Second Skin

Land of Spices

High lights of helplessness? Mere trivial record of collapse? Say, rather, that it is the chronicle of recovery, the history of courage, the dead reckoning of my romance, the act of memory, the dance of shadows. And all the earmarks of pageantry, if you will, the glow of Skipper’s serpentine tale.

Cinnamon, I discovered when I was tossed up spent and half-naked on the invisible shore of our wandering island — old Ariel in sneakers, sprite surviving in bald-headed man of fair complexion-cinnamon, I found, comes to the hand like little thin brown pancakes or the small crisp leaves of a midget tobacco plant. And like Big Bertha who calls to me out of the black forest of her great ugly face I too am partial to cinnamon, am always crumpling a few of the brittle dusty leaves in my pockets, rubbing it gently onto the noses of my favorite cows. And what better than cinnamon for my simmering dreams?

Yesterday, if I can trust such calculations in my time of no time, yesterday marked the end of Catalina Kate’s eighth month. Four weeks to go and right on time, and Kate has stretched and swelled and grown magnificently. My Kate with a breadbasket as big as a house, tight as a drum, and the color of old brick and shiny, smooth and shiny, under the gaudy calico of that tattered dress. And wasn’t Sister Josie pleased? “Baby coming in four weeks, Josie,” I told her. And weren’t we all? But yesterday was also the day I knocked up Sweet Phyllis in the shade of the calabash tree. A big day, as I told Sonny, a big day all around.

“Cow’s calling, Skipper. Just hear if she ain’t!”

Dawn. The first moment of windy dawn, and the bright limes were dancing, the naked flesh hung down from the little cocoa trees, and already the ants were swarming. Red-eyed Sonny stood there — metamorphosed, waiting forever — among the broad leaves and shadows framed in my large white rotting casement. Sonny was waiting, yawning, rubbing his eyes in my view of the world.

“Cow’s calling for sure. And ain’t that Sweet Phyllis, Skipper? Sounds like Phyllis to me!”

“All right, Sonny,” leaning forward, scratching myself, smearing the ants, watching the shifting torso in my window, listening, “it’s all right,Sonny. She’ll wait.” I could hear the faint far-off appeal, the dumb strained trumpeting of Sweet Phyllis in heat. She sounded ecstatic, was making a brassy sustained noise of grief. Sonny had a good ear.

“Tell Big Bertha to fix us a lunch, Sonny. We might as well make a day of it. And tell Bertha that she and Kate and Josie may come along if they’d like to. Fair enough?”

“Oh, they’ll want to come along, Skipper,” grinning, shifting softly and erratically in the window with his arms pressed tight to the long thin torso and somehow active, up to something, though in no way suggesting his intention to be off, to be gone about my business, “them girls wouldn’t miss a hot fete for Phyllis if you allows them the privilege and lets them get off from work. Skipper, you knows that!”

The old smashed petty officer’s cap this time, the indecent angle of the cap, the long shrunken torso like a paste of hickory ash and soot, the fixed grin, the unshaved black jaw working. “Well, Sonny,” I said, “how about it? Are you going to tell Big Bertha what I told you?” And then, listening, watching, returning his grin: “Sonny,” I said softly, “Sonny, are you relieving yourself against Plantation House? Under my very window, Sonny? You have no scruples. You have no scruples at all.”

And shaking his head in pretended pain, showing me that long wry black face and contorting his brows, blinking: “That’s right, Skipper,” he said, “I don’t have none of that scruples stuff. No, sir!”

So that’s how yesterday began, with the live sounds of the calling cow and Sonny’s water. It ended after dark with a bath, one of the prolonged infrequent sandy sea-splashing baths for Sonny and myself. And in between, only our little idyl down with the cow. Only the five of us in the shade of the calabash tree with Phyllis. And the girls, as Sonny called them, added their charms to the cows’ and enjoyed our little slow pastoral down in the overgrown field with Phyllis and Alma and Edward and Freddy and Beatrice and Gloria. More water, of course, and a little song and so many soothing hands and a nap on a pile of green calabashes and the taste of guava jam, it couldn’t have been a better time for Phyllis, a better time for us.

