Fingerprints of Previous Owners Page 2

  Last year, just a few months after Troy had joined him in the capital, our dad was dead, and Troy briefly back among us for the funeral. (Not a real funeral, since Dad’s body had been buried in the capital—who could pay for otherwise?—but what Mother wanted anyway. Mr. Ken came on behalf of the funeral committee. I walked the perimeter of the house while they sat across from each other at our wobbly table. Took walking only nine of those small squares for them to settle the details of the grave marker without a grave. The empty that would be inside of it heavier than his body had ever been.) Two days, that visit, and then Troy was off again, and the night before he left he didn’t even come home. Out with friends all night. Miss Philene had given me a ride to work that morning, and I saw him standing, waiting for the boat to the airstrip. Saw his back and one knee leaning toward the other, unsure. Turtled with his overstuffed red backpack; one frayed strap hung limp. Someone else also waiting stepped into my view, blocked him out entirely.

  Right before Troy left he managed to run our cousin’s car through the fence and let the cows out. Used to be his best friend Andre’d keep him reined in those nights out, but they’d gone to the capital together, and only Troy had come back that trip.

  Guessed Lionel felt bad it had been his truck that did the wrecking, since he offered to take me inland to search the path of broken brush the cows had stomped out. We gathered the machetes our fathers had used for gardening and headed up. Or in. The middle of our island was a big hump you couldn’t really see unless you got way out to sea in a boat or way up in the air in a plane. From the road and the sandy strip around the island we lived on, it was just a hill of snarly brush we sometimes dipped a hand into to pluck leaves for teas.

  The cows were so big, how could they hide? So big, how could we not hear them? So big, roaming the inland like they themselves were the ghosts that lived up there.

  First time I fell over a stone wall was when we were searching for those cows. Thicket so dense I didn’t see a two-foot-tall wall in front of my legs. Fell over and got a ridge of red scrapes on my knees.

  Lionel was only four years older than I was, but he kicked the wall as if he’d known something, lived in a different time when people told you what the walls were for, when you could walk inland for something other than chasing your food. A different time when you could walk inland to add background to the whispering of the elders who’d been around long enough to have their grandparents’ memories of moving down and letting the inland seal itself behind them. There was a time, Ole Mr. Vit had told me, that time I was young enough to ask, before my time, when folks knew who was or wasn’t Africa born and when folks recalled moving down from the estate and calling themselves “stateless.” Then people didn’t want to talk about that anymore. Didn’t want their little ones strapped with sandbags while trying to wade across this life. Then he’d stopped talking, too, and nothing you could do to open those lips again. Sent me on my way.

  “Why’d you do that: kick?”

  Lionel looked at me like I was a stupid kid, putting him on with my ignorance. “These used to keep cattle in anyway,” he said.

  The walls were intact in some spots but mostly crumbling and intermittent. There were so many breaks where the cows could have gotten through. He rolled his eyes at me. I didn’t think he’d say more, but he did.

  “We’re on the estate, Myrna, don’t you know that much? These walls were built by slaves.”

  Word like a bogeyman. Something in the past or in the darkness or in nightmares. Bogeyman Slavery. Worse than a yeho, a monster. Monster of death who knew what he was doing. Bogeyman whose name wasn’t said. Sandbags we all wore but didn’t see.

  Only talk of the inland my whole life was when I was a kid too young to really understand much of what I heard, and when I was a little older, the residual trickle of gossip. About the night Miss Philene’s youngest son, Jimmy, never came home. His body was found somewhere inland. Came out later that Minister Callaghan had found some teenagers drinking up among the stones. And when Jimmy refused to get going, the minister spun himself into a rage. Beat him, left him bleeding, took his flashlight. Jimmy never found his way out and never went anywhere again, inland or otherwise. No one talked about it that much after it was all settled. Only remembered Jimmy’s death same as a person who died in hospital or from old, old age. Seemed like it had always just been the way it was: Jimmy and the minister both gone from the island in different ways, the minister’s wife, Miss Wayida, barely coming out of her church, and neither Miss Philene nor Mr. Ken speaking much about their youngest, long gone now. Then as now, that rage about the inland that grabbed the minister? Was a mystery to me the size of the ocean. Felt its depth each step I took through this brush.

