Children of Paradise: A Novel (7 page)

Trina and her dormitory companions talk in hushed tones. The young guard apologizes for having to lash at them but says it is better that he lashes them and they find out this important thing than no lash and no new crucial information about Father. He says he used as little force as possible. That an adult guard could deliver a bad lash to any one of them. The children nod and wonder if the young guard could aim for their legs next time rather than their arms and heads. He promises that he will. He leaves, and they make rude signs in the air behind his back. Trina wants to know if Ryan is the only one to get hit repeatedly by the guard who loves to wield the stick. The young guard calls the stick his rod of correction. The children avoid him as best as they can, since he finds the slightest opportunity to correct with lashes from his rod any behavior that he judges to be deviant. They return to examining and comparing the welts on each other’s arms and legs and bodies. Ryan wins first prize for the biggest welts, all down his left side. They question him about the focus on his left side. He says he tried to squeeze through a gap in the fence and half of him, his right side, made it through the gap before the rest of him got stuck. He says the guards came along at random and hit him a few times and wandered off as others queued to take a few swipes at him and marvel at the easy target he made of himself by choosing to be still rather than the usual squirming, dodging, jumping. The children agree.

Trina worries about their leader. He cried because they cried. He appeared to be one of them. But he is their father. What would become of them if he stopped being their father? The children fret about this and about how they will be treated by the guards and teachers and other prefects from now on. Ryan says that the evening sermon should answer all their questions. Trina urges them to be on their best behavior at the meal and to complete all their chores quickly and with as little talk as possible and certainly free of any horsing around. All agree. Rose says today’s rain is the best she has seen since her arrival six months earlier. The children nod. Rose imagines that she sees her absent mother’s face in the bark of a tree and blinks and looks again and again until the image fades from that tree though it remains burned on her retina. She becomes glum. Trina asks her what is wrong.

—I miss my mother. I wonder if it’s raining in the capital. She likes the rain. Will I ever see her again?

Both Ryan and Trina jump to offer Rose an answer. Trina wins out by being louder with her more strident tone.

—The capital isn’t far. I’m sure she’s thinking about you right now in this rain.

Rose likes the idea that the same rain soaks her mother in the capital. The many other children whose parents are not living with them in the commune say that this is true for them as well. Their parents left the commune or were thrown out of it. Like Rose, they were all told they belonged to the commune and Father was their sole parent. The children bring the talk back to how good it feels to run out into the wall of rain and feel it lash the arms, legs, body, and face. And rainwater swallowed directly from the sky tastes just like fresh coconut milk. They rub their hungry bellies and lick their lips.

—Yummy.

Trina follows with another assertion:

—It’s worth a beating, isn’t it?

A few of them hesitate to agree, but most think she is right, there is nothing like running out into this kind of rain and nothing sweeter to drink than sky water.

—Like bread just out of the oven, Ryan says. And they agree:

—Yes, just like fresh bread.

Trina wonders how the rain might be improved to make it even tastier. Rose says it would be great if, on the way down, the rain could hit bees and strip them of their honey, then the rain would arrive in their mouths honey-sweet. This gets everyone wild with speculation.

—What if the clouds were cotton candy and the rain flavored strawberry?

—Or any other flavor we could wish for?

—How about chocolate?

—Chocolate?

—Yes, chocolate.

—And strawberry.

—And vanilla.

—Vanilla?

—Yes, vanilla.

Trina thinks that, for there to be vanilla, there would have to be vanilla being transported somewhere by some flying creature that the rainwater could come into contact with on its looping, swaying descent toward their upturned faces and into their open mouths.

The children leave for their chores and try to maintain the hush made by the preacher’s outburst. So many feet shuffle over wooden walkways and wood floors with so little noise. So many hands handle cutlery, plates, and cups with hardly a clatter and whisper, yet keep the sum of those hands, feet, and eating utensils no louder than a heavy breath, collecting trays of dirty dishes and running them under water with just a sound of a splash, and exit or enter rooms with a similar demeanor of, say, the wind taking the opportunity to explore an open space, or an inquisitive dragonfly or hummingbird. Those sounds. The noise of a child amounts to as much as that wind or that insect and no more; not one foot drags, not one collision of shoulders, not one foot finds that one loose floorboard in a parade of feet on the floor, not one body trips, nothing drops to the floor, not even a knife or fork or spoon. All of the commune’s utensils are collected one at a time from a tray of such things without the usual clash and scrape of metal. All this deliberate cultivation of quiet sums up the lesson to the children of their collective beating and the preacher’s outburst.

