Lime Tree Can't Bear Orange Read online

  “Yes, Marva would love nothing more than that.”

  “Marva is concerned about you as well. I think you should go away for a little while, then we can see where we are with everything.”

  I knew that Marva had been keeping an eye on me. Whenever I was anywhere near Dr. Emmanuel Rodriguez, I could feel her burning eyes. The seeds of doubt had been sown and they were now growing tall.

  “How long for?”

  “Three weeks or so. As long as it takes. I will get a message to you somehow, and let you know.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  WHEN I SAW AUNT SULA’S FACE I WANTED TO CRY.

  “Child, what happen?” she said, and put her arms around me. “What happen?”

  And then she asked me again at the table when I couldn’t eat, and again when I was sitting outside on the steps staring at nothing.

  “Celia, what is it?”

  I wanted to tell her my life was hanging on a thread; that I was in love with a man who—as far as I could see—no longer loved me; a man I couldn’t have, a man I had no right loving. But I thought she wouldn’t understand.

  “Is it your job? Has the English woman been unkind to you?”

  Each time I shook my head.

  “Is it a money problem?” Then, “Are you pregnant?”

  And later, when she grew tired of asking, she said, “How long will you stay?”

  “I don’t know. Three or four weeks. I hope that’s okay.”

  “Of course,” she said. “You stay as long as you need to. My home is your home, you must always remember that.”

  “If somebody wanted to reach me, would they send a telegram?”

  “Yes, it would come to the house and one of the children would bring it here for you. Are you expecting something?”

  • • •

  THOSE FIRST FEW days at Tamana I felt faraway, as if I was outside the world looking in. I watched Aunt Sula while she cooked and cleaned and crocheted. I watched her sweep, and fold clothes, and wash dishes. I often caught her looking at me with a sideways glance. I tried to eat a little to please her, but my appetite had gone. Now and then, to break the silence, she spoke about something that had happened on the estate. Sudden heavy rain; a worker who had cut himself; a parrot found with a broken wing. She talked about Joseph Carr Brown—the news that a citrus disease had broken out in South Trinidad, somewhere near Central. “If you’re wondering why you haven’t seen him, he’s been up in the orchard covering the trees with nets.” Apparently, it might not stop infection but it would help. It had been a terrible time. Aunt Sula said these things as if they mattered at all to me.

  AT NIGHT I lay on the mattress and listened to the wind in the bamboo. I listened to the crickets in the grass. I listened to the gentle rumble of my aunt’s breath. And I longed with every bone in my body to be back in my bed in St. Clair with Dr. Emmanuel Rodriguez above me; to smell his hair, to feel his mouth on mine. And I berated myself for wasting time with William, time that I could have spent with him. I had become complacent. It was my fault that he had turned away from me.

  In the morning Aunt Sula would ask, “How did you sleep?”

  “Same,” I’d say. “Hardly at all.”

  And so it went. I soon lost weight and the dark circles under my eyes got darker.

  • • •

  THEN, AFTER FOUR or five days, she said, “Mr. Carr Brown want to know if you could help out at the stables.”

  My heart sank. “I’m not sure how helpful I will be.”

  “The stable boy is sick and we don’t know when he’s coming back. Mr. Carr Brown will show you what to do. Right now he has too many other things to think about to do it himself; everybody busy with something.”

  THE SUN WAS low when we started on the track. It was cool and still and there was mist on the ground. I looked up at the big house, pretty like a painting. I said, “How come some people have so much, and some people have to struggle all their lives just to get by?”

  “It’s only a struggle if you make it a struggle.” She put her hand on my back.

  AUNT SULA STOOD by and watched as Joseph Carr Brown took me into the stables. “You came at just the right time, Celia. Marlon is sick with yellow fever.”

  “I heard so, sir.”

  “The trouble when you get ill up here in the country, is finding a doctor. It takes three hours as you know to get into Port of Spain. Not all of us are lucky enough to live in the same house as one.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, my heart heavy as clay.

  “Now, remember, we have three horses and a mule. And the workmen always tell me before they take them out. Unless it’s something urgent. We don’t like them to get overworked. The horses, that is.”

