Eden Burning Read online

  “This is a translation I made,” Père explained. “From the French, naturally. The original is in my vault in town. It’s crumbling, ought to be in a museum. Well, I’ll get to that one of these days. Here it is: ‘Diary of the First François.’

  “‘We sailed from Havre de Grace on the English ship Pennington in the year of our Lord 1673, I being fifteen years of age and indentured for seven years to a Mr. Raoul D’Arcy on the island of St. Felice in the West Indies; he to pay my passage and clothe me, he to pay me three hundred pounds of tobacco at the end of my service.’”

  Père turned some pages. “Fascinating. Here, listen to this. ‘We labor from a quarter of an hour after sunrise to a quarter of an hour after sunset. I share a cabin with two black slaves. They are pleasant enough, poor creatures. They suffer, but I suffer worse than they do. My master admits to working the white man harder because after seven years he will part with him; but the Negro is his for life and must therefore be kept in health.’”

  “I thought,” Tee remarked, “our ancestor was a buccaneer.”

  “Oh, yes! He ran away to join the buccaneers. You can hardly blame him. And yet—what a devilish thing is human nature!—he became more savage than the master whom he had escaped. Listen to this. ‘We came alongside the Garza Blanca, a merchantman sailing for Spain, sometime before moonrise. We boarded without a sound, surprising the watch, whom we threw overboard into a heavy sea. We bayonetted the captain, seized the guns, and put to shore, there to dispose of a goodly cargo: gold, tobacco, hides, and a great prize in pearls.’”

  “I don’t think,” Tee shuddered, “I want to know any more about this François.” She stretched out her arm, turning it over to regard the small cluster of blue veining at the elbow. “I can’t believe his blood runs in my veins…. A savage like him!”

  “Many generations removed, my dear,” Père said complacently. “And anyway he became a gentleman before very long.” He flipped through a few more pages. “‘I have resolved to become provident, having seen my lads squander a year’s gain on brandy and’”—Père coughed—“other things. ‘I mean to buy land and live on my property like a gentleman, to marry well—’” He closed the notebook. “And so he did. He married Virginia Durand, daughter of a well-established planter who had apparently no qualms about giving her to a reformed buccaneer. He lived, incidentally, to make a fortune in sugar before he was forty. Sugar’s not a native plant; you did know that, didn’t you?” Père frowned. “Tee, I’m feeling the signs of age. I was about to tell you about sugar and all of a sudden the facts have fled. Would you believe it possible that I can’t name the place where it originated?”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Francis, sir,” Clyde said. “It was the Canary Islands. Columbus brought the first cuttings from there.”

  “Why, yes, you’re right; of course you are.”

  “Yes, sir. I read it in the National Geographic.”

  “You read the Geographic!”

  “I’ve a friend. He was my teacher when I went to school. He keeps it for me.”

  “I see.”

  Clyde spoke eagerly. The words came out fast, as if he were afraid someone would stop him before he was finished. “I read a lot. I guess I’ve about read everything in the Covetown library. Well, not quite. I like history the best, how we all got to be what we are, you know—” He stopped, as if this time he feared having said too much.

  He wants to show us how much he knows, Tee thought, sensing now not only the mocking pride which had been her first impression, but also something humble. It made her uncomfortable.

  But Père appeared to be delighted. “Oh, I know you’re a reader, Clyde! And that’s wonderful! Reading is all there is to knowledge. Reading, not classrooms…. Oh, I’ve been collecting books all my life. I’ve got books from as far back as when the English took this island from the French in—”

  “In 1782, when Admiral Rodney beat the French at the Battle of the Saints.”

  “Listen to that, Tee! Listen to what the boy knows! Didn’t I tell you Clyde was smart?”

  He is treating him like a performing monkey, Tee thought.

  Père stood up. “Well, Clyde, you may borrow all the books you want from me. Any time. As long as your hands are clean when you touch them. Come, Tee, it’s time. We’re having guests at dinner.”

  “Père,” Tee said when they were inside, “that was insulting. Telling him about clean hands.”

  Père was astonished. She had never spoken to him that way. “You don’t understand,” he said. “They don’t mind. They’re not as sensitive as you are.”

  How could he know? How could he say such a thing? And yet he was so kind, Père was. Who else would invite a colored workman to sit down with them? Mama certainly would not, nor would Uncle Herbert.

  “Bigotry, besides being stupid and cruel, stains the personality,” Père liked to say. Yet there was this contradiction in him.

  Another thing to puzzle over! The world, as you grew older, kept presenting things to puzzle over. There were many vague thoughts in her head, circling there like bees: thoughts about places beyond the island and times before the island and how people came to be what they are …

  “You are much too serious,” Mama complained, not unkindly. “I wish you could just learn to take pleasure out of life.”

  And Tee would think, Your pleasures are not mine. I’m not pretty enough for your pleasures anyway, even if I wanted them. And if I had your beauty, I wouldn’t know what to do with it, how to laugh and touch Uncle Herbert on the cheek when he stands there adoring you in a room full of people. What I need is someone to talk to, really talk, without having to be afraid that I’m boring, or childish, or asking too many questions.

