Inkprov

French Patois, or Creole, was the preferred language on the island; the lingua franca where English was the official language. I felt I should try to learn it, but I just had not gotten around to it when I started construction of the hotel.

The workers chatted away in their Patois, laughing and occasionally making what I assumed were humorous references to me, but I really didn’t care. I began learning some words and commands that were better at conveying a quick instruction such as CLUE-ey when I wanted someone to drive a nail, or LEVE-ey when I wanted to say “raise that up.” If a worker wanted me to understand something they would say it in English so the job went along well.

I was gathering my own aggregate for concrete because there were no ready-mix companies on the island. Each day I would get the crew working and then take one or two men with me in the pick up truck and drive down to the Caribbean coast for material. Concrete is made up of several sizes of aggregate mixed with cement. If all you mix with the cement is sand you have mortar that is relatively weak but if you make up the same bag of cement with sand, small stone, and larger stones in about equal amounts you have concrete of some strength. Local women, working along the shore laboriously scooped up a mix of small to medium sized stones that were rounded by years of the sea’s pounding. They  mound it into a pile of roughly a cubic yard and offer it for sale to builders. This mix is called ‘chippen’ and when mixed with sand at about two to one made a good easily worked concrete. I would make my deal with the woman and the men would shovel it into the truck.

For sand I went to a government borrow pit. The sand was in fact pure pumice and had to be dug out of the side of a small hill. I would leave the men there at the site to dig piles of sand so that when I returned from the construction site after dropping off the chippen I could expect a pile or two of sand.

This did not work terribly well. The men were, in the local term, skylarking in my absence and upon my return I would have to wait for them to dig what should already have been dug.

I asked my friend Allandale Winston what he would suggest. Could he teach me to curse in patois? I was gently told that I was having trouble enough with my pronunciation of patois and that curse words would likely come out more as a joke than a slur.

“I will teach you one phrase that will help,” he said. He always had that marvelous half smile and I knew that he was thinking mischievously. Try, “Le CHAT Pa La, WATT Cab-bay-Bahl.”

“What does it mean?” I asked suspiciously.

“When the cat’s away the rats will play,” he explained. “Literally it means the cat is not there – rat has a ball.”

I practiced it until I was tired of trying but I did not totally please Allandale with my pronunciation.

“Mutter it under your breath a little, they will be less likely to notice your missed pronunciations,” he advised.

The next day I arrived back down to the borrow pit where I had left two workers to dig pumice and only one pile was partially done.

“Le CHAT Pa La, WATT Cab-bay-Bahl,” I mumbled and grumbled half under my breath.

The two men looked up in surprise and immediately turned to the hill and began digging pumice at full speed. Neither one of them said anything in patois, and when we reached back to the job they immediately seemed to be spreading the news to the other workers.

I simply tried to look wise and went on about the supervision of the construction, but I noticed that the good humored bandying in patois had almost stopped and the work proceeded at a faster pace.

One night on the road up to the hotel a couple of years after we moved to Dominica, Margie and I had a frightening experience.

Unlike the United States, nights are usually dark in Dominica. Although moonlit nights seem brighter than those in the states and the stars on a clear night seem brighter it is probably because there is seldom any other source of light.

Electricity on the island is supplied primarily from small hydro installations in the Roseau Valley. Internal combustion engines of some magnitude pick up the peak loads and supply a few of the outlying areas. Roseau and a couple of other towns have some street lights, and reasonably well illuminated shops and houses, but the rest of the island seems to almost disappear at night. Small light sources can be seen here and there in the country areas but people who have electric service usually rely on one small wattage bulb. Where there is no electric service the reliance is usually on a kerosene (locally called paraffin) lamp and Dominicans almost always close all wood shutters at night. On most nights few vehicles move after about nine p.m..

When we moved to the island this darkness seemed eerie to us but we soon became accustomed. Driving at night on narrow winding roads with frequent hairpin turns and blind corners might have been quite hazardous, but they were relatively easy because oncoming vehicle headlights gave more than ample warning.

The four mile-plus uphill road from the town to our hotel was one-vehicle-width incorporating twenty-one bypass places. In the daytime it was essential that one travel slowly because another vehicle might be coming. When two vehicles did meet it was necessary that one driver or the other know the nearest passing spot so one could back while the other followed to the place.

When going up the road from town the sheer cliff was on the right and the valley, with its hundred foot-plus drop off was on the left. Trees festooned with epiphytes and vines covered the road with a delightful tropical canopy. It was a beautiful daytime drive.

One night, however, Margie and I were driving home from the club when the vehicle battery’s ground came loose and we stopped dead. Instant blackness engulfed us.

We had no flashlight, match, or cigarette lighter, so we sat there for a few minutes trying occasionally to breathe life back into the car with futile attempts at twisting the key in the ignition. I had no idea what had caused the failure. Nothing worked, and at that time of night it was unlikely that any vehicle would come up or down the road.

We had been talking so neither of us could remember exactly where we had stopped, or how far we had to go.

We could not see each other sitting side by side in the car.

“Are we going to have to sit here all night, do you suppose?” Margie asked, sounding wistful.

“Our eyes should become accustomed to the darkness after a while. Let’s wait and see.”

