Chapter 5 5

5 Together we piled into Kate's golf cart parked at the far end of the pier.Bane sat in the back with my suitcase, and I climbed into the front seat, glanced warily at the car's air horn, and recalled the harrowing experience of the last time I was in her car. "Don't worry," Kate said, "I'm not going to honk unless someone's crazy enough to run in front of my car." "I hate that darn thing," I said. "Well, you can hate it, but it has saved the lives of countless tourists." "Mom used to hit tourists," said Bain. "Hey, I didn't." "I'm sure Bane wouldn't lie," I said, and Kate spun the car up the narrow street in a huff.Over our heads, the sky fades to orange.I sense the approaching darkness that gathers behind the light.We sped by in front of the island's shops, and no one spoke, not even Baine.There were boxes of taupe violets in bloom on the windowsills of every shop, even the little post office.The Sham Fishing & Fun Store was painted the color of persimmons, and the wooden pelican outside the Jiujiu General Store is now fitted with a small saddle, for the kids to sit on, I suppose.We passed in front of Egret Tours and saw several tourists registering for boat tours and bird watching excursions.Even in the off-season of winter, the place seems to be full of life.I pointed to a small shop sandwiched between Max's Coffee Shop and the Island Dog Inn.A blue and white striped pergola fronts the shop, and a sign in the window reads "A Mermaid Tale."Wasn't there a fish shop there? ""closed. said Kate. "It's Mom's store now," said Bain. "Aren't you kidding?Your shop?that gift shop? "I'm surprised. I've known Kate all my life and she's never expressed any interest in opening a shop. Since her husband died - and that was at least twenty years ago - she and Bain have been content to rely on Her pension and some Social Security." I opened last spring. said Kate. Who's watching the shop now? ""When I am present, the shop will be open; if the person is not present, the shop will be closed. "She said." I like the name of the store very much. "I said to her." I started to call it 'the end of the road,' but your mother wouldn't allow it.The woman had no sense of humor. "" She never did. "" That's not right.Long ago, she used to be very humorous. said Kate. She sped the golf cart down the street into the pale twilight. I saw her body lean forward, as if she were mentally pushing the car past eighteen miles an hour. The speed limit. So many memories flooded my mind—my mother’s bits and pieces of laughter, the times when we were still living together normally and happily.

Kate was right—Mother used to be very funny indeed.I remembered that once my mother cooked shrimp in coconut milk, she put on a grass skirt and greeted everyone to eat.Another time, when Mike was eight, he pissed in a Coke bottle and got his poor little penis stuck in it—none of us figured out how.His little cock, how should I put it, swelled somehow after it was inside.Mom tried to look concerned, but couldn't help laughing.She said to him, "Mike, go sit in your room and think about Mother Teresa and your dick will come out." Pass the 'yellow sign," I heard Kate say to me, "and our mermaid booklet. Do you remember Father Dominique? He wrote us the story of Saint Cynara, and we printed it in a book called A booklet called The Mermaid Tale - the same name as the store. We can't keep it in stock. Dominique always comes into the store with his battered straw hat on and asks for an autograph. I say to him, 'Dominique , for God's sake, don't you think you're Pat Conroy.'" I laughed.As a child, when I was playing in the convent while waiting for my mother to finish in the kitchen, I used to run into Father Dominique; he would always play knock-knock with me.But there was another side to him, a solemnity which I cannot quite articulate.The monks brought my father's wreck to the house that day, and stood there watching my mother burn the planks in the fireplace, and Dominique was among them. "Does he still have that straw hat on?" "Yes. The stem is starting to rot," she said.We fell silent for a while, when we rounded out to the rear fringe of the island, which was chiefly a barren, wind-beaten clump of trees.We turned a corner, and the woods suddenly opened up, and a large piece of withered and yellow grass appeared in front of us. At the end of the grass, there was the sea.The water was inky black, purple black, and I was struck with emotion and remembered everything, why I was here, what my mother did with the meat cleaver.Her life has become very twisted and complicated.

