The Left-over Daughters

Chapter One

The Death

When they informed Petra Johnson of her daughter’s death, she began to scream. There were four of them standing before her in a semi-circle like black ravens of death. Then one of them knelt by her chair and took her hand. It was then she knew. The gesture was so oddly out of place. They didn’t touch much in this family. One would think that with six women in the house there would be a surfeit of hugging and kissing. But there wasn’t. Never. They scurried around each other, and smiled and laughed when they were happy. Often, they were very kind to each other. But, touching was reserved for special occasions – births, weddings, funerals, and death. This was the way she had been reared and she taught her daughters the same. Public displays of affection were an anathema. Private displays merely boring

They were hesitant too. That was unusual. She had rowdy girls, rambunctious girls. She had a drawer full of complaints from schools about her girls and their antics. In more than thirty years, Petra could not remember a silent moment in the house. Her girls screamed, shouted, yelled, tore each other’s clothes, laughed loudly, very loudly, and argued the same way. Who were these strangers? For a moment, a fleeting moment Petra was moved to compassion. That was unusual for her. Then, a second later, her brain deciphered the sounds which were issuing from their mouths, and she began to scream. It wasn’t an ordinary scream. No, this filled her head; enveloped her brain; clogged her ears so she heard only the reverberations in her skull. This scream blew through her nostrils and pulled her mouth into wild contortions. This scream attacked the end nerves on the layers of her skin, so they trembled as though charged by bolts of electricity. It contracted her vocal chords, so the utterances, which emerged from her throat, had an atonic stridency. Her limbs twisted and were flung into poses of their own volition, striking her daughters who were trying to comfort her.

Still, Petra screamed, until the spittle dried and flaked on the sides of her mouth, and her eyes began to roll back into her head. But, she did not lose consciousness. The refrain was too strong in her head.

“My daughter is dead.”

“My girl is dead.”

“My daughter is dead.”

They were trying to hold her down, her left-over daughters. Did she say that aloud? No. The only sound, which she could bring forth, was that horrible, that terrible, that all-encompassing scream. Now there was a faint clearing in her brain, which allowed her to filter in their words in those strange, consoling voices.

“Please Mum, please.”

“Did someone call the doctor?”

“Why didn’t you bring the doctor with you, you fool?”

“How was I going to know she would react like this?”

“Oh, God, oh God, shut up.”

Yes, that was the way they usually acted; one of them bringing up everlasting excuses with another one shouting her down.

“Don’t change. Don’t try to be comforting. Don’t die.”

Renewed memory chased logical thought away.

“Somebody hold her legs, for Christ’s sake.”

“Am I supposed to think of everything?”

“Please Mum. We’re here.”

“Please try to be quiet Mum.”

“Somebody get some water.”

“Get some brandy.”

“You know she doesn’t drink.”

“This might be a good time to start.”

Someone began to laugh hysterically. There was the sound of a slap and the wild laugh abruptly stilled.

“Stop arguing for God’s sake. My sister is dead.”

“She was my sister too.”

“I told her not to go.”

Petra tried to rise as they let go of her. She wanted to…She didn’t know what she wanted to do. She wanted to get away from these women, these left-over daughters. The uproar in her head hampered her movements. Something crashed to the floor.

“Grab her hands.”

“Hold her back.”

“Jesus, I don’t have the strength for this.”

She didn’t either. Strength was not a quality she possessed in abundance. She had always envied strong women. She envied her daughters.

“Where the hell is the doctor?”

“I can’t take much more of this.”

“Well, you’re going to have to. It’s just beginning.”

“Put this cold cloth on her.”

Drops of ice, cold water dribbled into her ears when they placed the too wet cloth upon her forehead. It produced a chain reaction of clamminess along her skin. Was dead flesh this cold?

“Here’s the brandy.”

“Gently, gently. You don’t want her to choke.”

“She took a sip. Good.”

The brandy tasted like acid. It burned her throat, her gullet. She could feel it blaze all the way down to her stomach. She clenched her teeth and swatted at the glass.

“Hold her tight. She’s moving again.”

“Christ, I can’t take that noise.”

“Get lost if you can’t help.”

“Stop her screaming, please.”

“Please stop that noise. It’s driving me crazy.”

There was a prick in her arm. Then as she felt her consciousness begin to slip away coherent thought came again.

“Where was Julius? Where was her husband? Where was the man who had brought this curse upon her and her daughters? Was he with her, that woman who never left? Was he with the witch again?”

Chapter Two

Petra

“In the olden days,” Petra told her daughters, “In the olden days before you were born I was young and beautiful” She paused for their expressions of surprise and smiled a secret smile, for the past was not that long ago to her. It was so unusual for her to reminisce about her past that for the moment the girls gave her their attention.

It was true. She was so beautiful that no one ever wondered if she had a brain, so bedazzled were they by the perfection of her face and form. The truth was there was not much more than a twinkle as her mother used to say, though Petra herself never thought about it. She did not inherit her mother’s aptitude for mercantile dealings nor her father’s quickness, inquisitiveness, and boundless curiosity. But from a long dead ancestor she did inherit a capacity for obsessive loving. Her love was finite, limited to one person at a time. And though she functioned normally and learned how to move in society, she always to the end of her days considered other people whom she did not love as intrusions and treated them as such. Her father’s death was her first heartbreak. She was destined to have others.

They sat together in what they called the family room on the big overstuffed sofas that Petra had purchased early in her marriage, transported from house to house, and refused to change. The brightly coloured upholstery was faded now with stains from spilled drink and food and one memorable white spot where someone had tried to wipe away vomit with bleach. There were tears in the seams of the cushions and the arms of the chairs were still filthy despite repeated rubbings and washings. Still it was their favourite place to gather as a family, the women that is, not Julius. He always said that the sight of all of them in that small room made him feel as if he had entered a harem and knives were hidden nearby to do unspeakable things to parts of his body. He hated it when they laughed at him.

Outside the temperature was ninety degrees. The air was still and muggy. The leaves on the two poinciana trees which over looked the house barely moved. The humidity would drench a body in sweat in ten minutes. But inside, in the cool air- conditioning, the air was sweet and balmy. In times before people sat on their porches and greeted each other, exchanged news, caught up on juicy scandals, but now they remained in their hermetically sealed houses living in familial isolation

“Yes, I was.” Petra said, “And men used to stop me all the time because they couldn’t believe their eyes. They would stare at me everywhere I went. I never acknowledged them of course, yet they still worshipped me”

Inevitably one of her mean children would mutter, “What happened?” and all of them would dissolve into uncontrollable laughter, clapping their hands and slapping their thighs in merriment.

“You happened,” Petra told them. “You all came and took my beauty away. I gave it away to you. That’s what you’re supposed to do. You give your all to your children.”

The girls nodded impressed by her eloquence. The spell lasted less than a minute.

“Not me,” Diane said, “I’m keeping it all for myself. Ain’t no little monster going to steal my beautiful.”

Petra only smiled again.

In the summer of her eighteenth year Petra took the Mackey Airlines small plane to Grand Bahama to visit her cousin. She landed at West End Airport and looked out over the settlement by the sea and sighed in relief. Only three other people were on the small plane with her, older foreigners who would be staying at the hotel. The flight was smooth and restful. She didn’t speak to the tourists on her flight, not from shyness, but because she always expected people she met to approach her and make her acquaintance first. The two men and the woman stared, that was as usual, but they did not initiate conversation.

After the cool darkness of the airplane the sunlight on the tarmac blinded her for a moment. Then she saw her cousin waving to her from the parked car. There were no formalities. The passengers climbed down the steps from the plane and went directly to their waiting rides. Her cousin Stacy stared at her for a long time. She was a short stubby girl with very large bulbous breasts and a huge rear end which seemed to be tilted up and so contrived to make all of her skirts and dresses longer in front than in back. Her face was small and round and when she smiled she seemed to lose her eyes in the creases of her wrinkles.

“Wow! I had forgotten just how you looked,” Stacy said.

Petra ducked her head in irritation. Family didn’t speak like this.

And yes, she was beautiful. She was petite but voluptuous and the high red colour of a ripe mango. In her youth, she was vibrant, almost overflowing with life as if it was waiting to explode out of her body and envelope the world. There was a bursting energy about her and a strange lightness as if when touched her pores would float into the air and pop in frissons of light. She had those rare blue-green eyes, received from a long gone Irish ancestor. They were large, widely spaced, oval, deeply set and luminous. Her face and body drew attention. Her eyes made them fall in love.

She had been bored in the capital. There were no more conquests in that dirty jungle for one who had been slaying boys and men since her early childhood. As they drove down the hot road in the five minutes it took to get to the house Stacy updated her on family news using the island vernacular which omitted words considered superfluous. Most people on the island could switch back and forth from their local dialect to practiced flawless English. Some people never bothered to switch at all.

“Marlee is having a baby. She don’t know who it for. That girl was always a slut. Uncle Benny had a heart attack and he in the hospital in Freeport. We’ll go visit him tomorrow. Mummy doing well. Her knees hurting her as usual. One all swell up, but at least she still walking. Jerry, Patrick, and Newton are just still little bits of trouble, but they’re too young to know better. Tyler now, you remember my big brother?”

Without waiting for an affirmative answer, she went on her hands moving on and off the wheel as she made quick emphatic gestures. “Well, let me tell you. If he don’t find himself on the straight and narrow, he gonna get into some big trouble one of these days and find himself working for Her Majesty at Fox Hill. And I hear that prison is not a clean place and you know how Tyler so fastidious.

“What about Uncle William?”

Stacy looked surprised as if she had forgotten about her own father, her fine straight nose, the proud characteristic of all the Hanna’s, wrinkled.

“Daddy’s just fine too. He never is anything else. You know he doesn’t talk much. He just listens and pays the bills. They say Cousin Lea gat cancer. But, nobody’s talking about it. You know that word does put the dread in everyone.”

“That’s sad.”

“That’s life. How’s your Mum.”

“Same as usual, running everything.”

“She still gat that little store?”

“Yes. We must be a family of merchants. She keeps that place open all night and day. I don’t know when she sleeps. She’s been frantic ever since Daddy died.

“It hits some people that way.”

“How long though? It’s been five years now.”

“Maybe they were really in love?”

Petra refuted that. “I didn’t see no evidence of that.” The thought made her feel uncomfortable somehow. She’d loved her daddy with a passion which never lessened as she grew up. His loss scarred her and turned her inward. Maybe she was more like her mother than she knew.

“Children don’t see everything.”

“But, I know”, thought Petra. “I know he didn’t love her because he loved me.”

As soon as she thought it she realized how childish the thought was. Her repentance was words.

“Maybe you’re right. Parents don’t show you all they feel for each other.”

“Darn right too, said Stacy,” No PDA in the home.”

She thought for a moment then added, “Or in public either.” My parents act like strangers all the time. I like it that way. I hate to see people slobbering all over each other, especially old people. There should be an age where you get over all that emotional stuff. Now us, we just getting there. You know, they say that you feel more when you are in your teens and early twenties than at any other time in your life. Do you think that’s true? I wonder if emotions just dissolve over the years, like they are mixed in the water of your life. I think that is what happens actually. I think they dissolve. Then as you age you become diluted until all you can do, all you want to do is sit and observe. It’s like a benefit of growing older and it’s a curse too. Thank God, I have years before that happens to me. But, then again maybe I’ll be the exception.

She thought again and added, “And you too of course, being as you’re my favourite cousin.”

Petra barely listened. She watched the men pulling up their lobster traps in the harbour. They were full of clawing crustaceans. Mounds of discarded conch shells glistened in the sunlight. The odour of newly scaled fish permeated the air. There was also mustiness as if the houses had layers of mildew or mould buried deep within their walls. The fruit trees were in bloom, guava, sapodilla, mango, juju, sugar apples and the tiny red, white and yellow flowers gave out a sweet scent to combat the stale air from the houses. Most of the fruits were still yet green, tiny rounds on the branches waiting for the nadir of the summer to ripen to abundance.

Barefooted children sauntered by carrying groceries, fishing poles. They played bat and ball with a piece of plywood and an old softball, darting into the street to run to the makeshift bases. Here and there, on porches, or standing along the side of the street were clusters of adolescents. Loitering for no good reason as her mother would say. They interrupted their conversations with loud raucous laughter. Petra wondered about them. Why were they so happy? Didn’t they have anything to do? She had never felt connected to people of her own age. She found them lazy and stupid especially on this island.

Chapter One

The Death

When they informed Petra Johnson of her daughter’s death, she began to scream. There were four of them standing before her in a semi-circle like black ravens of death. Then one of them knelt by her chair and took her hand. It was then she knew. The gesture was so oddly out of place. They didn’t touch much in this family. One would think that with six women in the house there would be a surfeit of hugging and kissing. But there wasn’t. Never. They scurried around each other, and smiled and laughed when they were happy. Often, they were very kind to each other. But, touching was reserved for special occasions – births, weddings, funerals, and death. This was the way she had been reared and she taught her daughters the same. Public displays of affection were an anathema. Private displays merely boring

They were hesitant too. That was unusual. She had rowdy girls, rambunctious girls. She had a drawer full of complaints from schools about her girls and their antics. In more than thirty years, Petra could not remember a silent moment in the house. Her girls screamed, shouted, yelled, tore each other’s clothes, laughed loudly, very loudly, and argued the same way. Who were these strangers? For a moment, a fleeting moment Petra was moved to compassion. That was unusual for her. Then, a second later, her brain deciphered the sounds which were issuing from their mouths, and she began to scream. It wasn’t an ordinary scream. No, this filled her head; enveloped her brain; clogged her ears so she heard only the reverberations in her skull. This scream blew through her nostrils and pulled her mouth into wild contortions. This scream attacked the end nerves on the layers of her skin, so they trembled as though charged by bolts of electricity. It contracted her vocal chords, so the utterances, which emerged from her throat, had an atonic stridency. Her limbs twisted and were flung into poses of their own volition, striking her daughters who were trying to comfort her.