I began to make out some differentiation in the darkness. I could tell the parts of the front seat and see the form that was Margie’s. Soon I thought I could barely make out the whiteness of the gravel on the road’s edge, though I was certainly not sure. I looked straight up but I could see no stars; this could mean clouds or vegetation cover.

I recalled from US Navy Flight Training that we were supposedly able to fly over and detect a totally blacked out town from just starlight, but there was no star showing now. I recalled that we had been required to wear red lensed glasses for a period before going into the training session. This was the adjustment time. It seemed to me that it was about two hours. I also remembered something about utilizing the cones (photoreceptors) of the eyes and looking slightly away from the place you wanted to see.

We were eager to get home, but were afraid to move far from the safety of the vehicle.

For another twenty minutes we waited.

“I’ll go out and see what it seems like. You stay here for a bit,” I said. Oddly, we found ourselves whispering.

We have the British left-hand traffic pattern on the island and the driver is on the right side. I was on the cliff side and got out of the car. Then I promptly stepped down into the wet, shallow drain that followed the cliff where it met the road. I said “Damn!”, with much emphasis, and stepped back up on the inside verge.

“Oh! What happened?” Margie asked anxiously, still whispering, adding “Please, be careful.”

“The drain against the cliff is full of water and I stepped right in it up over my shoes.”

“Gee, Honey, that’s a tough break.”

Using my pocketknife I managed to fashion a walking stick from a roadside sapling.

I could make out the car now as I moved around to Margie’s side.

“I can see more now,” I said, “but I’m not comfortable with this situation yet. I am going to try walking up the road a bit and see how it goes.”

“I don’t like that idea much,” she answered.

“Neither do I, Honey, but I’ll be very careful.”

I had not paid all that much attention to the paving and design of the road before, but now I carefully probed and examined everything, mostly by feel. The road was not well paved, but there was a pot-holed black top on the center eight or so feet and on the ravine side the blacktop ended in a small amount of light colored gravel. Past that there was a sloping grass covered verge that went into nothingness. I found a rock and tossed it a foot or two further out and heard it hit a hundred feet or so below. If I did not know it had to be about a hundred I would have guessed two or three hundred. It was very disconcerting.

I moved up the road on the right hand side, reasoning that if I fell, it was better to fall in the shallow drain against the cliff than off the outside and down into the ravine.

I went ahead about ten yards using the walking stick to good advantage but it was slow going.

I thought of how blind persons rely on such sounds as my stick was now making on the various surfaces; smooth on the pavement, scratchy on the gravel, and silently with occasional snares on the verge’s grass. If it stuck on something unexpectedly the adrenaline surged through me.

I was reasonably sure that we would have no more than a mile to go before reaching the Watten Waven village store where I was certain that I could buy or borrow a torch-light to use in the last half mile to the hotel.

I was just about to turn around and go back to Margie when I began to see more of the road. I looked up at the sky and saw that the trees were less dense and the stars were shining brightly.

I backtracked to the car and told Margie what I had in mind.

“I’ll get some light at Ma Nicko’s store. They will be closed but she and Nicko live just in back. Then I’ll come back for you.”

“No, you don’t! No way am I staying here alone. If you are going to fall off the cliff I’m coming too,” she said, getting out of the car.

We set out cautiously, at a snail’s pace.

We had walked the road in daylight and it was a climb, always uphill, but our pace now was so measured that we hardly noticed the incline.

We finally reached the village. It was late and we were now seeing more of the road. The village was in a small valley and contained no roadside ravines so we decided to press on without disturbing the Nickos.

At the end of the road was the hotel, brightly lit, though just its night-lights were on. With all the wonderful light our tenseness left us and we picked up our pace to a fast and happy stride.

“Just imagine what this would have been like if we didn’t know that Dominicans are all right,” Margie said.

“Yes, indeed! What if that happened back in Florida in some of those nifty neighborhoods? Or, how would you like to be broken down on some of the streets in New York City?”

“Well, this wasn’t fun by any means, but we could have just snoozed in the car until morning and we would have been in no danger. It was inconvenient and annoying, but it sure didn’t have to be dangerous.”

“For a while there, I would have disagreed with you, but it all worked out. I’ll sure appreciate the lights more now.”

“And carry a spare torch-light!”

“And carry two spares.”

We both laughed.

We climbed those last steps to our warm, well lit, familiar house, tired but relieved to be home. Those bright electric lights were now, indeed very much more appreciated.

After that night Margie always carried a small torch in her handbag and does to this day.

In Dominica the sobriquet for a person who lived way out in the country, or in a very small village was “Country Boukie”.

Most nations of the world have laws against the hiring of foreigners unless certain rules protecting the employment opportunities of the country’s nationals are observed. The United States has such laws and, so too, has the Commonwealth of Dominica. The bureaucratic minefield one had to traverse in order to hire other than nationals is intricately constructed. Compliance simply was not worth it. We considered ourselves “Guests in the house,” rather than just expatriates, and we considered confrontation impolite and unbecoming of a guest. As a result we hired locally and trained as we went.

Celestine St. Hilaire was a bright young country boukie from Fond St. John, a small, rural village on the southern end of the island. We had felt that he would be a good employee when we met him and our confidence proved well founded.

In the beginning of his employment Celestine required our patience, though his enthusiasm and willingness more than compensated.

