The Wonder That Was Ours Read online

  We slipped through the vents after Desmond left the cab. Our relief at his departure was short-lived. As we assembled on the dashboard, Professor Cleave set aside his anthology and drew from beneath his seat one of the most boring books ever penned: The Flora and Fauna of the Lesser Antilles, the so-called magnum opus of early nineteenth-century British naturalist Geoffrey Morrow. We bristled. We seethed. We fanned our wings and turned in circles. Professor Cleave had fallen into a mood, though. The gig, for us, was up.

  An overbearing teacher on his best days, Professor Cleave had grown somewhat obsessed with certain passages in The Flora and Fauna of the Lesser Antilles. In these, he seemed to find comfort and even moral guidance when his feelings became too difficult to bear.

  “Here you are, mired in hostility. Treading upon very dangerous ground. In this respect, you hardly differ from Desmond.” He fingered the book’s bent corners. “He says no one would hold my feelings against me. But even to speak the word hatred is to conjure something terrible, to give new life to an abomination by planting its seed in another’s mind.” He opened the book to a well-worn page. “I should not have said it.”

  He rubbed his fingertips together, and we quieted ourselves. All day, he’d been wracked by physical tics he’d developed in prison, and we were trying to be patient. He cleared his throat, and we drew our legs beneath our wings. He considered our drooping antennae and tapped a page to rouse us from a presumed stupor (not that he gave a bee’s fuzzy ass about our opinions).

  “‘The splendorous Earth sustains infinite varieties of tree and flower and beast,’” he began. He’d quoted the same passage about tropical agriculture so many times before. “‘Tend the ground beneath your feet as if there is no other, and with utmost vigilance, guard it against every noxious weed, contagion, and source of blight. By your example, others will do the same, and none shall want.’” Professor Cleave surveyed the dashboard. “From Morrow, we have much to learn. Hatred, in its spread, is a foul weed, the stem of violence.”

  Some of us edged toward the vents, and he lifted his finger.

  “And violence must be refused without exception,” he intoned. “It is a contagion. This, my students, is Morrow’s lesson.”

  Where to begin? Morrow, like so many British naturalists of his era, held a fairly benign view of tilling the earth, little considering the disruptions modern agriculture has created in the lives of six-legged “beasts” who would happily live in the soil, unmolested, if not for humans’ insatiable appetite for cereal. As for Professor Cleave, he’d taken considerable liberties with a simple text. Worse, he’d spoken of hatred without addressing the more compelling subject of love. In his omissions, we recognized the doubts of one treading upon uncertain ground. Professor Cleave was an awkward man, and he clearly wasn’t getting enough at home. Love, we mean.

  We almost felt relieved when the Celeste’s foghorn sounded. We rustled our wings and stretched our legs. Professor Cleave looked through his windshield at the people pressed against the Celeste’s deck railings, waving unsought farewells to sweaty rickshaw drivers.

  “If the world could see what we have seen, would faith remain?” He slid The Flora and Fauna of the Lesser Antilles beneath his seat, turned back to his anthology, and lost himself in ancient dialogues between dead philosophers.

  When he at last closed his book, he found us pacing beneath the windshield, shifting between sets of legs to escape the burn of magnified heat. A short distance away, Desmond was offering a cigarette to a man with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. The man scratched the back of his neck, where blond hair brushed his collar. He exuded health, and with it, contentment verging on complacency.

  “He knows I don’t have much time, and there he is, smoking with strangers.” Professor Cleave paused to listen to Desmond’s conversation. We tuned our antennae to an American accent. The American cupped his hand around a match.

  “No need,” Desmond said. “There hasn’t been a breath of wind in weeks.”

  “Habit. Been lighting them on deck for the past few months.”

  “You work on the ship, then.”

  “Until a few hours ago.” The man lifted his face to the sky and exhaled. “My services are no longer required, as they say. Seeking my fortunes elsewhere now.”

  “Elsewhere is where you should go. You’re in the wrong place to seek your fortunes.”

  The man rubbed his jaw. “If I was sticking around for a day or two, where’d I stay?”

  “Most Americans stay at the Plantations. It has a golf course. A beach.”