  And I was also coming to understand something about confusing swirls of anger that could gather in my own gut. Like what I felt when news of Dad’s heart attack came to us.

  We kept walking, inching along behind our machetes. Thorny branches scraped the tops of my arms, leaving thin lines of white. It was the dry season, and the haulback had lost its leaves. Just gray branches now like a skeleton of itself instead of the cloud of emeralds it looked like in full bloom. (In full bloom leaves wouldn’t make a tea any less bitter than the branches would. Coughed a little, thinking of the prickles ricocheting down our throats.) In some of the particularly thick places where Lionel told me to stay back while he swung wide for a good slice, I found angles to stick my arms through the brush to feel the stones of those walls.

  Felt some need to run as far as I could and be like Mother, never talking about any of it. Felt some other need just as strong to clear all this brush away to expose it all, clear the brush to explore the nooks and crannies the way Dad had done as the island dentist. He’d once described to me, when I asked why anyone would want to go digging around in other people’s nasty mouths, how it made him feel to find where the pain was coming from, to know exactly what to do, and to dig out the source of it. How it made him feel, when people brought their X-rays from the dentist in the capital, to match them up to the mouth in front of him, as different as they seemed just to his eyes. And then using his fingers to carefully feel out, trusting.

  I felt dust on my tongue and held it as I watched Lionel’s back, T-shirt stuck with what we called island glue, turn this way and that to avoid the haulback. All around me, even with the island glue sticking my shirt up under my breasts and around my belly button, I felt the chill of the past like a ghost pushing its way right through me. Here I was, days after Dad’s funeral, feeling out the secret source of pain.

  After we’d been at it for a long while, Lionel said, “No way we’re finding those cows. Let’s get out of here. And don’t be coming up here. And don’t tell your ma where we were looking.”

  “Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t,” I said, now rolling my eyes at him.

  “Look, no one wants to hear about this shit anymore. Leave it gone,” he said, interpreting my body language.

  I didn’t need him telling me that, older cousin or not. Never once heard the word slavery spoken above an accidental whisper, not even in school. In history class used to run my finger along the edges of the textbook’s sliced-out pages, half hoping for a paper cut that’d remind me later something was missing, something almost invisible that bled easily. Hebbie, my best friend when we were kids and Andre’s sister, used to call me Hyphen Hands for all the straight bitty slits on my fingers.

  Say the word estate at work and look down at your palm for your firing papers.

  “Aren’t you the Landfill Manager? Dealing with everything that’s thrown away?” I didn’t know what I meant exactly, but he seemed angry, and I felt like pushing back.

  “Yeah, exactly, Miss Smarty. I know how to get rid of everything no one wants and keep it from ruining the whole island. Besides,” he said, his tone changing, “the resort owns all this land now anyways. You get caught up here, you trespass. Lose your job. Then how you gonna feed your ma?”

  “W
e’re here now,” I said, but I mumbled it to myself.

  The thing about my cousin Lionel was he was smart, and he did lots of stuff for Mother, especially in the weeks since my dad died. Stuff like that made me swallow what he told me, even if I told him to his face that he should mind his own business.

  I kept following behind him, letting him do the machete work while my hands felt through the brush for more traces of walls, places where I could feel the absence of where a wall had been. By the time we emerged from the brush, my arms and hands were maps of where I’d been cut up.

  We stood on the road looking at each other. No cows. Lionel pointed up around the bend.

  “Thiflae Bar?” he asked.