Still, Petra screamed, until the spittle dried and flaked on the sides of her mouth, and her eyes began to roll back into her head. But, she did not lose consciousness. The refrain was too strong in her head.

“My daughter is dead.”

“My girl is dead.”

“My daughter is dead.”

They were trying to hold her down, her left-over daughters. Did she say that aloud? No. The only sound, which she could bring forth, was that horrible, that terrible, that all-encompassing scream. Now there was a faint clearing in her brain, which allowed her to filter in their words in those strange, consoling voices.

“Please Mum, please.”

“Did someone call the doctor?”

“Why didn’t you bring the doctor with you, you fool?”

“How was I going to know she would react like this?”

“Oh, God, oh God, shut up.”

Yes, that was the way they usually acted; one of them bringing up everlasting excuses with another one shouting her down.

“Don’t change. Don’t try to be comforting. Don’t die.”

Renewed memory chased logical thought away.

“Somebody hold her legs, for Christ’s sake.”

“Am I supposed to think of everything?”

“Please Mum. We’re here.”

“Please try to be quiet Mum.”

“Somebody get some water.”

“Get some brandy.”

“You know she doesn’t drink.”

“This might be a good time to start.”

Someone began to laugh hysterically. There was the sound of a slap and the wild laugh abruptly stilled.

“Stop arguing for God’s sake. My sister is dead.”

“She was my sister too.”

“I told her not to go.”

Petra tried to rise as they let go of her. She wanted to…She didn’t know what she wanted to do. She wanted to get away from these women, these left-over daughters. The uproar in her head hampered her movements. Something crashed to the floor.

“Grab her hands.”

“Hold her back.”

“Jesus, I don’t have the strength for this.”

She didn’t either. Strength was not a quality she possessed in abundance. She had always envied strong women. She envied her daughters.

“Where the hell is the doctor?”

“I can’t take much more of this.”

“Well, you’re going to have to. It’s just beginning.”

“Put this cold cloth on her.”

Drops of ice, cold water dribbled into her ears when they placed the too wet cloth upon her forehead. It produced a chain reaction of clamminess along her skin. Was dead flesh this cold?

“Here’s the brandy.”

“Gently, gently. You don’t want her to choke.”

“She took a sip. Good.”

The brandy tasted like acid. It burned her throat, her gullet. She could feel it blaze all the way down to her stomach. She clenched her teeth and swatted at the glass.

“Hold her tight. She’s moving again.”

“Christ, I can’t take that noise.”

“Get lost if you can’t help.”

“Stop her screaming, please.”

“Please stop that noise. It’s driving me crazy.”

There was a prick in her arm. Then as she felt her consciousness begin to slip away coherent thought came again.

“Where was Julius? Where was her husband? Where was the man who had brought this curse upon her and her daughters? Was he with her, that woman who never left? Was he with the witch again?”

Chapter Two

Petra

“In the olden days,” Petra told her daughters, “In the olden days before you were born I was young and beautiful” She paused for their expressions of surprise and smiled a secret smile, for the past was not that long ago to her. It was so unusual for her to reminisce about her past that for the moment the girls gave her their attention.

It was true. She was so beautiful that no one ever wondered if she had a brain, so bedazzled were they by the perfection of her face and form. The truth was there was not much more than a twinkle as her mother used to say, though Petra herself never thought about it. She did not inherit her mother’s aptitude for mercantile dealings nor her father’s quickness, inquisitiveness, and boundless curiosity. But from a long dead ancestor she did inherit a capacity for obsessive loving. Her love was finite, limited to one person at a time. And though she functioned normally and learned how to move in society, she always to the end of her days considered other people whom she did not love as intrusions and treated them as such. Her father’s death was her first heartbreak. She was destined to have others.

They sat together in what they called the family room on the big overstuffed sofas that Petra had purchased early in her marriage, transported from house to house, and refused to change. The brightly coloured upholstery was faded now with stains from spilled drink and food and one memorable white spot where someone had tried to wipe away vomit with bleach. There were tears in the seams of the cushions and the arms of the chairs were still filthy despite repeated rubbings and washings. Still it was their favourite place to gather as a family, the women that is, not Julius. He always said that the sight of all of them in that small room made him feel as if he had entered a harem and knives were hidden nearby to do unspeakable things to parts of his body. He hated it when they laughed at him.

Outside the temperature was ninety degrees. The air was still and muggy. The leaves on the two poinciana trees which over looked the house barely moved. The humidity would drench a body in sweat in ten minutes. But inside, in the cool air- conditioning, the air was sweet and balmy. In times before people sat on their porches and greeted each other, exchanged news, caught up on juicy scandals, but now they remained in their hermetically sealed houses living in familial isolation

“Yes, I was.” Petra said, “And men used to stop me all the time because they couldn’t believe their eyes. They would stare at me everywhere I went. I never acknowledged them of course, yet they still worshipped me”

Inevitably one of her mean children would mutter, “What happened?” and all of them would dissolve into uncontrollable laughter, clapping their hands and slapping their thighs in merriment.

“You happened,” Petra told them. “You all came and took my beauty away. I gave it away to you. That’s what you’re supposed to do. You give your all to your children.”

The girls nodded impressed by her eloquence. The spell lasted less than a minute.

“Not me,” Diane said, “I’m keeping it all for myself. Ain’t no little monster going to steal my beautiful.”

Petra only smiled again.

In the summer of her eighteenth year Petra took the Mackey Airlines small plane to Grand Bahama to visit her cousin. She landed at West End Airport and looked out over the settlement by the sea and sighed in relief. Only three other people were on the small plane with her, older foreigners who would be staying at the hotel. The flight was smooth and restful. She didn’t speak to the tourists on her flight, not from shyness, but because she always expected people she met to approach her and make her acquaintance first. The two men and the woman stared, that was as usual, but they did not initiate conversation.

After the cool darkness of the airplane the sunlight on the tarmac blinded her for a moment. Then she saw her cousin waving to her from the parked car. There were no formalities. The passengers climbed down the steps from the plane and went directly to their waiting rides. Her cousin Stacy stared at her for a long time. She was a short stubby girl with very large bulbous breasts and a huge rear end which seemed to be tilted up and so contrived to make all of her skirts and dresses longer in front than in back. Her face was small and round and when she smiled she seemed to lose her eyes in the creases of her wrinkles.

“Wow! I had forgotten just how you looked,” Stacy said.

Petra ducked her head in irritation. Family didn’t speak like this.

And yes, she was beautiful. She was petite but voluptuous and the high red colour of a ripe mango. In her youth, she was vibrant, almost overflowing with life as if it was waiting to explode out of her body and envelope the world. There was a bursting energy about her and a strange lightness as if when touched her pores would float into the air and pop in frissons of light. She had those rare blue-green eyes, received from a long gone Irish ancestor. They were large, widely spaced, oval, deeply set and luminous. Her face and body drew attention. Her eyes made them fall in love.

She had been bored in the capital. There were no more conquests in that dirty jungle for one who had been slaying boys and men since her early childhood. As they drove down the hot road in the five minutes it took to get to the house Stacy updated her on family news using the island vernacular which omitted words considered superfluous. Most people on the island could switch back and forth from their local dialect to practiced flawless English. Some people never bothered to switch at all.

“Marlee is having a baby. She don’t know who it for. That girl was always a slut. Uncle Benny had a heart attack and he in the hospital in Freeport. We’ll go visit him tomorrow. Mummy doing well. Her knees hurting her as usual. One all swell up, but at least she still walking. Jerry, Patrick, and Newton are just still little bits of trouble, but they’re too young to know better. Tyler now, you remember my big brother?”

Without waiting for an affirmative answer, she went on her hands moving on and off the wheel as she made quick emphatic gestures. “Well, let me tell you. If he don’t find himself on the straight and narrow, he gonna get into some big trouble one of these days and find himself working for Her Majesty at Fox Hill. And I hear that prison is not a clean place and you know how Tyler so fastidious.

“What about Uncle William?”

Stacy looked surprised as if she had forgotten about her own father, her fine straight nose, the proud characteristic of all the Hanna’s, wrinkled.

“Daddy’s just fine too. He never is anything else. You know he doesn’t talk much. He just listens and pays the bills. They say Cousin Lea gat cancer. But, nobody’s talking about it. You know that word does put the dread in everyone.”

“That’s sad.”

“That’s life. How’s your Mum.”

“Same as usual, running everything.”

“She still gat that little store?”

“Yes. We must be a family of merchants. She keeps that place open all night and day. I don’t know when she sleeps. She’s been frantic ever since Daddy died.

“It hits some people that way.”

“How long though? It’s been five years now.”

“Maybe they were really in love?”

Petra refuted that. “I didn’t see no evidence of that.” The thought made her feel uncomfortable somehow. She’d loved her daddy with a passion which never lessened as she grew up. His loss scarred her and turned her inward. Maybe she was more like her mother than she knew.

“Children don’t see everything.”

“But, I know”, thought Petra. “I know he didn’t love her because he loved me.”

As soon as she thought it she realized how childish the thought was. Her repentance was words.

“Maybe you’re right. Parents don’t show you all they feel for each other.”

“Darn right too, said Stacy,” No PDA in the home.”

She thought for a moment then added, “Or in public either.” My parents act like strangers all the time. I like it that way. I hate to see people slobbering all over each other, especially old people. There should be an age where you get over all that emotional stuff. Now us, we just getting there. You know, they say that you feel more when you are in your teens and early twenties than at any other time in your life. Do you think that’s true? I wonder if emotions just dissolve over the years, like they are mixed in the water of your life. I think that is what happens actually. I think they dissolve. Then as you age you become diluted until all you can do, all you want to do is sit and observe. It’s like a benefit of growing older and it’s a curse too. Thank God, I have years before that happens to me. But, then again maybe I’ll be the exception.

She thought again and added, “And you too of course, being as you’re my favourite cousin.”

Petra barely listened. She watched the men pulling up their lobster traps in the harbour. They were full of clawing crustaceans. Mounds of discarded conch shells glistened in the sunlight. The odour of newly scaled fish permeated the air. There was also mustiness as if the houses had layers of mildew or mould buried deep within their walls. The fruit trees were in bloom, guava, sapodilla, mango, juju, sugar apples and the tiny red, white and yellow flowers gave out a sweet scent to combat the stale air from the houses. Most of the fruits were still yet green, tiny rounds on the branches waiting for the nadir of the summer to ripen to abundance.

Barefooted children sauntered by carrying groceries, fishing poles. They played bat and ball with a piece of plywood and an old softball, darting into the street to run to the makeshift bases. Here and there, on porches, or standing along the side of the street were clusters of adolescents. Loitering for no good reason as her mother would say. They interrupted their conversations with loud raucous laughter. Petra wondered about them. Why were they so happy? Didn’t they have anything to do? She had never felt connected to people of her own age. She found them lazy and stupid especially on this island.

Chapter One

The Death

When they informed Petra Johnson of her daughter’s death, she began to scream. There were four of them standing before her in a semi-circle like black ravens of death. Then one of them knelt by her chair and took her hand. It was then she knew. The gesture was so oddly out of place. They didn’t touch much in this family. One would think that with six women in the house there would be a surfeit of hugging and kissing. But there wasn’t. Never. They scurried around each other, and smiled and laughed when they were happy. Often, they were very kind to each other. But, touching was reserved for special occasions – births, weddings, funerals, and death. This was the way she had been reared and she taught her daughters the same. Public displays of affection were an anathema. Private displays merely boring

They were hesitant too. That was unusual. She had rowdy girls, rambunctious girls. She had a drawer full of complaints from schools about her girls and their antics. In more than thirty years, Petra could not remember a silent moment in the house. Her girls screamed, shouted, yelled, tore each other’s clothes, laughed loudly, very loudly, and argued the same way. Who were these strangers? For a moment, a fleeting moment Petra was moved to compassion. That was unusual for her. Then, a second later, her brain deciphered the sounds which were issuing from their mouths, and she began to scream. It wasn’t an ordinary scream. No, this filled her head; enveloped her brain; clogged her ears so she heard only the reverberations in her skull. This scream blew through her nostrils and pulled her mouth into wild contortions. This scream attacked the end nerves on the layers of her skin, so they trembled as though charged by bolts of electricity. It contracted her vocal chords, so the utterances, which emerged from her throat, had an atonic stridency. Her limbs twisted and were flung into poses of their own volition, striking her daughters who were trying to comfort her.

Still, Petra screamed, until the spittle dried and flaked on the sides of her mouth, and her eyes began to roll back into her head. But, she did not lose consciousness. The refrain was too strong in her head.

“My daughter is dead.”

“My girl is dead.”

“My daughter is dead.”

They were trying to hold her down, her left-over daughters. Did she say that aloud? No. The only sound, which she could bring forth, was that horrible, that terrible, that all-encompassing scream. Now there was a faint clearing in her brain, which allowed her to filter in their words in those strange, consoling voices.

“Please Mum, please.”

“Did someone call the doctor?”

“Why didn’t you bring the doctor with you, you fool?”

“How was I going to know she would react like this?”

“Oh, God, oh God, shut up.”

Yes, that was the way they usually acted; one of them bringing up everlasting excuses with another one shouting her down.

“Don’t change. Don’t try to be comforting. Don’t die.”

Renewed memory chased logical thought away.

“Somebody hold her legs, for Christ’s sake.”

“Am I supposed to think of everything?”

“Please Mum. We’re here.”

“Please try to be quiet Mum.”

“Somebody get some water.”

“Get some brandy.”

“You know she doesn’t drink.”

“This might be a good time to start.”

Someone began to laugh hysterically. There was the sound of a slap and the wild laugh abruptly stilled.

“Stop arguing for God’s sake. My sister is dead.”

“She was my sister too.”

“I told her not to go.”

Petra tried to rise as they let go of her. She wanted to…She didn’t know what she wanted to do. She wanted to get away from these women, these left-over daughters. The uproar in her head hampered her movements. Something crashed to the floor.

