Black Cake(37)

Elly wasn’t sure how the shells had come to be in that particular place, Elly’s place, between the guava and guinep trees and the cerasee bush. She only knew that she was most content when she could scoop them up and paint them with watercolors, or crush them into a pinkish grit, or feel for them in the pocket of her tunic. She tucked the best ones into the cardboard box where she kept the coins and a pretty old hair comb that she’d plucked from the dirt.

In the dormitory at night, Elly sometimes spent hours turning a shell over and over in her hands. Later, she would read enough to understand that these shells were not so much out of place as out of time. Elly’s breasts were just beginning to bud when she finally realized that she and the shells had been meant to find one another. And this was her first understanding of her destiny.

Elly had been born to sift through the dirt, to look for her history and future by picking through fossils, rocks, and sediment. She might walk to her lessons with a clip in her hair and shoes on her feet and books in her arms, but she knew now that these were superficial things, that what she was at the core was not what other people gave her or called her or told her or denied her, that none of these had anything to do with her true place in the world.

The Bible said for dust thou art and now Elly saw what it really meant. She knew that she had been part of the world forever and always would be, and had nothing to fear, nothing at all. And she would do whatever it took to realize her dream. She would study the dirt and shells and rocks at the heart of the world, because that was her destiny.





The Gate





On June 7, 1692, three powerful earthquakes struck the island. The soil turned to putty and a large tsunami sucked the island’s richest city, a famed haven for pirates, into the sea. Three thousand people were killed. Another two thousand died in an epidemic that followed.

In the spring of 1961, a group of orphans took turns dipping a small plastic bucket into the shallows at the marina. The girls were scooping up water full of tiny fish, waiting to begin a day trip to a minor island, when one of them cut her foot on the remains of a three-hundred-year-old gate. Regulars knew the gate was there below the surface, but these girls were from the interior. They had never been to the marina before and some had never even seen the sea up close.

Elly didn’t know it then but when she sliced her foot open on that gate, she set her life on a new path. She ended up in the hospital with an infection and fever that, the sisters later claimed, nearly killed her. After the fever passed, Elly would watch each day as the morning nurse unwound a bandage from around Elly’s foot, patted at the area ringing the cut with a piece of gauze doused in something that stung, and wrapped her foot again in clean cotton.

“Do you like being a nurse?” Elly asked one day.

“Why, yes,” said the nurse. “It’s a respectable profession for a young woman. And I get to help people.” The nurse snipped at the bandage with a pair of scissors, then looked at Elly. “Do you think you would want to do this someday?” she asked.

Elly shrugged. “I want to go to Britain, to study,” Elly said.

“Well, there’s a great need for nurses in Britain,” the nurse said. “And the government is recruiting our women to study there. You should think about it.” Elly was already aware that the health service in Britain was sponsoring women from the Commonwealth to complete nursing certificates there in exchange for a minimum work commitment. She had heard it on the radio in the kitchen at the children’s home. Going to nursing school could be her first step toward fulfilling her destiny. Elly emerged from her stay in the hospital with a plan.

She still had a couple of years to go before finishing secondary school, but now she knew what to do. She would study hard in high school and when the time came, she would travel across the ocean to take up nursing. She might find a job in a hospital or a doctor’s office. And then she would apply to a university where she could study what she really wanted to do. There was a name for what Elly was destined to be, she had seen it in books. Elly was going to be a geologist.

Her timing was fortunate. In those days, the benefactors of the orphanage were still generous enough to fund her overseas passage. Her exam results were better than almost anyone’s on the island and this was the kind of thing that made a sponsor proud. By the time she met Coventina Brown six years later in England, Elly was finishing her nursing studies and already in the midst of formulating a new plan.





Cake





“Go on, Elly,” Coventina said.

Elly closed her eyes but could still see the light from the candles through her lids. She took a deep breath and blew. She was twenty-one years old. Not long ago, she was just a skinny pickney living in an orphanage thousands of miles away.

Elly at ten, always hungry, never sleeping.

Elly, walking barefoot on cool tiles in the dark.

Elly, praying for no scorpions in the hall.

Elly, at the kitchen door, searching for the tin.

Elly, breathing in the smell of rum-soaked fruit.

Elly, scooping cake crumbs out of the tin.

Licking her fingers, closing the lid.

Rushing toward her bed, praying for no nuns.

Now she had her very own cake. The birthday candles were for her. The applause and hugs were all for her. The girls who shared the kitchen in this London bedsit had been soaking the fruits for weeks and setting aside the eggs, just for her. Elly was still motherless, still fatherless, but not alone.