  We kicked dust in front of us as we walked along the road. Lionel pulled his shirt up to wipe sweat off his forehead. The wind had died, leaving the ocean flat with stillness and bugs hanging in the air. The only sound that reached us was of distant cars, but no one drove by as we were walking. Walls of brush on either side of the road looked so thick, almost like it was impossible we could’ve ever been where we’d been. A skinny blondish dog we both recognized from the landfill, Freddy, zigzagged the road about a quarter mile ahead, probably waiting for someone to come out the bar and drop something. The sky was going pink just as slowly as we were shuffling along. I was thirsty, and I kept my eye on Freddy to see how close we were getting.

  When we got to the entrance, the door hung crooked like always so you could see a slice of the room before you went in. I didn’t bother looking, knew there wasn’t anyone I particularly wanted to see. We could hear voices of all the men hanging out on what had been the bar’s back porch. All the slats gone, now just a piece of floor jutting toward the brush like a pier without water. I didn’t know how long it’d been since I’d seen my dad on that porch, talking it up with his friends. My memory of coming to find him there—so long ago—was only of legs at my eye level.

  “Wanna go on the porch or inside?” Lionel asked.

  Usually older folks on the porch, away from the music. How would we explain our machetes this time of night? The coating of the inland all over us?

  “Inside,” I said, where I knew everyone would be tipsy. I pushed ahead of him through the door.

  “Lionel!” Christine’s voice squawked above the din of voices in the room and on the TV as soon as we entered. Her hair glowed orangish in the fluorescent light where she had streaked it blond. It hadn’t been like that at work earlier in the week. We worked side by side at the resort, and she worked some nights at Miss Patrice’s store.

  She was calling us over, though I saw only one extra chair by her. She’d always been sweet on Lionel, but I couldn’t tell whether he couldn’t stand her or was willing. Lately he’d been talking an awful lot about that vet who came from the capital to tend to the island dogs. But she came out to us only once a year, a few weeks at a time, and Lionel wouldn’t go to the capital.

  Lionel and I sat at the bar instead, on stools he’d once rescued from the landfill when the resort threw them away. Christine walked over where we were anyway and slid closer than I wanted her. I reminded myself of all the times she helped me out, like when she spread early word to a few of us that a new shipment of the good tampons had come in at the store.

  “Lem’s here,” Lionel whispered into my ear. I didn’t bother looking around. “Ah. Done with that already?”

  I figured he’d known how long it’d been since I’d been done, everyone around here knowing everyone else’s business. I didn’t think Lem would come over to me at this point, since we hadn’t even talked much lately—though we both worked at the resort, him on garbage duty. But then there he was, by my shoulder. The heaviness I used to feel around my hips when he came near, and the furiousness following—gone.

  “Hey, Myr.”

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Another beer, Mr. Ken,” he said. I heard the exhaling sound of the cap being released, and Lem put the bottle in front of me. I put my hand on it for the cold feeling, then rubbed the glass against some scratches on my arm. I didn’t feel like having a drink.

  Lem’s head was shaved perfectly as always along a sharp line above his ear. Breath of beer that used to smell crisp and fun to me, now just stale.

  “I could use a water, Mr. Ken,” I said, feeling the kind of parched even my hair was soaking up the smell of fritters sizzling in their baskets behind the kitchen door. Lionel and I’d been up inland since before it was even thinking about getting dark.

  “Saw Troy before he left again,” Lem said. “Told me take care of his sister right.”

  “What’d you tell him?” I was looking at him now.

  “What? Can’t tell my old buddy I been hanging out with his sister?”

  Christine started doo-doo-ing a little tune she thought sounded like something sexy. Lionel laughed, and I glared at him.

  “We’re not—I— Seriously, what did you tell him that’s gonna get all back around to me now?”

  “I see how it is,” Lem said, stepping back and looking less smiley. “Always too good for everyone else around here, right? That’s how it’s always been with you: biggity. Even before, when we were, you know.”

