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.