  “Just need a few beers and a bed. Nothing special.”

  “Then you want the Ambassador Hotel. I’ll get you a taxi.”

  The American glanced over his shoulder at a woman sitting on a suitcase, picking at the sleeves of her lime-green sweater and staring into the valley formed by her knees and the sagging fabric of a faded sundress. He tossed his cigarette to the ground and started toward her.

  Professor Cleave rapped his knuckles on the dashboard and herded us toward a vent with his anthology. We scattered beyond Socrates’s sweep and angled our antennae at a policeman.

  “This book is not worse than a baton,” Professor Cleave insisted. “Only intellectual invalids would make such a comparison.”

  We considered his prospective fares. The man was crouched beside the woman, pleading or quietly arguing. When he helped her to her feet, she wavered once, and he placed his hand on her back. They leaned into one another like exhausted lovers wilting in the heat and started toward the cab, joined at the hips in a drunken four-legged gait.

  “Theirs is bound to be a questionable affair. One that can only end in tears.” Professor Cleave watched Desmond wheel the woman’s suitcase to the curb. “It’s hardly his job to carry luggage. I’d help him, but I have all of you to contend with. Cora would not be pleased.”

  At the third mention of Cora Cleave, we surrendered the dashboard. There are times to take a stand, and there are times for quiet compromise behind the loose slats of air-conditioning vents. Professor Cleave stepped from the cab as the couple neared.

  “I’m looking for a hotel with a bar,” the man said. “More to the point, a hotel bar. Nothing special. Your friend said the Ambassador will do.”

  As his passengers lowered themselves into the backseat, Professor Cleave registered the man’s blue eyes, as depthless as the cloudless sky, and the woman’s anemic cast and stringy hair. Her ragged sweater, above all else, unsettled him. It was unseasonable, and, even by his standards, unfashionable. Its color suggested sickness, the wasting and weakness following an extended debauch, and its sleeves some wretched attempt at concealment. He saw a fresh bruise on the top of her hand and imagined needle marks along her arm. The pain of his anniversary had skewed his judgment; the medical disinfectants stinging our antennae spoke of suicide.

  He stepped behind the taxi and watched Desmond lower a tiny suitcase with broken zippers into the trunk. “Never a good thing to say about this place. And you’ve riled them with your cigarettes.”

  “Get some traps.” Desmond slammed the trunk. “So you can use proper air conditioning.”

  When Professor Cleave pulled from the curb, a few of us pushed our antennae through the vents to get some relief from the engine’s heat.

  “You have no civility or sense,” he snapped.

  He glanced into his mirror and muttered something about a flatbed truck without brake lights, though he had no need for caution. The man leaned into the window, lost in passing scenery. The woman skimmed the landscape with vacant eyes. Their intimacy was merely physical, Professor Cleave concluded, noting the woman’s listless attitude. Professor Cleave would have been the last authority on the subject of carnal passion, but we stifled anything he might have construed as “rude commentary.” We’d caused him enough grief already. We remained quiet until he parked in front of the Ambassador.

  On the curb, the man considered the stunted palms beneath a portico. “Works for now
.”

  The woman splayed her fingers across the cab’s window for support. When she lowered her hand, its ghostly imprint remained on the glass. Professor Cleave glanced at the smudge and recoiled. To be fair, she bore an uncanny resemblance to the woman who had been seeding his mind with nightmares for years.

  “The Ambassador is the oldest modern hotel on St. Anne. A historic landmark,” he said, turning away from her.

  The man nodded and pulled out his wallet. Some of us dropped from the cab’s undercarriage and skittered across the sidewalk toward a crack in the Ambassador’s wall. “Happy hour,” to borrow an inapt phrase from the hotel’s absentee managers, was about to commence in the lounge, and who, these days, is in a position to decline free snacks?