I don't know if all this would have happened if I had been a better daughter.Should I have expected something like this to happen?For all I know, at this very moment, she may be cutting off the rest of her fingers at home.Why did she cut off her finger?I wonder.Why fingers?Bane was humming a tune in the backseat.I moved my body closer to Kate. "What happened to her finger? The one she cut off." "It's in a mayonnaise jar by her bed," she said flatly.We came to the end of the paved road and the steeple atop the abbey church came into view.Kate didn't slow down at all, and we hit the hard dirt road, jumping a foot in the air.Clouds of dust rose from behind the car. "Sit tight!" she yelled at Bane.Kate's hair, all out of its barrettes, was flying behind her as we sped past the Abbey gate.Next to the monastery gate is the Starfish Chapel, a community church with white panels, where the monks say mass for the islanders, and where the children of Bailu Island, myself included, go to elementary school.Anna Legaret, who teaches all grades at the same time, told me straight to the point when I was ten: I was a born artist.When I was twelve, she hung my numerous sketches of shipwrecks on the walls of the chapel, and invited the whole island to a "painting exhibition."Kate bought one for twenty-five cents. "Is my painting, the one you bought to hang in the kitchen, still there?" "I still have it. It's hanging in the 'Mermaid Tale' shop." As we passed Kate's house As I was walking down the driveway, I noticed a "Mermaids Pass Here" sign tacked to a post next to the letterbox.A few seconds later, we slowed down in front of my mother's house.Like most houses on the island, the mother's house was in the style of 1720s Tidewater cottages.The house was built on stilts, surrounded by a large palm grove, with dormer windows, black shutters, and a wide porch that spanned the front of the house.The house had always been green, but now it was a faded light green.In the yard, where yuccas and pennyweeds grew here and there, stood Mother's astonishing bathtub grotto in the center.More than ten years ago, she asked Shem for help to bury a bathtub vertically in the ground. Because Shem didn't immediately understand her intention, he left the end with the faucet on the ground.Mother put it to use anyway, placing a concrete statue of Mary under the vaulted tub.Now, the bathtub is covered in rust and there are some plastic flower-like things tied to the faucet.When I first saw the tub, I said to my mother, no wonder people say the statue of Mary weeps because her devotees are in poor taste.Of course Dee thinks this bathtub madonna is awesome.The car came to a slow stop, Bane jumped out from behind, and I saw Hepjiba standing on the porch.She was wearing an afro-dyed scarlet and orange gown that fell to her ankles, with a matching turban tied around her head.She stood there, tall and burly and radiant.

"Hey, isn't that our Queen of the Hottentots!" said Kate, waving at her.She put a hand on my arm. "Jessie, if your mother says fish can fly, you just nod your head and say, 'Yes, ma'am, fish can fly.' Don't argue with her about anything, okay?" "Some fish do fly," Bane said , "I saw a picture in a book." Kate ignored her.She fixed her eyes on my face.Don't make her angry. "I pulled away. I didn't intend to offend anyone." Hepjiba came down the porch steps to greet me, she smelled of okra pods, and I knew she had dinner ready for us. "We are happy to meet you." She said, greeting me in Gela language as she did when she met me in the past.I smiled and looked past her to the lighted window.I looked at the wooden window frame, the wood of which was beginning to crack, and I saw a tiny shiny smudge on the glass, and tears welled up, and I couldn't hide them. "Hey, what's going on here?" Hepjiba said, hugging me into the stunning pattern on her gown.I broke free from her arms.It dawned on me that this is a ridiculous question.I might have said: Well, first of all, there's a mayonnaise jar in the house with my mother's fingers in it; but, that would be rude and unfair, and besides, I'm not thinking of my mother right now.but my father.The last time I saw Joseph Du Bois, he was sitting at that window peeling an apple, and he wouldn't break the peel—one trick in a series of his famous tricks.He's doing a "spin girl".That night, I sat in a small patch of light on the ground, watching the apple peel as it spun from his blade, wondering nervously if he could make it all the way to the bottom.When he chipped the last turn, I sat up and knelt.If he succeeds, I can hang this red spiral in my bedroom window, along with those "twirling girls" he used to make.All the Spinning Girls were hung with sewing thread, bobbing up and down in front of the glass windows, in varying degrees of decay and shriveling.

"Give my spin girl a 'twirl girl,'" he said, calling me by my nickname as he put an apple peel on my open palm.Those were the last words he said to me.I sprinted back to my room without looking back or telling him that my favorite part of the ritual was the spin girl he called me.I imagined myself to be one of his masterpieces, the apple peel on the window making for a strange static self-portrait.Kate saw my tears and clattered up the steps in her high heels, waving her arms above my head.She reminds me of the web-toed crake, the noisiest bird in the swamp, the size of a hen.Before she could speak, I could already feel my anger towards her disappear. "Jessie, I'm too nagging and not nice to talk to. Of course you wouldn't go in there and annoy your mother. I—" "It's all right," I said, not because of that.real. "Bane struggled up the steps with my suitcase. She left it by the door. I thanked them and told them they could leave and I'd be fine. I said I was crying because I was so tired , that's all. They left in a golf cart that lumbered over a string of roots—"island road bumpers," as Kate called them. I told myself I should be in, but, I Standing on the porch for a few more minutes. The wind has become cold, mixed with the breath of the swamp. I wait for the indescribable feeling in my heart to fade away——to complete a little sad baptism.