told you all of this last month.

My wife is visiting her parents in Miami and I am not cooking, so I took a couple of days to use one stone to kill both birds. Besides, I realize I don't see enough of you, ‘miss high powered marketer.’

He took Ana’s suitcase from the car, “how long are you planning to stay? The whole year?” He groaned while he pulled her bag into the house.

“Breakfast will be served soon,” Ana’s mother said, heading into the house. She understood the dazed look that was in Ana’s eyes. After leaving the concrete jungle that was Kingston and coming to Rio Bueno, one had to sit down and absorb beauty in pieces.

Ana stood with her hands akimbo, inhaled slowly, and gazed at the sparkling blue of the Caribbean waters, which seemed as if it was in competition with the blue of the sky. If she were a painter, she would spend a lifetime capturing all this beauty: the blues, the greens, the lawn in the front yard, the trees in the backyard and beyond, and the mountains in the distance.

Her mother’s flowers were starkly beautiful in the driveway, the different colors and hues blending together to create a picturesque splash to the green lawn.

She had never felt like this before, so overwhelmed by the beauty of nature.  Tears streamed down her face as she sat in the driveway unmindful of her clothes. She suddenly felt as if nature was telling her something, as if there was something that she must do.

“Ana, are you alright?” Her mother and her brother were peering at her as if she had two heads.

She looked at them through tear-washed eyes and shook her head. “I…I… love this place,” she sobbed, “I love this country, I love the people.”

“It’s a nervous breakdown,” Carey said matter-of-factly. “She was under too much stress at work. It’s just catching up with her. Up you go, young lady.” He scooped her up from the walk and carried her into the house and deposited her gently on a sofa.

“I want to go back outside,” Ana said, trembling.

Carey looked at his mother and shrugged.

“What was she talking about?” Clara whispered. “I have not seen such madness since your father. Do you think it’s inherited?”

“No, Ma,” Carey said hesitantly. “It is just a reaction to the stress she’s been undergoing; we’ll just have to allow her to get plenty of rest on this vacation.”

Ana sat across from them, the weird feeling that she was on the verge of a self discovery was closing in on her, she barely registered that her mother and brother were sitting across from her or that she was sitting in the living room that used to be her father’s showpiece with all his Taino artifacts.

“Ana, listen to me,” Carey said and knelt before her. “I recommend that you sleep as much as you can while you are here. How many hours have you been sleeping at night?”

“Oh…about five or so.”

“Not good enough,” Carey said, looking at her worriedly. Her hazel eyes looked more green than brown at the moment. She was obviously troubled. “Let’s hook you up with some food and then you can regale us with all your Probe Inc. happenings. How is that girl you hired for a secretary, the one that speaks like she is on the verge of an asthmatic wheeze?”

Ana nodded and forced a laugh. “She’s as whiny as ever.” She was struggling against the feeling that she was desperate and she needed to do something urgently.

******

Breakfast was Carey and Ana’s favorite: fried fish with bammy. Their mother used sweet cassava and made the bammy from scratch.

“How is it?” Clara asked worriedly. She was always trying to get it right.

“It's good Ma,” Carey answered, taking one more from the basket that was in the center of the table. “Tell me how you do it again?”

“Well I…” Clara was getting ready to expound on the finer points of making the bammy, when Ana piped up.

“It has in a bit more salt than the natives would have made it.”

“Well, well, Miss Bammy Maker,” declared Carey curiously. “How do you know this?”

“The original people, the Tainos, used to grate the root on a board that they covered with small pebbles until it formed a paste. Then they would put it into a wicker tube, which they would hang on a branch, they would then attach a heavy stone or some other weight to it to force the poisonous liquid out through the wicker. They would leave the paste to dry and pound it with a stone mortar to make flour, add sea salt for flavor and pound, to form flat cakes; they would then bake it to perfection on a clay griddle.”

Carey’s fork was half-way to his mouth, and Clara was just staring.

Ana continued to eat as if she didn't say something out of the ordinary.

“Ana, I thought you had no time for anything besides marketing. “How could you remember this and not my birthday last week?” Clara asked incredulously.

Ana looked up, “I don’t know, it was just there in my head. Probably Dad told me,” she said staring from her brother to her mother. “Your birthday was last week?”

They looked at each other and then continued eating. Ana was definitely not herself.

CHAPTER THREE

“Ma, I want to see that treasure chest you were so agog about,” Ana declared after breakfast.

They were lounging around the back in hammocks. Ana was peeping at the sky through her leafy kingdom as the breeze gently swayed the hammock.

Carey laughed. “I was so frustrated last night that I could not get the rusty lock off the thing, I gave up. The way mom described it, I thought it was a big, old treasure chest that you’d see in the movies. Instead it was more like a tall shoe box with a handle,” he said and looked at his mother who was in the process of getting out of the hammock.

“Come, Ana. I am sure, between the two of us ladies, we can open the box.”

Clara and Ana hauled the chest from where she had stashed it into the corner of the veranda and stood over it. The box was rusty with age and had algae growing at the sides and on the top. It was sealed closed by rust and a heavy looking lock that seemed as if all its properties had merged together over the years.

