Free Land of Love and Drowning: A Novel by Tiphanie Yanique Page B

floating in the water. But this time the captain must have been called to the island, as though by a siren. “That does happen,” so the living men said.
The Homecoming
, which had shipped rum, which had shipped the food that fed St. Thomas, shipped the money that floated Tortola, had been shipping nothing more than a cargo of bones. A ship full of bones and all of it sunk to the shallow sea bottom.
    We can imagine what will happen to the cargo on
The
Homecoming
. How the bones will be released from their sacks by nibbling fish. How for years fishermen will pull up mandibles with their lobster catch. How for generations children will find femurs in the sand.
    Eeona’s pearl-and-diamond engagement ring was returned to Moreau—whose father now forbade him to marry Eeona as it was clearly a burdensome financial venture. Moreau saved the ring and put it on the finger of a full-bred French woman whom he followed back to Nice—abandoning his Anegada dreams. Whenever Louis Moreau sat alone in a quiet place to drink a bottle of wine, he tasted Eeona in it. In company, he would whisper her name into champagne flutes, for she was that color—champagne. A muted color and mysterious for that. Even his pretty French wife thought he was mad. She never knew who Eeona was, though she heard the name often.
    And though
The Homecoming
crashed miles away on the shoals of Anegada, Owen Arthur Bradshaw’s body was finally found washed up from the sea on the bay right there in St. Thomas’s Water Front. His face was liquid but the rest of him was unmistakable to anyone who had seen him naked in life. Antoinette wept and believed that her husband must have been trying to get back to her. But it must be said that he was equidistant between Villa by the Sea and Rebekah’s red-shuttered house. And of course, Antoinette was not the only woman of his heart who was there at Villa by the Sea.
    Most said drowned. But the Frenchies knew that Owen Arthur was a man of the sea and men of the sea don’t just drown. They walk into the sea with stones in their fists. They drink and bow into a heavy wave. They are smashed in the head by a loose anchor and heaved into the sea.
    From Anegada came the stories. Someone had seen the little side boat gliding away empty as the big ship sank. Someone else had seen a large beautiful bird circling a figure eight just as the boat began to rumble. It was whispered that the murderess was a woman with backward-facing feet and hair like the sea. Perhaps it was the captain’s witch mistress, who knew magic and knew love and knew that they were one and the same, despite any sin.
    Eeona, who knew she could sink ships, could only blame herself.
    Owen’s mates came in from around the closer islands. Mama Antoinette didn’t fling herself into the arms of any of these, as we’d all imagined she must do to save the family’s wealth. No, that Antoinette had her own ideas. No men even boarded at Villa by the Sea, which was too full of women for it to be decent. Male mourners stayed in the new Grand Hotel, right there in town, which otherwise catered to visiting Americans.
    During the wake, Owen Arthur’s bloated body lay in his marriage bed with a linen spread to hide the sea-mauled face. It was noted by Liva Lovernkrandt that Owen’s buttons were still sewn tightly on. Antoinette felt there had been no point in removing the buttons from his clothes. Nor did it make sense to cut out his pockets. He didn’t need this help to swim easily up the River Jordan. Clearly her husband had been swimming. Or drowning.
    The captain’s daughters, one too young and the other too shocked, also failed to tie his toes together so he wouldn’t turn into a jumbie and haunt them. But Owen Arthur would have haunted them anyway. This is what parents do.
    Three months after the funeral Eeona was still seventeen when Antoinette grasped her hand and said, “You are now the mother of Anette and mademoiselle of Villa by the Sea.” Antoinette