Land of Love and Drowning: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

who might bear a son for him, damn the American law and its rule of legitimacy.
    He looked down at the little boat one last time. He could see the bodies of his wife and daughter against each other’s like courtesans, then a glint of silver.
    Down below, in the small boat that did little to separate her from the ocean, Eeona had stopped crying. Now she looked hard at her mother and spoke harder. “Stop, Mama.” Antoinette finally ceased but her alarm solidified. Now the women faced each other, hard as mountains.

5.
EEONA
    My mother was jealous of me. Mama would often take me to her rooms where there was a mirror. She would bid me sit up straight beside her before the looking glass. She peered from my face to her own as if searching my face for a history of herself. She was very pretty, but I was the more lovely. I say that only because it was a fact.
    My mother also feared for me. She feared that I would become a woman who depended on her beauty and so did not develop her skills and talents. It was not enough to be beautiful, she said. A woman must be able to create beauty. Mama made sure I learned to weave straw, sew clothes, and crochet bags. These were all skills that might come in handy when beauty would not.
    I do believe, however, that Mama’s stories also had their power. Their telling was also a skill, albeit one only displayed for me. The story of the Duene was used to warn me. If a woman was not self-possessed, she was in danger of the wildness. I knew my mother suffered from this. Episodes, we called them. Papa described the episodes as a bit of rebellion and impetuousness. My mother, as everyone knew, had run away from her island of Anegada to marry my father. She had barely known Papa. Mama had wild and wandering tendencies. I always knew I had the same.
    In order to tell her story, Mama would sit in her rocking chair. It was a fine rocker, made by hand from a strong stick of mahogany. It was one of the things I was most sorry to see go when the drowned lands took my father. In the big drawing room, lamps would flicker about us. Our shadows would reach long behind our backs. Often, Miss Lady stood over me braiding my hair for bed. My father would sip a short glass of rum and watch myhair being tamed. I have always known that my real skill is my own beauty, despite what Mama said.
    When Mama began to tell a story, Papa would rise and take a turn around the room. This would be terribly distracting to me. The sound of his sipping his drink made me want to place my own finger in his mouth. Now that I understand envy, I understand that perhaps he was jealous of this time that Mama had with me. With his free hand Papa would stroke his earlobe. When on his stroll, he would arrive at the door and lean against the chest where Mama displayed her treasured porcelain figurines. Then he would slip out of the room.
    Mama never asked if I wanted to hear a story. She would be unassumingly sewing an accent onto a dress and then she would look up at me. She began with the female Duene who live in the sea of the Anegada Passage. They sink ships with their singing. They are tall with thin angular legs that push like fish through the water. On parts of their bodies they have scales the colours of precious metal. This hides a bit of their bursting beauty when they come to land.
    The men live only on the land of our sister island, St. Croix. The males are as chiseled as stones and as brown as bark. They wait on the land for the mating season when the women come to them. The Duene men live mostly in Frederiksted, where the inkberry trees grow wild and hide them. They do not swim. Sometimes Mama would say that the men hide extra legs in their breasts. That they are arachnids, like Anancy. Sometimes she would say that they hide wings in their shoulders, and that they fly.
    There is only one thing the men and the women have in common. Their feet face backwards. This is so it is difficult for humans to track them. The Duene do not want