“Grab her hands.”

“Hold her back.”

“Jesus, I don’t have the strength for this.”

She didn’t either. Strength was not a quality she possessed in abundance. She had always envied strong women. She envied her daughters.

“Where the hell is the doctor?”

“I can’t take much more of this.”

“Well, you’re going to have to. It’s just beginning.”

“Put this cold cloth on her.”

Drops of ice, cold water dribbled into her ears when they placed the too wet cloth upon her forehead. It produced a chain reaction of clamminess along her skin. Was dead flesh this cold?

“Here’s the brandy.”

“Gently, gently. You don’t want her to choke.”

“She took a sip. Good.”

The brandy tasted like acid. It burned her throat, her gullet. She could feel it blaze all the way down to her stomach. She clenched her teeth and swatted at the glass.

“Hold her tight. She’s moving again.”

“Christ, I can’t take that noise.”

“Get lost if you can’t help.”

“Stop her screaming, please.”

“Please stop that noise. It’s driving me crazy.”

There was a prick in her arm. Then as she felt her consciousness begin to slip away coherent thought came again.

“Where was Julius? Where was her husband? Where was the man who had brought this curse upon her and her daughters? Was he with her, that woman who never left? Was he with the witch again?”

Chapter Two

Petra

“In the olden days,” Petra told her daughters, “In the olden days before you were born I was young and beautiful” She paused for their expressions of surprise and smiled a secret smile, for the past was not that long ago to her. It was so unusual for her to reminisce about her past that for the moment the girls gave her their attention.

It was true. She was so beautiful that no one ever wondered if she had a brain, so bedazzled were they by the perfection of her face and form. The truth was there was not much more than a twinkle as her mother used to say, though Petra herself never thought about it. She did not inherit her mother’s aptitude for mercantile dealings nor her father’s quickness, inquisitiveness, and boundless curiosity. But from a long dead ancestor she did inherit a capacity for obsessive loving. Her love was finite, limited to one person at a time. And though she functioned normally and learned how to move in society, she always to the end of her days considered other people whom she did not love as intrusions and treated them as such. Her father’s death was her first heartbreak. She was destined to have others.

They sat together in what they called the family room on the big overstuffed sofas that Petra had purchased early in her marriage, transported from house to house, and refused to change. The brightly coloured upholstery was faded now with stains from spilled drink and food and one memorable white spot where someone had tried to wipe away vomit with bleach. There were tears in the seams of the cushions and the arms of the chairs were still filthy despite repeated rubbings and washings. Still it was their favourite place to gather as a family, the women that is, not Julius. He always said that the sight of all of them in that small room made him feel as if he had entered a harem and knives were hidden nearby to do unspeakable things to parts of his body. He hated it when they laughed at him.

Outside the temperature was ninety degrees. The air was still and muggy. The leaves on the two poinciana trees which over looked the house barely moved. The humidity would drench a body in sweat in ten minutes. But inside, in the cool air- conditioning, the air was sweet and balmy. In times before people sat on their porches and greeted each other, exchanged news, caught up on juicy scandals, but now they remained in their hermetically sealed houses living in familial isolation

“Yes, I was.” Petra said, “And men used to stop me all the time because they couldn’t believe their eyes. They would stare at me everywhere I went. I never acknowledged them of course, yet they still worshipped me”

Inevitably one of her mean children would mutter, “What happened?” and all of them would dissolve into uncontrollable laughter, clapping their hands and slapping their thighs in merriment.

“You happened,” Petra told them. “You all came and took my beauty away. I gave it away to you. That’s what you’re supposed to do. You give your all to your children.”

The girls nodded impressed by her eloquence. The spell lasted less than a minute.

“Not me,” Diane said, “I’m keeping it all for myself. Ain’t no little monster going to steal my beautiful.”

Petra only smiled again.

In the summer of her eighteenth year Petra took the Mackey Airlines small plane to Grand Bahama to visit her cousin. She landed at West End Airport and looked out over the settlement by the sea and sighed in relief. Only three other people were on the small plane with her, older foreigners who would be staying at the hotel. The flight was smooth and restful. She didn’t speak to the tourists on her flight, not from shyness, but because she always expected people she met to approach her and make her acquaintance first. The two men and the woman stared, that was as usual, but they did not initiate conversation.

After the cool darkness of the airplane the sunlight on the tarmac blinded her for a moment. Then she saw her cousin waving to her from the parked car. There were no formalities. The passengers climbed down the steps from the plane and went directly to their waiting rides. Her cousin Stacy stared at her for a long time. She was a short stubby girl with very large bulbous breasts and a huge rear end which seemed to be tilted up and so contrived to make all of her skirts and dresses longer in front than in back. Her face was small and round and when she smiled she seemed to lose her eyes in the creases of her wrinkles.

“Wow! I had forgotten just how you looked,” Stacy said.

Petra ducked her head in irritation. Family didn’t speak like this.

And yes, she was beautiful. She was petite but voluptuous and the high red colour of a ripe mango. In her youth, she was vibrant, almost overflowing with life as if it was waiting to explode out of her body and envelope the world. There was a bursting energy about her and a strange lightness as if when touched her pores would float into the air and pop in frissons of light. She had those rare blue-green eyes, received from a long gone Irish ancestor. They were large, widely spaced, oval, deeply set and luminous. Her face and body drew attention. Her eyes made them fall in love.

She had been bored in the capital. There were no more conquests in that dirty jungle for one who had been slaying boys and men since her early childhood. As they drove down the hot road in the five minutes it took to get to the house Stacy updated her on family news using the island vernacular which omitted words considered superfluous. Most people on the island could switch back and forth from their local dialect to practiced flawless English. Some people never bothered to switch at all.

“Marlee is having a baby. She don’t know who it for. That girl was always a slut. Uncle Benny had a heart attack and he in the hospital in Freeport. We’ll go visit him tomorrow. Mummy doing well. Her knees hurting her as usual. One all swell up, but at least she still walking. Jerry, Patrick, and Newton are just still little bits of trouble, but they’re too young to know better. Tyler now, you remember my big brother?”

Without waiting for an affirmative answer, she went on her hands moving on and off the wheel as she made quick emphatic gestures. “Well, let me tell you. If he don’t find himself on the straight and narrow, he gonna get into some big trouble one of these days and find himself working for Her Majesty at Fox Hill. And I hear that prison is not a clean place and you know how Tyler so fastidious.

“What about Uncle William?”

Stacy looked surprised as if she had forgotten about her own father, her fine straight nose, the proud characteristic of all the Hanna’s, wrinkled.

“Daddy’s just fine too. He never is anything else. You know he doesn’t talk much. He just listens and pays the bills. They say Cousin Lea gat cancer. But, nobody’s talking about it. You know that word does put the dread in everyone.”

“That’s sad.”

“That’s life. How’s your Mum.”

“Same as usual, running everything.”

“She still gat that little store?”

“Yes. We must be a family of merchants. She keeps that place open all night and day. I don’t know when she sleeps. She’s been frantic ever since Daddy died.

“It hits some people that way.”

“How long though? It’s been five years now.”

“Maybe they were really in love?”

Petra refuted that. “I didn’t see no evidence of that.” The thought made her feel uncomfortable somehow. She’d loved her daddy with a passion which never lessened as she grew up. His loss scarred her and turned her inward. Maybe she was more like her mother than she knew.

“Children don’t see everything.”

“But, I know”, thought Petra. “I know he didn’t love her because he loved me.”

As soon as she thought it she realized how childish the thought was. Her repentance was words.

“Maybe you’re right. Parents don’t show you all they feel for each other.”

“Darn right too, said Stacy,” No PDA in the home.”

She thought for a moment then added, “Or in public either.” My parents act like strangers all the time. I like it that way. I hate to see people slobbering all over each other, especially old people. There should be an age where you get over all that emotional stuff. Now us, we just getting there. You know, they say that you feel more when you are in your teens and early twenties than at any other time in your life. Do you think that’s true? I wonder if emotions just dissolve over the years, like they are mixed in the water of your life. I think that is what happens actually. I think they dissolve. Then as you age you become diluted until all you can do, all you want to do is sit and observe. It’s like a benefit of growing older and it’s a curse too. Thank God, I have years before that happens to me. But, then again maybe I’ll be the exception.

She thought again and added, “And you too of course, being as you’re my favourite cousin.”

Petra barely listened. She watched the men pulling up their lobster traps in the harbour. They were full of clawing crustaceans. Mounds of discarded conch shells glistened in the sunlight. The odour of newly scaled fish permeated the air. There was also mustiness as if the houses had layers of mildew or mould buried deep within their walls. The fruit trees were in bloom, guava, sapodilla, mango, juju, sugar apples and the tiny red, white and yellow flowers gave out a sweet scent to combat the stale air from the houses. Most of the fruits were still yet green, tiny rounds on the branches waiting for the nadir of the summer to ripen to abundance.

Barefooted children sauntered by carrying groceries, fishing poles. They played bat and ball with a piece of plywood and an old softball, darting into the street to run to the makeshift bases. Here and there, on porches, or standing along the side of the street were clusters of adolescents. Loitering for no good reason as her mother would say. They interrupted their conversations with loud raucous laughter. Petra wondered about them. Why were they so happy? Didn’t they have anything to do? She had never felt connected to people of her own age. She found them lazy and stupid especially on this island.

Chapter One

The Death

When they informed Petra Johnson of her daughter’s death, she began to scream. There were four of them standing before her in a semi-circle like black ravens of death. Then one of them knelt by her chair and took her hand. It was then she knew. The gesture was so oddly out of place. They didn’t touch much in this family. One would think that with six women in the house there would be a surfeit of hugging and kissing. But there wasn’t. Never. They scurried around each other, and smiled and laughed when they were happy. Often, they were very kind to each other. But, touching was reserved for special occasions – births, weddings, funerals, and death. This was the way she had been reared and she taught her daughters the same. Public displays of affection were an anathema. Private displays merely boring

They were hesitant too. That was unusual. She had rowdy girls, rambunctious girls. She had a drawer full of complaints from schools about her girls and their antics. In more than thirty years, Petra could not remember a silent moment in the house. Her girls screamed, shouted, yelled, tore each other’s clothes, laughed loudly, very loudly, and argued the same way. Who were these strangers? For a moment, a fleeting moment Petra was moved to compassion. That was unusual for her. Then, a second later, her brain deciphered the sounds which were issuing from their mouths, and she began to scream. It wasn’t an ordinary scream. No, this filled her head; enveloped her brain; clogged her ears so she heard only the reverberations in her skull. This scream blew through her nostrils and pulled her mouth into wild contortions. This scream attacked the end nerves on the layers of her skin, so they trembled as though charged by bolts of electricity. It contracted her vocal chords, so the utterances, which emerged from her throat, had an atonic stridency. Her limbs twisted and were flung into poses of their own volition, striking her daughters who were trying to comfort her.

Still, Petra screamed, until the spittle dried and flaked on the sides of her mouth, and her eyes began to roll back into her head. But, she did not lose consciousness. The refrain was too strong in her head.

“My daughter is dead.”

“My girl is dead.”

“My daughter is dead.”

They were trying to hold her down, her left-over daughters. Did she say that aloud? No. The only sound, which she could bring forth, was that horrible, that terrible, that all-encompassing scream. Now there was a faint clearing in her brain, which allowed her to filter in their words in those strange, consoling voices.

“Please Mum, please.”

“Did someone call the doctor?”

“Why didn’t you bring the doctor with you, you fool?”

“How was I going to know she would react like this?”

“Oh, God, oh God, shut up.”

Yes, that was the way they usually acted; one of them bringing up everlasting excuses with another one shouting her down.

“Don’t change. Don’t try to be comforting. Don’t die.”

Renewed memory chased logical thought away.

“Somebody hold her legs, for Christ’s sake.”

“Am I supposed to think of everything?”

“Please Mum. We’re here.”

“Please try to be quiet Mum.”

“Somebody get some water.”

“Get some brandy.”

“You know she doesn’t drink.”

“This might be a good time to start.”

Someone began to laugh hysterically. There was the sound of a slap and the wild laugh abruptly stilled.

“Stop arguing for God’s sake. My sister is dead.”

“She was my sister too.”

“I told her not to go.”

Petra tried to rise as they let go of her. She wanted to…She didn’t know what she wanted to do. She wanted to get away from these women, these left-over daughters. The uproar in her head hampered her movements. Something crashed to the floor.

“Grab her hands.”

“Hold her back.”

“Jesus, I don’t have the strength for this.”

She didn’t either. Strength was not a quality she possessed in abundance. She had always envied strong women. She envied her daughters.

“Where the hell is the doctor?”

“I can’t take much more of this.”

“Well, you’re going to have to. It’s just beginning.”

“Put this cold cloth on her.”

Drops of ice, cold water dribbled into her ears when they placed the too wet cloth upon her forehead. It produced a chain reaction of clamminess along her skin. Was dead flesh this cold?

“Here’s the brandy.”

“Gently, gently. You don’t want her to choke.”

“She took a sip. Good.”

The brandy tasted like acid. It burned her throat, her gullet. She could feel it blaze all the way down to her stomach. She clenched her teeth and swatted at the glass.

“Hold her tight. She’s moving again.”

“Christ, I can’t take that noise.”

“Get lost if you can’t help.”

“Stop her screaming, please.”

“Please stop that noise. It’s driving me crazy.”

There was a prick in her arm. Then as she felt her consciousness begin to slip away coherent thought came again.

“Where was Julius? Where was her husband? Where was the man who had brought this curse upon her and her daughters? Was he with her, that woman who never left? Was he with the witch again?”

Chapter Two

Petra

“In the olden days,” Petra told her daughters, “In the olden days before you were born I was young and beautiful” She paused for their expressions of surprise and smiled a secret smile, for the past was not that long ago to her. It was so unusual for her to reminisce about her past that for the moment the girls gave her their attention.