In Celestine’s village there was no telephone or electricity except for the occasional special purpose generator. When he came to work for us he brought his belongings in a small bag and settled in to live in the helps’ quarters over the generator room.

Our home, the Tree House, was on a ridge perhaps four stories above the small parking lot at the front of the hotel. From our living room we could see arrivals and departures at the main entrance and monitor the activities around the swimming pool, and the guests’ rooms.

We had the equivalent of a simplified old PBX telephone exchange in our living room and since we had no walls on that room we could sit at the exchange and ring down to the hotel when we saw a taxi arrive or a guest who needed help.

Someone had to be in or near the hotel kitchen at all times so that guests could be accommodated if they wished between-meals room service. Often visitors came up from a cruise ship or a visiting yacht and wanted more than bar drinks.

We received a call from the secretary of the Tourist Board informing us that a travel writer had requested a visit to our hotel and that a member of the board would be driving him up to us.

Dominica was noted for its limes. The Florida Key Lime came originally from Dominica and L. Rose and Co. maintained a large lime processing plant in Roseau. Soon after its formulation by Lochland Rose, Rose’s limejuice was found to prevent scurvy and was later responsible for the nickname “Limey” for British sailors. It was the world’s first non-alcoholic fruit cordial.

Ripe yellow limes were required for processing in Rose’s factory. Home recipes usually require either ripe limes or green limes but in all other table and tipple use, green limes are preferred.

For this reason Margie called down to the hotel to check with the kitchen on the supply of green limes. We expected to entertain the visitor at our house and we had none.

Celestine answered the phone in the kitchen. At this time he had only been in our employ a short while.

“Hello?” an obviously uncomfortable voice answered.

“Who is this?” Margie asked. She knew she had rung the kitchen, but she did not recognize Celestine’s timid little voice.

“This is one Celestine St. Hilaire from Fond St. John speaking,” came the rapid-fire answer after a long pause.

“Ah, Celestine. Good. We just got a call from the Tourist Board and we are going to have a visitor up here at the Tree House.”

“Yes, Madam.”

“We will need some fresh limes. I want lovely green ones, you hear?” she said, using a bit of local idiomatic phraseology, “Do you have any there in the kitchen?”

“We have plenty limes, oui.”(‘plenty’ in local colloquial English means just a little more than enough. ‘Not plenty’ means not quite enough) “Just a moment, Madam,” he replied, and she could hear the phone being placed down on the kitchen table.

After a minute or so he came back to the phone.

“Madam?” he said.

“Yes, Celestine? Do we have any nice green ones?”

“These would be good, Madam?” His phraseology and emphasis was the standard island idiomatic form with which to express a question.

He was obviously holding the limes up to the receiver.

She held her laughter long enough to quickly instruct him to bring six up to the Tree House.

Dominica has different power than the United States. The norm in the States is 110 volts and 60 cycles. In the island the power is 220 volts and 50 cycles. This does terrible things to small motors made for use in the United States.

As a would-be writer I learned on a manual Remington that I garnered from the University of Florida bookstore on the GI bill before a clamp down limited us to just books and supplies.

Years later I finally felt entitled to the luxury of a modern electric typewriter. Still later Fred Ward told me about typewriters with eraser ribbons. Luxury living.

One could not buy an electric typewriter on the island so on one of my trips to Florida I had a local manufacturer’s representative order a 220-volt motor for my electric typewriter. I would take the chance that the 50 volts would not “humbug me”, as they say locally.

My machine gave up quietly soon thereafter, defeated by local power brownouts and surges which aggravate the 10 cycle difference.

So it was, therefore, that on a visit to Martinique, the next island south, I discovered a typewriter dealer in downtown Fort de France who had an Olympia machine that worked on the 220-volt system. According to the salesman it was built strong enough to contend with the power fluctuations found in the islands.

We always accepted French francs from French guests at the hotel and so frequently had a reasonable accumulation, which seemed always ready to “burn a hole in our pockets” as my mother used to say. I thought the typewriter was a perfect purchase and went across Empress Josephine Square to find Margie and tell her of my wonderful find.

She was at the Hotel Europa reading a book.

She agreed with me that it sounded wonderful and then she asked me if I had tried it out.

“Well, no,” I confessed, “why should I? The thing is brand new. The Salesman hit a bunch of letters and it was fine.”

“You should try it,” she said. “I’ll go across with you and look at it but you should at least try it.”

“You can be annoying sometimes,” I groused, “I will try the damned thing, all right?”

We walked back across the corner of the square and entered the shop. The salesperson was all smiles. I thrust my open palms at the machine and said “There, see?”

“Type on it,” she said nodding affirmatively at its nice appearance.

I sat down grumbling and the salesperson handed me a piece of paper. I rolled it in and typed “All good individuals come to the aid of their party.”

“What are you typing?” she asked.

It was gibberish.

I looked at the keys. There was a crazy, unrecognizable arrangement of letters that bore no resemblance to the standard American typewriter keyboard. The French keyboard was different.

I shrugged and grinned, embarrassed. “I guess if one wanted to type code this would be a good machine to have but I sure can’t use it.”

“Oh, well,” Margie said. “But, look on the bright side. I have a wonderful place for us to spend those francs. Loiza says that new restaurant on the bayfront is marvelous.”

“You’re on,” I said.

