Children of Paradise: A Novel Read online

  The adults approve and return in their various work groups to their various allocated chores: to feeding the pigs on the farm, to cutting up trees at the sawmill to sell as timber for construction, to collecting eggs from the chicken coops, to milking in the cow sheds, to washing clothes in the laundry room, to mending and sewing in the tailor shop with its bolts of cloth on giant rollers, to the infirmary with its sick and mostly elderly patients, to the mechanic and carpentry shops, the bakery, the large kitchen with its vats for pots and battalions of potato peelers and legions of sobbing onion slicers, and washers of dishes clattering pots and pans in a carnival of stacking and soaping and rinsing, and somewhere a lone voice launches a couplet and gathers a chorus of voices all lifted in praise of the Lord as routine continues to be pressed on a daily basis into the service of the commune’s heraldic purpose.

  Supply trucks arrive leaving deep mud tracks, their big wheels caked in mud and the whole vehicle sprayed with it. Men unload bags of rice, sacks of flour, sugar, salt, barrels of cooking oil, vinegar, bottles of wine and spirits (kept out of sight and shuffled away directly to the preacher’s whitewashed house) and medical supplies in white plastic bags and sealed containers, from syringes to mobile coolers with ampoules of penicillin, analgesics, narcotics, and all of it walked directly to the pharmacy situated beside the infirmary and all of it kept under lock and key and properly refrigerated with an emergency generator ready to chug into action should the main compound generator choke to a standstill.

  The children chant in the schoolrooms, divided by screens easily wheeled around to accommodate additions or subtractions of children, and the chants vary from multiplication tables to Bible psalms to swearing allegiance to Father and the church of eternal brotherhood, sisterhood, parenthood, to singing hymns with verses interspersed by one-liners shouted by a teacher or rotated between the children so that the songs last for hours of head-spinning enchantment. A class moves outside and sits under a tree. Adam hears these alphabets and numerals, and he absorbs the stories of sinners redeemed and the lost found by the Holy Scripture, and he somersaults and claps his hands as the children clap theirs to a hymn. As they recite a psalm, so Adam listens with parted lips. This is the glory of heaven made on earth, of watching the day begin with putting back into place the trees and the birds hurled from limbs into flight and the animals erased by the dark, now redrawn with morning light and released from the traps of sleep: set free to buck, scamper, and roam.

  Daylight brings peddlers to the compound in defiance of the hand-painted signs warning that Trespassers May Be Shot and listing pork knockers and speculators and encyclopedia sellers as examples of subjects who qualify for target practice and listing indigenous tribes such as the Akawaio, Mawakwa, Warrau, and the Wapishana as the only exceptions because of their wood carvings that decorate the private dwelling of the preacher, and their medicines kept in leather pouches and gourds carved from calabash, and refrigerated in the commune pharmacy for emergencies in case supplies of the Western remedies run out. The indigenous natural therapies bear neat labels handwritten in ink bled from berries, and the remedies—some of which smell as if taken from fish guts or pig feces, others like peppermint or rosewater—stave off fevers, cure snakebites, spider bites, water ague, sun poisoning, berry and mushroom poisoning, foot and stomach worms, crotch-eating mites, and nightmares. The preacher breaks his own rules and, from time to time, entertains jewelers from the capital whose handmade bangles are famous as far away as Australia and whose amulets are worn by babies from Berbice to Bangladesh to protect against night raids by witches out to rob babies of their spirits. The preacher believes in the enduring value of gold and diamonds, but he instructs his guards to aim their rifles at the speculators because they offer the world nothing but bad ideas and appear at the gates of the compound only to contaminate this great community devoted to redeeming a lost humanity.