“All right,” I said, “everyone here? Now let’s not have a lot of noise. I don’t want you making a lot of noise and frightening that cow. You hear? I don’t want to get kicked.” And then I started off, leading the way. And Sonny in the old chief’s cap and ragged white undershorts followed, and then Big Bertha with our lunch on her head in an iron pot, and then beautiful sway-backed Kate and Sister Josie, who in her mauve hood and cowl, long mauve skirts hiding her little black shoes, loved all the wild cows and mockingbirds and indecent flowers. In a long single file and in that colorful order they followed me through the bush, and I was the Artificial Inseminator of course, and in one hand I carried the little black tettered satchel and in the other hand swung Uncle Billy’s crucifix. A slow languid single-file progress through the bush with the women jabbering and the orchids hanging down from the naked Indian trees and Sonny slapping flies and the sun, the high sun, piercing my old white Navy cap with its invisible rays. And I swayed, I swung myself from side to side, opened up our way along that all-but-obliterated cow path on the saw-toothed ridge among the soft hibiscus and poisoned thorns and, yes, the hummingbirds, the little quick jewels of my destiny. From the frozen and crunchy cow paths of the Atlantic island — my mythic rock in a cold sea — to this soft pageant through leaf, tendril, sun, wind, how far I had come.

“Got to go a little faster now,” I said, and raised the dripping satchel so they could see it, “must hurry it up a little, Sonny and young ladies, or the ice will melt.”

And from the other side of the ridge and on the floating air she was calling us, Sweet Phyllis, was holding her quarters rigid and sticking her nose through the calabash leaves and blaring at us, blaring forth the message of her poor baffled fertility. It was a signal of distress, a low-register fire horn, and I recognized more than Sweet Phyllis’s voice drifting over the ridge.

“You hear it, Big Bertha?” I said, “hear it, Kate? And you, Sister Josie, do you hear it too? They’re all calling now. Alma and Beatrice and Gloria and Edward and Freddy — hear them calling? They’ve gotten the idea from Phyllis, eh? All of them think it is time for a hot fete, even the steers. Isn’t that so, Josie?”

Little black Josie, old Bertha with the pot on her head, my dusty rouge-colored pregnant Kate with her club of dark hair hanging down to her breast and her belly slung down and forward near the end of her time — they giggled, each one of them, and pointed at the wet shirt clinging to my enormous back, pointed at the dripping satchel. I smelled them — little nun, old cook, mother-to-be — and knew that they were in a processional, after all, and that each one of them was capable of love in her own way.

“The way things is going, Skipper, old Sonny’s about to start a little calling of his own any minute now. I just feels a big call catching right here in this skinny throat of mine. Got to bellow it out any minute, Skipper, damn if I don’t.”

“You want to call too, Sonny,” I said. “Why not? A little calling wouldn’t hurt you. It’s the hammock that’s bad for you, Sonny. Too much time in the hammock is bad.”

And I laughed, glanced over my shoulder — Sonny flopping along in his unbuckled combat boots, Sonny pulling up his drawers — and the three dark women were watching us and listening. Love at last, I thought, and I thrashed out onto a small golden promontory above the field. Blue sky, bright pale blue of a baby’s eye, our golden vantage point, the field below; and in the center of the field the dark low sprawling shape of our deep green tree, and under the tree the cows — two steers, four heifers, six young beauties in all — and in the branches of the tree, which were tied together, knotted together like tangled ribbons in a careless head of hair, the birds, a screeching and wandering tribe of birds that were drawn to Phyllis’s song like ourselves and now swarmed in the tree. Love at last. I smiled over my shoulder and we started down.

To the last we held our single file. To the last we maintained our evenly spaced formation, our gentle steps, delicate order, significant line. Tennis shoes filled with burrs, white trousers tom, old rakish and rotting white cap, shreds of once-white shirt plastered to my mahogany breast and back, and except for these I was naked. Sniffing the sweet air and keeping my chin lifted, and swaying, riding slowly forward at a heavy contented angle I, Skipper, led the way. I knew the way, was the man in charge — the AI — and there was no mistaking me for anything but the leader now, and they were faithful followers, my entourage. Down we went, and the tennis shoes and combat boots and little black pointed shoes from the missionary’s museum and two other lovely pairs of naked feet hardly touched the earth, hardly made a sound, surely left no prints in the soft wild surface of the empty field. It was a long slow day with the cows, a picnic under the calabash tree, a gentle moment, a pastoral in my time of no time.

