Skin Folk (2 page)

Morgan shouted, “The water table! It’s rising!” Before Silky could stop him, he ran down the hill, yelling that he had to
go and get his wallet. She knew that the flood would drown the city below, then rise to engulf her, and there was nothing
she could do about it.

Morgan would have called the dreams apocalyptic. He would have hauled some tatty paperback about “mysticism and the psychic
power of dreams” off the bookshelf and launched into a speech about how she was tapping into her archetypal consciousness,
or something.

In her mind’s eye, Silky could just see his earnest expression as he tried to convince her, the eagerness that could usually
make her smile, ever since they were children.

She made herself a cup of tea and took it to the kitchen table. She shoveled a tablespoonful of sugar from the sugar bowl
into her mug. Demerara brown sugar, damp with molasses and moist as mud. The glimmering crystals swirled like chips of gold,
then sank slowly to the bottom of the cup. She loved the rich taste, hoarded the Demerara sugar for herself; guests could
have the white. In Jamaica it was the other way around; the costly refined sugar was for guests, and the everyday brown sugar
was cheap. Mummy would have been horrified at how expensive Demerara sugar was in Toronto.

Silky was aware that her mind was wandering, skittering over mundane things to avoid thinking about Morgan. The Jamaican police
hadn’t found him. It was horrible not knowing whether she should be grieving or not. She stood up and walked over to the kitchen
window, leaned out to look at the pear tree just outside.

The moist heat of the summer past had been good for the tree. In the crisp fall air, its branches drooped with heavy fruit.
The pears looked like the bodies of plump, freckled green women. Through the leaves of the tree, the sun cast pale disks of
gold onto the pears. The autumn light was muted, as though everything were underwater. If she stretched a little, Silky could
touch one or two of the pears, stroke their smooth skin. Many of them were about to ripen. Soon she’d be able to pluck sustenance
from the watery air. The pear tree was the main reason that Silky had persuaded Morgan that they should buy this little old
house with the silverfish living in the cracks. Besides, it was what they could afford, what with Morgan only doing casual
work at the car parts plant. He was angling for full time, but until then her job as research assistant for the Ministry of
State just barely brought in enough to keep them both going.

Morgan had been fed up of never having enough money, and he thought he’d found a quick way to make his fortune back home.
He wouldn’t tell her about it, had wanted to surprise her. He’d flown to Jamaica, where Silky had had one phone call from
him. His plans were going well, it looked like his hunch was going to pan out. Then he disappeared.

The cold air through the kitchen window was making her eyes water.

When they were children, Silky and Morgan used to fly with their parents to Gaspar Grande island off the coast of Trinidad
to spend the summer holidays there. That was before it became a fancy resort. At the time, there were only a few rambling
cottages and the small house where the caretaker lived with his old dog. Silky and her brother would dig sea cockroach barnacles
out of the rocks for bait, then fish all morning for little yellow grunts, mimicking the fishes’ croaking sounds as they pulled
them up out of the water. They would take their catch for their mother to gut. The rest of the day, the island was theirs
to roam. They would climb sweetsop trees for the green-skinned, bumpy fruit, sucking out the sweet, milky pulp and spitting
the black seeds at each other. During those holidays, Silky felt that she could want no other food, need no other air to breathe.

She remembered her mother diving from the jetty into the dark water, circling down past the parrot fish and the long-snouted
garfish, until Silky could barely make her out, her plump body shimmering greenish in the deep water. She seemed to stay under
forever, and it scared Silky and Morgan, but Daddy would simply smile.

“Is by the riverside I first met your mother. She was in the water swimming, like some kind of manatee. Mamadjo woman, mermaid
woman. Happy in the sea, happy in the river!” He laughed. “What a man your daddy must be, eh, to make a fair maid from the
river consent to come and live on dry land with him?”

The children wouldn’t be reassured, though, until she burst to the surface again, not even winded.

Their mother had tried to teach them both to swim, but the sight of her sinking into the black water appalled them. Morgan
refused to be coaxed in any deeper than the shallows. Silky remembered him shaking his head no, how the sunlight would make
diamonds of the water flying from his tight peppercorn curls. For herself, she had loved the feeling of body surfing, but
wouldn’t put her whole head under the water. She’d stick her face in just far enough to be able to see the grunts flit by.
She never learned to dive beneath the surface the way her mother did. “Just try to go deeper, nuh, sweetheart?” Mummy would
say, undulating her arms to show her how to stroke through the water. “You and Morgan can both do it; you’re my children.
I’m right here. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

But Silky hadn’t wanted to be swallowed up by that dark wetness.

She had another dream that night. In it, she had survived the flood from the previous nightmare. She was swimming on the surface,
above the drowned lands. Bloated corpses bumped her from time to time. The horror made her skin prickle. She put her face
into the water to inspect the damage below her. She could see submerged roads, tiny fish nibbling at dissolving lumps of flesh,
a sea anemone already blossoming on a disintegrated carcass that had sunk to the sea bed.

