Black Cake(12)

“Well, it’s just a penknife, it’s not big enough.”

“Which is your first problem right there.”

“What? Am I supposed to be roaming the coast with a big old knife, just in case I run into a pineapple?”

Covey kissed her teeth, and then they both laughed and Gibbs let himself fall back on the sand. Covey tried not to stare at his trunk, gleaming in the sun. She held the pineapple in place and began to shave off the skin, bit by bit, exposing the yellow flesh covered with dark eyes. Then she cut diagonally into the side of the fruit, digging out the spots, one or two at a time. With Gibbs’s small knife, it was going to take a while. And Covey was glad.

“So,” Gibbs said. “What are you going to do when you finish school? You want to teach swimming like Bunny?”

“Well, first, I want to win that harbor race and, yes, I want to keep swimming. But I want to go to university. See if maybe I can go to England. Maybe I could do something with numbers. I’m good with numbers, like my pa.”

Covey saw a look pass over Gibbs’s face. She could imagine what he was thinking. What most people thought about her father. “And you?” Covey asked.

“I’m definitely going to London next year. I’m going to study law,” Gibbs said. Covey felt her heart thudding. They could both end up in Britain.

“Law?” Covey said. “You mean, like criminals and such?”

“I was thinking more of people’s rights. You know, people whose rights are denied. Like my family’s.”

“Why, what happened?”

“My father. He had a farm, you know this. But it was taken away. That’s why we had to move.”

“I thought some big company bought your father’s land?”

“That’s what they called it, anyhow. It’s not like he had a choice. They paid what they wanted to pay. Then they made us all move. The whole village.”

Covey looked at Gibbs silently. She didn’t know that such a thing could happen.

Gibbs took a chunk of pineapple from Covey.

“If you go to London, do you think you would come back?”

“Not if I go, when.”

Each time they met alone, Gibbs insisted that leaving the island was the key to his future. The rest, he’d have to see. At some point, he stopped talking about his future only, and started talking about a life together with Covey.

We, he started saying. We.

Gibbs, who had shoulders as broad and brown as a guango tree.

Gibbs, whose arms around Covey’s waist burned her with a warmth that ran down through her middle.

Covey’s father had forbidden her to stay out with boys alone, but Covey and Gibbs kept finding excuses. The swim club, the debate team, and in the summer, the recitals to practice for Independence Day. They lived in a town surrounded by quiet coves and lush tree cover. It was easy enough for a pair of teenagers to find places to steal time together and, like each generation before them, they were emboldened by adolescent love.

Covey and Gibbs, holding hands down by the breakers.

Covey and Gibbs, kissing in the hollow of a sea cave.

Covey and Gibbs, clinging and probing and whispering promises.





Lin





Things hadn’t been easy with Covey. That she was a girl-child was bad enough. That she had grown to inherit her mother’s eyes and bust and teeth had become a problem. The local men were already taking notice of her looks, not to mention the wife of one of Lin’s suppliers who, everyone knew, was that way. But the worst part of it all was the disrespect his daughter had begun to show him.

When Covey was old enough to understand that her mother wouldn’t be coming home, she started acting up, started getting home late from school. Lately, she’d been telling Lin that she was studying with a friend after class, or training extra hours at the swim club, but he could see that the girl had been up to something. She would walk into the house with that look on her face and Lin knew that there had to be a boy. But Covey denied it.

One afternoon, Lin ran out of patience and grabbed Covey by the hair. That was when he realized what had been going on.

“What is this?” Lin said.

Covey’s ponytail was stiff with salt. She’d been swimming in the sea after school again. Lin had forbidden it and, still, his fool of a daughter had been going out there in the afternoons. And lying to him about it.

“Are you mad?” Lin said. “Haven’t we talked about this before? Do you know what can happen to you if you go out there alone?”

“Nothing is going to happen to me,” Covey said, picking up a mango and running the point of a paring knife along its skin.

“And right you are, Coventina. Nothing is going to happen to you because you will not be going out there again.”

Covey cut her eyes at him and turned away. Back in Lin’s day, a girl would never have given her own father an insolent look of that sort. Nowadays, there was all manner of loose behavior going around. The previous week, Covey had sewn herself a new skirt, or Lin should say, a new strip of cloth, halfway up her backside. All the girls were wearing them, Covey had said. Lin put a stop to that business right away, made her let out the hem. But this was what the world was coming to.

“Anyway, you can’t stop me,” Covey said, slicing a piece of mango away from the seed and swallowing it whole.