We maintained our places in line up to the very tree itself, and then one by one and without breaking file we stopped and folded aside the tender branches, one by one entered the shade, joined the loud animals in the din of the birds. The spot I chose for entering was not an arm’s length from Sweet Phyllis’s dripping nose which was thrust through the leaves and sniffing us. giving the sound of desire to our approach. But she was not frightened. And as soon as I entered that grove of shade I rested my hand on her shoulder, thrust my own nose through the leaves, was just in time to watch Kate take the last twenty or thirty steps of our amorous way.

She was like a child, like a young girl, because despite her weight and swayed back, despite sore muscles and the rank sweat on her exotic brow, she was taking those last steps with her hands held behind her back — backs of her hands nesting in the small of her back — and with her elbows held out like wings, and she was waggling her elbows, tossing her head, taking light happy strides on her naked toes. It was a sinuous slow-motion seductive cantering, the heavy oblivious dance of my young Kate. Despite the water under her skin. Despite the big precious baby inside the sac.

“Come along, Catalina Kate,” I cried, “I’m watching you!” And then we were all together and the bellowing stopped, the birds simmered down, Bertha wedged the iron pot into the above-ground roots of the tree, and I — humming, musing, stripping off the rags of my shirt — I squatted and opened my official black satchel and removed the little sad chunk of ice, deposited the little smooth half-melted piece of ice in the lip of the spring that was a black puddle among the lesser roots at the far edge of the tree. And carefully — down on my knees, smiling — I took the little glass bottle from the satchel and weighed it in my hand — a mere nothing in the hand, but life, the seeds of life — and stood it carefully on the chunk of ice. Safe now. No worry now. I could take my time.

“See there, Kate? That’s Oscar. Oscar in the little bottle, Kate! For Sweet Phyllis, do you understand?”

And smiling, glancing at the bottle, glancing at me, fixing the shiny black club of plaited hair between her young breasts and indifferent to the sweat that trickled down her bare throat and down her arms, down the sides of her young face and even into the comers of her dark eyes, she said softly: “Oh, yes, sir, Kate know what you mean.”

“Good girl,” I said, “I’m glad.” And then: “Well, what about it, Bertha, time to eat? Poor Sonny looks pretty hungry to me!”

So while the spring kept Oscar cool, the five of us sprawled close together and held out our hands to the fat black arm that disappeared inside the pot and came up dripping. Calypso herself couldn’t have done better. Sweet guavas and fat meat that slid into the fingers, made the fingers breathe, and crushed leaves of cinnamon on the tongue and sweet shreds of coconut. We ate together under the dark speckled covering of the tree, sprawled together, composed, with no need for wine, and the cows stood about and nosed us and a blackbird flew down and sat on Sonny’s cap. We ate together among the smooth green oval calabashes that were as large as footballs, and lay among the calabashes and licked our fingers. I told Josie to take off her shoes—“Take them off, Josie,” I said, “you have my permission.” And while she was trying to unfasten the little knotted strings Edward took it into his head to jump up on Sweet Phyllis and the bird hopped wildly about on Sonny’s cap. And my namesake — reluctantly I say that name, reluctantly admit that name — left bright thick gouts of mud on each of Sweet Phyllis’s soft yellow flanks.

And Sister Josie spoke. Holding the tiny broken-heeled shoes in her lap and poking a little naked foot from under the madness of the mauve skirts, at last she felt the need to speak, to speak to me: “Edward trying to walk down the road on Phyllis, sir?”

“Of course he is, Josie,” I said softly, “of course he is.”

“Walk down the road for babies?”

“Yes, Josie. That’s what he wants.”

So we ate out of Bertha’s pot, watched Edward jumping up, watched Freddy using his nose for life—“See how he goes at it, Kate,” I said, “no holding him back”—Freddy ramming his head straight out and nuzzling, drawing back his lips, that famished steer, and snuffling and waving marvelous long streamers from his glazed bubbling nose. And in our lazy heap we noticed idly that Alma and Beatrice and Gloria were playing tricks with their tails or trying to mount each other or one of the steers.

“Poor Alma,” I said. “She looks like Pagliacci, don’t you think so, Sonny? But look there, Sonny, when Beatrice tops Gloria and then Gloria tops Beatrice you really have something, don’t you, Sonny? Divine confidence, isn’t that it? Blessed purpose anyway, eh? And who’s to say nothing will come of it?”