Damn!” I thought, “Murphy’s bloody law.” I was thinking about what kind of impression was being made on the complimented guest in the individual suite we called the Ti Kai, literally ‘Little house’ in Creole. This was the travel writer, Ms. Eugenia Battle. She pronounced it ‘Ba-TELL’, not ‘Bottle’ as our room boys did in private. She did like her tipple.

Travel writers wield terrible powers that can literally cost tourist destinations and resorts vast sums of money if they are displeased, and so inform their readers.

The entire island of Dominica suffered one whole season at the malevolent hands of a man and wife who had been retained to bring a famous European travel guide to coverage of the Caribbean area. This arrogant twosome wrote to the Dominica Tourist Board, of which I was a member, for updated information on Dominica. Through some sort of slip their letter was not answered, probably because there was actually nothing new. The next letter from them informed us that they would simply leave the island out of the premier issue of the Caribbean book if we did not answer. We took that the wrong way, got our collective backs up, and did not answer. After all, we reasoned, they would look silly if they left us out of a book on the Caribbean. We also felt that they would certainly not try to write about us without at least visiting the island and we could show how charming and wonderful we were then.

Well, you guessed it. They did not come and they did not omit the island. They just murdered us in a book that was published only once a year.

Later these charmers gave Island House a knock; the only one we ever received. We had always been written up as the best on the island all of our years of existence. Their chop? They said the place was “too tricked up for our taste,” and “…(they)…always get their guests inebriated at the bar before serving dinner.” These are quotes as best I remember them. Certainly they were hard to forget and the loss of business was even more difficult to ignore.

So travel writers, emotionally troubled or not, are treated with kid gloves, though some, like Ms. Eugenia Bottle were just arrogant sponges and were hard to take.

Up to now Ms. Battle’s visit had been a successful effort on our part. After all, this last day had been filled with activities and personal attention for all of the guests, including her. We had done a one-hour nature walk around our acres of tropical gardens. A picnic lunch had been prepared and the hotel guests, including Ms. Battle, loaded into Mokes and taken ten miles north to the Layou River pools for a leisurely afternoon swim and lunch with plenty of Island House punch. Ms. Battle really related to that punch and she was much easier to deal with after a few; up to a point. Fortunately, we only experienced that condition in the extreme once when it took two room boys to get her up the path to her room.

Our punch making, a once a year activity, had been put forward to impress her. She stood over us with pencil and pad asking questions at every stage, from the squeezing of the Dominica limes that had made Rose’s Lime Juice famous, to the mixing of the brown sugar and adding the ‘shrub’ for seasoning.

“Shrub? Shrub?” she asked in that annoying voice as we stirred in the seasoning. “What is that?” She had her pencil in the air, poking at some unseen other victim of its venom.

“Shrub is in this 5 gallon demijohn that we keep from year to year,” I explained, “This is more than ten years old now. We only use a kitchen ladle for each gallon of punch. It is special old rum plus all the spices which season as it ages.”

“Smells like vanilla extract to me,” she said.

“It’s all rum, plus spices. Of course, vanilla is a dominant essence, Ms. Battle, but the shrub has all the spices; cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, all spice, tamarind, cloves, ginger, and lots of vanilla beans. See them all in there?”

She was leaving tomorrow, to the great relief of us all, and tonight we had arranged to serve large river crayfish for the fish course and Crapaud, the giant local frog, for the entree.

We were all seated at the big Gommier table. I had the lady on my right and Margie was seated, eight guests down, at the other end.

Suddenly I saw Margie’s look of surprise.

Then I knew why as the hotel room boys came pouring, in great haste, out of the kitchen door behind me. They did not stop until they had reached Margie’s end of the big dining table.

I didn’t ask the help what the matter was.

I didn’t ask Margie what she thought was happening.

I didn’t want to share our problems with Ms. Battle.

I rose to my feet, and moved quickly around the screen that shielded us from the kitchen, down the half flight and into the bright light of chef Wilson Paris’ domain.

There, wide eyed, and glaring, stood our chef, Wilson Paris. He held a meat cleaver in his right hand, which nestled, on the ready, in the fold of his beefy arms.

Wilson was as pure a Carib Indian as there was. American Indians were known locally as red Indians. He looked Indian as well, though he did have loose curls of black hair rather than straight. He had a broad face, Indian eyes, and well-muscled stocky body. His non-Indian type mustache was a sparsely furred caterpillar-like Fu Man Chu.

He had always been extremely pleasant.

Margie had allowed privately that she could visualize him in a loincloth with a spear.

I asked him in an insistent, just short of demanding, whisper, “Sa ka fete, Garcon?” (What is happening?).

“Well, Sir,” he began in English, his right arm unfolding and bringing with it the cleaver.

I stepped back instinctively, raising my hand in defense, but he meant no threat.

“Sir, Sir,” he said, sounding placating.

“Put that thing down,” I said, more a plea than a demand.

“Oh, yes sir,” he said as he put it down and then moved back close to me, in an uncharacteristic invasion of my space. He was inches away from my nose when he opened his mouth to explain his disagreement with the rest of the staff.

An undeniable strong smell of vanilla and rum made me recoil as if it had been garlic breath.

“Damnit, Wilson, you’ve been in the bloody shrub! You’re sloshed!” I exclaimed in English.

“Oh, yes sir,” he replied and hung his head.

