Bay of Souls: A Novel by Stone Robert

Author:Stone, Robert [Stone, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2004-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

By the time she had showered and changed again, Roger was gone. The house had a floating population of servants and hangers-on, none of whom were anywhere in sight. The telephone was working and she called the hotel. Michael's flight from San Juan had not taken off. No one knew about the bus service to the capital.

The keys she had brought with her from the States still served their purpose. Checking the garage, she found the old Land Rover with three quarters of a tank of gas, not enough to make it to Rodney and back. There were some jerry cans of gas but she was afraid to drive the roads with them. If Michael needed fetching, she decided, she would go. Then, on impulse, she set off along the coast road toward the convent where she had taught school. On the road she passed no one except an elderly woman who was closing her soft-drinks stand, padlocking a battered tin shutter. A few miles farther along, a gang of young boys shouted after her.

As she pulled up at the gate, she heard the sounds of a football match inside. When the old Haitian servant let her in, she saw the game itself in progress on the parched field: two sets of teenagers playing Gaelic football. One side had been equipped with rugby shirts. Their opponents, playing bare-chested, showed the knotty frames of the poorer island people. Lara parked her machine in front of the two-story school building and watched for a while. On a veranda on the upper story, she saw Sister Margaret Oliver, in dark glasses, apparently absorbed in the game, poised on the edge of her rocking chair. It was so very like her, Lara thought, to set the boys at Gaelic football behind convent walls in the middle of an insurrection.

Another weight of memory stopped Lara on the way upstairs. The hallways still bore the foreign schoolroom fragrances she recalled from years before. Metal polish and candle wax, ink and cut flowers, ant spray and English soap. When she stepped out on the balcony, the nun was shouting something in Irish to the boys on the pitch. Lara paused before knocking on the frame of the louvered door.

The sister shouted down to her spalpeens. Her side, Lara thought, must naturally be the shirtless ones. Lara felt herself in a welter of all the crazed, promiscuous forces of her island. Nuns shouting in Gaelic to black children playing Irish games. Cane cutters singing in medieval French patois to the rhythm of their cutlass strokes. Here and there plastic radios running on tractor batteries playing rhythm and blues. From the school balcony, canefields stretched toward the purple ridge of the Morne Chastenet, where the descendants of Haitian Maroons served vodoun loas, African gods and savage Taino spirits in thin Christian disguise.

Meanwhile at St. Brendan's, for a hundred years the Marist nuns and brothers had been urging black and brown children to prodigies of valor at Gaelic football, shouting encouragement in the auld speech.

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