  The preacher allows encyclopedias into the grounds to update the school library or to add to his small collection, but only those handpicked by him. Books on the history of capitalism and communism and the making of the industrial revolution and the rise, rise, rise of Cuba and the demise of kings and queens and stories about the elevation of the downtrodden status throughout history of the poor and powerless and the heroes who fight for them from John the Baptist to Robin Hood to Che Guevara. Many of these books arrive in multiple volumes, hardbound with gold leaf painted into the covers. The commune library remains as well stocked as the food storeroom, for without feeding the mind and spirit, the preacher reminds them at nightly sermons, without exercising the mind with a strident and stringent vocabulary and facts about history and a Euclidean numeracy, the body can never feel satisfied, no matter how lavish the dining tables or how heaped the enamel plates. For the cup that runneth over is not physical but spiritual.

  The long loud blast of the horn of the captain’s boat with its weekly delivery climbs up from the river, floats over the trees to the commune, and lands in the ears of Trina and Joyce. Trina lowers her flute from her parted lips and looks in the direction of the preacher’s house, where her mother helps to keep the commune’s accounts straight, not quite the commune’s bookkeeper but one of the people the preacher credits with keeping his books in order. Trina thinks of the boat with her mother, their first time, before Eric and Kevin accompanied them and the captain introduced her to his tall tales about the trickster spider. Trina refits her lips to the flute and repositions her fingers and breathes, dreaming of Anansi.

  Joyce stops her work and raises her pencil to her lips and stares into the distance, and a tune springs to mind: Captain, Captain, put me ashore.

  Her captain did just that. Put her ashore. Left her there and continued on his merry way. Left her with what? An appreciation of life on the water and the days measured by tides; sighting swaths of land from the river, a view of the land that will make it never the same once she sets foot on the muddy banks again.

  —Why did you call this boat Coffee? Why not Tea or Hot Chocolate?

  —Coffee was an eighteenth-century enslaved African who ran away from his plantation and led a slave rebellion. He lived in the interior and evaded capture.

  —Sounds like my kind of guy. I mean I like his trailblazing spirit.

  —I get you.

  Joyce asks him about his family and he says he has no one and she refuses, point-blank, to believe him. This annoys him, albeit teasingly.

  —You calling me a liar?

  —Yes. A man of your, how shall I put it, obvious qualities must have someone to love and who loves in return.

  His anger dissipates. He is a liar to her because he is someone whom somebody cannot help loving. He says he likes the way she insults him, and can she elaborate a little?

  —Well, you have a sound trade, and you have all of your teeth and your fingers and, I bet, even your toes.

  He laughs and coughs and gives the wheel to his first mate so that he can find a drink to stop himself from choking.

  —All my teeth! You will be entering me for a steeplechase next.

  She says that is not what she means. Other women might use the word “handsome” or “good-looking,” but that would give him the wrong idea about her estimation of his attributes. Trina looks up from her sketchbook at this juncture in the conversation. She has not heard her mother talk like this to a man. Joyce sounds playful, with a higher-pitched, lighter voice, none of the usual grave warnings or thinking geared to praising the preacher and his mission. The captain says there is someone but that things have cooled between the two of them. Joyce says she does not mean to pry, but by “cool,” does he mean over or simply in cold storage and liable to be brought into the light and rejuvenated at any moment? The captain says cool as in stone-cold dead, cordial but not intimate, no longer romantic, in fact, a frosty cordiality and therefore no light and no such sustenance at all. Joyce says a lot must have been asked of him for the whole thing to be shut away and starved of light. Trina looks puzzled by all t
he photosynthesis talk and returns her attention to her sketchbook. The captain says that this person wanted him to settle down with her in the city and give up his boat. She wanted him to make more money than a river captain.

  —How could I give up all of this?

  He spreads his arms at the river and the surrounding country and the light bathing them all.

  —Do you ever regret it?

  She hates herself for saying this the moment it jumps out of her mouth. She looks at her feet, rubs her hands down the front of her dress as if to smooth out the pleats, and shakes her head. She wonders how her talk about God and the commune and her leader has turned to this intimate conversation with a man whom she’s known only a day.