  I realized he had made a joke and smiled. But I was a little late.

  The wooden sheds were large, cool, and dark, except for where there were holes in the roof and sunlight jetted in. I followed him to each stable door and he told me the name of each horse. He showed me a large box of brushes, combs, and the special cream I must use when their skin was bruised or sore. “Sometimes they get open wounds or the skin breaks where the girth pinches. You have to watch out for that.” At one point, he stepped out and called down the hill to Tatton, who was playing right there by the oleander tree. He came running up. Apparently, he knew how to “muck out,” but Joseph Carr Brown thought it best if he didn’t do it alone.

  They left me there with Tatton.

  TOGETHER, WE GOT the horses from inside to outside, letting them roam a bit under the trees. At first I felt unsure about holding their ropes, and their size frightened me, but then I saw the boy calmly leading them here and there. “They’ll get used to you,” he said. “Sometimes they get in a bad mood and you have to leave them. Especially Cocoa. She doesn’t like anyone except Mr. Carr Brown.”

  We swept out the stables and mopped the floors. It was hard work and I soon got hot and tired. Once it was clean, we brought the horses back in and Tatton showed me how to check the bottom of their feet, where “things” got stuck, and how to clean them out. We carried water from the pump up the path. Bucket after bucket. And they drank quickly as if these buckets were small like thimbles. Then we glanced over their coats to make sure there weren’t any cuts or sores or parasites. And, finally, we brushed them down. Their bodies, their tails, their manes. By the time we had finished it was almost midday.

  On the way back to Aunt Sula’s house I realized, for the first time in days, I was hungry. I could tell my aunt was pleased.

  “It’s good to take your mind off things,” she said. “You’ll do the same tomorrow?”

  • • •

  BY THE END of my first week, I was taking out the horses on my own. Tatton was impressed. I had such an “easy way” with them, he said, it must be in my blood. When I told him that was doubtful, he said, “Then your mother must’ve ridden a horse when she was pregnant.” Truth was, I wasn’t sure that I liked horses. I liked Milo because he was smaller, and there was a gentleness about him. But the other two were big and unfriendly. Their dark eyes followed me around and made me wonder if they knew things. When I was stuck, when they bucked, or jerked their heads from side to side, or refused to move, I called Tatton and he quickly came to help. They were always keen to get outside. Seafer and Cocoa were the most impatient; I half expected them to break away and run out onto the field, but they didn’t. They waited in the sun until we took them to the shaded parts and fastened them to the trees. Once the gate was up, we untied their ropes and let them go. They stayed quite still, particularly Diamond, the mule who seemed weary like an old man. Diamond, Tatton said, was a friend for Cocoa when she was young. They need a friend when they’re foals,” he said. “Like children.”

  We swept out the sheds together. They were often hot and damp, especially when the rain came in through the roof. It made a narrow funnel of water which seeped through the partition. When this happened, Tatton brought the mop and soaked it up. At times there was a strong an
d unpleasant smell. He said the dogs were to blame; they got in when the stable door was left open, and slept in the passageway. “Sometimes they make a mess. Don’t tell Mr. Carr Brown. He’ll say it’s my fault for not closing the door.”

  “Who else could have left it open?”

  “Soldier Ghost.”

  I must have looked confused.

  “Soldier Ghost was a pilot. His plane crashed in the hills.” The little boy pointed behind him. “When they found him he was so mashed up you could fit him in a bucket. And now he walks around Tamana looking for his plane and the passengers.”

  I said, “Have you seen him?”

  He lowered his voice. “No, but Cedar saw him in the yard one night, walking around the back of the house, in a blue uniform with stripes and boots, and a white hat.”

  “Does Mr. Carr Brown know about Soldier Ghost?”

  “Yes, miss. He say it’s nonsense and superstition.”

  EVERY MORNING, JOSEPH Carr Brown stopped off on his way back to the house. I’d hear him whistling all the way down the track. For some reason, I often felt shy with him, and this made me awkward. Like that time, a few days after I had started, when he asked, “You like the horses, Celia?” and I said, “Yes, sir.”

