The Sand Hill Review               http://www.sandhillreview.org 2010

Lemon’s First Morning

David Hirzel

Island of Tristan da Cunha, 1827

“It’s cold here.”

“That all you got to say?”

Silence, except for the stirring of the wind in the thatch overhead and the steady drip of the rain from the eave onto the woodpile outside. Lemon hears the murmur of other couples awakening: a groan, a sigh, the creaking of a roped bed sling. The closeted air is rank with the foul breath, the sweat and heavy musk of a common bedchamber. The low voices of strangers—whispers, sighs, complaints, a giggle—come from behind the curtains of woven grass. She hears a slap—Ow!—and another, the rustle of a lover’s tussle, a voice she barely knows calling a name she can’t remember.

Inside, the hut is dark, almost as black as the pit of hell—dark enough to conceal the filth and vermin in the bed and the rat-like face of the man she had wed only yesterday. There are no windows to the room—a single door is the only way out. Still, Lemon knows it is morning. She stirs from her pallet on the floor and sits upright. The dank woolen blanket falls away and a chill draft kisses her bare shoulder. She knows already that this will be the gentlest touch she will ever feel in this her new and final home. Her man, Perl, the man who had won her by chance, turns away, pulling the loose blanket around himself.

The night had been one of animal rutting—not so bad in its own way but leaving no promise of anything better. And Lemon had come to the island in search of something better. All the girls had. The ship that had brought them had sailed away and now they are here for good, chosen for brides the moment they had stepped off the boat. Those five men who had sent for them—who knew what they really wanted? Who could figure what brought any of them to this awful lonesome place?

The five women had come without knowing where they were going or who they would wed. Even so, the prospect of life married to a stranger on a faraway isle had seemed better than everything that had gone before. Now they are all of them cast away together—by choice, yes, but still cast away. Counting the governor and his wife, there are only twelve people on the entire desert island.

Now she is wed to Perl. Who is this man? What does he look like? She barely remembers. It has only been a day since the boat ground to a halt on the beach and half a dozen men had rushed into the surf to pull it farther up to safety. The oldest among them, Swain, had quickly claimed the first woman ashore. “This one’s mine,” he announced, lifting Black Mary over the gunwale. Another man, the Dane, took the next girl and so it went until there was only one girl left—Lemon—and one man. You could tell he was not the strongest, or the smartest. Men have a way of arranging themselves like that. Like chickens. Women too.

There was a feast afterward, the best the island could provide, a thin stew of boiled small potatoes and goat meat with never a drop of wine to wash it down. The governor Mr. Glass and Mary his wife presided. Before the day had ended, the governor had also taken on the role of priest, marrying each of the new women to the man who had chosen her. The ship, having dropped her cargo, had long since departed from the island, gone in search of more prosperous commerce. And now it is the following morning. Lemon she knows this in spite of the pitchy darkness of the bachelor’s hall.

“I can’t see.”

“Get up!”

So this is how a husband speaks to his bride, like a master. If she had wanted a master she might have stayed in Singapore where at least she had a flowered apron to wear while cooking and cleaning for a white man’s children. She had instead bought her freedom, escaping to Ascension, an island in the middle of the Ocean Atlantic—an island so remote that even the Emperor Napoleon in his exile was a neighbor. There she had found island life no better than that life in the East Indies. Now this new place is no better than Ascension. Clearly, these men who had advertised for brides had overstated the worth of their freeholds.

“Get up!”

“I get up when I please. I’m no man’s slave.”

Perl gives her a slap across the face. He is surprised when she slaps him in return. He has forgotten that she is twice his weight, taller, with arms strengthened by years of toil. He fights back, but is swiftly overcome. An open-handed blow to the side of his head finishes him.

“All right then, will you get up and see to the fire?”

Without another word, Lemon lurches to her feet, stands unsteadily, swaying like a palm tree. Had she had her choice, she would have taken a man clever enough to make his own sling-bed. A man of some stature, broad-shouldered and erect like Swain or Cotton, a man with kindness in his face and temperance in his voice—not the shriveled Perl with ill-concealed anger in his beady eyes. Here is a man no woman would desire or want, and now, within a day of meeting him, she is his wife. Had she been the first girl off the boat, or even fourth, she might now still be in bed while Perl bullied another woman to make his fire.

But that was not to be. The better men had moved too quickly, claiming their brides in an instant, and now they are all as wed as Adam and Eve. Even the weddings had been quick, the same simple ritual she had always known. The governor and his wife held a broomstick up off the ground, the couples jumped over it hand-in-hand, and that was it. It is plain to Lemon that, like Eve, she will have cause to regret her ill-chosen act and suffer its consequence at leisure.

Lemon steps out of her corner of the hut and gropes her way between the hanging mats. The curtains of the other cells do not close well and she dimly sees coupling forms under rumpled blankets. At the far end of the hut, a gray light trickles down the chimney shaft and spills onto the cold ashes of the hearth, revealing a bench and a single table. There is a whale-oil lamp on the table, its flame long extinguished, and she sees no matches to spark it anew. The rough stone walls are more felt than seen. Only a faint crack of light reveals the door.

Lemon lifts the wooden bar from its cradle across the door and pushes at the nailed boards. The door swings out on its leather hinges, catches the wind, and slams—bam!—back against the stone wall of the house. She is stunned, blinded by the full white glare of a foggy dawn. The wind gushes in, sweeps the floor in a whirl of ash, and flies up the chimney like a loose spirit. The hanging mats sway.