It was true. She was so beautiful that no one ever wondered if she had a brain, so bedazzled were they by the perfection of her face and form. The truth was there was not much more than a twinkle as her mother used to say, though Petra herself never thought about it. She did not inherit her mother’s aptitude for mercantile dealings nor her father’s quickness, inquisitiveness, and boundless curiosity. But from a long dead ancestor she did inherit a capacity for obsessive loving. Her love was finite, limited to one person at a time. And though she functioned normally and learned how to move in society, she always to the end of her days considered other people whom she did not love as intrusions and treated them as such. Her father’s death was her first heartbreak. She was destined to have others.

They sat together in what they called the family room on the big overstuffed sofas that Petra had purchased early in her marriage, transported from house to house, and refused to change. The brightly coloured upholstery was faded now with stains from spilled drink and food and one memorable white spot where someone had tried to wipe away vomit with bleach. There were tears in the seams of the cushions and the arms of the chairs were still filthy despite repeated rubbings and washings. Still it was their favourite place to gather as a family, the women that is, not Julius. He always said that the sight of all of them in that small room made him feel as if he had entered a harem and knives were hidden nearby to do unspeakable things to parts of his body. He hated it when they laughed at him.

Outside the temperature was ninety degrees. The air was still and muggy. The leaves on the two poinciana trees which over looked the house barely moved. The humidity would drench a body in sweat in ten minutes. But inside, in the cool air- conditioning, the air was sweet and balmy. In times before people sat on their porches and greeted each other, exchanged news, caught up on juicy scandals, but now they remained in their hermetically sealed houses living in familial isolation

“Yes, I was.” Petra said, “And men used to stop me all the time because they couldn’t believe their eyes. They would stare at me everywhere I went. I never acknowledged them of course, yet they still worshipped me”

Inevitably one of her mean children would mutter, “What happened?” and all of them would dissolve into uncontrollable laughter, clapping their hands and slapping their thighs in merriment.

“You happened,” Petra told them. “You all came and took my beauty away. I gave it away to you. That’s what you’re supposed to do. You give your all to your children.”

The girls nodded impressed by her eloquence. The spell lasted less than a minute.

“Not me,” Diane said, “I’m keeping it all for myself. Ain’t no little monster going to steal my beautiful.”

Petra only smiled again.

In the summer of her eighteenth year Petra took the Mackey Airlines small plane to Grand Bahama to visit her cousin. She landed at West End Airport and looked out over the settlement by the sea and sighed in relief. Only three other people were on the small plane with her, older foreigners who would be staying at the hotel. The flight was smooth and restful. She didn’t speak to the tourists on her flight, not from shyness, but because she always expected people she met to approach her and make her acquaintance first. The two men and the woman stared, that was as usual, but they did not initiate conversation.

After the cool darkness of the airplane the sunlight on the tarmac blinded her for a moment. Then she saw her cousin waving to her from the parked car. There were no formalities. The passengers climbed down the steps from the plane and went directly to their waiting rides. Her cousin Stacy stared at her for a long time. She was a short stubby girl with very large bulbous breasts and a huge rear end which seemed to be tilted up and so contrived to make all of her skirts and dresses longer in front than in back. Her face was small and round and when she smiled she seemed to lose her eyes in the creases of her wrinkles.

“Wow! I had forgotten just how you looked,” Stacy said.

Petra ducked her head in irritation. Family didn’t speak like this.

And yes, she was beautiful. She was petite but voluptuous and the high red colour of a ripe mango. In her youth, she was vibrant, almost overflowing with life as if it was waiting to explode out of her body and envelope the world. There was a bursting energy about her and a strange lightness as if when touched her pores would float into the air and pop in frissons of light. She had those rare blue-green eyes, received from a long gone Irish ancestor. They were large, widely spaced, oval, deeply set and luminous. Her face and body drew attention. Her eyes made them fall in love.

She had been bored in the capital. There were no more conquests in that dirty jungle for one who had been slaying boys and men since her early childhood. As they drove down the hot road in the five minutes it took to get to the house Stacy updated her on family news using the island vernacular which omitted words considered superfluous. Most people on the island could switch back and forth from their local dialect to practiced flawless English. Some people never bothered to switch at all.

“Marlee is having a baby. She don’t know who it for. That girl was always a slut. Uncle Benny had a heart attack and he in the hospital in Freeport. We’ll go visit him tomorrow. Mummy doing well. Her knees hurting her as usual. One all swell up, but at least she still walking. Jerry, Patrick, and Newton are just still little bits of trouble, but they’re too young to know better. Tyler now, you remember my big brother?”

Without waiting for an affirmative answer, she went on her hands moving on and off the wheel as she made quick emphatic gestures. “Well, let me tell you. If he don’t find himself on the straight and narrow, he gonna get into some big trouble one of these days and find himself working for Her Majesty at Fox Hill. And I hear that prison is not a clean place and you know how Tyler so fastidious.

“What about Uncle William?”

Stacy looked surprised as if she had forgotten about her own father, her fine straight nose, the proud characteristic of all the Hanna’s, wrinkled.

“Daddy’s just fine too. He never is anything else. You know he doesn’t talk much. He just listens and pays the bills. They say Cousin Lea gat cancer. But, nobody’s talking about it. You know that word does put the dread in everyone.”

“That’s sad.”

“That’s life. How’s your Mum.”

“Same as usual, running everything.”

“She still gat that little store?”

“Yes. We must be a family of merchants. She keeps that place open all night and day. I don’t know when she sleeps. She’s been frantic ever since Daddy died.

“It hits some people that way.”

“How long though? It’s been five years now.”

“Maybe they were really in love?”

Petra refuted that. “I didn’t see no evidence of that.” The thought made her feel uncomfortable somehow. She’d loved her daddy with a passion which never lessened as she grew up. His loss scarred her and turned her inward. Maybe she was more like her mother than she knew.

“Children don’t see everything.”

“But, I know”, thought Petra. “I know he didn’t love her because he loved me.”

As soon as she thought it she realized how childish the thought was. Her repentance was words.

“Maybe you’re right. Parents don’t show you all they feel for each other.”

“Darn right too, said Stacy,” No PDA in the home.”

She thought for a moment then added, “Or in public either.” My parents act like strangers all the time. I like it that way. I hate to see people slobbering all over each other, especially old people. There should be an age where you get over all that emotional stuff. Now us, we just getting there. You know, they say that you feel more when you are in your teens and early twenties than at any other time in your life. Do you think that’s true? I wonder if emotions just dissolve over the years, like they are mixed in the water of your life. I think that is what happens actually. I think they dissolve. Then as you age you become diluted until all you can do, all you want to do is sit and observe. It’s like a benefit of growing older and it’s a curse too. Thank God, I have years before that happens to me. But, then again maybe I’ll be the exception.

She thought again and added, “And you too of course, being as you’re my favourite cousin.”

Petra barely listened. She watched the men pulling up their lobster traps in the harbour. They were full of clawing crustaceans. Mounds of discarded conch shells glistened in the sunlight. The odour of newly scaled fish permeated the air. There was also mustiness as if the houses had layers of mildew or mould buried deep within their walls. The fruit trees were in bloom, guava, sapodilla, mango, juju, sugar apples and the tiny red, white and yellow flowers gave out a sweet scent to combat the stale air from the houses. Most of the fruits were still yet green, tiny rounds on the branches waiting for the nadir of the summer to ripen to abundance.

Barefooted children sauntered by carrying groceries, fishing poles. They played bat and ball with a piece of plywood and an old softball, darting into the street to run to the makeshift bases. Here and there, on porches, or standing along the side of the street were clusters of adolescents. Loitering for no good reason as her mother would say. They interrupted their conversations with loud raucous laughter. Petra wondered about them. Why were they so happy? Didn’t they have anything to do? She had never felt connected to people of her own age. She found them lazy and stupid especially on this island.

Chapter One

The Death

When they informed Petra Johnson of her daughter’s death, she began to scream. There were four of them standing before her in a semi-circle like black ravens of death. Then one of them knelt by her chair and took her hand. It was then she knew. The gesture was so oddly out of place. They didn’t touch much in this family. One would think that with six women in the house there would be a surfeit of hugging and kissing. But there wasn’t. Never. They scurried around each other, and smiled and laughed when they were happy. Often, they were very kind to each other. But, touching was reserved for special occasions – births, weddings, funerals, and death. This was the way she had been reared and she taught her daughters the same. Public displays of affection were an anathema. Private displays merely boring

They were hesitant too. That was unusual. She had rowdy girls, rambunctious girls. She had a drawer full of complaints from schools about her girls and their antics. In more than thirty years, Petra could not remember a silent moment in the house. Her girls screamed, shouted, yelled, tore each other’s clothes, laughed loudly, very loudly, and argued the same way. Who were these strangers? For a moment, a fleeting moment Petra was moved to compassion. That was unusual for her. Then, a second later, her brain deciphered the sounds which were issuing from their mouths, and she began to scream. It wasn’t an ordinary scream. No, this filled her head; enveloped her brain; clogged her ears so she heard only the reverberations in her skull. This scream blew through her nostrils and pulled her mouth into wild contortions. This scream attacked the end nerves on the layers of her skin, so they trembled as though charged by bolts of electricity. It contracted her vocal chords, so the utterances, which emerged from her throat, had an atonic stridency. Her limbs twisted and were flung into poses of their own volition, striking her daughters who were trying to comfort her.

Still, Petra screamed, until the spittle dried and flaked on the sides of her mouth, and her eyes began to roll back into her head. But, she did not lose consciousness. The refrain was too strong in her head.

“My daughter is dead.”

“My girl is dead.”

“My daughter is dead.”

They were trying to hold her down, her left-over daughters. Did she say that aloud? No. The only sound, which she could bring forth, was that horrible, that terrible, that all-encompassing scream. Now there was a faint clearing in her brain, which allowed her to filter in their words in those strange, consoling voices.

“Please Mum, please.”

“Did someone call the doctor?”

“Why didn’t you bring the doctor with you, you fool?”

“How was I going to know she would react like this?”

“Oh, God, oh God, shut up.”

Yes, that was the way they usually acted; one of them bringing up everlasting excuses with another one shouting her down.

“Don’t change. Don’t try to be comforting. Don’t die.”

Renewed memory chased logical thought away.

“Somebody hold her legs, for Christ’s sake.”

“Am I supposed to think of everything?”

“Please Mum. We’re here.”

“Please try to be quiet Mum.”

“Somebody get some water.”

“Get some brandy.”

“You know she doesn’t drink.”

“This might be a good time to start.”

Someone began to laugh hysterically. There was the sound of a slap and the wild laugh abruptly stilled.

“Stop arguing for God’s sake. My sister is dead.”

“She was my sister too.”

“I told her not to go.”

Petra tried to rise as they let go of her. She wanted to…She didn’t know what she wanted to do. She wanted to get away from these women, these left-over daughters. The uproar in her head hampered her movements. Something crashed to the floor.

“Grab her hands.”

“Hold her back.”

“Jesus, I don’t have the strength for this.”

She didn’t either. Strength was not a quality she possessed in abundance. She had always envied strong women. She envied her daughters.

“Where the hell is the doctor?”

“I can’t take much more of this.”

“Well, you’re going to have to. It’s just beginning.”

“Put this cold cloth on her.”

Drops of ice, cold water dribbled into her ears when they placed the too wet cloth upon her forehead. It produced a chain reaction of clamminess along her skin. Was dead flesh this cold?

“Here’s the brandy.”

“Gently, gently. You don’t want her to choke.”

“She took a sip. Good.”

The brandy tasted like acid. It burned her throat, her gullet. She could feel it blaze all the way down to her stomach. She clenched her teeth and swatted at the glass.

“Hold her tight. She’s moving again.”

“Christ, I can’t take that noise.”

“Get lost if you can’t help.”

“Stop her screaming, please.”

“Please stop that noise. It’s driving me crazy.”

There was a prick in her arm. Then as she felt her consciousness begin to slip away coherent thought came again.

“Where was Julius? Where was her husband? Where was the man who had brought this curse upon her and her daughters? Was he with her, that woman who never left? Was he with the witch again?”

Chapter Two

Petra

“In the olden days,” Petra told her daughters, “In the olden days before you were born I was young and beautiful” She paused for their expressions of surprise and smiled a secret smile, for the past was not that long ago to her. It was so unusual for her to reminisce about her past that for the moment the girls gave her their attention.

It was true. She was so beautiful that no one ever wondered if she had a brain, so bedazzled were they by the perfection of her face and form. The truth was there was not much more than a twinkle as her mother used to say, though Petra herself never thought about it. She did not inherit her mother’s aptitude for mercantile dealings nor her father’s quickness, inquisitiveness, and boundless curiosity. But from a long dead ancestor she did inherit a capacity for obsessive loving. Her love was finite, limited to one person at a time. And though she functioned normally and learned how to move in society, she always to the end of her days considered other people whom she did not love as intrusions and treated them as such. Her father’s death was her first heartbreak. She was destined to have others.

They sat together in what they called the family room on the big overstuffed sofas that Petra had purchased early in her marriage, transported from house to house, and refused to change. The brightly coloured upholstery was faded now with stains from spilled drink and food and one memorable white spot where someone had tried to wipe away vomit with bleach. There were tears in the seams of the cushions and the arms of the chairs were still filthy despite repeated rubbings and washings. Still it was their favourite place to gather as a family, the women that is, not Julius. He always said that the sight of all of them in that small room made him feel as if he had entered a harem and knives were hidden nearby to do unspeakable things to parts of his body. He hated it when they laughed at him.

Outside the temperature was ninety degrees. The air was still and muggy. The leaves on the two poinciana trees which over looked the house barely moved. The humidity would drench a body in sweat in ten minutes. But inside, in the cool air- conditioning, the air was sweet and balmy. In times before people sat on their porches and greeted each other, exchanged news, caught up on juicy scandals, but now they remained in their hermetically sealed houses living in familial isolation

“Yes, I was.” Petra said, “And men used to stop me all the time because they couldn’t believe their eyes. They would stare at me everywhere I went. I never acknowledged them of course, yet they still worshipped me”

Inevitably one of her mean children would mutter, “What happened?” and all of them would dissolve into uncontrollable laughter, clapping their hands and slapping their thighs in merriment.