  EDEN

  IF WE EVER DISRUPTED Professor Cleave’s lectures, it wasn’t for the reasons he suspected: incomprehension or a sneering attitude toward education. Our threshold for irony simply fell short of what his lectures demanded, especially that week, when he fashioned strange gardening metaphors from The Flora and Fauna of the Lesser Antilles. As it was, nothing could have blossomed because of the withering heat and the poisons washing up on our shores. It’s no wonder Professor Cleave missed the irony. He’d suffered misfortune, certainly, but he had never buried his fingers in soil or felt fungus on the undersides of rocks. He’d never dirtied his hands. Worse, he lectured us about tending some common ground, as if humans haven’t driven us from almost every home we’ve known with toxic sprays (Roach Out! being the most wicked concoction in their arsenal).

  We forgave him, though, and not only because we craved the air conditioning in his cab. He couldn’t have foreseen the misfortune the Celeste would bring, but he sensed the earth giving way beneath him, the ground shifts of a world too quickly changing. He clung to his imaginary garden, his intellectual Eden, because he needed to believe in a common ground worth defending, in some unspoiled place still his to defend. If he patronized us, we empathized with him. Exile, after all, looms large in the collective memory of cockroaches.

  We slept soundly in the New World until the Spaniards unleashed their pigs, scrofulous beasts that rooted us from our beds with ghastly yellow teeth and filthy snouts long after their owners moved on in search of gold. The English introduced their own disruptions and horrors, including bespectacled entomologists with wretched pins and matting boards. They destroyed our nests to build sugar mills and razed the earth for an open market, where they delivered slaves and indentured servants to unspeakable fates. They built a stone fort to protect their enterprise, a church to sanctify their unholy endeavors, and a governor’s mansion to house corpulent men given to sloe gin and rapid dissipation. In time, they laid cobblestone streets, paved an airstrip, and dredged the harbor to ease the import of cars, crystal china, and claw-footed chairs—creature comforts from places some of them continued to call home.

  The Ambassador Hotel was different than anything lodged in our memory of St. Anne. The American machines that attended its birth cast aside earth faster than some of us could run. One morning, we were slumbering beneath rocks and brush when a dreadful roar wrested us from dreams of compost and loam. We awoke to find the ground breaking apart and steel claws tearing at the earth around us. Many of us perished in the gaping hole that became the Ambassador’s foundation. Rudely exposed, the rest of us scattered without sense or dignity and huddled among weeds that provided refuge in the absence of any other.

  Hopefully without downplaying our grief, we can admit the awe we felt when the Ambassador first opened its doors. At eight stories, it was the first skyscraper on St. Anne, a towering monument to American ingenuity and ambition. Unapologetic in its proportions, it mocked gravity. Its pink walls glistened with excess. Beside each balcony, air conditioning units hummed incessantly, shedding heavy beads of condensation onto manicured lawns. It had an elevator. It was, far and away, the most luxurious hotel on the island, a cornucopia of delights equipped with all the modern conveniences.

  Naturally, we established residence. We never questioned that the Ambassador Hotel belonged to us. It had been built on our homes, and, in some cases, on our backs. We claimed its air ducts and drainpipes and the space beneath its massive refrigerators. At night, we reveled in the kitchen trash, dining on spilled soda and potato chips—exotic fare, it seemed then—and the remains of prawn cocktails, iced melon, and meatballs. We enjoyed fare as exquisite as any (barring the puddings so adored by the British) found in the bins behind the Governor’s Mansion. After dinner, we’d sit on the rooftop and remember the world when it was young, at times saddened and at others wondering what, if anything, we’d lost.

  Few but Professor Cleave would deny that the Ambassador had become a somewhat déclassé establishment by the time the Celeste docked in St. Anne’s harbor. Absentee owners had done little for its upkeep. Accretions of car exhaust and rainwater runoff from rusting balconies streaked its pink walls. Online reviewers described it as a second-rate hotel suitable for travelers willing to humor passé décor—mint-green tiles, splintered wicker tables, and faux bamboo headboards—time capsule oddities that added to the hotel’s distinct personality, or as some wrote, its “decrepit character.” They complained of missing light bulbs, shoddy service, and oddly, given the basis of their authority, the caliber of the clientele.

  Few speak of the hotel now. Most have forgotten it, just as most have forgotten the days when it stood as a portent of prosperity and political change, when it was a source of wonder.

