The Island (17 page)

“Were you born here?”

She hesitated, apparently unsure. “I have always been here.”

“How old are you?”

“I have been a woman a hundred times,” she said. “It was celebrated.”

“What do you . . . ?” Maynard stopped. Perhaps she was referring to menstrual cycles. A hundred periods, a hundred months—a little more than eight years. She had her first period at, say, twelve. She was, maybe, twenty.

“You have no children.”

“I had two, but they were killed.”

“Why?”

“They were poorly. It was seen.” She stopped stirring, and set the bowl on the ground. “Roche provided, but he was always poxed.” She spat. “Pig.” She reached for something behind her, in the darkness. It was a pewter canister, about a foot long, with a wooden plunger on one end. “You are my last chance.”

“For a child?”

“A good child.”

“If you don’t . . . ?”

She fit a nozzle onto the open end of the canister and screwed it tight. “I cease being a woman. I join the sisterhood.”

“Of what? Nuns?”

“Nuns!” she laughed. “Prostitutes.”

“They force you to become a prostitute?”

“There is no forcing. It is the way.” She dipped the nozzle into the bowl and pulled back the plunger, drawing the thick liquid up into the canister. “Roll over. On your knees.”

Maynard didn’t move.

“Roll over!”

“What are you doing?”

“You are not well. You will not eat. You have poisons.” She brandished the canister. “This will clean you out.”

Maynard slid backward, against the wall of the hut. “You want to put that . . . Oh no, thanks anyway.”

“You need a physic.”

“You’re not sticking that thing . . .” In the shadowy darkness, he did not see her move until she was on him. Her bony knee pressed into his sternum. She held a short-bladed knife under his chin and forced his head back.

“You are alive because I suffer it,” she said. “The others would have you dead. You do well to remember. I need you, but I can take you to the edge of death, and bring you back, and take you to the edge again. I can teach you pain.” She moved off him. “Roll over.”

Slowly, he rolled onto his stomach and brought his knees up under him. “What’s in that thing?” he asked weakly.

“Fish oil and medicines.” She raised his hips and spread his cheeks. “The elders say it cures everything—shufflefoot, strabismus, even pox.” She chuckled sagely. “But their ways are old-fashioned. A clyster gives a good cleansing and relieves the poisons. Nothing more.”

Maynard closed his eyes and squeezed his temples. The sharp, cold nozzle slid up his rectum. It jabbed his prostate, and he felt a burning surge in his penis. As the nozzle probed deeper, the gratitude he had felt to the woman, the relief at being alive, began to wane.

She pushed the plunger. Maynard’s insides flooded.

“There,” she said when the pump was empty. She slapped his butt, and he collapsed onto the mat.

He lay, gasping, with his face in the dirt. A fleeting vision of Dena Gaines crossed his mind. Did she do this? For
fun?

His bowels cramped, rejecting the fish oil. He struggled to his knees. “Where . . . ?”

The woman had anticipated his need. She stood at the entrance to the hut, holding back the skin that covered the doorway. “Follow me.”

Clutching his stomach, struggling to keep his sphincter closed, Maynard staggered out into the night. He followed the woman through the underbrush until she stopped and pointed to an open trench, two feet wide, twenty or thirty feet long. A symphony of bug sounds was broadcast from the trench.

Maynard did not know how to use the trench, but he had no time to ask questions. He straddled it and squatted, and his intestines erupted.

The woman stood beside him, hands on hips, admiring.

Dignity, Maynard thought as through a mist of nausea, he regarded the woman. Die with dignity but live like a pig. His bowels heaved in spasms, and he groaned. A burst of air exploded from his guts.

“Now you’re fit,” the woman said.

“I think I’m gonna die.”

“Not yet. You’ve yet to serve your purpose. Come.” She took his hand and pulled him away from the trench.

“You’re kidding,” he said. Oil oozed down his legs.

She led him through a maze of narrow, overgrown paths. The bugs followed. Mosquitoes swarmed on his back; flies buzzed around his legs and settled at the corners of his mouth, where they drank from his drool. He was too weak to brush them away. He heard voices in the distance—subdued, conversational—but saw no one.

They emerged from the underbrush onto a beach. She led him into the water and bathed him, rubbing wet sand over his soiled legs, rinsing him in salt foam.