  —Never. Not for one moment. Especially at times like this, with someone new and surprising on my boat.

  She stands next to him as he steers. Trina sits nearby and draws two adult stick figures standing on either side of a child and holding the twigs of that child’s arms.

  —You’re not like a white woman, you behave different.

  She makes a surprised O of her mouth and covers her widened eyes with her hands.

  —I really want to know what a white woman is supposed to be like and just how many of them you’ve met to help you form this expert opinion about me.

  He confesses that he met few of them on his boat but encountered some in the city, and they were all bossy know-it-alls and seemed cross-eyed when they talked to him, as if looking down their noses at something unsightly hanging from the end of their vision.

  —What makes you think I’m white?

  —Your skin is a dead giveaway, though your jet-black hair is something of a puzzle. Do you have something mixed with your European blood?

  She says she has yet to meet someone who is not tainted with some mixture or other. Her father came from Spain to Florida on business and met her mother, a Miccosukee, in an illegal casino at West Palm Beach. Her mother thought he was an awful gambler, but he stayed at her table just to be dealt cards from her hand with her smile.

  —He lost a lot of money that night, but she slipped him her phone number by dealing seven cards to him in a sequence that she said was an awful-looking hand but a number of some import to him if he cared to remember it. And the rest was history, as they say.

  The captain smiles at this beautiful answer.

  —That explains your hair and your ways.

  —And what exactly do you mean by that, Captain?

  —Well, you seem more open to me as a human being. You don’t see me as black first and human second.

  He wonders if she feels an affinity to nature. He says everyone knows that the tribes in this forest have lived here for thousands of years without interfering with the place, while the Europeans with their enslaved Africans and indentured Indians from South Asia ruined the place in just four hundred years. Right on cue, a barge floats by with a red flag warning them that logs would follow, and they pull to the side as a half mile of felled trees floats past them with hired indigenous tribesmen running acrobatically across the logs to keep them together and hopping back into small motorboats that zip up and down alongside the flotilla of felled trees.

  The captain says he has one more thing to ask her, and ordinarily he would wait a little longer, but the dock for the commune is coming up around the next bend in the river.

  —Trina’s father?

  This makes Joyce laugh. She calls Trina and asks if she would kindly tell the captain about her father. Trina set down her sketchpad.

  —Oh, show me that.

  Trina holds up the double page for the captain, who sees an S for their river filled with logs. Instead of trees, lines of bulldozers are parked along the river’s banks, and instead of flocks in the air, just airplanes.

  —You have a gift, Trina.

  Trina says her mother met her father at college.

  —He was a football star, and he abandoned us for a life of women and drink.

  —Trina!

  —But Mom, that’s what you say about him.

  —I know, but you’re not allowed to repeat it.

  They are smiling, and the captain takes off his hat and raises his eyebrows at the first mate who seems equally amused and mildly shocked. Trina sees none of this and blithely carries on.

  —He looked like you, but you seem a lot nicer.

  This surprises the captain.

  —Like me?

  —Yes, Captain.

  Joyce adds that Trina’s father always maintained that his ancestors were never enslaved.

  —They arrived in Florida as free people from Haiti. He played for a few years and a knee injury ended his career and he got locked up for tax evasion and that was that. He’s back there somewhere, wheeling and dealing and, mercifully, out of our lives.

  —Any regrets?

  —Not a one.

  Joyce hugs Trina. A natural lull follows with some searching out of objects in the river. A log floats like an alligator, just submerged in the water. The current billows and mimics shape-shifting cloud. They pass herons nesting in the mangroves, pure white splotches against bright green and the green rising out of the mineral-stained water.