  CHAPTER TWO

  MONTHS BEFORE IT ROSE from a bluff overlooking Portsmouth Harbor, the Ambassador had already become the source of excited conversation and excessive drinking in Professor Cleave’s village, Stokes Hill. The drinking started the evening Professor Cleave’s father Topsy announced he’d just quit his job packing bananas on a moribund plantation. At the time, we were happily huddled behind a scrap bucket. Cora Cleave, with her folded newspapers and fastidious ways, had not yet sapped our precious joy; Professor Cleave’s mother Rose, a woman of reason and restraint, still ruled the proverbial roost.

  “I’ve been paid by the pound for the last time.” Topsy tilted a half-empty bottle of rum in Rose’s direction. “To hell with that knuckle-dragging boss and his crooked scales.”

  Rose crossed herself and lifted her eyes to the ceiling.

  “Save your prayers for someone who needs them.” Topsy threw his arms around Wynston, then still known by the name he’d been given at birth. Pressed against a taut paunch, Wynston listened to his father’s drunken declaration of independence. “We don’t need their jobs. The winds of change are blowing our way.”

  Rose lowered herself onto a rickety stool. “What did you do?”

  “Today, we gave those red-assed monkeys the sack.” Topsy released Wynston from his suffocating embrace. “All of us are going to work at the cement factory. My brother has it lined up. Everyone in Stokes Hill will be rich building hotels.”

  “Hotels?” Rose furrowed her brow. “There are no tourists here. This is not Jamaica.”

  Wynston studied his mother’s face and drew his eyebrows together.

  “Because we have no hotels. But the Americans are going to build one,” Topsy said. “Eight stories and a pool. All cement.”

  “One hotel?” Rose said. “How long can this work last?”

  “This is only the beginning.” Topsy drew Rose from the stool and into his arms. “This, I can promise.”

  However tentatively, Rose soon embraced her husband’s faith in St. Anne’s future—a future that rudely presented itself in the middle of Sunday service in Stokes Hill’s chapel. In a back pew, Wynston was sitting on his hands, shifting his weight to relieve the pressure on his bony haunches and daydreaming through the sermon of a preacher moved by the spirit as slowly as molasses. Beside him, Topsy was jotting cricket scores on a scrap of paper and making calculations related to a betting pool. In a small choir box, Rose violently fanned the air to distract herself from Topsy’s gambling
. We napped intermittently, alternately lulled by the opiate effects of the preacher’s drone and stirred by creaking pews, until the distant shriek of an electric saw cut through the air. At that moment, hundreds of us were scrambling from the loosened earth around a tree’s disturbed roots.

  Topsy slapped Wynston’s knee. “The Americans are starting.”

  Beneath Rose’s mortified gaze, Topsy slid from the pew, dragging Wynston behind him. Outside, he lifted Wynston onto his shoulders and walked to the edge of a small cemetery.

  “Look down near the water.” He pointed toward the harbor. “See the treetops move. They’re clearing ground for the hotel.”

  Wynston laced his fingers across his father’s forehead and leaned forward. We perched atop crooked crosses and strained our antennae. In the distance, trees swayed in widening circles and toppled one by one. By the time the preacher surrendered to the screech of saws, twenty trees had fallen and a patch of cleared ground was visible from the hillside.

  “They’re cutting trees,” Wynston shouted when Rose appeared. “Where the hotel will be.”

  “This noise. On Sunday. It’s a disgrace.” Rose pressed her Bible to her chest. “Nothing is sacred to these people. The Americans bow to nothing.”

  “Not even the English.” Topsy gripped Wynston’s ankle and lit a cigarette. “They’ll change this place. Wynston will wear new shoes, and you’ll have a new Sunday dress and hat.”

  Rose touched the brim of her straw hat. That morning she walked home with her Bible balanced precariously in the crook of her arm, indulging in fantasies of floral fabric and feather festoons—bold statements of faith better suited than straw to the celebration of God’s infinite glory. Over the next few weeks, she accompanied Wynston to the schoolhouse at the top of Stokes Hill. She always stopped beside the chapel to view the clearing.

  “Your father’s a foolish man,” she said at first. “We’ll be in the workhouse.”