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Soon Come

Years after, in the town on the island, in zinc-hatted hutches and neat plaster cottages washed by a tropical palette found on the reef offshore-where the blazing-hued fishes whisk among the coral towers-they would say she was the first awake on the island that day.

Arrayed on a rise above the main street, in these small homes, humble browns and haughty pastels like eggs in a West Indian Easter basket, the people there whisper and cluck about the woman. Opinion is evenly divided that she is an Obeah witch, that she is mad, or that she is wise and blessed.

On her own hill, taller and nearer the sea, she awoke with the sun that morning, roused from the murk of sleep by a percussive fugue. Above the tiny bungalow, fat palm fronds greenly pregnant with hard May rains in the night, slapped the roof. Below, on the curved cusp of shoreline, waves from the Caribbean pulsed gently, in ceaseless rhythm against the coarse, bleached sand, pushing fins of soapy foam inland.

The ancient woman lay still for some time. Naked atop cotton sheets the color of mango, she watches the sun pin stripes of light on her freckled right breast, just above the chocolate gumdrop nipple, bands of gold stealing into the cottage between louvered blinds at her window.

As she spreads her arms to let the light play, she remembers that her left elbow has been paining her in the last days. She rubs and fusses at it awhile, one knuckle on the kneading hand stiff and sore too. Yawning loudly, she tilts her head back to see fingers of palm scolding her window, threatening to penetrate and poke between the blinds. She looks back at her nude body. Arcing down in a dust-gauzed cone, the light paints a two-inch sunray strand across the wiry hair on her pubis. She laughs and tightens the muscles of her rump, arching the bump of her sex up toward the light, stretching her legs, still worrying the elbow.

She asks her toes, "Wasn't that the man's injury, too?"

Before her toes can answer, a melody adds to the drumming palms and slapping sea and lovemaking with the sun. It is Corelle, her nurse, climbing the steep hill, coffee knees churning up from her crisp-smocked lime shift. She sings, in a glassy soprano, the saddest song in the whole world, at least the saddest one the woman has ever heard. Of love found then lost-of men and women and sorrow unending. Corelle! The happiest woman, without care but silly, with a good man, four pickney and a true sweet life, who adores this unhappy song best of

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