The sea gave a greenish cast to the rotting flesh of the drowned people. In the rigor of death, a man clutched at a slab of
coral the size of a dinner table. The coral glowed reddish gold in the flickering water. The man’s face was turned up towards
her. His dying gasps for air had contorted it into a ghastly scream. Watery light glistened off his teeth, turning them to
gleaming coins. Silky was terrified. Just then, a freak wave rose and slammed her down into the depths, tossing her against
the drowned man. The current rearranged his features. It was Morgan. His eyes opened and he reached a beseeching hand out
to his sister. She couldn’t stop herself; she screamed. She expected the brine to flood her lungs, burning them, filling them
like sponges, but it entered her body slowly; sweet and sustaining, like a breath of air. In disbelief, she heaved, trying
to expel the liquid from her stomach.

She woke in terror, blowing hard. She was lying in bed, a few strands of her hair crushed between her face and the pillow.
Some of it had worked its way into her mouth. The hair tasted brackish as the sea, as though she’d been crying in her sleep.

Silky lay shivering under the icy sheets, trying to get rid of the image of herself drowned, swollen full of salty water.
She was afraid that if she hadn’t woken up, the sea would have changed her, rotting the flesh of her dream hands and feet
into corrupt parodies of flukes, while eels snapped at her melting flesh. Her mamadjo mother could live in the sea like a
mermaid, but she could not.

The pears were ripe. Silky climbed the tree with a basket hooked over one shoulder, a long scarf inside it. She wedged the
basket into a crook of the tree so that she would have her hands free to pick. Shards of golden sunlight struck her eyes.
She looked down. A light breeze was rippling the grass in waves. She was sailing on a green sea.

When they were children, she and Morgan would climb the julie mango tree in the back of the house and pretend that they were
old-time pirates, scaling the mast to spy out ships to plunder. Other little boys in Mona Heights had had cap guns. Morgan
had a plastic sword. He used to jab Silky with it, until that time when she punched him and broke his nose. Grandpy had been
so mad at her!

As she reminisced, Silky picked a fat, golden pear, but with a liquid sound it collapsed in her hand, rotted from within.
“Ugh! Nasty!” She flicked the soggy mush off her fingers and wiped her hand on her jeans.

After Mummy and Daddy died, the children’s grandfather came from Spanish Town to take care of them. He was the one who had
told them the story about Jackson, a man who had lived just outside Spanish Town in the 1600s. People hadn’t known it at the
time, but Jackson had been a carpenter turned pirate. He was a greedy man. He had drugged the crew with doped rum and scuttled
their ship at sea while they were still in it. He had drowned his mates so that he could retire rich with their booty.

“Guilt drove Jackson crazy,” Grandpy told them. “The ghosts of the drowned pirates called from their grave in the sea and
asked the river spirit for her help. They said she could have their gold if she gave them revenge.

“River Mumma loves shiny things. She agreed. She would come to Jackson at night. As he tossed and turned in his bed, he could
hear the river whispering in his ear that he was a murderer and a thief. River Mumma told him she would have revenge, and
she would have his gold. Jackson was afraid, but he was more greedy than scared. He wasn’t going to let her have the doubloons.
He used his carpenter’s skills to make a huge table of heavy Jamaican mahogany, then he nailed every last gold coin onto it.
Hid it in his cellar. He stopped bathing, stopped talking to his neighbours, stayed in his house all the time.”

“Then what happened?” Silky had whispered, holding tight to Morgan’s sleeve for reassurance. He looked just as scared as she.

“Jackson didn’t even notice the heavy rains that year. It rained so hard that the Rio Cobre river that ran beside his property
swelled up big. He was in his cellar admiring his gold when the Rio Cobre broke its banks and gouged a new course for itself,
right through his home. The house was demolished.

“River Mumma sent the water for him,” Grandpy said. “The last thing the neighbours saw was a big golden table rising to the
surface of the rushing water. It floated for twelve seconds with Jackson clinging to it. Then it sank. If he had let go, they
might have been able to save him, but he refused to leave his treasure.”

“What happened to the table?” Morgan had asked. He was eleven and already he had a taste for money. Grandpy was looking after
his two orphans as best as he could, but things were tight.

“No one ever fetched the golden table out of the Rio Cobre. They say that at the stroke of noon every day, it rises to the
top of the water, and it floats for exactly twelve seconds, then sinks again, dragging anything else in the water down with
it.”

Silky’s basket was full. She tied the scarf around the handle and lowered it to the ground, climbing down after it. She lugged
it inside the house. Morgan loved pears. She would make preserves from them, stew them in her precious Demerara sugar to keep
them until he returned.

The Jamaican police had sent her Morgan’s effects. Some clothes, a letter he hadn’t mailed. She had put the letter with the
month’s stack of bills on the bookshelf. At least the insurance was covering Morgan’s half of the mortgage payments.