They planted their hoofs among our legs — sticky hoofs, outstretched legs — and they lowered their brown eyes on us, and Gloria licked my cheek and Beatrice even lay down next to little Josie, cow’s head next to cowled head, breaths mingling.

“Now, what about this poor little Sweet Phyllis, Skipper? You going to make her wait all day?”

“In good time, Sonny,” I murmured. “She’ll wait, she’ll keep, don’t worry.”

The blackbird danced, the cows switched flies or picked off tom little leaves with their big teeth or tried to get everything started up again, the black spring continued to steep the roots of the tree and keep Oscar cool. We dozed. And Sonny sighed for Bertha, put his long skinny panther paw on Kate. “Hugging is all right, Kate,” I thought to say, “but nothing more, Kate, do you understand? You mustn’t hurt the baby.” Then I pulled little Sister Josie’s swaddled head down to rest on my broad steaming mahogany chest, gave her Uncle Billy’s crucifix to hold.

“No lady of the cloth ever had it this good, Josie,” I whispered — shoe-button eyes unmoving, mouth big with gold — and in my half-sleep I heard the animals and through a warm speckled film saw Kate kneeling and rinsing out Sonny’s drawers in the spring, then standing in shadow and turning, reaching, as I seemed to see the very shape of the earth-bound child, and hanging Sonny’s white drawers on a dead limb to dry. Shades beneath the calabash tree, soft sounds, leaf-eating dreams, grove of perpetuation. Silence. The tree was suddenly still, perfectly still, down to a bird. Love at last.

But we awoke together, and like Josie, Catalina Kate must have felt the need to speak, must have thought that it was her turn to speak to me, because she was leaning over Sonny and looking down at me, and I could see the shoulder, arm, small face, naked hair, and I heard what she was saying: “God snapping him fingers,” she said, and that sudden moment of waking was just what she said, “God snapping him fingers,” though it was probably Edward breaking a twig or one of the birds bouncing a bright seed off the smooth green back of a resounding calabash.

And on my elbow, suddenly, and wide-awake in my old time out of time: “Yes, Kate,” I said. “Snapping for you!” She giggled. And had the hours passed? Days, years? I put down the thought because I was wide-awake and the sharp harmony was like a spear in the ribs.

“Now, Sonny,” I said, and already I was crouching at the lip of the spring, “let’s take care of Phyllis. What do you say?”

Black spring, black ferns, last remnant of ice the size of a dime, bright little glass bottle upright, gleaming, cool. The genie had wreaked havoc on Oscar, I thought, and I picked up the bottle — the bull in the bottle — and weighed its fragile cool weight in my palm.

“Come, now, Sonny,” I said briskly, “let’s be done with her. Where’s the tube?”

He whipped it out of the satchel then, that resilient tube, long amorous pipette, and I snapped the neck of the bottle, stuck an end in the bottle and caught the other end between my teeth and quickly sucked the few pure drops of Oscar into the pipette and dropped the empty bottle down the spring and popped my finger over the end of the tube to keep Oscar where I wanted him.

“Battle stations, everyone,” I said softly, but they were already moving, dancing, and the somehow suspicious cows were already composing themselves into a single group-attitude of affection, and the arms were raised, curved, quick and languid at the same time. Apparently some brief intelligence was stirred in Alma, Freddy, Edward, Beatrice, Gloria, because suddenly they had sense enough to keep out of our way, and drew back and hung their heads and watched us with big round glowing sylvan eyes.

Late afternoon under the calabash tree. Closing in on Phyllis. Speckled shadows. Trembling, smiling, soothing. A cow and her sisters. And it was a simple job for me, and nothing for her, merely a long hair rolled up lengthwise and lost in a hot muscular blanket of questing tenderness, but nonetheless we smiled, closed in carefully and in our own sweet timeless time, expectant, bemused, considerate, with fingers and arms and in soft dalliance transplanting the bull and stopping the tide of the heifer.