  Père was growing too old for her. Suddenly that summer one saw that he was losing vigor and patience. Often he forgot what he was saying. He began to sleep away the afternoons. Eleuthera grew lonely.

  So now, after the noon meal, Tee would wander into the coolness and sweet wood scent of the library to read or watch Clyde chisel a floral wreath on a cornice. There was something soothing in the tapping noises of the little hammer and in his soft whistle of concentration …

  One day she read aloud from the ancient diary.

  “‘July, seventeen hundred and three. Time of great woe. My wife’s brother and four of his children dead of the fever. There is scarcely a family that has not suffered dreadful loss.’ Whatever made people come to this wilderness in the first place, Clyde? I can’t imagine myself doing it!”

  “Poverty, Miss Tee. There was no work in Europe and what there was paid badly. These islands weren’t populated by the rich.”

  He was reminding her that her ancestors hadn’t been aristocrats. She saw the humor in that and didn’t mind. Sometimes, lately, she surprised herself with her own insights.

  “Also, a lot of convicts were sent here. It was called transport.” He put the chisel down. “But you didn’t have to be a criminal to be a convict. You could go to prison for stealing a few pennies, or for being in debt. You could be innocent, really. The innocent poor,” he said queerly.

  In the pause that followed, the words repeated themselves in Tee’s head with a kind of grave dignity: the innocent poor.

  “Well,” she said, wanting to break this gravity that verged on sadness, “well, ancestors are fascinating, don’t you think? You must wonder about yours”—and instantly flushed with the awareness of having said something awkward, something out of place. She apologized: “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—” making it worse.

  “That’s all right, Miss Tee.” He picked up the chisel, setting to work again. “Yes, I wonder about mine. Not that it does any good.”

  “You could be a teacher,” she said after a minute, wanting to make amends. “I think you know as much as my teachers know.”

  “I left school too early. My mother got sick and couldn’t work, so I took to this trade.” He turned around, his shoulders gone proud. “There’s no shame in working with
your hands, as middle-class people, even among my people, seem to think.”

  “No, there certainly isn’t. And has your mother got well?”

  “She died.”

  “Oh. And your father?”

  “I don’t know whether he’s alive or dead. I never saw him.”

  “Oh. My father died when I was six. Would you believe I still think about him? I feel as if—I miss him, even though I couldn’t have known him well. I suppose it’s because I’m not very close to my mother.”

  Clyde looked at her. His eyes were kind. “That’s a great loss for you. And for her.”

  “She has two new babies and a new husband, so it probably doesn’t matter.” Her voice sounded bleak in her own ears.

  “There have to be more reasons than that, Miss Tee.”

  “Oh, there are! We’re very different, you see. My mother cares about clothes and entertaining and being invited places. She knows what families are important and who’s going to marry whom and who’s going abroad next month. But I don’t care about that sort of thing at all!”

  “What do you care about, then?”

  “Oh, books and dogs—all kinds of animals, actually, and riding, and of course I’d like to go abroad, too, not to see the fashions but—”

  “To see how other people live. To see Rome and London, the crowds and the great buildings—Yes, I’d like all that, too! And I mean to do it, someday.”

  “But then you’d want to come back here, wouldn’t you? I know I’d always come back. This is home.”

  “It’s different for you than for me,” he said quietly.

  Yes. Of course it was. His life and hers, both lived upon this little island, were different, indeed. And she had those queer feelings again: pity and a certain guilt—which was absurd; none of this was her fault!

  Agnes remarked indignantly, “I never saw such an uppity boy, talking away with you by the hour—you’d think he was part of the family or something!”

  “He isn’t ‘uppity,’ Agnes. He’s very polite. And he’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever known!”

  “Hmph,” replied Agnes.

  Agnes was jealous. Tee understood. Having no children of her own and having been scorned for it, Agnes had taken possession of Tee and couldn’t share her. Yes, she was jealous of Clyde.

  How strange it was that, outside of Père, a person like Clyde should be the easiest friend she had ever made! At school she had no deep friendships; there had once been a girl who read poetry with her, but she had gone to live in England and now there was no one.

  Clyde appreciated poetry.

  “Listen to this,” she said. “It’s by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and it’s the loveliest of all, I think. Listen.

  I thank all who have loved me in their hearts

  With thanks and love from mine. Deep thanks to all

  Who paused a little near the prison-wall

  To hear my music—”

  The room was very quiet. He had put down the tools. She was intensely aware of the quiet and the pure round tone of her own voice speaking.

  “I wasn’t quite sure at first what she meant by ‘prison-wall,’ and then I realized she meant her loneliness.”

  “She had a good deal of guilt, too. The family’s fortune came from the West Indies, you know, from slave labor. That didn’t disturb her father at all, but she was sensitive.”

  Clyde’s face was soft. He’s quite different when Père isn’t here, Tee thought suddenly. Not stiff, nor humble either. Just probably himself.

  “You read that very well,” he said.

  “Yes, Mama says I read with expression. I often think, if I were better-looking, I might be an actress.”