The children chew with their lips sealed. They pick up each spoonful or forkful of food with such deliberation that they seem to be in the middle of using the fork or spoon of food to thread some kind of needle. They drink and do not slurp. They replace their cups on the tabletops with a deliberateness that slows time and kills sound. They burp and silence it by keeping their mouths shut, and only briefly do their puffed cheeks give way to that occurrence. Their joints crack and click involuntarily and make them a new breed of living thing, utterly quiet in all actions except for this noise in their joints. Bellies grumble with digestive juices, but even this is muffled and sounds like a building settling on its foundations or the air making some adjustment in temperature or pressure, if such a thing can be heard as much as it can be felt. Adults look at the children and nod their approval. A few of the parents think it might be high impudence on the part of their children to obey and in such an ostentatious manner. But most agree that this is a new set of children.

The adults approve and return in their various work groups to their various allocated chores: to feeding the pigs on the farm, to cutting up trees at the sawmill to sell as timber for construction, to collecting eggs from the chicken coops, to milking in the cow sheds, to washing clothes in the laundry room, to mending and sewing in the tailor shop with its bolts of cloth on giant rollers, to the infirmary with its sick and mostly elderly patients, to the mechanic and carpentry shops, the bakery, the large kitchen with its vats for pots and battalions of potato peelers and legions of sobbing onion slicers, and washers of dishes clattering pots and pans in a carnival of stacking and soaping and rinsing, and somewhere a lone voice launches a couplet and gathers a chorus of voices all lifted in praise of the Lord as routine continues to be pressed on a daily basis into the service of the commune’s heraldic purpose.

Supply trucks arrive leaving deep mud tracks, their big wheels caked in mud and the whole vehicle sprayed with it. Men unload bags of rice, sacks of flour, sugar, salt, barrels of cooking oil, vinegar, bottles of wine and spirits (kept out of sight and shuffled away directly to the preacher’s whitewashed house) and medical supplies in white plastic bags and sealed containers, from syringes to mobile coolers with ampoules of penicillin, analgesics, narcotics, and all of it walked directly to the pharmacy situated beside the infirmary and all of it kept under lock and key and properly refrigerated with an emergency generator ready to chug into action should the main compound generator choke to a standstill.

The children chant in the schoolrooms, divided by screens easily wheeled around to accommodate additions or subtractions of children, and the chants vary from multiplication tables to Bible psalms to swearing allegiance to Father and the church of eternal brotherhood, sisterhood, parenthood, to singing hymns with verses interspersed by one-liners shouted by a teacher or rotated between the children so that the songs last for hours of head-spinning enchantment. A class moves outside and sits under a tree. Adam hears these alphabets and numerals, and he absorbs the stories of sinners redeemed and the lost found by the Holy Scripture, and he somersaults and claps his hands as the children clap theirs to a hymn. As they recite a psalm, so Adam listens with parted lips. This is the glory of heaven made on earth, of watching the day begin with putting back into place the trees and the birds hurled from limbs into flight and the animals erased by the dark, now redrawn with morning light and released from the traps of sleep: set free to buck, scamper, and roam.

Daylight brings peddlers to the compound in defiance of the hand-painted signs warning that Trespassers May Be Shot and listing pork knockers and speculators and encyclopedia sellers as examples of subjects who qualify for target practice and listing indigenous tribes such as the Akawaio, Mawakwa, Warrau, and the Wapishana as the only exceptions because of their wood carvings that decorate the private dwelling of the preacher, and their medicines kept in leather pouches and gourds carved from calabash, and refrigerated in the commune pharmacy for emergencies in case supplies of the Western remedies run out. The indigenous natural therapies bear neat labels handwritten in ink bled from berries, and the remedies—some of which smell as if taken from fish guts or pig feces, others like peppermint or rosewater—stave off fevers, cure snakebites, spider bites, water ague, sun poisoning, berry and mushroom poisoning, foot and stomach worms, crotch-eating mites, and nightmares. The preacher breaks his own rules and, from time to time, entertains jewelers from the capital whose handmade bangles are famous as far away as Australia and whose amulets are worn by babies from Berbice to Bangladesh to protect against night raids by witches out to rob babies of their spirits. The preacher believes in the enduring value of gold and diamonds, but he instructs his guards to aim their rifles at the speculators because they offer the world nothing but bad ideas and appear at the gates of the compound only to contaminate this great community devoted to redeeming a lost humanity.