“Wow, this is exciting,” Ana said, gushing. “There could be treasure in there. Dad should be here to see this.”

“Well, I can’t agree more,” Carey mumbled. “Then he would be the one to have to tussle with this sealed shut baby here.”

“Where exactly did you dig it up, Mom?” Ana asked curiously.

“Under that tree,” Clara said, pointing to a palm tree. “I wanted to plant some flowers over there. It would have been good to look at while hanging in the hammocks, but now I'm not so sure, I want to find out if there is more treasure there.”

“Well lets clean it up,” Ana said enthusiastically. “We have to open it today. I won’t sleep tonight if I can’t see what’s inside.”

After putting on gloves, each of them took a side of the treasure chest to clean.

“Remember the time when Dad found the human bone in the bottom of his lettuce garden?” Carey asked, “he was deliriously happy for weeks. He dug up the whole place looking for more but only found that one bone.”

“It was a foot bone,” said Ana. “The National Heritage Trust gave it to the local Taino museum.”

“That’s when your father started going crazy,” Clara muttered. “He kept going down to the palm trees. Said he had to warn them. When I asked who, he clammed up.”

“He was watching too much sci-fi,” Carey said laughing.

Ana frowned, “the Tainos were his passion. He knows their history more than anyone in the world. It’s as if he thought they were his people.”

Clara laughed, “well I am certain that I'm of African decent, and that my parents came here on a slave ship. Just take a look at my hair, she grabbed off her tie head and wiped her face with it.”

Her hair was sticking up all over her head. The coarse short strands were braided in big plaits that refused to stay down.

“How I hooked up with a man who was so fascinated with the past, I don’t know. He was lecturing history at the University of the West Indies when I went there.”

“Oooh.” Carey and Ana looked at each other and smiled. They were never tired of hearing about their parent’s romance.

“He came into the classroom,” Clara scrubbed her side of the chest, her tongue sticking out a bit from her mouth, “then he looked at me and I felt dizzy. He was just the most handsome man I'd ever seen. He gave me a C that semester and I went to his office to contest my grade.

He said to me, ‘Well… Clara Sinclair, if you were not staring at me so much in class you would know what I was saying and you would have gotten a better grade’. She mimicked her late husband’s deep voice and laughed.

“I married him six weeks after that and had Carey nine months later.  We moved to Rio Bueno so that we could be near his pet project, the Tainos. And Lord help me, that man was obsessed. He even spoke the language.”

Ana laughed. “That’s funny. Our grandfather is Spanish. Weren’t the Spanish the ones to discover the New World and wipe out the Indians on the islands? If Daddy’s claim is true then where would his lineage start, wasn’t there some mass genocide or something.”

Ana’s curly hair was falling from her bun and she was panting as she spoke. The uneasy feeling was coming back. For all her twenty-six years she had prided herself as a rational thinker. She was losing it. She felt as if she should hurry and so she started scrubbing the box urgently.

She had to see what was inside. What was in the box was the key.

“What did you say?” Carey asked wearily, as he watched his sister scrubbing as if her life depended on it.

“I didn’t say anything,” Ana said, panting.

“You said what was in the box is key,” Carey repeated, frowning.

“Yes you did,” Clara said, before she could begin protesting.

“I probably said what we needed was a key.” Ana looked up at her mother and kept scrubbing.

They scrubbed until lunchtime and the years of dirt and grime kept coming off layer by layer. They could actually see the crease where the lid of the box met the bottom.

“There is a pattern on the box,” Carey announced after a few minutes.

“Good,” Clara declared. “I say, let us eat and then come back and see it.”

“No,” Ana shouted. “We have to do it now. We have to open the box before the end of the day. Please guys, I am so anxious about this.”

“You need rest, that’s what,” her mother declared. “This buried treasure thing has gotten to your head. We could find nothing in there. This property was only bush and thick weeds interspersed with large trees when we bought it from Schuster and Landers, the real estate dealers. The only things that could be considered familiar were the palm trees. If there is treasure in there,” she pointed to the rusty box, “somebody would have had to brave it in the dense foliage to dig up the ground and then bury it.”

“It could be a slave hiding his masters gold that he stole from the Seville plantation,” Carey piped up, “that should fetch quite a bit of money when we show it to the world.” He grinned at Ana. “Or it could be a French buccaneer hiding his jewels.”

“You are crazy,” Ana laughed. “The French were never here in Jamaica for any period of time. Know your history, Carey.”

“I'm going inside to fix us some guava juice and then we eat rice and peas and curried goat,” Clara announced as she got up from the floor.

Ana went around to Carey’s side of the box to look at the pattern. “Wow, it’s an initial,” she whispered.

“How do you know that sister dear? I can barely see the thing.”

“It is a J,” she said pointing, “it is written in cursive or what we would call join up, and that is a P. It is carved in the iron, this belonged to JP.”

“Yeah,” Carey shouted, his full lips pouting, “we have the property of JP, will he please come and get it!”