Margie and I finished the kitchen side of the dinner and everyone took the disruption in good humor; except the charming Ms. Battle.

As I recall she said, “Thousands will hear of this!” We worried but fortunately she did not write us down. She probably suffered an alcoholic loss of memory of the night.

“Honey! Just look at this!”

We were in the hotel kitchen because the chef had not shown for work and we had guests to feed and it was late.

“What? What?” she asked, turning quickly to me and to whatever it was that had caused my outburst; prepared for the worst. We were both upset that no one had told us Pedro had not shown back to work from his visit to town.

“No one fired the stock pot,” I said, turning my attention to its contents. Holding the large lid off to the side so that Margie could come beside me and look. “It looks like some bubbles on the top, too. It may have gone off.”

“That damned Pedro! Where do you think he is?”

In a French Creole speaking island a Spanish given name was unusual enough, but Pedro was more than a bit odd himself.

“He was supposed to be here at noon and it’s nearly six. He’s mad all right but he’s not a boozer. Do you suppose he’s gone funny?”

“Off his nut?”

“Sure, his nut. We both know he’s strange.”

“We were warned, but he’s been so good so far. Maybe he had a catastrophe or something at home, maybe at his little shop.”

Pedro had worked for years as a soup and sauce chef on the Lady Boats, small passenger and freightliners from Canada. The line had ultimately folded and he opened a small bread shop in town which, it developed, did not satisfy his creative urges or his family’s need for support. When food was ready to be served at the hotel he invariably said, “Steward, pick up!” to the room boys, who did not understand the phrase but deduced what they were being asked to do.

“Well, whatever,” Margie said, “We had better get on with it. We’re the cooks tonight.”

“Yet again.”

“Yet again. This is the worst part of owning a hotel. Bloody chefs.”

A kitchen helper came up the back stairs to report for the dinner preparation. He and some of the staff lived just below the hotel’s main building in a little picturesque imitation of a Carib Indian thatched hut built over the hotel’s generator room.

“Celestine?” I said, forgetting to get the agitation out of my voice. “When was this stock pot boiled last?”

“I don’t know sir.”

He looked frightened.

“Last night? This morning? This afternoon? When?”

“I don’t know, Sir. That’s Mr. Pedro’s thing to do, Sir.”

I still had the stockpot lid in my hand, looking back at the five or six gallons of stock that had been carefully tended for a long time. It was an ongoing thing; the base for most of our soups and some sauces. Little bubbles now showed in the center. A chicken breast bone protruded from the liquid’s surface.

“Damn!” I exclaimed again.

Margie, resigned to our having to fix the hotel dinner, had begun placing vegetables on the kitchen’s ‘set up’ table.

“Here, Celestine, wash these and cut them for tonight.” Margie instructed the boy.

“Yes, Madam,” he said, moving into position for the task, apparently eager to get away from where I stood in front of the stove holding the top of that bomb (a large pot)of stock. I kept looking at the contents, hoping somehow that I was mistaken.

Pedro came in at that moment.

“Ah, Pedro,” I smiled broadly, willing to forgive his very late arrival, so happy was I that I would not have to do the kitchen work myself. I managed to conceal my feelings about his misfeasance on the stockpot’s tending.

“Pedro,” I said, carefully, “You have been cooking the stock pot every morning and evening, haven’t you?”

“Well, sir, it doesn’t matter,” he smiled broadly. Shrugging off blame, usually with non-sequiturs, was his way.

I looked at Margie, paused, and calmly explained. “Pedro, if you don’t heat it to a boil twice a day it will spoil. We don’t have a big enough fridge to put it in so we have to do that. I’ve told you this.”

“Oh, yes, Sir,” he said and grinned his super gold toothed grin. His teeth may well have represented his accumulated wealth. This was Pedro’s charming, wide mouthed, ingratiating smile and he relied on it to get him past a reprimand. He offered no excuse.

Margie interjected; “Why don’t you throw that pot out and start another. No use crying over spoiled stock.” I knew she meant to be humorous but she was not laughing.

“We can’t do that,” I said over my shoulder as I looked again at the open stock pot. “This took so long to stew down.”

I took a spoon and dipped it into the stock and came up with a sample, which I raised to my nose. ” It smells reasonably all right, Honey,” I said. “Maybe it’s good.”

“Throw it out,” she said firmly.

Ignoring her, I tasted it.

“It’s sorta sour,” I said. “It’s spoiling all right.”

“We are noted for our soups, too,” she said to no one in particular, then she looked at Pedro. “Do we have any bullion cubes?”

“None, Madam,” he answered, his smile having left him. She looked at me as though I had not been checking inventory carefully enough; and I had not.

“Can you make something… anything, for tonight’s soup, Pedro?” she asked.

Pedro paused and made a face as though giving the question much thought and then shrugged in the negative. “Not really, Madam,” he said in Dominican English vernacular.

The hotel was at the edge of the rain forest, on the foothills of Morne Trois Piton at the end of four and a half miles of somewhat tortuous, mostly single lane road. One could not just nip out to the store for supplies.

“Pedro, Where is your baking soda? Maybe I can fix our soup problem.”

Pedro produced a large box. It was four times the size of the ones suggested for keeping in the refrigerators for odor control.