  “Which one is your favorite?”

  “Diamond,” I said, suddenly unsure.

  “But Diamond’s a mule, not a horse.”

  I said, “Are they so different?”

  He narrowed his dark blue eyes, as if he wasn’t quite sure if to believe that I was serious. Then, “Well, the head is bigger, the tail is short like the tail of a cow. The eyes are larger, the ears longer. They’re completely different beasts!”

  More than once he caught me using a brush instead of a comb. My strokes were going in the wrong direction, he said. “Follow the growth of the hair,” and he took my hand and ran it over the long back of the horse. “See how it grows. You have to use your instincts with these things, too.”

  TATTON SAID, NICE as Mr. Carr Brown seemed, he didn’t stand for fools or cowards. When he found him and Ruth behind the shed making a fire, he took a switch from the mango tree and beat them both. Now the boy was quite frightened of him. Tatton told me of at least three people who had been caught stealing at Tamana. “All of them were fired, even though Mr. Carr Brown knew them since they were small like me. One of them was in his fifties. His whole life all he ever knew was Tamana. And Mr. Carr Brown throw him off the land like he a stranger trespassing. No matter how the man beg, he wouldn’t let him come back. When Mr. Carr Brown finish, he finish.”

  After the stables, Tatton and I made our way back together. I stopped off at the main house and looked in at the kitchen where Dolly was preparing lunch. She cooked a hot meal for Mr. and Mrs. Carr Brown and it had to be on the table by 12:30 p.m. Cedar served the meal. If there was anything extra, a piece of meat or some pie or an extra loaf of bread, she sent it for Aunt Sula and we had it for lunch. Dolly said, “They don’t have the children here anymore, so who gonna eat it? I cook all this food and for who? Madam eat like a bird.”

  Before I left, I’d ask if the mail had come.

  “No, child. Nothing for you,” she’d say. “Check again in the morning. Tomorrow another day.” And half of me would feel wretched, and the other half relieved; no news was better than bad news.

  NOW AND THEN, when Mr. Carr Brown said I could, I took Milo and rode slowly up to the fields. There was another route around the forest, and it meant riding on the road, which was easier. The hills were right there, covered with vines and huge ferns; there were red, hard, hanging flowers. For some reason, they made me feel sad. After I had ridden through the fields and checked the citrus trees, I started back. Sometimes, my heart ached so much I felt like carrying on into Arima, and riding on horseback all the way to Port of Spain.

  • • •

  EVEN THOUGH I was unhappy, there was something about the land at Tamana that calmed me, maybe because there was so much of it. Nothing here changed, and yet everything changed.

  Every afternoon, Joseph Carr Brown dropped by. He sat on the veranda, his long legs stretched out. Aunt Sula made a pot of tea and offered him something to eat: shortbread, cake, biscuits. Mr. Carr Brown had a sweet tooth, she said. They sat and talked like friends who had known each other for a long time. It was easy, comfortable. Sometimes, Aunt Sula took out a pack of cards and the three of us played a simple game called hearts.

  “Hold up your hand,” Joseph Carr Brown would say. “I don’t want to see what you have.” And I’d hold my cards right up to my face, but then as the game went on, I’d forget and the cards would drop.

  “Why does this girl want to show me everything she has,” he’d say, and Aunt Sula and I would laugh. Sometimes, when he gave a joke, Aunt Sula laughed so much tears rolled down her face.

  He taught me how to shuffle the cards, splitting them equally into three, pressing down with my fingers, using my thumbs to lift the corners, arching my palms to create a bridge. “Your hotshot friends in Port of Spain will want to know where you learned to do this. You can tell them, in Sula’s gambling parlor.”

  Aunt Sula told me that when his children were young, Joseph Carr Brown played marbles with them every afternoon. They sat underneath the house where he’d laid a smooth flat patch of stone, perfect for the game. He carved giant pickup sticks and painted them in bright colors; he marked up a cricket pitch. He built a wooden house in the mahogany tree, nearly good enough to live in. Now and then he packed them in his car and drove to Ballandra where he swam with them in the Atlantic ocean. “They clung to his back like a raft. That sea can be rough.”

