The Yunque

Vermilion haberdasheries of gulf water bile and all its amazing life came retching upon our skiff the moment we broke from the rig and out into the blistering monsoon. Not but a yard before me was my co-conspirator Charles, Charles Maglieu, a conscript from one of the isles. On the oiler we would take to calling him Arabica for the blend of French Creole and pidgin English he’d spit back at us continental men on the poor season of our lives. Six acres and a John Deere waited for me in my parish, and it would have to wait another long while for my hours to trickle through and my life to remain resplendently intact at my offshore time’s end. I watched the drowning embers of the rig less than a league behind us as it pulsed and waned and a curtain sheet of crashing gale punctured only by the wicked tongues of brimstone lightning that arced from on high and I knew then that my time had reached its end. Arabica and I motored through the night and tousled winds and waves towards terra ignota and a fortune grander than life.

I find no particular point I ought to illustrate for you of Charles’ and mine’s flight from the Yunque oil platform other than the usual torments of a castaway’s prelude. Each of us rotated at the motor through the hours, marking our time by watch alone as signal nor star met us. Without orientation nor light to gauge the size of the crests rising our way, we collided the best we could into the violent volumes awaiting conclusion, be it our salvation or our sundering. The line between the two had come to fray in the days before that night.

Through it all I could have selected no better companion than Charles. Arabica, we chided, yes, but his esteem stood without question to all us hands. Together we were equal. Together we had served the seasons dating to the Yunque’s first launching. On the first day of our acquaintance, we’d each flown our own ways to Port Fourchon. Drillers, engineers, medics and administrators, an army in the register descended on the port town, sealing our last hours of land in a liquored tomb, squeezing our last memories of home in a bottle we drained together. And Charles was there, yes, and so was I, yes, and we the partners to a bunkroom peeled back the layers of our strangeness to each other in a game whose ferocity matched up to any tempest to come.

Lightning laced against parting clouds like gold molten into the cracks of the world’s most immense ceramic work. Rain toned it down from a patter to a pitter, pecking us in a sprinkle that pressed down upon a newfound phenomenon of mist, fog and haze sublimating in the swelter. The skiff’s engine had long since ceased in a fit of over-exhaustion, which we who could not have been mechanics would not have known the first thing to fix, leaving us more fortunately with peace in our newfound absence of any duties. No engine, a new deontology, kings to ourselves and our adrift skiff, boundless and aimless, heading for the water’s edge like madness in current.

Celine waited for me. Celine waits for me. I needed to return; I needed my contract to end. She would still be waiting, wouldn’t she? The house, our home, the place we made for each other, that too would be waiting. The night I took that train holds her image. Why did she turn away from me? I reached for her from behind the room’s glass and she turned away dressed as if she were a widow. Why did she turn away from me? I told her I would return, I told her my contract would end and we would be set, that we could welcome the baby without worry. Celine. Wait for me.

Arabica looked ragged when he woke me. His features blurred into focus as he shook me and I came to stillness when he quit. There was no more rocking, no humming, no thundering or peltering or pattering: stillness embraced us. Charles shrunk off to the helm to stand facing away from me. His mane of hair fell beribboned with streaks of dampness and salt and I’m sure I would have smelled his reek had the mineral wind not blown towards the shore he faced. We’d landed at

some outcrop of rocks like besiegers held at the frontier. In silence Charles stepped from the boat spooling out a tethered line from it and pulled us in a feat of sizable strength further onto the shoal between the jagged and rather uninviting stone teeth. In drifting pauses of dream riddled sleep I envisioned us together pulling the boat through endless channels walled in by hooks and fangs into a fog of palm and marsh; no voices arrived but the sounds of our swaggering steps as we waded further into whatever awaited, further away from the humming sound of a storm encroaching. Charles turned to me and I found myself awake in the skiff, puddled and battered but intact, and I left it to find we had arrived to a shore with fathomless beaches of grey sand that was cool to the touch.