  A watch repairman who sells clocks and watches and peddles his wares in a cart ignores the No Trespassing sign and tries to sneak around the commune gates. The guards fire at his cart, alarmed by the noise coming from it. He opens the cart to show them that it is full of harmless clocks and watches. He tells the guards that by shooting at his cart, they try to kill time but succeed only in ruining his merchandise. The commune leader purchases a kitchen clock and a schoolroom clock from the watch repair specialist to compensate him for the damage and for the fright of being fired upon. The seller of timepieces trudges from the compound, dissatisfied. He grumbles.

  —Time wasted on you people.

  The man feels he knows time from the inside out.

  —Nobody can beat time. No matter how grand he think he is.

  On his way out of the compound, the time seller waves at Adam.

  —I feel sorry for you, forced to live here and watch them day and night.

  The time seller’s sweeping gesture takes in the rain forest, whose clock is the rain made in the trees and the mist grazing and a sun crawling in a blue sea fished by birds and sailed by cloud.

  Adam looks around at the industry of the commune that surrounds him. The people’s unceasing labor is a testament of their higher calling, and by their treatment of him, keeping him close to them and giving him a central place in their lives, he feels elevated from his humble position of a dumb beast to honorary citizen of the commune. The people want him here so that he can witness their toiling. All he has to do is look up at the giant monocot trees that fringe the compound to see how much labor it takes to clear this place and erect buildings and weed and pluck the wild greenery every day to keep it from encroaching and swallowing the compound. He, too, could pluck, chop, and carry if they would let him. He cannot see himself sitting around in a clearing or propped against a tree picking fleas from some other gorilla’s fur as another hand combs his fur for ticks to nibble. He knows nothing of that life. He was captured too young. Saved from his preordained station in the order of things, his fate tied to that of the compound and its inhabitants. His place in the world is narrated in the creation stories read aloud by the children seated in a semicircle in front of a teacher and sheltered from the flames of the sun under the inclusive canopy of a tree. But he will prove destiny wrong.

  SIX

  The entire community of more than one thousand souls is required to attend nightly sermons unless someone is bedridden in the infirmary. Everyone aims to finish chores early to find a chair. Latecomers end up seated on the floor. The singing of hymns begins right away and continues as the place fills up, and soon those who have missed finding a chair simply squat on the ground beside a row of seats and shelter under the tarpaulin from the cool night breeze, the mosquitoes, and the general feel of discomfort of sitting
too close to the thick jungle dark. Citronella coils burn. Bulbs strung around the tented structure attract kamikaze moths. Guards stand around the edges of the congregation to keep children in their place and wave off with big sticks and much gesticulating of arms and whistling and curses any curious night life that will arrive, mostly in the form of snakes, wild boar, and the occasional hungry panther. The preacher remains in his house waiting for the right time to join the congregation and deliver his sermon. He paces the corridor behind his front door and warms up for the service. He clasps his leather-bound Bible to his right breast and utters verses aloud, gesturing wildly. He hears the singing and clapping and waits until he is satisfied that the congregation has reached an optimal volume. And if joy in a clearing means anything in the pitch black of the jungle, it surely amounts to the preacher’s flock of devoted followers in full swing, vocals at a maximum, hands red from vigorous clapping, feet hot from stamping on the ground, and wide smiles on sweating faces invigorated by chanting and movement and pooled enthusiasm.

  His appearance results in shouts and whistles and prolonged applause. He holds up his arms and calls for calm and thanks his congregation for its unbridled welcome. But he takes a full five minutes of saying thank you, and please, and okay, and praise the Lord, before his followers settle and wait for him. They erupt once more the moment he lifts his arms and praises the Lord, which is always a signal for the congregation to repeat his words in unison and throw their arms collectively into the air and start the applause all over again. The preacher cannot begin his train of thought until ten minutes after his arrival. He spends the time standing there and watching and smiling. Gradually, his people settle and become still for him and concentrate on him to the exclusion of everything else, from the whirring fans and jungle shrieks and coughing from those who turned up sick, to the discomfort of the metal folding chairs with no elbow room between one person and the next.