I shook a dollop into the pot, about a heaping tablespoon full, and stirred it with the big kitchen spoon. The liquid foamed like a freshly poured beer and I stirred it until the foam disappeared. I tried another, smaller, portion of soda and again it foamed. A third addition of soda produced almost no reaction and I stirred the mixture until I was satisfied that the mix was uniform.

Pedro, Margie, and Celestine were now at my side watching this recreation of some high-school chemistry class experiment.

“Tastes pretty good,” I pronounced as I sampled the result of the partial alkaline neutralization of the acid of spoilage.

“But, is it safe?” Margie asked.

“You can bet that it will be boiled for a proper time before we use it but it should be safe enough after at least ten minutes boiling. We usually figure five.”

We let it slow boil for half an hour just to be sure. I ate a small bowl of it, additionally seasoned, with a penny bread. It wasn’t bad. We told Pedro to mix it with some fresh vegetables and left the kitchen to the chef and his helpers.

Guests numbered about sixteen that night; a family from Maine, eight from the Chicago area and a couple from Pennsylvania. Our custom was to buy a round or two of drinks downstairs in the Loupe Garou Lounge before dinner to make certain that the guests had all met each other. This was a happy group and everyone seemed delighted with the hotel. That night we were ‘heavy on the TLC’ Margie remarked later.

At 8:15 we were summoned to the dinner upstairs and because of the small number of guests we seated them all at the long Gommier table where we told tales of the islands and encouraged friendly conviviality.

The room boys came up from the kitchen with the soup course and placed the steaming bowls before each of the guests.

Margie looked down the table at me, seated at the other end. I raised my eyebrows just the slightest bit and then could not suppress a smile. She waited for me to take my first taste and I found it still a little more acidic than I had thought, but it was not bad. I looked up at her and after she checked to see that no one was looking, she made a disapproving face. I raised my shoulders in an ‘oh, well, so what,’ shrug and took another spoonful.

“My, my,” one of our lady guests said, “That’s simply marvelous soup!”

“Yes, it is indeed,” another added.

Yet another added her praise of the soup.

“What ‘kind’ is it?” the first lady insisted, looking at Margie.

“I’m not sure,” she responded, “We’ll call the Chef, and have him tell us.”

‘She is really gambling,’ I thought.

I asked one of the room boys to go down and bring Pedro up for a ‘Compliments to the chef’ moment, which we often did when a guest requested it.

Pedro came up smiling his bright gold smile, and spoke to Margie from the edge of the kitchen screen. “Yes, Madam?” he asked, smiling broadly.

The lady guest who had first asked said, “That soup is simply marvelous, Sir, we can taste the wine. It’s just wonderful. What kind is it?”

Pedro’s smile faded for the briefest moment and then the gold reappeared, brighter than before.  “Potage, Madam…Potage!”  he said, beaming.

Margie had gone up to the States on business and to visit relatives and taken all but one of our children; Daniel.

Daniel was eight and I remembered when I was about that age being left with my Father while Mother went up to Sebring (Florida)to visit relatives. Dad made sure that I had a good time and I was determined, as he must have been, that having to stay behind was not to be thought of as a slight.

I took Daniel with me wherever I went. The hotel was empty as it sometimes was in off-season, and we spent considerable time at the Dominica Club.

Bill Bunting was Gus Smith’s brother-in-law and had settled in Dominica long after Gus, but long before we came. Some thought he had a bit of a bad-boy or D.O.M. reputation but I considered that unjustified. He did seem to know all of the back alleys in the small capital and almost every Dominican who owned a vehicle because Bill ran one of the local gas stations.

Bill and I were at the Club swapping obligations to buy rounds with the hard core drinking members and Daniel was out in the yard playing with some other children.

“Why don’t you come with me to have some dinner at Flossie Joseph’s?” Bill asked when we both were getting up to go. The Club usually closed a little after eight. “Marjorie is up in the States for a fortnight, isn’t she?”

“Yeah, Bill. I was going to suggest going over to Ft. Young Hotel for dinner. Who the hell is Flossie Joseph?”

“Hell’s Bell’s, Pete, loosen up. I can’t believe you haven’t met Flossie.”

Daniel and I followed Bill’s Landrover in our Mini Moke. He went a few blocks into the center of town and then turned into an alley behind the Carib Cinema and parked in a spot half way down the dark lane. The wall of the Cinema smelled from the movie patrons’ propensity to make sure, before the show’s start.

“This it?” I asked, a little disappointed.

“In here,” he replied as he pushed open a door from which a flood of light immediately showed.

Inside was a brightly-lit series of medium sized rooms filled with dining tables. More than half of the tables were occupied by patrons. It was quite pleasant though obviously not a place that tourists would discover.

We found an empty table and Flossie immediately came over to us from another room.

“Hi, Bill,” she greeted, “and, Mr. Brand. Nice to have you visit my place. Is this your son?”

We exchanged pleasantries with this nice woman, who, it turned out, was one of the towns leading merchants in addition to being a restaurateur. We had a good meal of local favorites at an unbelievably low price and went home before nine.

Daniel and I went there for dinner several times in the next two weeks and when Margie came back and asked him if he had a good time staying with Daddy, he gave a glowing affirmative report.

“And, Mommie, we went all the time to Flossie Joseph’s at night. She is a nice lady. Mr. Bunting brought us there.”