“You happened,” Petra told them. “You all came and took my beauty away. I gave it away to you. That’s what you’re supposed to do. You give your all to your children.”

The girls nodded impressed by her eloquence. The spell lasted less than a minute.

“Not me,” Diane said, “I’m keeping it all for myself. Ain’t no little monster going to steal my beautiful.”

Petra only smiled again.

In the summer of her eighteenth year Petra took the Mackey Airlines small plane to Grand Bahama to visit her cousin. She landed at West End Airport and looked out over the settlement by the sea and sighed in relief. Only three other people were on the small plane with her, older foreigners who would be staying at the hotel. The flight was smooth and restful. She didn’t speak to the tourists on her flight, not from shyness, but because she always expected people she met to approach her and make her acquaintance first. The two men and the woman stared, that was as usual, but they did not initiate conversation.

After the cool darkness of the airplane the sunlight on the tarmac blinded her for a moment. Then she saw her cousin waving to her from the parked car. There were no formalities. The passengers climbed down the steps from the plane and went directly to their waiting rides. Her cousin Stacy stared at her for a long time. She was a short stubby girl with very large bulbous breasts and a huge rear end which seemed to be tilted up and so contrived to make all of her skirts and dresses longer in front than in back. Her face was small and round and when she smiled she seemed to lose her eyes in the creases of her wrinkles.

“Wow! I had forgotten just how you looked,” Stacy said.

Petra ducked her head in irritation. Family didn’t speak like this.

And yes, she was beautiful. She was petite but voluptuous and the high red colour of a ripe mango. In her youth, she was vibrant, almost overflowing with life as if it was waiting to explode out of her body and envelope the world. There was a bursting energy about her and a strange lightness as if when touched her pores would float into the air and pop in frissons of light. She had those rare blue-green eyes, received from a long gone Irish ancestor. They were large, widely spaced, oval, deeply set and luminous. Her face and body drew attention. Her eyes made them fall in love.

She had been bored in the capital. There were no more conquests in that dirty jungle for one who had been slaying boys and men since her early childhood. As they drove down the hot road in the five minutes it took to get to the house Stacy updated her on family news using the island vernacular which omitted words considered superfluous. Most people on the island could switch back and forth from their local dialect to practiced flawless English. Some people never bothered to switch at all.

“Marlee is having a baby. She don’t know who it for. That girl was always a slut. Uncle Benny had a heart attack and he in the hospital in Freeport. We’ll go visit him tomorrow. Mummy doing well. Her knees hurting her as usual. One all swell up, but at least she still walking. Jerry, Patrick, and Newton are just still little bits of trouble, but they’re too young to know better. Tyler now, you remember my big brother?”

Without waiting for an affirmative answer, she went on her hands moving on and off the wheel as she made quick emphatic gestures. “Well, let me tell you. If he don’t find himself on the straight and narrow, he gonna get into some big trouble one of these days and find himself working for Her Majesty at Fox Hill. And I hear that prison is not a clean place and you know how Tyler so fastidious.

“What about Uncle William?”

Stacy looked surprised as if she had forgotten about her own father, her fine straight nose, the proud characteristic of all the Hanna’s, wrinkled.

“Daddy’s just fine too. He never is anything else. You know he doesn’t talk much. He just listens and pays the bills. They say Cousin Lea gat cancer. But, nobody’s talking about it. You know that word does put the dread in everyone.”

“That’s sad.”

“That’s life. How’s your Mum.”

“Same as usual, running everything.”

“She still gat that little store?”

“Yes. We must be a family of merchants. She keeps that place open all night and day. I don’t know when she sleeps. She’s been frantic ever since Daddy died.

“It hits some people that way.”

“How long though? It’s been five years now.”

“Maybe they were really in love?”

Petra refuted that. “I didn’t see no evidence of that.” The thought made her feel uncomfortable somehow. She’d loved her daddy with a passion which never lessened as she grew up. His loss scarred her and turned her inward. Maybe she was more like her mother than she knew.

“Children don’t see everything.”

“But, I know”, thought Petra. “I know he didn’t love her because he loved me.”

As soon as she thought it she realized how childish the thought was. Her repentance was words.

“Maybe you’re right. Parents don’t show you all they feel for each other.”

“Darn right too, said Stacy,” No PDA in the home.”

She thought for a moment then added, “Or in public either.” My parents act like strangers all the time. I like it that way. I hate to see people slobbering all over each other, especially old people. There should be an age where you get over all that emotional stuff. Now us, we just getting there. You know, they say that you feel more when you are in your teens and early twenties than at any other time in your life. Do you think that’s true? I wonder if emotions just dissolve over the years, like they are mixed in the water of your life. I think that is what happens actually. I think they dissolve. Then as you age you become diluted until all you can do, all you want to do is sit and observe. It’s like a benefit of growing older and it’s a curse too. Thank God, I have years before that happens to me. But, then again maybe I’ll be the exception.

She thought again and added, “And you too of course, being as you’re my favourite cousin.”

Petra barely listened. She watched the men pulling up their lobster traps in the harbour. They were full of clawing crustaceans. Mounds of discarded conch shells glistened in the sunlight. The odour of newly scaled fish permeated the air. There was also mustiness as if the houses had layers of mildew or mould buried deep within their walls. The fruit trees were in bloom, guava, sapodilla, mango, juju, sugar apples and the tiny red, white and yellow flowers gave out a sweet scent to combat the stale air from the houses. Most of the fruits were still yet green, tiny rounds on the branches waiting for the nadir of the summer to ripen to abundance.

Barefooted children sauntered by carrying groceries, fishing poles. They played bat and ball with a piece of plywood and an old softball, darting into the street to run to the makeshift bases. Here and there, on porches, or standing along the side of the street were clusters of adolescents. Loitering for no good reason as her mother would say. They interrupted their conversations with loud raucous laughter. Petra wondered about them. Why were they so happy? Didn’t they have anything to do? She had never felt connected to people of her own age. She found them lazy and stupid especially on this island.

Chapter One

The Death

When they informed Petra Johnson of her daughter’s death, she began to scream. There were four of them standing before her in a semi-circle like black ravens of death. Then one of them knelt by her chair and took her hand. It was then she knew. The gesture was so oddly out of place. They didn’t touch much in this family. One would think that with six women in the house there would be a surfeit of hugging and kissing. But there wasn’t. Never. They scurried around each other, and smiled and laughed when they were happy. Often, they were very kind to each other. But, touching was reserved for special occasions – births, weddings, funerals, and death. This was the way she had been reared and she taught her daughters the same. Public displays of affection were an anathema. Private displays merely boring

They were hesitant too. That was unusual. She had rowdy girls, rambunctious girls. She had a drawer full of complaints from schools about her girls and their antics. In more than thirty years, Petra could not remember a silent moment in the house. Her girls screamed, shouted, yelled, tore each other’s clothes, laughed loudly, very loudly, and argued the same way. Who were these strangers? For a moment, a fleeting moment Petra was moved to compassion. That was unusual for her. Then, a second later, her brain deciphered the sounds which were issuing from their mouths, and she began to scream. It wasn’t an ordinary scream. No, this filled her head; enveloped her brain; clogged her ears so she heard only the reverberations in her skull. This scream blew through her nostrils and pulled her mouth into wild contortions. This scream attacked the end nerves on the layers of her skin, so they trembled as though charged by bolts of electricity. It contracted her vocal chords, so the utterances, which emerged from her throat, had an atonic stridency. Her limbs twisted and were flung into poses of their own volition, striking her daughters who were trying to comfort her.

Still, Petra screamed, until the spittle dried and flaked on the sides of her mouth, and her eyes began to roll back into her head. But, she did not lose consciousness. The refrain was too strong in her head.

“My daughter is dead.”

“My girl is dead.”

“My daughter is dead.”

They were trying to hold her down, her left-over daughters. Did she say that aloud? No. The only sound, which she could bring forth, was that horrible, that terrible, that all-encompassing scream. Now there was a faint clearing in her brain, which allowed her to filter in their words in those strange, consoling voices.

“Please Mum, please.”

“Did someone call the doctor?”

“Why didn’t you bring the doctor with you, you fool?”

“How was I going to know she would react like this?”

“Oh, God, oh God, shut up.”

Yes, that was the way they usually acted; one of them bringing up everlasting excuses with another one shouting her down.

“Don’t change. Don’t try to be comforting. Don’t die.”

Renewed memory chased logical thought away.

“Somebody hold her legs, for Christ’s sake.”

“Am I supposed to think of everything?”

“Please Mum. We’re here.”

“Please try to be quiet Mum.”

“Somebody get some water.”

“Get some brandy.”

“You know she doesn’t drink.”

“This might be a good time to start.”

Someone began to laugh hysterically. There was the sound of a slap and the wild laugh abruptly stilled.

“Stop arguing for God’s sake. My sister is dead.”

“She was my sister too.”

“I told her not to go.”

Petra tried to rise as they let go of her. She wanted to…She didn’t know what she wanted to do. She wanted to get away from these women, these left-over daughters. The uproar in her head hampered her movements. Something crashed to the floor.

“Grab her hands.”

“Hold her back.”

“Jesus, I don’t have the strength for this.”

She didn’t either. Strength was not a quality she possessed in abundance. She had always envied strong women. She envied her daughters.

“Where the hell is the doctor?”

“I can’t take much more of this.”

“Well, you’re going to have to. It’s just beginning.”

“Put this cold cloth on her.”

Drops of ice, cold water dribbled into her ears when they placed the too wet cloth upon her forehead. It produced a chain reaction of clamminess along her skin. Was dead flesh this cold?

“Here’s the brandy.”

“Gently, gently. You don’t want her to choke.”

“She took a sip. Good.”

The brandy tasted like acid. It burned her throat, her gullet. She could feel it blaze all the way down to her stomach. She clenched her teeth and swatted at the glass.

“Hold her tight. She’s moving again.”

“Christ, I can’t take that noise.”

“Get lost if you can’t help.”

“Stop her screaming, please.”

“Please stop that noise. It’s driving me crazy.”

There was a prick in her arm. Then as she felt her consciousness begin to slip away coherent thought came again.

“Where was Julius? Where was her husband? Where was the man who had brought this curse upon her and her daughters? Was he with her, that woman who never left? Was he with the witch again?”

Chapter Two

Petra

“In the olden days,” Petra told her daughters, “In the olden days before you were born I was young and beautiful” She paused for their expressions of surprise and smiled a secret smile, for the past was not that long ago to her. It was so unusual for her to reminisce about her past that for the moment the girls gave her their attention.

It was true. She was so beautiful that no one ever wondered if she had a brain, so bedazzled were they by the perfection of her face and form. The truth was there was not much more than a twinkle as her mother used to say, though Petra herself never thought about it. She did not inherit her mother’s aptitude for mercantile dealings nor her father’s quickness, inquisitiveness, and boundless curiosity. But from a long dead ancestor she did inherit a capacity for obsessive loving. Her love was finite, limited to one person at a time. And though she functioned normally and learned how to move in society, she always to the end of her days considered other people whom she did not love as intrusions and treated them as such. Her father’s death was her first heartbreak. She was destined to have others.

They sat together in what they called the family room on the big overstuffed sofas that Petra had purchased early in her marriage, transported from house to house, and refused to change. The brightly coloured upholstery was faded now with stains from spilled drink and food and one memorable white spot where someone had tried to wipe away vomit with bleach. There were tears in the seams of the cushions and the arms of the chairs were still filthy despite repeated rubbings and washings. Still it was their favourite place to gather as a family, the women that is, not Julius. He always said that the sight of all of them in that small room made him feel as if he had entered a harem and knives were hidden nearby to do unspeakable things to parts of his body. He hated it when they laughed at him.

Outside the temperature was ninety degrees. The air was still and muggy. The leaves on the two poinciana trees which over looked the house barely moved. The humidity would drench a body in sweat in ten minutes. But inside, in the cool air- conditioning, the air was sweet and balmy. In times before people sat on their porches and greeted each other, exchanged news, caught up on juicy scandals, but now they remained in their hermetically sealed houses living in familial isolation

“Yes, I was.” Petra said, “And men used to stop me all the time because they couldn’t believe their eyes. They would stare at me everywhere I went. I never acknowledged them of course, yet they still worshipped me”

Inevitably one of her mean children would mutter, “What happened?” and all of them would dissolve into uncontrollable laughter, clapping their hands and slapping their thighs in merriment.

“You happened,” Petra told them. “You all came and took my beauty away. I gave it away to you. That’s what you’re supposed to do. You give your all to your children.”

The girls nodded impressed by her eloquence. The spell lasted less than a minute.

“Not me,” Diane said, “I’m keeping it all for myself. Ain’t no little monster going to steal my beautiful.”

Petra only smiled again.

In the summer of her eighteenth year Petra took the Mackey Airlines small plane to Grand Bahama to visit her cousin. She landed at West End Airport and looked out over the settlement by the sea and sighed in relief. Only three other people were on the small plane with her, older foreigners who would be staying at the hotel. The flight was smooth and restful. She didn’t speak to the tourists on her flight, not from shyness, but because she always expected people she met to approach her and make her acquaintance first. The two men and the woman stared, that was as usual, but they did not initiate conversation.

After the cool darkness of the airplane the sunlight on the tarmac blinded her for a moment. Then she saw her cousin waving to her from the parked car. There were no formalities. The passengers climbed down the steps from the plane and went directly to their waiting rides. Her cousin Stacy stared at her for a long time. She was a short stubby girl with very large bulbous breasts and a huge rear end which seemed to be tilted up and so contrived to make all of her skirts and dresses longer in front than in back. Her face was small and round and when she smiled she seemed to lose her eyes in the creases of her wrinkles.

