Cee-Cee returned the clean china plate back to the cupboard and wiped her hands on the dishcloth. It was a hot night with the kind of heat and thickened air that foreshadowed a storm. Even the bugs were jumpy. Sitting on the bench that ran along the back of Grandma Sally’s porch, she looked to her left and pictured her gran rocking in her chair as she fanned her face on a night just like this. Glancing to the right, she smiled at the terrace where her mom and dad had done the same.
She opened up her notepad and took the pen in her hand.
Cee-Cee looked up and thought some more about those early days when she and Oscar were still getting to know each other.
She had closed the book and placed it on the little boy’s nightstand. He yawned.
‘So what did you learn today at nursery?’ She had smiled, tucking the duvet around his shoulders to take the chill from the air conditioning.
‘I did drawing.’
‘You did drawing? You are an artist! Maybe one day you will have a big exhibition in Hamilton or even New York! Can you imagine that?’
Oscar laughed.
‘What did you draw?’
‘Umm, I did dinosaurs and a digger and a car with a big snake on it.’ He spoke with the slur of fatigue.
‘Well, that sounds like a masterpiece, little Oscar, a masterpiece!’
Oscar wriggled on the mattress and placed Mr Bob under his chin, the sign that he was readying for sleep.
‘Shall I sing to you? Shall I sing you a hymn, little Oscar?’
He nodded and let his head fall to one side on the pillow.
Cee-Cee took a big breath and closed her eyes.
‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,
Look upon a little child;
Pity my simplicity,
Suffer me to come to Thee.
Lamb of God, I look to Thee;
Thou shalt my Example be;
Thou art gentle, meek, and mild;
Thou wast once a little child . . .’
She’d looked up as Rachel pushed open the door. ‘Cee-Cee, I heard you singing, and you have the most beautiful voice!’
Cee-Cee shrugged, as the woman leaned over her son.
‘Ah, I was coming to say goodnight. He looks so tiny when he’s asleep.’
‘He does.’
‘We are just going to have a drink, Cee-Cee – by the pool. James has invited Mr and Mrs Williams from next door over.’
‘I know them.’
‘Well, you are more than welcome to come and join us.’
Why would I want to do that? Mrs Williams is as haughty as she is thin.
‘No, thank you, but I will sit with Oscar for a bit and then I’ll go home.’
‘Okay, well, night night and if you change your mind you know where we are.’
‘Goodnight.’ Cee-Cee waited for the click of the door in the doorframe then sat back in the wicker chair with her hands folded neatly in her lap.
‘Mr and Mrs Williams?’ she whispered. ‘I think I will pass.’ She chuckled.
She looked now at the notepad, open on her lap. ‘What to write to you?’ She looked up, hoping that some God-given inspiration might fall into her lap. ‘Maybe I could tell you some of my stories. It might help. It could be a good thing that you know a little about the island where Oscar will always live. Ah, Oscar . . .’ She paused and looked up over the garden wall and down towards the beach. ‘I do know that when I was hurting real bad, back when . . . stories would have helped, distracted me.’ Cee-Cee smiled.
Rachel, sweet girl,
I have been thinking about what to write to you and wanted to start by telling you this: everyone I have ever loved and everyone I have ever lost are still with me. Every day, all around. I see them, I feel them and I remember them. They are not gone, not truly, and I know that is scant comfort to you right now, but I hope in time . . .
I think, no, I hope that writing will be an easier way to get all the things I want to say – things that seem locked in my mouth – flowing from my pen and into your hands. I have not written letters for some time and it might be wise to warn you that my thoughts and those I choose to voice are whatever comes to me and for that I make no apology, as I know no other way. I see your pain and I recognise it as my own. I know that things are hard for you right now, and that you would rather not face each new dawn. I also know you will not believe me when I tell you that this will not always be the case, but it’s true. Things get easier, they do, as the months and years pass by, you will see.
Time heals. Time heals.
Someone said that to me once and Lord knows I wanted to punch him! It felt like an insult, like I didn’t know my own mind! But he was right. He was. It does. And maybe at my time of grief I didn’t know my own mind.
Despite our being together through this hardest and saddest of events, you still know so very little about me. I would like to put that right. I will try and distract you with my stories. I will try to show you that you are not alone in your sadness and that this little island is a wonderful place, a place where my history lives and yours too, because it’s where Oscar now lives.