Late afternoon and only faint sounds of breathing, brief shifting activity in the shadows, and Sonny was embracing the smooth alerted head while Catalina Kate and Josie were posted on her starboard side, were rubbing and soothing and curving against her starboard side and Bertha, Big Bertha, was tending the port. And I was opposite from Sonny and knew just what to do, just how to do it — reaching gently into the blind looking glass with my eye on the blackbird on Sonny’s cap — and at the very moment that the loaded pipette might have disappeared inside, might have slipped from sight forever, I leaned forward quickly and gave a little puff into the tube — it broke the spell, in a breath lodged Oscar firmly in the center of the windless unsuspecting cave that would grow to his presence like a new world and void him, one day, onto the underground waters of the mysterious grove — and pulled back quickly, slapped her rump, tossed the flexible spent pipette in the direction of the satchel and grinned as the whole tree burst into the melodious racket of the dense tribe of blackbirds cheering for our accomplished cow.

And wasn’t she an accomplished cow? And wasn’t it, this moment of conception, this instant of the long voyage, a time for bird song and smiling and applause? So she gave a sprightly kick then — one pretty kick from Sweet Phyllis but too late, much too late, because I had seen that pretty kick coming even before I took Oscar’s little bottle off the ice and was standing back well out of her way and smiling when she let fly so prettily in the face of her fate — and then, and only two years old, she gathered herself in sulky modesty and pushed through the screen of leaves and without much hurry but with clear purpose trotted off alone across the empty field. I waved, I watched her diminishing and rising and falling brown body until it turned into the heavy bush and was gone.

“Well, too bad, Phyllis,” I said to myself, “you won’t quite catch up with Kate,” and I smiled and shook my head.

And then Sonny was pulling on his sun-bleached under-drawers and Bertha was hoisting up her pot and Josie was putting on her shoes and Kate was plaiting her long dark hair again and trying to arouse my heart, I thought, with sight of the child. Any time now, I knew, and the sun would die.

“Good-by to the dark-eyed cow,” I said. “And now Big Bertha and Catalina Kate and Sister Josie, I want the three of you to return to Plantation House together while Sonny and I go down to the south beach and have our bath. You lead the way, Bertha; be careful, Kate; remember what you do at sundown, Sister Josie.”

So I retrieved Uncle Billy’s crucifix from Sister Josie, and they started off.

And in darkness and in silence Sonny and I made our way to the south beach and naked except for our official caps sat together in the sand on the south beach, ground ourselves back and forth, back and forth in the abrasive white sand and scrubbed our calves, thighs, even fleshy Malay archipelagos with handfuls of the fine sand that set up a quick burning sensation in tender skin. By the time we waded out to our shoulders the moon was on the water and the little silver fish were sailing in to nibble at the archipelagos. My arms floated out straight on the warm dark tide, I rinsed my mouth with sea water and spit it back to the sea, I tasted the smooth taste of salt. When we rose up out of the slow-motion surf the conchs were glistening at us in the moonlight.

“I tell you what. Sonny,” I said, and dried the crucifix, pulled up my tattered white pants, “why don’t you look in on Josie or see what Bertha’s fixing us for chow? I just want to stop off a moment at the water wheel. OK?”

So I left him at the corner of the barn and whistled my way to the water wheel and found her waiting. I stood beside her, mere heavy shadow leaning back against dark broken stone and moonlit flowers, and I smelled the leaves of cinnamon. I put my arm around her and touched her then, and part of the dress— sweat-rotted dissolving fragment of faded calico — came off in my hand. But it was no matter and I simply squeezed the cloth into a powder and dropped it and put out my hand again.

Her eyes were soft, luxurious, steady, in the darkness she reached out and tore off a flower — leaf, flower, taste of green vine — and looking at me put it between her teeth, began to chew.

“Saucy young Catalina Kate,” I whispered, “eight months pregnant and still saucy, Kate? Iguana going to get you again if you keep this up.”

She giggled. I felt the shadow then, the firm shadow of tiny head and neck, little upswept protecting arms. Felt, explored, caressed, and by the position of the moon and direction of the scent of spices I knew that the island was wandering again, floating on.

“Now tell me, Kate,” mouth close to her ear, hand holding her tight, “what’s it going to be? Little nigger boy, Kate, or little nigger girl?”

And spitting out the leaf and smiling, putting her hand on mine: “Whatever you say, sir,” she said, “please God.…”

Yesterday our pastoral, tomorrow the spawn. A mere four weeks and I will hold the child in my own two hands and break out the French wine, and after our visit to the cemetery, will come to my flourishing end at last. Four weeks for final memories, for a chance to return, so to speak, to the cold fading Atlantic island which is Cassandra’s resting place. And then no more, nothing, free, only a closed heart in this time of no time.

So on to the dead reckoning of my romance….