“Wow! I had forgotten just how you looked,” Stacy said.

Petra ducked her head in irritation. Family didn’t speak like this.

And yes, she was beautiful. She was petite but voluptuous and the high red colour of a ripe mango. In her youth, she was vibrant, almost overflowing with life as if it was waiting to explode out of her body and envelope the world. There was a bursting energy about her and a strange lightness as if when touched her pores would float into the air and pop in frissons of light. She had those rare blue-green eyes, received from a long gone Irish ancestor. They were large, widely spaced, oval, deeply set and luminous. Her face and body drew attention. Her eyes made them fall in love.

She had been bored in the capital. There were no more conquests in that dirty jungle for one who had been slaying boys and men since her early childhood. As they drove down the hot road in the five minutes it took to get to the house Stacy updated her on family news using the island vernacular which omitted words considered superfluous. Most people on the island could switch back and forth from their local dialect to practiced flawless English. Some people never bothered to switch at all.

“Marlee is having a baby. She don’t know who it for. That girl was always a slut. Uncle Benny had a heart attack and he in the hospital in Freeport. We’ll go visit him tomorrow. Mummy doing well. Her knees hurting her as usual. One all swell up, but at least she still walking. Jerry, Patrick, and Newton are just still little bits of trouble, but they’re too young to know better. Tyler now, you remember my big brother?”

Without waiting for an affirmative answer, she went on her hands moving on and off the wheel as she made quick emphatic gestures. “Well, let me tell you. If he don’t find himself on the straight and narrow, he gonna get into some big trouble one of these days and find himself working for Her Majesty at Fox Hill. And I hear that prison is not a clean place and you know how Tyler so fastidious.

“What about Uncle William?”

Stacy looked surprised as if she had forgotten about her own father, her fine straight nose, the proud characteristic of all the Hanna’s, wrinkled.

“Daddy’s just fine too. He never is anything else. You know he doesn’t talk much. He just listens and pays the bills. They say Cousin Lea gat cancer. But, nobody’s talking about it. You know that word does put the dread in everyone.”

“That’s sad.”

“That’s life. How’s your Mum.”

“Same as usual, running everything.”

“She still gat that little store?”

“Yes. We must be a family of merchants. She keeps that place open all night and day. I don’t know when she sleeps. She’s been frantic ever since Daddy died.

“It hits some people that way.”

“How long though? It’s been five years now.”

“Maybe they were really in love?”

Petra refuted that. “I didn’t see no evidence of that.” The thought made her feel uncomfortable somehow. She’d loved her daddy with a passion which never lessened as she grew up. His loss scarred her and turned her inward. Maybe she was more like her mother than she knew.

“Children don’t see everything.”

“But, I know”, thought Petra. “I know he didn’t love her because he loved me.”

As soon as she thought it she realized how childish the thought was. Her repentance was words.

“Maybe you’re right. Parents don’t show you all they feel for each other.”

“Darn right too, said Stacy,” No PDA in the home.”

She thought for a moment then added, “Or in public either.” My parents act like strangers all the time. I like it that way. I hate to see people slobbering all over each other, especially old people. There should be an age where you get over all that emotional stuff. Now us, we just getting there. You know, they say that you feel more when you are in your teens and early twenties than at any other time in your life. Do you think that’s true? I wonder if emotions just dissolve over the years, like they are mixed in the water of your life. I think that is what happens actually. I think they dissolve. Then as you age you become diluted until all you can do, all you want to do is sit and observe. It’s like a benefit of growing older and it’s a curse too. Thank God, I have years before that happens to me. But, then again maybe I’ll be the exception.

She thought again and added, “And you too of course, being as you’re my favourite cousin.”

Petra barely listened. She watched the men pulling up their lobster traps in the harbour. They were full of clawing crustaceans. Mounds of discarded conch shells glistened in the sunlight. The odour of newly scaled fish permeated the air. There was also mustiness as if the houses had layers of mildew or mould buried deep within their walls. The fruit trees were in bloom, guava, sapodilla, mango, juju, sugar apples and the tiny red, white and yellow flowers gave out a sweet scent to combat the stale air from the houses. Most of the fruits were still yet green, tiny rounds on the branches waiting for the nadir of the summer to ripen to abundance.

Barefooted children sauntered by carrying groceries, fishing poles. They played bat and ball with a piece of plywood and an old softball, darting into the street to run to the makeshift bases. Here and there, on porches, or standing along the side of the street were clusters of adolescents. Loitering for no good reason as her mother would say. They interrupted their conversations with loud raucous laughter. Petra wondered about them. Why were they so happy? Didn’t they have anything to do? She had never felt connected to people of her own age. She found them lazy and stupid especially on this island.

Chapter One

The Death

When they informed Petra Johnson of her daughter’s death, she began to scream. There were four of them standing before her in a semi-circle like black ravens of death. Then one of them knelt by her chair and took her hand. It was then she knew. The gesture was so oddly out of place. They didn’t touch much in this family. One would think that with six women in the house there would be a surfeit of hugging and kissing. But there wasn’t. Never. They scurried around each other, and smiled and laughed when they were happy. Often, they were very kind to each other. But, touching was reserved for special occasions – births, weddings, funerals, and death. This was the way she had been reared and she taught her daughters the same. Public displays of affection were an anathema. Private displays merely boring

They were hesitant too. That was unusual. She had rowdy girls, rambunctious girls. She had a drawer full of complaints from schools about her girls and their antics. In more than thirty years, Petra could not remember a silent moment in the house. Her girls screamed, shouted, yelled, tore each other’s clothes, laughed loudly, very loudly, and argued the same way. Who were these strangers? For a moment, a fleeting moment Petra was moved to compassion. That was unusual for her. Then, a second later, her brain deciphered the sounds which were issuing from their mouths, and she began to scream. It wasn’t an ordinary scream. No, this filled her head; enveloped her brain; clogged her ears so she heard only the reverberations in her skull. This scream blew through her nostrils and pulled her mouth into wild contortions. This scream attacked the end nerves on the layers of her skin, so they trembled as though charged by bolts of electricity. It contracted her vocal chords, so the utterances, which emerged from her throat, had an atonic stridency. Her limbs twisted and were flung into poses of their own volition, striking her daughters who were trying to comfort her.

Still, Petra screamed, until the spittle dried and flaked on the sides of her mouth, and her eyes began to roll back into her head. But, she did not lose consciousness. The refrain was too strong in her head.

“My daughter is dead.”

“My girl is dead.”

“My daughter is dead.”

They were trying to hold her down, her left-over daughters. Did she say that aloud? No. The only sound, which she could bring forth, was that horrible, that terrible, that all-encompassing scream. Now there was a faint clearing in her brain, which allowed her to filter in their words in those strange, consoling voices.

“Please Mum, please.”

“Did someone call the doctor?”

“Why didn’t you bring the doctor with you, you fool?”

“How was I going to know she would react like this?”

“Oh, God, oh God, shut up.”

Yes, that was the way they usually acted; one of them bringing up everlasting excuses with another one shouting her down.

“Don’t change. Don’t try to be comforting. Don’t die.”

Renewed memory chased logical thought away.

“Somebody hold her legs, for Christ’s sake.”

“Am I supposed to think of everything?”

“Please Mum. We’re here.”

“Please try to be quiet Mum.”

“Somebody get some water.”

“Get some brandy.”

“You know she doesn’t drink.”

“This might be a good time to start.”

Someone began to laugh hysterically. There was the sound of a slap and the wild laugh abruptly stilled.

“Stop arguing for God’s sake. My sister is dead.”

“She was my sister too.”

“I told her not to go.”

Petra tried to rise as they let go of her. She wanted to…She didn’t know what she wanted to do. She wanted to get away from these women, these left-over daughters. The uproar in her head hampered her movements. Something crashed to the floor.

“Grab her hands.”

“Hold her back.”

“Jesus, I don’t have the strength for this.”

She didn’t either. Strength was not a quality she possessed in abundance. She had always envied strong women. She envied her daughters.

“Where the hell is the doctor?”

“I can’t take much more of this.”

“Well, you’re going to have to. It’s just beginning.”

“Put this cold cloth on her.”

Drops of ice, cold water dribbled into her ears when they placed the too wet cloth upon her forehead. It produced a chain reaction of clamminess along her skin. Was dead flesh this cold?

“Here’s the brandy.”

“Gently, gently. You don’t want her to choke.”

“She took a sip. Good.”

The brandy tasted like acid. It burned her throat, her gullet. She could feel it blaze all the way down to her stomach. She clenched her teeth and swatted at the glass.

“Hold her tight. She’s moving again.”

“Christ, I can’t take that noise.”

“Get lost if you can’t help.”

“Stop her screaming, please.”

“Please stop that noise. It’s driving me crazy.”

There was a prick in her arm. Then as she felt her consciousness begin to slip away coherent thought came again.

“Where was Julius? Where was her husband? Where was the man who had brought this curse upon her and her daughters? Was he with her, that woman who never left? Was he with the witch again?”

Chapter Two

Petra

“In the olden days,” Petra told her daughters, “In the olden days before you were born I was young and beautiful” She paused for their expressions of surprise and smiled a secret smile, for the past was not that long ago to her. It was so unusual for her to reminisce about her past that for the moment the girls gave her their attention.

It was true. She was so beautiful that no one ever wondered if she had a brain, so bedazzled were they by the perfection of her face and form. The truth was there was not much more than a twinkle as her mother used to say, though Petra herself never thought about it. She did not inherit her mother’s aptitude for mercantile dealings nor her father’s quickness, inquisitiveness, and boundless curiosity. But from a long dead ancestor she did inherit a capacity for obsessive loving. Her love was finite, limited to one person at a time. And though she functioned normally and learned how to move in society, she always to the end of her days considered other people whom she did not love as intrusions and treated them as such. Her father’s death was her first heartbreak. She was destined to have others.

They sat together in what they called the family room on the big overstuffed sofas that Petra had purchased early in her marriage, transported from house to house, and refused to change. The brightly coloured upholstery was faded now with stains from spilled drink and food and one memorable white spot where someone had tried to wipe away vomit with bleach. There were tears in the seams of the cushions and the arms of the chairs were still filthy despite repeated rubbings and washings. Still it was their favourite place to gather as a family, the women that is, not Julius. He always said that the sight of all of them in that small room made him feel as if he had entered a harem and knives were hidden nearby to do unspeakable things to parts of his body. He hated it when they laughed at him.

Outside the temperature was ninety degrees. The air was still and muggy. The leaves on the two poinciana trees which over looked the house barely moved. The humidity would drench a body in sweat in ten minutes. But inside, in the cool air- conditioning, the air was sweet and balmy. In times before people sat on their porches and greeted each other, exchanged news, caught up on juicy scandals, but now they remained in their hermetically sealed houses living in familial isolation

“Yes, I was.” Petra said, “And men used to stop me all the time because they couldn’t believe their eyes. They would stare at me everywhere I went. I never acknowledged them of course, yet they still worshipped me”

Inevitably one of her mean children would mutter, “What happened?” and all of them would dissolve into uncontrollable laughter, clapping their hands and slapping their thighs in merriment.

“You happened,” Petra told them. “You all came and took my beauty away. I gave it away to you. That’s what you’re supposed to do. You give your all to your children.”

The girls nodded impressed by her eloquence. The spell lasted less than a minute.

“Not me,” Diane said, “I’m keeping it all for myself. Ain’t no little monster going to steal my beautiful.”

Petra only smiled again.

In the summer of her eighteenth year Petra took the Mackey Airlines small plane to Grand Bahama to visit her cousin. She landed at West End Airport and looked out over the settlement by the sea and sighed in relief. Only three other people were on the small plane with her, older foreigners who would be staying at the hotel. The flight was smooth and restful. She didn’t speak to the tourists on her flight, not from shyness, but because she always expected people she met to approach her and make her acquaintance first. The two men and the woman stared, that was as usual, but they did not initiate conversation.

After the cool darkness of the airplane the sunlight on the tarmac blinded her for a moment. Then she saw her cousin waving to her from the parked car. There were no formalities. The passengers climbed down the steps from the plane and went directly to their waiting rides. Her cousin Stacy stared at her for a long time. She was a short stubby girl with very large bulbous breasts and a huge rear end which seemed to be tilted up and so contrived to make all of her skirts and dresses longer in front than in back. Her face was small and round and when she smiled she seemed to lose her eyes in the creases of her wrinkles.

“Wow! I had forgotten just how you looked,” Stacy said.

Petra ducked her head in irritation. Family didn’t speak like this.

And yes, she was beautiful. She was petite but voluptuous and the high red colour of a ripe mango. In her youth, she was vibrant, almost overflowing with life as if it was waiting to explode out of her body and envelope the world. There was a bursting energy about her and a strange lightness as if when touched her pores would float into the air and pop in frissons of light. She had those rare blue-green eyes, received from a long gone Irish ancestor. They were large, widely spaced, oval, deeply set and luminous. Her face and body drew attention. Her eyes made them fall in love.

She had been bored in the capital. There were no more conquests in that dirty jungle for one who had been slaying boys and men since her early childhood. As they drove down the hot road in the five minutes it took to get to the house Stacy updated her on family news using the island vernacular which omitted words considered superfluous. Most people on the island could switch back and forth from their local dialect to practiced flawless English. Some people never bothered to switch at all.

“Marlee is having a baby. She don’t know who it for. That girl was always a slut. Uncle Benny had a heart attack and he in the hospital in Freeport. We’ll go visit him tomorrow. Mummy doing well. Her knees hurting her as usual. One all swell up, but at least she still walking. Jerry, Patrick, and Newton are just still little bits of trouble, but they’re too young to know better. Tyler now, you remember my big brother?”

Without waiting for an affirmative answer, she went on her hands moving on and off the wheel as she made quick emphatic gestures. “Well, let me tell you. If he don’t find himself on the straight and narrow, he gonna get into some big trouble one of these days and find himself working for Her Majesty at Fox Hill. And I hear that prison is not a clean place and you know how Tyler so fastidious.