I think a lot about heaven. I think it was Mark Twain who said, ‘You can go to heaven if you want, I’d rather stay in Bermuda!’ I used to fret over this sometimes in my more restless hours. Suppose this was as good as it got? Suppose my little island, shaped like a fishhook in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean with its myriad of hidden bays and secret coves, edged with full and ancient palms, the icing-sugar sand and crystal-clear blue water, is the most beautiful place in the whole of creation? You see, I had banked on there being a place so breathtaking, so perfect, that when the Lord sent one of his messengers to take me under his wing on my final journey, I would see such splendour that I would weep! My concern was what it might feel like if, when I peek out from beneath those fine angel wings, my thoughts were, ‘Hmph, not as pretty as where I’ve come from! Ain’t a patch on Warwick Long Bay with a stiff breeze knocking up the foam against the rocks and the sun warming your skin as you lie on that soft, pink sand . . .’
But I guess that whenever I arrive at wherever it is I am going, I shall just have to be polite and say that heaven is indeed the most beautiful thing I have ever seen! He’ll know though, the Lord. He’ll know cos I never could tell a lie. Nearly seventy-five years on this earth and my lack of guile and my trusting nature have been both my blessing and my curse. If I could have my time again, I would surely learn how to twist the truth a little, honey up the words that sit on my honest tongue, and have a bigger voice to fight for what is rightfully mine. I am damn sure if I had, I might have kept me a husband.
I got it from my Grandma Sally, she couldn’t lie either, but Lord she had ten times my courage. As far as we all know, she spoke nothing but the truth in her ninety-four years alive! ‘Offend or please,’ she’d mutter, as if neither were of any consequence or interest to her. My grandma’s honesty was the reason my mom cried on her wedding day, and why my daddy refused to come in the house if she was visiting – and she used to visit a lot. On account of the fact that she lived next door, which was just as well for me, as my bedroom was in Grandma Sally’s house. This arrangement was partly out of necessity, with my mommy’s house being short on space, and partly because I was good company for my grandma; by all accounts I kept her young.
‘Him?’ She had, according to the story, pointed at my daddy when my mom brought him home, and near enough popped with rage. ‘Of all the boys on this island, some with brains in their heads and strength in their boots, you pick him?’ My mom didn’t so much as twitch. Instead, she placed her hand on my daddy’s arm and didn’t look back. Her choice was made!
But I am racing ahead with my stories when you still don’t know some of the basics. Let me fill in the gaps for you, my dear.
My name, as you know, is Cee-Cee Symmons. My mom (despite any protestations from her mom!) married Mr Symmons and she was, before marriage, a Tucker; this was my Grandma Sally’s married name. Cee-Cee is short for Cecilly. I don’t think I have ever been called Cecilly – well, maybe once or twice in church or way back at school when a new teacher didn’t know the convention that just because you had a name written in a register didn’t mean that was the name you were called.
I am neither the only nor best example of this.
My best friend Eliza-Jane Clara May Brown was, and still is to my knowledge, called Clara, on account of there already being an Eliza in the form. Thomas Ivor Newton was commonly known as Newton Junior – his daddy who ran the hardware store on Front Street was Big Newton, and Moses Temperate Mills was, and always has been, called Buddy, no matter that he now has a fancy job in government. He might walk every day with his head held high and neat creases down the front of his shorts, as he strides into the fancy building in Parliament Street, but he is still Buddy to those of us who have known him longest.
I don’t know why we called him that.
So, what else to tell you?
Or, more specifically, what to tell you first?
I was always skinny, not too tall, but stronger than any man has ever given me credit for, both physically and mentally.
I have lived on Bermuda my whole life.
And I have never left her shores. Not once. I have never been on a plane, nor a ship.
This island – she is part of me and I am part of her and that’s just how it is; can’t imagine anything different.
Despite what you might assume, I never longed for bright city lights or hustle and bustle. I was always more than content to wake each day and breathe in great lungfuls of the fine sea air that swept through the open window, blowing away the worries of the night-time and bringing with it the promise of something new.
I have listened to tales of my family and can give you ten, maybe twenty examples of folk who had that itch; adventurers who left the island and spent the rest of their lives trying to figure out a way to get back to her. Some managed it, not all. Some now lie in rich earth or dusty soil the world over, nothing more than bones and dust. And this tells me all I need to know: why go in the first place?