  “But there’s nothing wrong with you, Miss Tee! You—”

  “Look at me—No, no, you’re not looking.” For he had glanced quickly once and turned away. “Don’t you see my nose? I’ve got my grandfather’s nose. Can’t you see?”

  “I’ve never really looked at your grandfather’s nose.”

  “Well, next time look at it carefully. Only I’d advise you not to let him know you’re doing it.”

  The absurdity of this caution struck her then, and she began to laugh. Clyde standing there staring, measuring her grandfather’s nose! And now Clyde, having, no doubt, the same picture in mind, began laughing too.

  “You know, Clyde, I’ll really miss you when you’ve finished these cabinets.”

  “It’s good of you to say so.”

  “Not ‘good’! True! I never say things I don’t mean. I wish we could stay friends. Maybe we will!”

  He didn’t answer. Intent again on his work, he bent to refine the spreading petals of a wooden flower. She thought perhaps he hadn’t heard.

  “I said I wish we might stay friends.”

  “That would be nice, Miss Tee.”

  “Clyde, you don’t have to call me Miss. Don’t you think that’s silly? We’re the same age, almost.”

  “It’s the custom,” he answered, blowing the sawdust away.

  “But a custom can be silly, can’t it?”

  “You’re not going to change it, Miss Tee, even if you want to. You’ll only make trouble for yourself if you try.”

  Now it was her turn not to answer. Instead, she stood over him, watching the chisel flow along the soft wood, shaping a vine. He was right, of course. There was a rigid order in this world. A person knew where he stood in that order and how he must behave, how he must speak. In their different ways each fell into his place at birth, whether it was Mama’s place or Père’s or Agnes’s. Money was part of it. Color was part of it. But—and this was very strange—mind, which should be most important of all, was not part of it.

  A mind was a queer thing. Père had a book with a sketch of a brain, a gray lump, ridged and corrugated; you would have expected a brain to be more colorful, more like a mosaic, patterned with the pictures that your particular life had printed on it. And it seemed to her as if Clyde’s mind and her own were of the same print, so that you could have set them beside each other in a continuous design, and there would be no jarring, no interruption.

  Only their skins were different—and not all that different. Her sunburned hand, resting on the shelf a foot away from his working hand, was almost as dark as his.

  He came to the end of the vine, curling it upward into a joyous flourish.

  “There, how do you like that?”

  “It’s lovely. You’re an artist, Clyde.”

  “Not really. I wish I were.” But he was pleased. “There’s a man in Spain, Antonio Gaudi, who does these flowers in stone. He’s building a cathedral in Barcelona, all leaves and vines and even animal faces, a whole forest in stone…. The world’s full of beautiful things.”

  How did he know of such things? He must have lived, must still live, in some village hut a world removed from Covetown, let alone Barcelona! And a soft compassion moved in Tee.

  “That’s all for today,” he said, putting the tools away.

  “See you tomorrow, then?”

  “See you tomorrow.”

  So the weeks passed, and Tee was curiously happy, not lonely at all anymore. In the mornings at her bedroom window she watched the crows descending from the mountain to eat the palmiche of Père’s royal palms along the driveway. The calm days stretched ahead. In the warm evenings after rain she stood at the window in her nightdress and heard the toads singing in the tree tops. She was so peacefully happy! She had no idea why. She did not even question why.

  The hammock rocked gently between two acoma trees behind the house; so tall were they that their tremendous tops were shaken by a breeze, although at ground level the burning air was still. Yawning, Tee laid the book facedown on her lap; in the house Père was taking his long Sunday nap; the whole world dozed.

  She came awake. On the path beyond the rose beds Clyde was walking fast, swinging a bamboo birdcage.

  “What have you got there?” she called.

  “A parrot,” he called
back.

  “Let me see!”

  He set the cage down beside the hammock. In it stood an enormous parrot, two feet tail, a king of birds, marked splendidly in amethyst and emerald.

  “Sisseron,” he said proudly. “The imperial parrot.”

  “Where did you find him?”

  “Caught him this morning. It was some job to catch him, I can tell you.”

  “What are you going to do with him?”

  “I have a buyer. A sailor on an Italian ship, due back this month. I promised to get one for him, last time he was here.”

  The bird raised its wings and, there being no room in the cage to extend them, wearily dropped them again to stand in an attitude of patient waiting. Yet its round, alert, and curious eye seemed to respond to Tee’s attention, and this aliveness was piteous, as though through the eye alone a plea were being communicated.

  “He’s so quiet,” she said.

  “He’s not used to the cage yet. He’s frightened.”

  “It’s awfully sad, don’t you think?”

  “In a way, Miss Tee.”

  “When you think of how fast they can fly, how they love to fly! … They can live to be sixty years old, Père says.”

  “That’s true. This is a young one. Two years, no more.”

  “So then … He has maybe fifty-eight years to spend in prison!”

  Clyde looked down at the parrot, then looked away across the lawn.

  “How much did the sailor promise to pay you?”

  “I’m not sure. But a good price.”