“What about Uncle William?”

Stacy looked surprised as if she had forgotten about her own father, her fine straight nose, the proud characteristic of all the Hanna’s, wrinkled.

“Daddy’s just fine too. He never is anything else. You know he doesn’t talk much. He just listens and pays the bills. They say Cousin Lea gat cancer. But, nobody’s talking about it. You know that word does put the dread in everyone.”

“That’s sad.”

“That’s life. How’s your Mum.”

“Same as usual, running everything.”

“She still gat that little store?”

“Yes. We must be a family of merchants. She keeps that place open all night and day. I don’t know when she sleeps. She’s been frantic ever since Daddy died.

“It hits some people that way.”

“How long though? It’s been five years now.”

“Maybe they were really in love?”

Petra refuted that. “I didn’t see no evidence of that.” The thought made her feel uncomfortable somehow. She’d loved her daddy with a passion which never lessened as she grew up. His loss scarred her and turned her inward. Maybe she was more like her mother than she knew.

“Children don’t see everything.”

“But, I know”, thought Petra. “I know he didn’t love her because he loved me.”

As soon as she thought it she realized how childish the thought was. Her repentance was words.

“Maybe you’re right. Parents don’t show you all they feel for each other.”

“Darn right too, said Stacy,” No PDA in the home.”

She thought for a moment then added, “Or in public either.” My parents act like strangers all the time. I like it that way. I hate to see people slobbering all over each other, especially old people. There should be an age where you get over all that emotional stuff. Now us, we just getting there. You know, they say that you feel more when you are in your teens and early twenties than at any other time in your life. Do you think that’s true? I wonder if emotions just dissolve over the years, like they are mixed in the water of your life. I think that is what happens actually. I think they dissolve. Then as you age you become diluted until all you can do, all you want to do is sit and observe. It’s like a benefit of growing older and it’s a curse too. Thank God, I have years before that happens to me. But, then again maybe I’ll be the exception.

She thought again and added, “And you too of course, being as you’re my favourite cousin.”

Petra barely listened. She watched the men pulling up their lobster traps in the harbour. They were full of clawing crustaceans. Mounds of discarded conch shells glistened in the sunlight. The odour of newly scaled fish permeated the air. There was also mustiness as if the houses had layers of mildew or mould buried deep within their walls. The fruit trees were in bloom, guava, sapodilla, mango, juju, sugar apples and the tiny red, white and yellow flowers gave out a sweet scent to combat the stale air from the houses. Most of the fruits were still yet green, tiny rounds on the branches waiting for the nadir of the summer to ripen to abundance.

Barefooted children sauntered by carrying groceries, fishing poles. They played bat and ball with a piece of plywood and an old softball, darting into the street to run to the makeshift bases. Here and there, on porches, or standing along the side of the street were clusters of adolescents. Loitering for no good reason as her mother would say. They interrupted their conversations with loud raucous laughter. Petra wondered about them. Why were they so happy? Didn’t they have anything to do? She had never felt connected to people of her own age. She found them lazy and stupid especially on this island.

Chapter One

The Death

When they informed Petra Johnson of her daughter’s death, she began to scream. There were four of them standing before her in a semi-circle like black ravens of death. Then one of them knelt by her chair and took her hand. It was then she knew. The gesture was so oddly out of place. They didn’t touch much in this family. One would think that with six women in the house there would be a surfeit of hugging and kissing. But there wasn’t. Never. They scurried around each other, and smiled and laughed when they were happy. Often, they were very kind to each other. But, touching was reserved for special occasions – births, weddings, funerals, and death. This was the way she had been reared and she taught her daughters the same. Public displays of affection were an anathema. Private displays merely boring

They were hesitant too. That was unusual. She had rowdy girls, rambunctious girls. She had a drawer full of complaints from schools about her girls and their antics. In more than thirty years, Petra could not remember a silent moment in the house. Her girls screamed, shouted, yelled, tore each other’s clothes, laughed loudly, very loudly, and argued the same way. Who were these strangers? For a moment, a fleeting moment Petra was moved to compassion. That was unusual for her. Then, a second later, her brain deciphered the sounds which were issuing from their mouths, and she began to scream. It wasn’t an ordinary scream. No, this filled her head; enveloped her brain; clogged her ears so she heard only the reverberations in her skull. This scream blew through her nostrils and pulled her mouth into wild contortions. This scream attacked the end nerves on the layers of her skin, so they trembled as though charged by bolts of electricity. It contracted her vocal chords, so the utterances, which emerged from her throat, had an atonic stridency. Her limbs twisted and were flung into poses of their own volition, striking her daughters who were trying to comfort her.

Still, Petra screamed, until the spittle dried and flaked on the sides of her mouth, and her eyes began to roll back into her head. But, she did not lose consciousness. The refrain was too strong in her head.

“My daughter is dead.”

“My girl is dead.”

“My daughter is dead.”

They were trying to hold her down, her left-over daughters. Did she say that aloud? No. The only sound, which she could bring forth, was that horrible, that terrible, that all-encompassing scream. Now there was a faint clearing in her brain, which allowed her to filter in their words in those strange, consoling voices.

“Please Mum, please.”

“Did someone call the doctor?”

“Why didn’t you bring the doctor with you, you fool?”

“How was I going to know she would react like this?”

“Oh, God, oh God, shut up.”

Yes, that was the way they usually acted; one of them bringing up everlasting excuses with another one shouting her down.

“Don’t change. Don’t try to be comforting. Don’t die.”

Renewed memory chased logical thought away.

“Somebody hold her legs, for Christ’s sake.”

“Am I supposed to think of everything?”

“Please Mum. We’re here.”

“Please try to be quiet Mum.”

“Somebody get some water.”

“Get some brandy.”

“You know she doesn’t drink.”

“This might be a good time to start.”

Someone began to laugh hysterically. There was the sound of a slap and the wild laugh abruptly stilled.

“Stop arguing for God’s sake. My sister is dead.”

“She was my sister too.”

“I told her not to go.”

Petra tried to rise as they let go of her. She wanted to…She didn’t know what she wanted to do. She wanted to get away from these women, these left-over daughters. The uproar in her head hampered her movements. Something crashed to the floor.

“Grab her hands.”

“Hold her back.”

“Jesus, I don’t have the strength for this.”

She didn’t either. Strength was not a quality she possessed in abundance. She had always envied strong women. She envied her daughters.

“Where the hell is the doctor?”

“I can’t take much more of this.”

“Well, you’re going to have to. It’s just beginning.”

“Put this cold cloth on her.”

Drops of ice, cold water dribbled into her ears when they placed the too wet cloth upon her forehead. It produced a chain reaction of clamminess along her skin. Was dead flesh this cold?

“Here’s the brandy.”

“Gently, gently. You don’t want her to choke.”

“She took a sip. Good.”

The brandy tasted like acid. It burned her throat, her gullet. She could feel it blaze all the way down to her stomach. She clenched her teeth and swatted at the glass.

“Hold her tight. She’s moving again.”

“Christ, I can’t take that noise.”

“Get lost if you can’t help.”

“Stop her screaming, please.”

“Please stop that noise. It’s driving me crazy.”

There was a prick in her arm. Then as she felt her consciousness begin to slip away coherent thought came again.

“Where was Julius? Where was her husband? Where was the man who had brought this curse upon her and her daughters? Was he with her, that woman who never left? Was he with the witch again?”

Chapter Two

Petra

“In the olden days,” Petra told her daughters, “In the olden days before you were born I was young and beautiful” She paused for their expressions of surprise and smiled a secret smile, for the past was not that long ago to her. It was so unusual for her to reminisce about her past that for the moment the girls gave her their attention.

It was true. She was so beautiful that no one ever wondered if she had a brain, so bedazzled were they by the perfection of her face and form. The truth was there was not much more than a twinkle as her mother used to say, though Petra herself never thought about it. She did not inherit her mother’s aptitude for mercantile dealings nor her father’s quickness, inquisitiveness, and boundless curiosity. But from a long dead ancestor she did inherit a capacity for obsessive loving. Her love was finite, limited to one person at a time. And though she functioned normally and learned how to move in society, she always to the end of her days considered other people whom she did not love as intrusions and treated them as such. Her father’s death was her first heartbreak. She was destined to have others.

They sat together in what they called the family room on the big overstuffed sofas that Petra had purchased early in her marriage, transported from house to house, and refused to change. The brightly coloured upholstery was faded now with stains from spilled drink and food and one memorable white spot where someone had tried to wipe away vomit with bleach. There were tears in the seams of the cushions and the arms of the chairs were still filthy despite repeated rubbings and washings. Still it was their favourite place to gather as a family, the women that is, not Julius. He always said that the sight of all of them in that small room made him feel as if he had entered a harem and knives were hidden nearby to do unspeakable things to parts of his body. He hated it when they laughed at him.

Outside the temperature was ninety degrees. The air was still and muggy. The leaves on the two poinciana trees which over looked the house barely moved. The humidity would drench a body in sweat in ten minutes. But inside, in the cool air- conditioning, the air was sweet and balmy. In times before people sat on their porches and greeted each other, exchanged news, caught up on juicy scandals, but now they remained in their hermetically sealed houses living in familial isolation

“Yes, I was.” Petra said, “And men used to stop me all the time because they couldn’t believe their eyes. They would stare at me everywhere I went. I never acknowledged them of course, yet they still worshipped me”

Inevitably one of her mean children would mutter, “What happened?” and all of them would dissolve into uncontrollable laughter, clapping their hands and slapping their thighs in merriment.

“You happened,” Petra told them. “You all came and took my beauty away. I gave it away to you. That’s what you’re supposed to do. You give your all to your children.”

The girls nodded impressed by her eloquence. The spell lasted less than a minute.

“Not me,” Diane said, “I’m keeping it all for myself. Ain’t no little monster going to steal my beautiful.”

Petra only smiled again.

In the summer of her eighteenth year Petra took the Mackey Airlines small plane to Grand Bahama to visit her cousin. She landed at West End Airport and looked out over the settlement by the sea and sighed in relief. Only three other people were on the small plane with her, older foreigners who would be staying at the hotel. The flight was smooth and restful. She didn’t speak to the tourists on her flight, not from shyness, but because she always expected people she met to approach her and make her acquaintance first. The two men and the woman stared, that was as usual, but they did not initiate conversation.

After the cool darkness of the airplane the sunlight on the tarmac blinded her for a moment. Then she saw her cousin waving to her from the parked car. There were no formalities. The passengers climbed down the steps from the plane and went directly to their waiting rides. Her cousin Stacy stared at her for a long time. She was a short stubby girl with very large bulbous breasts and a huge rear end which seemed to be tilted up and so contrived to make all of her skirts and dresses longer in front than in back. Her face was small and round and when she smiled she seemed to lose her eyes in the creases of her wrinkles.

“Wow! I had forgotten just how you looked,” Stacy said.

Petra ducked her head in irritation. Family didn’t speak like this.

And yes, she was beautiful. She was petite but voluptuous and the high red colour of a ripe mango. In her youth, she was vibrant, almost overflowing with life as if it was waiting to explode out of her body and envelope the world. There was a bursting energy about her and a strange lightness as if when touched her pores would float into the air and pop in frissons of light. She had those rare blue-green eyes, received from a long gone Irish ancestor. They were large, widely spaced, oval, deeply set and luminous. Her face and body drew attention. Her eyes made them fall in love.

She had been bored in the capital. There were no more conquests in that dirty jungle for one who had been slaying boys and men since her early childhood. As they drove down the hot road in the five minutes it took to get to the house Stacy updated her on family news using the island vernacular which omitted words considered superfluous. Most people on the island could switch back and forth from their local dialect to practiced flawless English. Some people never bothered to switch at all.

“Marlee is having a baby. She don’t know who it for. That girl was always a slut. Uncle Benny had a heart attack and he in the hospital in Freeport. We’ll go visit him tomorrow. Mummy doing well. Her knees hurting her as usual. One all swell up, but at least she still walking. Jerry, Patrick, and Newton are just still little bits of trouble, but they’re too young to know better. Tyler now, you remember my big brother?”

Without waiting for an affirmative answer, she went on her hands moving on and off the wheel as she made quick emphatic gestures. “Well, let me tell you. If he don’t find himself on the straight and narrow, he gonna get into some big trouble one of these days and find himself working for Her Majesty at Fox Hill. And I hear that prison is not a clean place and you know how Tyler so fastidious.

“What about Uncle William?”

Stacy looked surprised as if she had forgotten about her own father, her fine straight nose, the proud characteristic of all the Hanna’s, wrinkled.

“Daddy’s just fine too. He never is anything else. You know he doesn’t talk much. He just listens and pays the bills. They say Cousin Lea gat cancer. But, nobody’s talking about it. You know that word does put the dread in everyone.”

“That’s sad.”

“That’s life. How’s your Mum.”

“Same as usual, running everything.”

“She still gat that little store?”

“Yes. We must be a family of merchants. She keeps that place open all night and day. I don’t know when she sleeps. She’s been frantic ever since Daddy died.

“It hits some people that way.”

“How long though? It’s been five years now.”

“Maybe they were really in love?”

Petra refuted that. “I didn’t see no evidence of that.” The thought made her feel uncomfortable somehow. She’d loved her daddy with a passion which never lessened as she grew up. His loss scarred her and turned her inward. Maybe she was more like her mother than she knew.

“Children don’t see everything.”

“But, I know”, thought Petra. “I know he didn’t love her because he loved me.”

As soon as she thought it she realized how childish the thought was. Her repentance was words.

“Maybe you’re right. Parents don’t show you all they feel for each other.”

“Darn right too, said Stacy,” No PDA in the home.”

