The New Moon's Arms Read Online Free PDF

working men get tongue-tied around people who had high schooling? Not Mr. Mckinley.
    “Mr. Mckinley, I’m so sorry. If I knew you and Dadda were friends, I would have told you about the funeral.”
    He smiled. “Don’t fret yourself. Knowing somebody is one thing. Friends is something else.”
    Gene pulled a flask of white rum out of his back pocket and unscrewed the top. “I liberated it from the funeral parlour,” he said. “A drink to Mr. Lambkin?”
    “Thanks.” I took the bottle, knocked back a swig of it. “To Dadda.”
    I passed the bottle to Mr. Mckinley. He looked surprised, but he took it, drank, made his toast: “Jimmy, walk good, you hear?” To us he said, “I make the mistake one day and tell him if his wife get bored with him, she could always come to me. He never speak to me after that again.”
    “Dadda was always jealous for the women in his life.”
    “Mm-hmm. So I find out.”
    Gene made his own toast.
    Mr. Mckinley nodded to me and Gene. “Thank you for sharing your flask with me. Some people wouldn’t want to drink from the same bottle as a working class man.” He picked up his tackle box. “Well, Jimmy had a hard row to hoe. But every man will put his past mistakes behind him, one way or another. Good evening to you.”
    When he was gone, Gene said to me, “He and all?”
    “He and all what?”
    “He was talking about your mother disappearing.” He sighed. “This blasted island. Everybody always up in everybody else’s business. And nobody will forgive, nobody will forget.” We passed the bottle back and forth in silence for a bit. Then he glared at me, red-eyed. “You think Mr. Lambkin did it, too? Killed your mother?”
    “Gene, he was my father. Two years I looked after him.”
    He turned his face away from me. He knuckled at one eye. “Beg pardon. I just feeling guilty that I lost touch with him. Years now. Shouldn’t be putting that guilt on you.”
    The revving of the waterbus’s engines slowed. We were nearly at Dolorosse. “We stopping soon,” I told him. “When I drive down the ramp, just follow me.”
    “All right. I sorry, eh?”
    “I know.”
    We went back to our cars. Lots more cars getting off at Dolorosse nowadays; families moving to work at the new saline plant. There were some familiar faces, too. But I knew scarcely any of them by name. I hadn’t moved to Dolorosse to socialize.
    Dolorosse Island was the last stop on the waterbus’s run. Blessée used to be the last; the last liveable island on the arm of the Cayaba archipelago. I’d lived on Blessée for the first fifteen years of my life before moving to the big island. When I was twenty-seven, a hurricane had hit Blessée. We weren’t ready for it—Blessée was outside the hurricane zone, and we hadn’t had one in over fifty years.
    The 1987 storm pulverized Blessée in a matter of days. The survivors had been evacuated. Mr. Kite on Dolorosse had taken Dadda in, and Dadda had remained in that house till now.
    Did I think that Dadda had killed Mumma? I hadn’t answered Gene’s question. Couldn’t give him an answer I didn’t have.
    The cars drove down the waterbus ramp onto the island. The sun had taken its nightly dive headlong into the sea. In the dark, the little cement ferry house had its one yellow light on. From behind the station house window, Mr. Lee waved the incoming cars through. I flashed my ferry pass at him and took the gravel turnoff to get to Dadda’s house. Gene followed.
    I got my cell phone out of my handbag. Speed-dialled. “Stanley? Let me talk to Ife, nuh?”
    People were yelling in Ife’s house: Clifton’s voice, and Ife’s. I thought Stanley had sounded upset.
    “Hello?”
    “Ife, what you did to make Clifton so angry?”
    “What I did? That is what you call me to say to me?”
    “Lord, what a way you harsh! I thought you wanted to know if I get home safe.”
    A sigh from the other end. “Yes. I’m sorry, Mummy. So you home now?”
    “Nearly there. I’m