She took him back to the hut and ordered him to lie on the mat. She pulled the animal skin across the doorway, trapping myraid gnats inside the hut. “No wind tonight,” she said. “The wind is all that keeps this land from bedlam.” She scooped a handful of something from a pot and knelt beside Maynard.

Alarmed, Maynard asked, “What’s that stuff?”

“Hog grease.”

“Where are you gonna put it?”

“Everywhere.” She laughed. “It’s all I have to keep the bugs at bay. Roche could have taken a ration of 6-12 from that last prize. He had a good choice. But he chose rum.”

She removed her poncho and, naked, smeared the grease all over her body. Her skin glistened in the flashlight beam.

To Maynard, the pork fat smelled like childhood Sunday mornings, when his father would cook bacon and sausage and fry eggs in the residue.

“Where
is
my son?”

“With the other boys.”

“Are there many?”

“Now, only two. And the girl, Mary. The number changes.” She sat back and swabbed grease on the insides of her thighs.

“What will they do with him?”

“Do? Nothing. They will teach him to do for himself.”

“Are there others like me?”

She shook her head. “You are the only one, the only one ever, alive.”

“Why?”

“The covenant says, a grown man, a grown person, is corrupt. Only the young are pure.”

“What covenant are you talking about?”

“You will learn . . . if you live to.” She filled her hand from the pot and began gently to rub grease onto Maynard’s face. She greased his neck and his chest and his legs and his feet and between his toes. She missed nothing. Her fingers were soothing, and as she kneaded his thighs, he drifted toward sleep. He snored.

She snapped the back of her hand across his mouth. Her knuckles opened cracks in his parched lips. She glanced at his startled eyes, then scooped more grease from the pot and slathered it on his genitals. “You’ll not sleep yet.”

“But . . . I couldn’t!”

“Yes, you can. I’ll show you.”

“Are you . . . ?”

“Ripe? No. But we must prepare for the day.”

C H A P T E R
1 1

“I
t looks like mush,” he said, gazing into the earthenware bowl.

“It is mush. Cassava-root mush and mushed bananas. Good for you.”

“I’m not very . . .” He stopped, for he saw that she had put down her sewing and was reaching for the clyster pump. He ate. She smiled and resumed sewing.

The cassava was white and pasty and tasteless; the bananas were overripe, almost pure sugar. What taste there was in the mush came from ground nutmeg.

If the mush was palatable, her sewing was nauseating. Using a sturdy sailmaker’s needle, she was stitching together a garment from shreds of freshly killed, uncured animal skins that exuded a fetid stench.

“What are you making?”

“Trousers. For you. I cannot have you frying your bum.”

“You don’t cure the skins?”

“Why? The sun and the water cure them. When they cure on the wearer, they suit him better.” She pinched two edges of flesh together, and juice ran down her fingers.

The odor made Maynard’s lip curl. “They smell like death.”

“Aye.” She looked up. “What else?”

The skin covering the doorway was pulled back, and Nau stooped and entered the hut. He carried a wooden chest, with brass handles on either end. A length of half-inch chain lay atop the chest. He sat the chest on the ground and shoveled the chain toward the woman.

She looked at the chain and at Nau. It seemed to Maynard that she wanted to argue, but instead she said, “As you wish.”

“I’ll not put in peril threescore people,” Nau said sharply, “just so you may indulge your . . . pet.” He turned to Maynard and slapped the chest. “Here, scribe. Make order of this. Our assigns will thank you.”

“Where’s my son?”

“You have no son. You have nothing. Soon you will
be
nothing, not in this world.” Nau’s eyes were cold, giving nothing, encouraging Maynard to look away.

He refused. “I want to see him.”

“Sometime, perhaps, if he chooses. I will ask him.” He backed to the doorway and said to the woman, “Get to work, Goody. When you are a whore, you may live like a whore. As long as you are a woman, you will work like a woman.” He left.

Maynard saw the woman’s hands shake as she took a final stitch in the hides. Angrily, she threw them into the dirt.

He wanted to say something consoling, but he did not know what. He tried: “ ‘Goody’ is a nice name.”

