Therese stopped scaling grouper fish and said that what he saw was what she smelled and it couldn’t be a swamp woman because they had a pitchlike smell. What he saw must have been a rider. So she took to bringing two avocados instead of one and leaving the second one in the washhouse. But each third day when she returned it was still there, untouched by all but fruit flies. It was Gideon who had the solution: instead of fixing the sash on the window of the pantry as he was ordered, he removed one of its panes and told machete-hair he was having trouble getting another. The heavy one fumed and removed “perishables” and things that attracted flies into the other kitchen until he could repair the window. In the meanwhile, they hoped the horseman would have access to the food left there. And soon they saw bits of folded foil in funny places and they knew he had gotten from the pantry chocolate at the very least. Once Gideon saw an empty Evian bottle in the gazebo. Then they knew he had fresh water too.
Therese removed the coffee pot from the stove and put it back five times before she heard Gideon’s footsteps. She poked her head out of the doorway, grinned and started to speak.
“Sh,” he said, “sh.” His finger touched his lips. But Therese could not restrain herself.
“Something’s going on. I can tell.” Then as he stepped inside and came close she saw his shirt. “You slaughter the hen or the hen slaughter you?”
Gideon held up one hand to shush her and with the other pulled the door shut.
“Open the door, man,” she complained. “Too hot in here.”
Gideon stood fast. “Listen,” he said. “He’s in the house.
“I knew it! I knew it!” Therese’s whisper was close to a shout. Gideon went to the coffee pot. Two cups were sitting on top of the folding table and he filled them both.
“A little fridge out here wouldn’t be a bad idea,” he said. “Just one of them little ones, like he got out in the greenhouse. Plug it up right there…”
“Talk, man. Stop going on about a fridge.”
“Wouldn’t you like a little cold beer or chilled wine from time to time?”
“Cold beer?” She looked at him in amazement. “That country ruined you, man. Stop fooling with me. Where did you see him?”
“In the window. Her window.” He took the chicken head and feet from his shirt and wrapped them in newspaper.
“Doing what?”
“Looking. Just looking. A sheet or something wrapped around him, but bare naked on top.”
“Did he see you see him?”
“No. Don’t think so. I pretended I was taking off my cap to scratch my head and looking off up in the trees.”
“He didn’t do anything? Move?”
“Nope. Just looked around. Then I turned and walked back away.”
“Alone? Was she with him?”
“Can’t say. But it was in her room. Get what I mean? And I saw her up there before naked as a worm when I was fixing to put up the tree. She jumped back, but didn’t do no good. She don’t know I got eyes in the top of my head. Then next, about a hour or so later, there
“I told you!” said Therese. “He’s a horseman come down here to get her. He was just skulking around waiting for his chance.”
“Maybe. Maybe.” Gideon looked at her milky eyes. “You damn near blind, but I have to hand it to you. Some things you see better than me. Otherwise why would a big strong-looking man be hiding round here like that? Why this house all the time? Why not over the other side, or up the road where those Filipinos are? He must have been looking for somebody specific.”
“The chippy. The fast-ass,” said Therese. “That’s why he went straight up to her room. Because he knew she was here, he saw her from the hills. Maybe he’ll run her out of here.”
“Back to the States, eh?”
“Or France even. Where that big box came from. Maybe he’s not a rider. Maybe he’s an old boyfriend and he the one sent her the box, Gideon.”
“Hold on. You going wild.”
“And machete-hair she don’t like it. Tried to keep them apart. But it didn’t work. He find her, swim the whole ocean big, till he find her, eh? Make machete-hair too mad. Now she tell her bow-tie husband…” Therese sat on the wooden chair and rocked in the telling, pressing her fingers into Gideon’s shoulder as each new sequence presented itself to her. “Bow-tie get mad very. ’Cause he lives near machete-hair’s thumb…” The more she invented the more she rocked and the more she rocked the more her English crumbled till finally it became dust in her mouth stopping the flow of her imagination and she spat it out altogether and let the story shimmer through the clear cascade of the French of Dominique.
Gideon couldn’t stop her, so he tried to gulp coffee while warding off the jabs to his shoulder. When she abandoned English he stopped listening for it was in French that she had tricked him into leaving the States after twenty years and coming back to Dominique to handle family property. So he shut his ears and tried to finish his coffee submitting to the shoulder jabs out of deference to her because she was his mother’s baby sister and because of a grudging respect for her magic breasts and because she had been able to trick him (of all people) with thirty-four letters in fifteen years, begging him to come home and take care of the property by which she must have meant herself because when he got there that’s all there was left: no land, no hills of coffee bush. Just Therese, two years his senior, and a cement house whose roof had to be put back on after every hurricane which meant four times a year. When he looked at the house—one of a dozen scattered over the emerald hill—and discovered that the 130