“Hey, close that door,” cries a voice from within, but Lemon does not heed. She stands at the threshold, looking past the fallen gate through a low stone wall. Dew covers the grass beyond the gate, and so the whole world seems gray like the sky. As far as she can see, the landscape is empty of flowers or trees. This is her new home, the one she has chosen. You cannot say it is barren, not with the dense tufts of tussock-grass dotting the lower slopes of the mountain or the thickets of giant ferns choking the gullies and ravines. But Lemon comes from warmer, tropic isles and already her eyes hunger for the red of hyacinth and rose and the green of towering trees.

“The door! I said, close the door!” There is anger and urgency in the voice, as though all the fate of the world hangs on a door with sagging hinges. You and your door, she thinks, stepping outside under the overhanging thatch—you and your door! As she lifts it back into place, cold water drips from the eave—not rain but the gathered damp of fog.

Is the island always like this, always dripping, always cold? One day is not enough to know, but Lemon has a suspicion. When she was little, her mother said, “Girl, you got the gift, you know more and sooner than anyone else.” But Mama had been wrong about other things too. About snakes not living in trees, about white men taking care of their children, about a better life as a free woman on another island. Chance had taken her to Ascension. It was warm and flowery there, but the white planters made no better masters than the merchants of Singapore. And their white wives resented the colored serving girls with their half-breed children.

Lemon had no such children. Her refusal had cost her two front teeth. It had also made her an outcast among the planters, forbidden all but the most menial of work. And so when a man she knew had read to her an advertisement—“Wives wanted at Tristan da Cunha”—she had thought, ‘Tis time for me to wed.

The woodpile has been carelessly stacked under the dripping eaves of the hut. Any cook would have known better than to leave the morning’s kindling where it would be too wet to light by dawn. Any good man would have put up a shed roof.

Another voice calls out from inside—“The fire!”—as though somehow it was her duty to gather kindling. The voice could have come from any of them, man or woman. They are all alike, even the girls she’d come with—lazy.

“Get your own fire. I’m not your slave.” She does not shout these words, she speaks them. No one hears. She repeats them without conviction. I’m not your slave What do these words mean now? She is a castaway—wed to a man she hardly knows for a life of toil and hardship I came here to get away from that.

I can’t go home. The thought is like the cold wind snatching at her shift. I can’t go home, I am home.

She looks at the outer walls of the hut, at the pitted stone mottled with lichen, at the patches of yellow-green moss in the shelter of the eave. The whole town is the same. Town? Someone called it Edinburgh, as though a name could make it what it is not. There are six stone huts to it—most of them storerooms too small to enter. Six and that is all.

A woman shouldn’t have to live like this. Not in a hovel with all those people. My man will make us our own house, she thinks. That is the way it should be.

The way it should be. Ha! Perl must be still in bed, snoring and scratching. He’d no more build a house than he would get up out of the fleas and lice. Lemon hasn’t known the man one full day, but she knows he wouldn’t even dig his own potatoes if Mr. Glass didn’t make him. The other men, who could tell? Maybe all the men are like Perl. The women too.

Not me, she thinks. The door to the hut pushes at the stone she has set up to it hold it in place. No one comes out. The words run through her mind again—not me—not me—not me, like the chorus to an old song, one her mother had taught her oh so long ago, oh so far away. Not me—

“Hullo, Lemon. ‘Tis a fine morning, don’t you say?” It is Mary Glass, the governor’s wife. She is coming barefoot up the path, clutching a faded calico shawl around her shoulders. A broad gap-toothed smile graces her broader face. Her skin is lighter than Lemon’s, her speech melodic with the lilt of Afrikaans, the mulatto heritage of her Dutch father and her Zulu mother.

“Hullo, Missus.” The greeting returned is all Lemon has the heart for. She looks past the stout figure of the older woman and focuses on a spotted goat grazing in the distance. “I thought there would be more.”

“We all did.” Mrs. Glass steps closer, the soles of her bare feet sucking at the thin black mud of the dooryard. The two stand in the scant shelter of the eave, looking past the goat, up the mountain. The mountain disappears into a level ceiling of dull gray cloud, as though such ideas as height and summit cannot ever be fathomed here. Mrs. Glass holds out the hem of her shawl and Lemon steps under her enfolding arm. Beads of dew like tiny jewels dot the frayed weave of the calico. Minutes go by in silence.

“What have I come to?”

Mrs. Glass knows there is no answer that words can convey. She has been on the island for years—for years the only woman. She has learned to be content with the small produce of the potato patch, with the rare visits of calling ships, and with the few words she exchanges with her Scottish husband.

“You’ve come to Tristan, Dearie.”

The gray light is brighter and the thinning fog reveals high scudding clouds as they rush across the wide South Atlantic. Lemon saw a globe of the world once in the house she swept in Singapore. The globe was so small that she had never reckoned on the vast reaches of the oceans or the echoing isolation of islands like this. It had taken days and days of sea-travel to reach this place, the ship beating against a foul wind the whole way. After such effort to get here, there will be no leaving, not for Lemon, not ever. She is a free woman now, yet captive as she has ever been.

This island is so tiny, so remote that it hadn’t even registered on the globe. Probably, it only appears on the charts that ship captains keep to seek out landing places in the middle of the sea. This is the place where ships come to wreck when their leaks are too great, their sails to worn to bear the wind any longer. A place no one would ever think to come to, unless to avoid a worse disaster.

Someone inside the hut pushes at the door. The stone scrapes away, the door opens. Mrs. Glass takes back her arm and wraps her shawl tightly around herself. The other women step from the shadowy hut into the bright morning, blinking. Each gives the governor’s wife a small curtsey.

“Thank you,” she says to them, “but I’ll have no more such courtesy. Mr. Glass is governor in name only, and that because he came here before anyone else. The men heed his words, most times, when they so choose, as you will heed theirs.”

An angry shout comes from within the stone house. “The fire!”

No one moves. No one answers.