Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

Donna Hemans
“What’s there to do around here?” I asked.
Red looked at me as if surprised I could speak. And I wanted to
say, yes, I talk, I cry, I laugh.
“Nights we play dominoes, cards, Ludo. Going over by Shane to
watch a movie. Come nuh.”
We watched the end of a program that ran in America as a daytime
soap opera; the characters, mostly white, seeming more vindictive
and selfish than ever before. Shane took out a stack of movies and the
guys chose one with no thought about what I might or might not like.
I tuned out as the first car blew up and the muscled hero emerged
without a scratch.
I imagined we would spend the remainder of our nights there like
that, yards away from our deserted cabin, watching American movies.
This couldn’t be what Mom expected, but who could tell. We retreated
to basic cabins with the bare comforts only to find within a few yards
that which we retreated from. We didn’t tell her of course how we
spent our evenings, and she didn’t ask.
We saw less and less of Mom. Perhaps that was what she
wanted. She told us in the evenings, when she was preparing dinner,
of the places she had been: Accompong, the only remaining Maroon
town on the west of the island, Lover’s Leap, YS Waterfalls. She didn’t
invite us to come along. She was rediscovering on her own the land
she left behind some twenty-something years ago. Still, she was
shielding it from us.
There at The Cove, those secluded rustic cabins, my mother
became a single, independent woman, not saddled by children,
or husband, or chaos. In the evenings when she returned from her
outings, she made dinner, fish with mushy rice or with a sweetened
fried dumpling she called festival. We didn’t have the heart to tell her
we’d already eaten with the families of our newfound friends. Perhaps
we should have told her. Instead, we saved her food for breakfast,
knowing she wouldn’t be making a meal that early, knowing too that
we would be sharing with the tiny ants that came to carry away even
the tiniest crumb.
Brad and I were also living lives independent of her. We came and
went from our cabins, not bothering to check if Mom was awake or
gone, swimming in the private cove and wandering Treasure Beach as
if we were born there. Mom made no attempt to contact family, hers
or Dad’s, so that side of the island is all we saw. We marveled at the
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