  I WAS HEADING home that morning when I remembered that Aunt Sula had asked me to stop off at the chicken shed and pick up some eggs for supper. Through the wire fence, I could see Ruth playing with her doll.

  “Hello, miss,” she said, her little face beaming.

  “Now it’s holidays, you’re happy not to go to school,” I said, bending down by the wooden gate. There were about twenty chickens in all and they were mostly walking about, pecking at seed on the ground. They didn’t seem to bother her.

  “Yes, miss.” Then, “Will you play jacks with me?”

  “Maybe,” I said, not seeing the snake that had crawled into the pen right where the little girl was playing. But then I did see it: a thick black and yellow snake and it was crawling toward a hen just inches from Ruth’s feet. The hen was sitting on its nest and could not move, as though the snake had put a spell on it, and then Ruth saw it too. They say this about snakes—that they can hypnotize animals and children. Then suddenly, as if the spell snapped, there was a screeching and squawking. I ran around the edge of the pen, dived inside, and grabbed Ruth, who, terrified, climbed onto my back and clung like a crab on a rock. From the safety of the fence, both of us watched at where the hen was jumping, flapping its little wings. And we watched in horror as the snake opened up its mouth and swallowed each and every one of its seven eggs. And in no time at all, all the eggs were gone from the nest and the snake was sliding itself over the dusty earth toward the corner of the pen. There, it curled its body into a ring and quickly fell asleep.

  Next thing, Joseph Carr Brown came outside. “Why didn’t you call me?” he said, surprised. Then he did something that shocked me: from over his shoulder, he took up a fouling piece with a duck shot, held it out, and fired and blew the snake’s head into pieces. I held Ruth’s head so she would not see the fleshy mess. He told me to collect the eggs. So I walked over to the dead snake and plucked out each egg (not one of them was broken) from its throat and put them back in the nest. That evening, the hen was sitting on them again and four days later chicks started to hatch.

  When I told Aunt Sula what had happened, she said it took courage to go inside the pen and rescue Ruth. “Not everyone could have done such a thing. You’re brave,” she said, “like Mr. Carr Brown.”

  NEXT DAY, AT the stables, Joseph Carr Brown asked if I was feeling better. “Su
la told me you haven’t been yourself for a while. I thought so, too.”

  I felt my face grow hot.

  “Your aunt is a good person to talk to.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I didn’t tell him that I felt like I was dying inside.

  DURING THE DAY I could just about cope, but at night, my longing for Dr. Emmanuel Rodriguez left me exhausted and unable to sleep at the same time. I tried hard to imagine what he was doing. I tried to picture him in his study, sitting at his desk and working. I saw him in his bed, lying on his back, his eyes open. I talked to him, softly, so Aunt Sula wouldn’t hear. I asked him to come for me or to send for me. I told him I was sorry and that I missed him with all my heart. I thought about the children and wondered if they had asked where I was and what he would say to them. I counted the days I had been at Tamana, and I counted how many there were before I could leave. And when I lay there thinking about all that had happened to bring me to this place, I didn’t know how I would last. I knew that Aunt Sula was glad to have me there. More than once she said, “I don’t know why you came and I never want to see you unhappy, but I—for one—am very glad to have you here.”

  And this is how it was every day at Tamana. And the days passed. And I waited, and I waited, and I waited. But I didn’t hear anything from Dr. Emmanuel Rodriguez.

  THEN, ONE AFTERNOON, Dolly came rushing down the hill to Aunt Sula’s house calling, Celia! Celia! I had just finished bathing; my hair was wet, my dress not yet buttoned. Aunt Sula was lightly sleeping in the chair when Dolly arrived in the living room, her face hot and shiny. “Look what came,” she said, waving an envelope. I felt my whole heart flutter like a bird in a cage.

  There was no postmark; my name was written in black ink. I tore it open; it didn’t matter that Aunt Sula and Dolly were there.

  Dear Celia

  Please forgive my handwriting. This is my third try. The others were not correct and you will see from this why I did no good at school. I am writing to ask how you are. I ask Marva when you coming but she don’t know. So I hope you will tell me.