  A sourness started collecting in my gut and wanted to come out of my mouth as something nasty, like telling Lem I had more fun by myself than I ever did with him. Wanted to shoot the sourness at Lionel, too, embarrass him about the way he was always running to get messed up with any girl at all set foot on this island from somewhere else. Couldn’t even be bothered with Christine and her tune. I took a sip of water and tried to shut off the trickle of meanness.

  “Man, Lem,” I said. “We haven’t even been out together in a month.”

  He looked at me for a long time. “Sorry ’bout your pa, anyway,” he said, and he walked away. Lionel was sucking down his beer, his eyebrows raised, whole forehead in a smirk.

  “What?” I demanded, and Lionel shrugged.

  “Nothing. Lem’s a nice guy, that’s all.” The two of them hadn’t ever been close when we were younger, but with Lem on the resort’s garbage crew and Lionel at the dump, they’d worked themselves up some kind of friendship.

  “I’m just so tired of all this. Of everyone.”

  I stared at the glass of water Mr. Ken had put in my hand. A bottle broke behind me, and Christine seemed to laugh and shriek at the same time. Then her voice and Lionel’s started braiding together until I couldn’t make out anything they were saying, but the sounds were there, just nudging against my ears but not going in. Lots of shuffling behind me, too, like everyone had started dancing or moving in some game, but I just kept staring at my own hands.

  When I looked up the room seemed shadowy, like a smudgy black-and-white photocopy of itself. Everyone was mulling about more slo-wly, transparent, as if I could see them but through them, only the bottoms of their feet looking heavy and solid. Everyone looking like glass but their feet lined with iron. I stopped hearing the sounds of the conversations in the room and just heard a white-noise sound like the wind or the waves coming in. Like none of this was real, but there was something just beyond. Just under us. Not like a bogeyman either, but something calling me to come see. Like I would come to feel about my dad’s gravestone: calling me even if the ground it marked was full of dirt, empty of him.

  “I’m going home.”

  Whatever Lionel said in response sounded too far away.

  But I didn’t go home. I’d left both machetes at the bar with Lionel, and it was dark out, but I found myself pushing through the bushes, arms raised up, the way I’d seen tourists wade deeper into the pool, shuddering at the chill.

  I was trying to follow the stone walls again through the tangled brush that clawed and scraped and twined and wrapped and pricked and caught. The stone walls were meant to keep the cattle in, not the slaves. That was done in other ways. The oval shoreline looped around us all.

  It kept me in, too. A year ago I’d been planning to finally get off the island, looki
ng into art history at the university, but then Troy went off, and now Dad was gone, and with all of it there was no way I could leave Mother. I’d never be going. Just walking the oval my whole life. (Always ovals, never perfect circles. Circles smooth and calm; ovals warped by some force. Those months with Lem he was shaving his head smooth, and my hands would absentmindedly run over and over the oval of it. While his fingers scrambled, and when he found the right spot, slowed and stayed, until my mind burst in shards of light. Now my brain was already different, held a thickness.)

  No going off the island for me. Going inland, back in time, instead. These stones my ancestors—and almost everyone’s ancestors on this island—had quarried and carried and packed in place, like planting gravestones. (Each of them known as Cruffey’s soand-so: the same seven letters painted on Mr. Harper’s old rickety boat, the same surname so many on this island—this Cruffey Island—had, including my own mother’s family.)

  That first night inland—more than a year ago—I thought the wall ruins would keep me on a path. I ended up lost in the dark, cowering, sweeping fire ants from my ankles and then from my hands and cursing myself for being dumb enough to try to go in without the right supplies, without even a flashlight. Imagined them telling Mother they found me, and where, both stupid and dead, so soon after Dad’s heart attack. I’d have to wait until the sun came up to move or risk getting in deeper. Crouched until the feeling in my ankles disappeared. Thought about Mr. Harper’s half-leg. Anyone ever ask what happened to it, folks would nod up at the hump of the inland and say nothing but Stones.