For me personally, I am sure that if there is anything in the whole wide world as good as diving into the cool, frothy Atlantic Ocean on a hot day when the cotton dress clings to your back like a second skin and the road home lifts under the gaze of the sun, then I am yet to hear about it.
As a girl, I all but lived in that ocean. That same ocean that I know you despise was like a mother to me. It didn’t matter that the water might be swirling and fierce, so much so that you couldn’t see the eels, wrasses and blue angels sniffing around, waitin’ in the depths to graze your ankles and send a scream from your lungs that would fill the hot, still air. No sir, when your body, aching from chores, got dipped in that cool, cool water, it was as if you could breathe for the first time that day. It was like being baptised all over again in that sweet water that is as good as any I’ve ever seen in the holy font at St Anne’s Church, Southampton Parish.
It was my favourite thing: to lie on my back in that water and stare at the big sky, watching the Bermuda longtails circle overhead, as the water lapped my ears and made the whole world echo. I didn’t know about desire or any man-made, grown-up carryings on – they were not part of my world.
Not yet.
I have always been just one woman, doing my best, struggling with all the good Lord put about my shoulders and placed in my hands, but as the saying goes, and as Pastor Raymond was always keen to remind us, ‘He never gives you more than you are able to handle.’ I’m not sure that this has always felt true, but I have to believe it is true.
My momma always said, ‘All any of us has is our story. The other stuff ain’t of no ‘portance.’
And I can now see that she was right.
What else to tell you, Rachel?
I’m thinking . . .
I guess I should say that being the housekeeper in your home with that perfect view of the ocean has made me very happy, not only because of the view, but because of you and James and Oscar. I won’t ever forget the day you all arrived. Oh! That little boy! He was my darling! My joy! And he crept into my heart where I was more than happy for him to lodge. I never had the chance of a whole brood of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, but Oscar filled that gap for me. He was a total wonder to me. I remember how he liked to keep me busy! Stories before bedtime and any spare moment during the day we’d play hide-and-seek. God only knows that boy had a love of it. I spent an age roaming the rooms and looking behind curtains. I now wonder who was fooling who, as I skirted by his tiny feet sticking out from under the duvet or ignored his giggle from behind the wardrobe door, saying, ‘Now where on earth could he be?’ I sit here now on my porch, laughing to recall the pantomime!
His loss has made me think a great deal about my own life, my own sadness and in some strange but comforting way it has helped me let go of certain things that sat in my mind like a pebble in a shoe.
Funny, isn’t it, how we think our opinions, our expressions of distaste or approval, are so important? Until something truly big happens in your life and you look back at everything that has gone before and see it for what it is: insignificant. I know you will understand this more than most. And I am quite sure that when I slip away from this world, I will look back at its big, green, open spaces and its deep-blue, life-giving oceans and I will see just how insignificant! We are no more than tiny, tiny specks, nothing more.
I have never been one for big-headed carrying on; didn’t think I was the cat’s whiskers like some I could mention. Miss Eliza-Jane Clara May Brown . . .
Not that I will mind when I do slip away, not at all. I don’t fear it, Rachel. I remember Grandma Sally sitting me down on this very veranda and telling me this: ‘In Bermuda there are three steps between heaven and hell. Each step is more than a mile wide. On the bottom step sit those with an excess of money and an excess of time. These folk have the furthest to climb and you can spot them as they have clean fingernails and good shoes. On the top step sit those with a dearth of money and a dearth of time; these folks bear the calluses from a wooden tool held tightly against their palm and have sandals on their feet, but their journey will be swift, as reward for all they have endured. And on the middle step sit those that have meat once a week and enough money in their pocket for a little rum when the fancy takes them. These folk that sit on the middle step spend their time judging them that sit above and below.’
I looked up at my grandma’s round, shiny face and asked, ‘Which step will I be sat on?’ I waited, eager to hear how far I had to climb.
She took my grubby fingers inside her warm, dry palm and kissed my forehead, ‘You are going straight to heaven, girl, and when you get there I’ll be waiting.’
And truth is, I kind of like the idea of that. I like it a lot.
Cee-Cee looked up at the rumble of thunder overhead.
Well, the evening is marching on and there is a storm coming in for sure.
I like to remember Oscar hiding from me, happy, excited and both of us knowing I could find him any old time but playing along anyhow. He was a smart little boy, ain’t no question.
Cee-Cee