Charles had asked me that first night aboard the Yunque about my life and I told him a lie. I told him I was from a parish to the north and that a woman named Celine waited for me. I told him she was pregnant and I, the expectant father, would return to her after the end of the season. I described to him the home we had built. The vined walls of red brick masoned by a friend of her family’s, the DeLange family, the once upon a time financiers from New Orleans who’d fallen from grace and into a masonry of no secret order. In our shared bunks, him below and me atop, looking up at the dripping linoleum ceiling lighted by washes of reflection from the port window below, I told him about my home that never could be. I told him about the garden Celine was so proud of and how she pictured the three of us together tending to magnolias with as great of care as we did the short corn and how we would winter in the home that would be aged and weathered and more homely for its time. He told me of his home. The island he was raised on, the long dirt roads that with distance traveled no longer felt like roads into anywhere but trails beaten and carved from the earth in constant assail. He told me it once was a plantation, maybe even one of the largest of the islands, and that the copper kettles where sugar cane would be crushed and boiled by his grandfather and his grandfather’s brothers remained as markers leading in even distances to the big house on the hill. No one lived in the big house but the property, after the revolution, fell to the family of the grandfather branded after the owners Maglieu who let the house fall to ruin. He told me he was the first to leave the island after so many years, that nothing waited for him, that his future came from over the shores through the waves of broadcasts and the shore.

We’d stumbled a ways beyond our initial landing to what looked like the east of the island and though the shore remained flat and the perimeter of rocks never rested the land itself seemed to coil and rise towards a single peak above the tree line. Charles, stoically or inexpressively, I could never tell, pointed towards a mouth in the palms and back at the storm that followed. We looked to take cover. While our footsteps in the sand melted with the rain we stepped further into the clearing over knolls and snaking roots, aware that a twisted ankle or worse might mean death without help to come.

We’d come across a hut nestled into the foot of the mountain’s climb and warmed by the flickers of a hearth or fire or light we decided to enter. The island showed no other signs of habitation and our dim remembrance of the sea and isles surrounding the Yunque yielded no hint at where we might have landed. Whether they were friend or foe to us or the company, we met the end of our lines and together jumped into the abyss. Everything in the hut felt as though it were built at an angle. Not an object was put level: not the floorboards with gaping holes into the obscured rush of what looked like a hot spring below, not the walls shafted upwards haphazardly like rows of uneven teeth, not the slanted thatched roof above or the tables and hurried furniture that completed the simple room. Afar from us and nearest to the clicking embers of the hearth, we saw a bed of felts of any sort and a human figure slumbering in the shadows. I took my seat at the table as quietly as I could

and sat amidst a cluttering of clouded jars, rotting fruit, and stringed meats. Without a word to me, Arabica approached the figure, gripped at the animal blankets and pulled them to reveal a still life of human passing. No amount of pelt or fire could warm the lifelessness we witnessed, and the woman seemed to have passed into the next life without any external sort of violence. She was dressed as I remember men and women of the continent would: cheaply in a tattered T graphic of a seed company and shorts torn and repeatedly stitched by a learning hand. Arabica pried open her hand and, silhouetted to me, remained crouched by her bedside palming something in his own, a jewel like light reflecting into the rafters of the room as he played with his new treasure. As he lifted himself up without expression and in shadow, leaving the room and returning to the shore, I sat affixed to my chair, hearing the storm return and a distant engine start, and watching the light of the fire move I watched the scene change again.

Celine in an apartment, Celine in the garden, Celine in any face I see. I stood at the train station and waved to nothing. I sat in New York in silence and memory. I lived in the parish without a word, in a home by a garden with a family and no history. I took a train and in my ticketed seat, looking out the window, saw apartments and homes and creeks and mountains and the coast, the long stretching shore with the sea in its horizon, and I saw beyond the sea. The train rolled on and in its moving pictures I saw a history for myself. I saw a man named Charles who we all called Arabica who came from an island with a history. I saw an oil rig named the Yunque for the white land where I worked on a history. I saw a skiff and a storm that could transform those who passaged its brimstone and cloud. I landed at an island and gave myself a history. I rewrite it for you, my home in a bottle, and live it one more time.