She thought for a moment then added, “Or in public either.” My parents act like strangers all the time. I like it that way. I hate to see people slobbering all over each other, especially old people. There should be an age where you get over all that emotional stuff. Now us, we just getting there. You know, they say that you feel more when you are in your teens and early twenties than at any other time in your life. Do you think that’s true? I wonder if emotions just dissolve over the years, like they are mixed in the water of your life. I think that is what happens actually. I think they dissolve. Then as you age you become diluted until all you can do, all you want to do is sit and observe. It’s like a benefit of growing older and it’s a curse too. Thank God, I have years before that happens to me. But, then again maybe I’ll be the exception.

She thought again and added, “And you too of course, being as you’re my favourite cousin.”

Petra barely listened. She watched the men pulling up their lobster traps in the harbour. They were full of clawing crustaceans. Mounds of discarded conch shells glistened in the sunlight. The odour of newly scaled fish permeated the air. There was also mustiness as if the houses had layers of mildew or mould buried deep within their walls. The fruit trees were in bloom, guava, sapodilla, mango, juju, sugar apples and the tiny red, white and yellow flowers gave out a sweet scent to combat the stale air from the houses. Most of the fruits were still yet green, tiny rounds on the branches waiting for the nadir of the summer to ripen to abundance.

Barefooted children sauntered by carrying groceries, fishing poles. They played bat and ball with a piece of plywood and an old softball, darting into the street to run to the makeshift bases. Here and there, on porches, or standing along the side of the street were clusters of adolescents. Loitering for no good reason as her mother would say. They interrupted their conversations with loud raucous laughter. Petra wondered about them. Why were they so happy? Didn’t they have anything to do? She had never felt connected to people of her own age. She found them lazy and stupid especially on this island.

Chapter One

The Death

When they informed Petra Johnson of her daughter’s death, she began to scream. There were four of them standing before her in a semi-circle like black ravens of death. Then one of them knelt by her chair and took her hand. It was then she knew. The gesture was so oddly out of place. They didn’t touch much in this family. One would think that with six women in the house there would be a surfeit of hugging and kissing. But there wasn’t. Never. They scurried around each other, and smiled and laughed when they were happy. Often, they were very kind to each other. But, touching was reserved for special occasions – births, weddings, funerals, and death. This was the way she had been reared and she taught her daughters the same. Public displays of affection were an anathema. Private displays merely boring

They were hesitant too. That was unusual. She had rowdy girls, rambunctious girls. She had a drawer full of complaints from schools about her girls and their antics. In more than thirty years, Petra could not remember a silent moment in the house. Her girls screamed, shouted, yelled, tore each other’s clothes, laughed loudly, very loudly, and argued the same way. Who were these strangers? For a moment, a fleeting moment Petra was moved to compassion. That was unusual for her. Then, a second later, her brain deciphered the sounds which were issuing from their mouths, and she began to scream. It wasn’t an ordinary scream. No, this filled her head; enveloped her brain; clogged her ears so she heard only the reverberations in her skull. This scream blew through her nostrils and pulled her mouth into wild contortions. This scream attacked the end nerves on the layers of her skin, so they trembled as though charged by bolts of electricity. It contracted her vocal chords, so the utterances, which emerged from her throat, had an atonic stridency. Her limbs twisted and were flung into poses of their own volition, striking her daughters who were trying to comfort her.

Still, Petra screamed, until the spittle dried and flaked on the sides of her mouth, and her eyes began to roll back into her head. But, she did not lose consciousness. The refrain was too strong in her head.

“My daughter is dead.”

“My girl is dead.”

“My daughter is dead.”

They were trying to hold her down, her left-over daughters. Did she say that aloud? No. The only sound, which she could bring forth, was that horrible, that terrible, that all-encompassing scream. Now there was a faint clearing in her brain, which allowed her to filter in their words in those strange, consoling voices.

“Please Mum, please.”

“Did someone call the doctor?”

“Why didn’t you bring the doctor with you, you fool?”

“How was I going to know she would react like this?”

“Oh, God, oh God, shut up.”

Yes, that was the way they usually acted; one of them bringing up everlasting excuses with another one shouting her down.

“Don’t change. Don’t try to be comforting. Don’t die.”

Renewed memory chased logical thought away.

“Somebody hold her legs, for Christ’s sake.”

“Am I supposed to think of everything?”

“Please Mum. We’re here.”

“Please try to be quiet Mum.”

“Somebody get some water.”

“Get some brandy.”

“You know she doesn’t drink.”

“This might be a good time to start.”

Someone began to laugh hysterically. There was the sound of a slap and the wild laugh abruptly stilled.

“Stop arguing for God’s sake. My sister is dead.”

“She was my sister too.”

“I told her not to go.”

Petra tried to rise as they let go of her. She wanted to…She didn’t know what she wanted to do. She wanted to get away from these women, these left-over daughters. The uproar in her head hampered her movements. Something crashed to the floor.

“Grab her hands.”

“Hold her back.”

“Jesus, I don’t have the strength for this.”

She didn’t either. Strength was not a quality she possessed in abundance. She had always envied strong women. She envied her daughters.

“Where the hell is the doctor?”

“I can’t take much more of this.”

“Well, you’re going to have to. It’s just beginning.”

“Put this cold cloth on her.”

Drops of ice, cold water dribbled into her ears when they placed the too wet cloth upon her forehead. It produced a chain reaction of clamminess along her skin. Was dead flesh this cold?

“Here’s the brandy.”

“Gently, gently. You don’t want her to choke.”

“She took a sip. Good.”

The brandy tasted like acid. It burned her throat, her gullet. She could feel it blaze all the way down to her stomach. She clenched her teeth and swatted at the glass.

“Hold her tight. She’s moving again.”

“Christ, I can’t take that noise.”

“Get lost if you can’t help.”

“Stop her screaming, please.”

“Please stop that noise. It’s driving me crazy.”

There was a prick in her arm. Then as she felt her consciousness begin to slip away coherent thought came again.

“Where was Julius? Where was her husband? Where was the man who had brought this curse upon her and her daughters? Was he with her, that woman who never left? Was he with the witch again?”

Chapter Two

Petra

“In the olden days,” Petra told her daughters, “In the olden days before you were born I was young and beautiful” She paused for their expressions of surprise and smiled a secret smile, for the past was not that long ago to her. It was so unusual for her to reminisce about her past that for the moment the girls gave her their attention.

It was true. She was so beautiful that no one ever wondered if she had a brain, so bedazzled were they by the perfection of her face and form. The truth was there was not much more than a twinkle as her mother used to say, though Petra herself never thought about it. She did not inherit her mother’s aptitude for mercantile dealings nor her father’s quickness, inquisitiveness, and boundless curiosity. But from a long dead ancestor she did inherit a capacity for obsessive loving. Her love was finite, limited to one person at a time. And though she functioned normally and learned how to move in society, she always to the end of her days considered other people whom she did not love as intrusions and treated them as such. Her father’s death was her first heartbreak. She was destined to have others.

They sat together in what they called the family room on the big overstuffed sofas that Petra had purchased early in her marriage, transported from house to house, and refused to change. The brightly coloured upholstery was faded now with stains from spilled drink and food and one memorable white spot where someone had tried to wipe away vomit with bleach. There were tears in the seams of the cushions and the arms of the chairs were still filthy despite repeated rubbings and washings. Still it was their favourite place to gather as a family, the women that is, not Julius. He always said that the sight of all of them in that small room made him feel as if he had entered a harem and knives were hidden nearby to do unspeakable things to parts of his body. He hated it when they laughed at him.

Outside the temperature was ninety degrees. The air was still and muggy. The leaves on the two poinciana trees which over looked the house barely moved. The humidity would drench a body in sweat in ten minutes. But inside, in the cool air- conditioning, the air was sweet and balmy. In times before people sat on their porches and greeted each other, exchanged news, caught up on juicy scandals, but now they remained in their hermetically sealed houses living in familial isolation

“Yes, I was.” Petra said, “And men used to stop me all the time because they couldn’t believe their eyes. They would stare at me everywhere I went. I never acknowledged them of course, yet they still worshipped me”

Inevitably one of her mean children would mutter, “What happened?” and all of them would dissolve into uncontrollable laughter, clapping their hands and slapping their thighs in merriment.

“You happened,” Petra told them. “You all came and took my beauty away. I gave it away to you. That’s what you’re supposed to do. You give your all to your children.”

The girls nodded impressed by her eloquence. The spell lasted less than a minute.

“Not me,” Diane said, “I’m keeping it all for myself. Ain’t no little monster going to steal my beautiful.”

Petra only smiled again.

In the summer of her eighteenth year Petra took the Mackey Airlines small plane to Grand Bahama to visit her cousin. She landed at West End Airport and looked out over the settlement by the sea and sighed in relief. Only three other people were on the small plane with her, older foreigners who would be staying at the hotel. The flight was smooth and restful. She didn’t speak to the tourists on her flight, not from shyness, but because she always expected people she met to approach her and make her acquaintance first. The two men and the woman stared, that was as usual, but they did not initiate conversation.

After the cool darkness of the airplane the sunlight on the tarmac blinded her for a moment. Then she saw her cousin waving to her from the parked car. There were no formalities. The passengers climbed down the steps from the plane and went directly to their waiting rides. Her cousin Stacy stared at her for a long time. She was a short stubby girl with very large bulbous breasts and a huge rear end which seemed to be tilted up and so contrived to make all of her skirts and dresses longer in front than in back. Her face was small and round and when she smiled she seemed to lose her eyes in the creases of her wrinkles.

“Wow! I had forgotten just how you looked,” Stacy said.

Petra ducked her head in irritation. Family didn’t speak like this.

And yes, she was beautiful. She was petite but voluptuous and the high red colour of a ripe mango. In her youth, she was vibrant, almost overflowing with life as if it was waiting to explode out of her body and envelope the world. There was a bursting energy about her and a strange lightness as if when touched her pores would float into the air and pop in frissons of light. She had those rare blue-green eyes, received from a long gone Irish ancestor. They were large, widely spaced, oval, deeply set and luminous. Her face and body drew attention. Her eyes made them fall in love.

She had been bored in the capital. There were no more conquests in that dirty jungle for one who had been slaying boys and men since her early childhood. As they drove down the hot road in the five minutes it took to get to the house Stacy updated her on family news using the island vernacular which omitted words considered superfluous. Most people on the island could switch back and forth from their local dialect to practiced flawless English. Some people never bothered to switch at all.

“Marlee is having a baby. She don’t know who it for. That girl was always a slut. Uncle Benny had a heart attack and he in the hospital in Freeport. We’ll go visit him tomorrow. Mummy doing well. Her knees hurting her as usual. One all swell up, but at least she still walking. Jerry, Patrick, and Newton are just still little bits of trouble, but they’re too young to know better. Tyler now, you remember my big brother?”

Without waiting for an affirmative answer, she went on her hands moving on and off the wheel as she made quick emphatic gestures. “Well, let me tell you. If he don’t find himself on the straight and narrow, he gonna get into some big trouble one of these days and find himself working for Her Majesty at Fox Hill. And I hear that prison is not a clean place and you know how Tyler so fastidious.

“What about Uncle William?”

Stacy looked surprised as if she had forgotten about her own father, her fine straight nose, the proud characteristic of all the Hanna’s, wrinkled.

“Daddy’s just fine too. He never is anything else. You know he doesn’t talk much. He just listens and pays the bills. They say Cousin Lea gat cancer. But, nobody’s talking about it. You know that word does put the dread in everyone.”

“That’s sad.”

“That’s life. How’s your Mum.”

“Same as usual, running everything.”

“She still gat that little store?”

“Yes. We must be a family of merchants. She keeps that place open all night and day. I don’t know when she sleeps. She’s been frantic ever since Daddy died.

“It hits some people that way.”

“How long though? It’s been five years now.”

“Maybe they were really in love?”

Petra refuted that. “I didn’t see no evidence of that.” The thought made her feel uncomfortable somehow. She’d loved her daddy with a passion which never lessened as she grew up. His loss scarred her and turned her inward. Maybe she was more like her mother than she knew.

“Children don’t see everything.”

“But, I know”, thought Petra. “I know he didn’t love her because he loved me.”

As soon as she thought it she realized how childish the thought was. Her repentance was words.

“Maybe you’re right. Parents don’t show you all they feel for each other.”

“Darn right too, said Stacy,” No PDA in the home.”

She thought for a moment then added, “Or in public either.” My parents act like strangers all the time. I like it that way. I hate to see people slobbering all over each other, especially old people. There should be an age where you get over all that emotional stuff. Now us, we just getting there. You know, they say that you feel more when you are in your teens and early twenties than at any other time in your life. Do you think that’s true? I wonder if emotions just dissolve over the years, like they are mixed in the water of your life. I think that is what happens actually. I think they dissolve. Then as you age you become diluted until all you can do, all you want to do is sit and observe. It’s like a benefit of growing older and it’s a curse too. Thank God, I have years before that happens to me. But, then again maybe I’ll be the exception.

She thought again and added, “And you too of course, being as you’re my favourite cousin.”

Petra barely listened. She watched the men pulling up their lobster traps in the harbour. They were full of clawing crustaceans. Mounds of discarded conch shells glistened in the sunlight. The odour of newly scaled fish permeated the air. There was also mustiness as if the houses had layers of mildew or mould buried deep within their walls. The fruit trees were in bloom, guava, sapodilla, mango, juju, sugar apples and the tiny red, white and yellow flowers gave out a sweet scent to combat the stale air from the houses. Most of the fruits were still yet green, tiny rounds on the branches waiting for the nadir of the summer to ripen to abundance.

Barefooted children sauntered by carrying groceries, fishing poles. They played bat and ball with a piece of plywood and an old softball, darting into the street to run to the makeshift bases. Here and there, on porches, or standing along the side of the street were clusters of adolescents. Loitering for no good reason as her mother would say. They interrupted their conversations with loud raucous laughter. Petra wondered about them. Why were they so happy? Didn’t they have anything to do? She had never felt connected to people of her own age. She found them lazy and stupid especially on this island.