Margie looked askance at me. “Who is Flossie Joseph?”

It suddenly dawned on me that Bill Bunting’s bad-boy reputation was combining with Flossie’s mysterious risqué sounding name to cause Margie’s eyebrows to rise. I suspected that something like Rhett Butler’s friend, Belle Watling, in ‘Gone With The Wind’ was being thought of in conjunction with the name Flossie Joseph.

I tried looking histrionically guilty but she knew me too well. The next day, however, we all went to dinner at Flossie’s.

The civil servants were out on strike. This time all of the island unions supported the strikers. Many of the shops in Roseau and the whole of government had shut down. Tourism suffers with any type of negative news, but this was worse. This time the airport closed. Our occupancy at the hotel dwindled immediately to zero.

We did not cut our staff; that would not have been fair. We let all that lived in the village stay home and at least saved the cost of feeding them. Those remaining drew straws for the sole duty obligation at the hotel to handle any unexpected local traffic.

Island House was the end of the road from town. From the Tree House, our residence on its high perch above the hotel, we could hear any motor vehicle from the first turn into the village, half a mile down the road. Few vehicles came to visit in the village and no one there owned one. The truck that provided a sort of bus service on market day was easy to identify by sound; the rest were usually taxis.

As nature would have it, the weather was glorious. There was no school but the older boys were up in prep school. Margie had settled in with a book for some lazy, luxurious reading upstairs.

Our housekeeper had asked to “make a message” in town and would not be back until the afternoon.

Our youngest was bored and wanted me to entertain him, but I was getting out the lawn mower because the large expanse of our upper lawn was due.

“Dad, can’t we go down to the river?”

“Come, on, Tooks, I have to mow the lawn.”

“Would Mommie go?”

“No, no, no. She is reading. Don’t you dare disturb her.”

“Ah, Dad, let’s do something.”

“Wait a minute, Tooks, I just remembered. And it’s almost ten o’clock. That’s when it begins.”

“What begins?”

“Why, Naked Day, of course. Didn’t you know?”

“Ah, Dad!”

“No, it really is. And, look, it’s ten o’clock. We better get our clothes off.”

“Ah, Dad, you’re just fooling me.”

“Better hurry, Tooks.”

“Dad! You’re naked. What if somebody comes?”

“Can’t help it. It’s Naked Day, and that’s all there is to it.”

“Dad! Put your clothes on, Dad.”

“Better get them off, Tooks.”

“Dad, you can’t mow the lawn naked.”

“Of course I can. Watch me.”

“I’m going to tell Mommie.”

“If she doesn’t remember that its Naked Day then you better remind her.”

“You’re not all the way naked, Dad. You have on your Wellingtons.”

“Boots don’t count.”

“They’ll see you at the hotel.”

“They can’t see me from there.”

“I’m going to tell Mommie, I’m going now. I’m really going to tell her.”

“Bye, Tooks.”

Margie and Tooks came to the screened north side of the master bedroom and looked down at the wide expanse of gardens and lawn. There, halfway down the roll of the lawn, I was pushing the power mower in my Wellingtons and otherwise in the all-together.

I saw Margie so I shut off the mower and left it to come up near her.

“My goodness, ” she marveled, beginning to laugh out loud. She turned to our child and said, “Well, Tooks, if it’s Naked Day, why haven’t you taken off your clothes?”

“It really is, Mommie?”

“Must be, if Daddy says so.”

Yeah, Tooks,” I added.

“Okay, then,” he said.

“That a boy, Tooks. Now go down and show Daddy you’re all set for celebrating Naked Day.”

“Mommie, where’s my boots?”

“You don’t need boots, Tooks,” I said.

“You outgrew them. You don’t have any now,” his mother reminded him.

“But you have to have boots on, on Naked Day.”

“Oh, I see. Well then, how about a pair of your brother’s? They’re too big for you, but I guess you would be legal then.”

“Okay, thanks, Mom. These will be all right.”

“Be careful you don’t fall. They’re awfully big for you.”

“You have to have them on Naked Day, Mom. You better get out your Wellingtons. I’m going down and help Daddy.”

“Yeah, Mom,” I laughed.

“You two are quite a picture, Daddy,” Margie said, “but, don’t you think that’s a little dangerous, running that mower without some sort of something to protect special places?”

“See, Mommie,” Tooks cut in, “Daddy has his clothes all off. You have to go back and take off your clothes.”

“Yeah, Mommie. It’s Naked Day. Didn’t Tooks tell you?”

“Sure he did. I know it’s Naked Day, but it’s the one for men, and women can’t do it. Their day comes in 1998.”

“Come on, Dad. Start the mower again. Mommie can’t do it today it’s only for us men. I’ll help you push.”

“I think I’ll save the mowing for another time, Tooks. Your mother has a valid point on the dangers.”

We grew several different plants that produced foliage for the wholesale florist business, but our main effort was growing anthuriums for the exporting of fresh cut blooms.

Anthuriums have a heart shaped spathe, which is shiny and wax-like. The blooms are very long lived from the time they are cut. Anthurium blooms come in many variations of red and also pink. There are also orange and white blooms commonly found in commerce. The spadix sticks up out of the colorful spathe and is reported to have upset Queen Victoria when British plant scientists first brought them back to England. She is reported to have exploded, “Get those phallic symbols out of my royal greenhouses!”