The preacher allows encyclopedias into the grounds to update the school library or to add to his small collection, but only those handpicked by him. Books on the history of capitalism and communism and the making of the industrial revolution and the rise, rise, rise of Cuba and the demise of kings and queens and stories about the elevation of the downtrodden status throughout history of the poor and powerless and the heroes who fight for them from John the Baptist to Robin Hood to Che Guevara. Many of these books arrive in multiple volumes, hardbound with gold leaf painted into the covers. The commune library remains as well stocked as the food storeroom, for without feeding the mind and spirit, the preacher reminds them at nightly sermons, without exercising the mind with a strident and stringent vocabulary and facts about history and a Euclidean numeracy, the body can never feel satisfied, no matter how lavish the dining tables or how heaped the enamel plates. For the cup that runneth over is not physical but spiritual.

The long loud blast of the horn of the captain’s boat with its weekly delivery climbs up from the river, floats over the trees to the commune, and lands in the ears of Trina and Joyce. Trina lowers her flute from her parted lips and looks in the direction of the preacher’s house, where her mother helps to keep the commune’s accounts straight, not quite the commune’s bookkeeper but one of the people the preacher credits with keeping his books in order. Trina thinks of the boat with her mother, their first time, before Eric and Kevin accompanied them and the captain introduced her to his tall tales about the trickster spider. Trina refits her lips to the flute and repositions her fingers and breathes, dreaming of Anansi.

Joyce stops her work and raises her pencil to her lips and stares into the distance, and a tune springs to mind: Captain, Captain, put me ashore.

Her captain did just that. Put her ashore. Left her there and continued on his merry way. Left her with what? An appreciation of life on the water and the days measured by tides; sighting swaths of land from the river, a view of the land that will make it never the same once she sets foot on the muddy banks again.

—Why did you call this boat
Coffee
? Why not
Tea
or
Hot Chocolate
?

—Coffee was an eighteenth-century enslaved African who ran away from his plantation and led a slave rebellion. He lived in the interior and evaded capture.

—Sounds like my kind of guy. I mean I like his trailblazing spirit.

—I get you.

Joyce asks him about his family and he says he has no one and she refuses, point-blank, to believe him. This annoys him, albeit teasingly.

—You calling me a liar?

—Yes. A man of your, how shall I put it, obvious qualities must have someone to love and who loves in return.

His anger dissipates. He is a liar to her because he is someone whom somebody cannot help loving. He says he likes the way she insults him, and can she elaborate a little?

—Well, you have a sound trade, and you have all of your teeth and your fingers and, I bet, even your toes.

He laughs and coughs and gives the wheel to his first mate so that he can find a drink to stop himself from choking.

—All my teeth! You will be entering me for a steeplechase next.

She says that is not what she means. Other women might use the word “handsome” or “good-looking,” but that would give him the wrong idea about her estimation of his attributes. Trina looks up from her sketchbook at this juncture in the conversation. She has not heard her mother talk like this to a man. Joyce sounds playful, with a higher-pitched, lighter voice, none of the usual grave warnings or thinking geared to praising the preacher and his mission. The captain says there is someone but that things have cooled between the two of them. Joyce says she does not mean to pry, but by “cool,” does he mean over or simply in cold storage and liable to be brought into the light and rejuvenated at any moment? The captain says cool as in stone-cold dead, cordial but not intimate, no longer romantic, in fact, a frosty cordiality and therefore no light and no such sustenance at all. Joyce says a lot must have been asked of him for the whole thing to be shut away and starved of light. Trina looks puzzled by all the photosynthesis talk and returns her attention to her sketchbook. The captain says that this person wanted him to settle down with her in the city and give up his boat. She wanted him to make more money than a river captain.