“ ‘Goody’ is no name,” she said. “It is an attachment, from the old days: ‘Good wife.’ My name is Beth.” She lifted an end of the chain. “Come here.”

She wrapped the chain twice around his neck, stood and fed the free end over the main brace in the roof of the hut, then joined the two ends with a shiny new combination padlock. She snapped the shackle and spun the three little combination wheels.

“Do you really think . . . ?” Maynard began.

“He is concerned. Now he need not be concerned. If you try to flee, you must take the whole house with you.”

“Do you ever think about fleeing?”

“From what?” she said. “
To
what?”

“This isn’t much of a life for you.”

“I have no other.”

“There is more . . .” Maynard gestured at the vague beyond.

“We are taught that more is worse, not better.”

“I could tell you . . .”

“Aye,” she interrupted, “and I could listen, and time would pass, and work would not be done, and my reward would be the wrath of l’Ollonois. As Jean-David Nau, he is a man as God made him; as l’Ollonois, he is the creation of the lord of darkness.” She gathered a wicker basket, a short-handled iron hoe, and a crude machete, and she left the hut.

When she had gone, Maynard sat on the dirt floor and listened. He heard the whisper of breeze in the dry leaves, the clicking and chattering of bugs, and raucous complaints of sea birds and, far away, sounds of hammering and sawing and men’s voices.

He examined the lock that joined the ends of the chain. It bore no scratches, no signs of tarnish; it was still coated with a film of silicone. He judged that the lock had never been used. Probably, it had been taken from a recently captured boat and stored in its original plastic-and-cardboard container.

The lock mechanism contained a thousand possible combinations. The only one Maynard could surely eliminate was the one Beth had left: 6,4,8. He spun the wheels until the numbers read 1,1,1. Then he tried 1,2,1, then 1,3,1 then 1,4,1. It was inevitable that eventually he would find the combination but the search might take days, or weeks, for he could fiddle with the lock only when he was alone, and he had no way of knowing how often, or for how long, he would be left alone.

As he tugged on the shackle after dialing 1,9,1 he noticed a tiny hole on the side of the lock. At first, the hole made no sense to him; what purpose could it serve? Then an image crept into his mind, of Justin squirreling away his birthday money in a strongbox. He secured the strongbox with a combination lock. Unlike the locks Maynard was familiar with—on which the combinations were set permanently by the manufacturer—this one could be set, and changed, by the owner. Maynard recalled Justin poking a slim stylus into a hole on the lock and dialing the last three digits of their phone number. When he removed the stylus, the combination was set at those numbers.

Maynard let suppositions tumble in his head: Suppose this lock had changeable combinations; suppose it was, in fact, new, unused, when it was taken from a boat; suppose that these people had found the instructions on the card too complicated to follow and had not bothered to reset the combination.

Still, the manufacturer would have to set
some
combination of numbers. What was the simplest, the most logical? He dialed 0,0,0 and tugged at the shackle.

The lock popped open.

Maynard smiled to himself, pleased by his resourcefulness. He wanted to take off the chain and leave the hut and prowl around the island in search of a vessel on which to escape. No, he told himself. It was too early; he knew too little about where and with whom he was; the risk of capture was too great, the punishment for attempting escape unknown. He didn’t know where Justin was. His new knowledge was an advantage, but he should husband it until it could be played for greater value.

He snapped the lock closed and returned the combination to 6,4,8.

He crawled over to the chest Nau had left and opened it. It was packed with papers—some old and frayed and yellowed, some joined in packets by twine woven from plant fibers, some crumpled and torn. All were handwritten, and on many the ink had faded to a shadow.

He crawled to the doorway, pulled back the skin, and blocked it with a rock. Dragging the chest into the shaft of light that streamed through the doorway, he sunk his hand into the chest and pulled out a paper. It was a coarse, grainy vellum, brittle and cracked with age. The ink was brown and faint.

It seemed to be an entry from a log or diary, scribbled in haste. But the writer had taken care to observe certain proprieties: “An account of the events of the day of September the 7th, 1797, writ in the blood of a quadroon due to the carelessness of the quartermaster, who knocked to bits the inkwell.

“At first light spied a two-masted barkentine and pursued her. Too swift for our sickly vessel. Planking started well at sea, caulked it with beef. Damn nigh sank, but made shore.