Although the anthurium is from the Western Hemisphere, Hawaiian growers and the US department of Agriculture in Hawaii have produced the most beautiful hybrids.

Anthuriums were originally epiphytes, growing in trees, much like orchids. They are commercially grown in shaded rows, planted like orchids in a loose woody medium rather than earth.

The planting medium frequently used is bagasse, (pronounced BAG-ass) a byproduct of the crushing of sugar cane stalks. Sugarcane is still grown in limited quantities on Dominica but here it is used exclusively for the distilling of rum. When the cane is crushed, the juice is immediately allowed to ferment for distilling and is thought to make the finest, most flavorful, rum. Crushed almost dry, the shredded cane stalks are not unlike the bagged mulch sold in US garden supply stores.

The crushed stalks can be had from the distillery for little more than the cost of loading and carrying it away. The distillery is glad to have it removed.

The sugar cane came into flower and the distillery began receiving it for crushing, so I made arrangements to secure half a dozen truckloads of bagasse for our anthurium plants.

As the fresh piles were deposited in the hotel parking lot, each dumped partially on the previous loads; the pile grew quite high. The smell is reminiscent of molasses or fermenting sugar, and our youngest was cautioned against playing in the messy, sticky material.

“Mommie, can I go down and watch the trucks unload, then?” Tooks asked.

“All right, Honey, but stay with your brothers down there, and keep out of the way of the trucks.”

Tooks hurried down the long flight of random steps of the path two steps at a time. We watched him until we were satisfied that his older brothers were keeping him out of harms way.

Soon, however, a puffing Tooks came back up on the run. “Mommie! Mommie!” he called breathlessly, “Do you know what Reed said?”

“What’s that, Honey?”

“Mommie, he said, Bagasse! And, and, he said it a lot, too.”

“Oh, that’s all right, Honey. That’s the name of that stuff down there; bagasse.”

“Then, can I say it?”

“Certainly.”

Tooks looked incredulous. He thought it over for a minute and then asked, “Mommie? You sure it’s all right?” He had suffered the indignity of having soap brushed across his tongue for saying bad words after being warned several times.

“Yes, Tooks, you can really say, bagasse,” Margie said.

He looked at me and I nodded agreement with Margie’s instruction. We could see him silently mouthing the two syllables of the word. Then he said “Bagasse!” tentatively.

His mother and I only smiled.

“Bagasse?” he tried again and we continued to smile at him. “Oh, Boy! Bagasse, bagasse, bagasse!” he said to no one in particular, and went skibbeling down the hill, all smiles, repeating it as he went.

The unsettling news over Radio Dominica, WDBS, was that in a fortnight the government would be welcoming a delegation from Castro’s Cuba.

Something was said about a friendship pact but I was so shaken by the first words that I am not sure what they said next.

There was to be a rally for the Cubans on the New Town Savanna after their long drive from Melville Hall Airport.

The few American and British expatriates were visibly unhappy at the prospect of this impending alliance and much discussion was promulgated around town and in the Dominica Club.

Cuba had provided scholarships for young Dominicans as had the United States, but the United States did not bother to see that the recipients returned, as promised, to Dominica after they completed their schooling. Cuba on the other hand did not allow its scholarship recipients to remain in Cuba after finishing and they returned, full of communist ideals, to Dominica.

Pro Castro communist cells had for some time been gathering strength in some of the outlying villages, instituted by these returning Cuban indoctrinees. A growing list of incidents began to incline the conservative Dominicans and expatriates to unease.

This announcement by the Dominican government, that Cuba would be welcomed, apparently came after an indication that some Cuban financial assistance could be arranged for the development of Dominica.

“Would the local populace welcome the Cubans?” was the question most often asked in the next few days.

Either the Dominicans we asked were telling us what they thought we wanted to hear, or they were genuinely against the friendly relations with Cuba.

“We could send to the States for some American flags,” one American suggested.

“But, would that be interfering in the local government? Remember we are not citizens,” another expatriate said.

“If the Cubans are to be favored now, we might be sent packing if we came into customs to clear an order of American flags,” I opined.

There did not seem to be much hope of frustrating the government’s current flirtation with communist Cuba and we each knew that if communism became Dominica’s philosophy of fashion we could kiss our investments, and perhaps even our residency good-by.

As the day grew near and tensions increased, Sylvia Johnson, a friend who had a dry goods shop in Roseau remembered buying a bolt of discounted 1976 US bicentennial celebration cloth in the United States in 1977. She intended to sell it to her customers to make shirts and blouses. The pattern was a print of the United States bicentennial logo of 1976, superimposed on a representation of the US flag. The pattern was a repeating one and by cutting straight across the bolt at the boundaries at each she found she could produce dozens of fairly large representations of the US Flag.

Without fanfare these simulations of US flags were quickly cut, attached to hand held sticks, and secretly made ready for the Cubans’ arrival.

The day came and the Cuban delegation was driven from the airport with much fanfare but when it reached town, windows, balconies and street corners, immediately began to display the US Flag representations.

When, after this unsettling development, the people at the rally, emboldened by their flags, gave a less than friendly reception to the uniformed Cubans, the Dominican Government officials rethought and dismissed their potential alliance with Cuba. Note: I missed the arrival and the rally so some of this is second hand. PB.