The winner of the sixth annual Middlebury Magazine Fiction Contest.
By Dena Simmons '05
Illustrations by Carole Henaff
The guava tree, with its uniquely big, yellow fruit, stood righteously at the side of my stepmother’s house, next to the kitchen where I spent most of my time preparing food and cleaning up after my stepmother, Dada, and two stepbrothers. I would pass that guava tree each day on my way out of the house to do the many chores my stepmother demanded of me. She forbade me from eating the fruit from that damn guava tree. Looking at it even felt like a sin. My stepmother did not think I was worthy enough to enjoy the fruit the tree produced. She did not think I was worthy of anything really. Mostly, Dada hated me for being a constant reminder of her husband’s infidelity.
I did not know how Dada thought that it was possible for anyone to pass that tree that birthed probably the most tantalizing fruit in Antigua without the desire to eat some guava. Seriously, God would not have created that tree and put it in the same yard I lived in if he did not want me eating guava, which is why while I was mostly obedient to her do-not-touch-the-guava-from-the-tree rule, I once stole fruit from the tree, but just once, despite how delicious the guava had been. I was tempted like Adam and Eve to eat the fruit from the forbidden tree.
It was not my fault though. You see, I did not know how to follow orders. Before living with my stepmother, I lived with my mother, who would go about her business, leaving me alone for days at a time. My freedom only encouraged me to find ways to get into trouble. On one occasion when I was living with my mother in Freetown, she arrived home to discover a bloody, one-inch gash under my nose. I was probably five when this happened, and I still have the scar. If you asked me how it happened, I could not tell you. Knowing me, it is possible that I was up to some mischief and got into a fight and had to protect myself.
There was another time that my mother returned from a trip in Town to find me sitting on the backsteps crying. Being the fast child that I was and not knowing any better, I thought it would be a good idea to put my hand in the honeybee nest for honey. All of a sudden, a swarm of bees came flying in my direction, angry that I had just violated their privacy with my hand’s intrusion.
At the end of my war with the bees (well, it was not really
a war; it was a one-sided attack, and I was on the losing side) my face was swollen. My already-big lips were bigger than they should have been, and my eyes were puffy, making it hard for me to open them fully. My nappy hair housed bee stingers for weeks until my mother finally washed the last of them out. I guess no one ever took the time to tell me not to put my hand in the beehive in the tree behind my house. It’s a good thing I was not allergic to bee stings because that day would have been my last. Now I know better.
I nearly killed myself through my mischievous and thrill-seeking acts, and I have collected lifetime scars to prove it. I did not purposely try to kill myself though, and it is not because I had learned that killing one’s self was a sin in church. My mother never took me to church on Sundays while the rest of the townspeople traveled to church in their best frocks and suits to show off and to pray all at the same time. The scars and the near-death experiences are things that happen when you leave a young child on her own to her own creative devices. I was a curious child, and I wanted to get into everything, so I did.
I raised myself from the day I was old enough to walk. I was my own boss and never had to listen to anyone until my mother dropped me off at Dada’s house, never to return again. My lack of ability to obey rules and my own independence at a very young age caused me to develop the skill of covering up for my mischievous deeds and of getting exactly what I wanted when I wanted it. Basically,
I had developed the skill to survive just to spite the people who did not want to see me alive.
I was proud of myself, though, for not having stolen more fruit from Dada’s tree. I know I was capable of stealing more, but I also knew the wrath of Dada, my light-skinned stepmother in her 50s from the British Virgin Islands. I knew she hated me even more than my own mother did. Dada was an unkind woman, who took every opportunity to curse me, to bring me down, to cuff me, to make me nothing. I always felt her glance, the burn it caused on my body because what she wanted more than life itself was to see my dead body thrown into some ditch.
When visitors from the village came to the house, the house that Dada reminded me was not mine, she would tell elaborate stories of how wicked I was in an effort to recruit an army against me, a child of 13 years. She and the village women would sit on the veranda in their modest, floral dresses, as I slaved about the house, picking up after everyone, invisible to the world. I could have slit my wrist and lay bleeding to death, and no one would have noticed.
“Oh, all that Jackie a do is a tief me guava from me tree. A greedy she be,” Dada would say odiously about me, and her friends who had nothing better to do but to humor this fair-skinned lady from Tortola would laugh while looking in my direction. I wanted so badly to kill Dada and the village women who helped to make my life a living hell, especially since I had nothing to do with those missing guavas. Everything that went wrong in that house, that house that would never be mine, was my fault. I stole from that tree only once, like I already said, but I was blamed for every missing fruit. I was blamed for my own wretched existence.
Despite my not being able to eat the fruit from the guava tree, it was one of my duties to water the tree. I had to keep alive what caused me so much pain. I had to weed around the tree, had to take care of it as though it were some god. I started to hate that tree as much as I hated Dada. The tree grew humongous guavas that only Dada and her sons could eat, and I was forced to watch while they enjoyed what I could not.
Dada’s sons, my two stepbrothers, caught the hatred that their mother felt for me like some contagious disease. They reminded me each day that I was the outsider, the pickney from Freetown via Liberta, the daughter of their father’s mistress, the help around the house. I was not family; they made that very clear to me through their daily abuse
and mistreatment.
The village women continued to visit, and as though Dada had nothing else to say to them, she would slander me unnecessarily. Jackie stole this. Jackie did that. Jackie a tief. Jackie can’t cook. I was sick of her. I was sick of the nuff village women who only came up the hill to the house to acquaint themselves with the contractor’s wife, my father’s wife. She benefited off of his wealth and his status, and I, his own daughter, was just in the way, an accident of one of his extramarital relationships.
I could not kill Dada though. As much as I despised her,
I could not bring myself to do it. One day, however, the idea
of murdering her tree sprouted into my head just like the weeds I so meticulously got rid of around the guava tree. For a day, I obsessed over the best and most inconspicuous way of killing her tree. I knew I had to be slick because if Dada had ever learned about my plan, she would kill me just as mercilessly as I wanted to kill her tree.
My father was a considerably wealthy man, and he and my stepmother bought most things in bulk—food, flour, sugar, salt. In the yard between the chicken coop and domicile, we had loads and loads of salt in a wooden shed. Something told me to mix salt with the water I used to water the tree in an effort to kill the tree softly, and so I did. But, I was never patient. The tree was not dying soon enough. I wanted it dead then and there. Along with storing food, my father stored diesel in a tank to the east of the veranda for his tractors and trucks. Instead of going to the gas station, my father could gas up his vehicles in the comfort of his own yard.
I remember thinking back then that oil, when coupled with vegetation, would kill the vegetation off. Up to this day, I do not know how I came to be so clever, but just as something told me to mix salt with water, something also told me to use diesel to kill off Dada’s tree. When I could access the diesel, I would sneak over to the tank and get some diesel and bring it over to the tree to pour it into a little hole I dug up right by the tree’s root. Little by little, I pumped diesel into that hole, and soon, after all my wishing, wanting, and praying, the guava tree finally started to dry up and shrivel.
Everyone wondered what happened to the guava tree and why it started to die. Everyone came up with his or her own theories. Perhaps, the tree got some fungus brought over by a bird. Perhaps, it was because Antigua did not get enough rain to maintain vegetation. Perhaps, it was the tree’s time. However, while I was always blamed for stealing the fruit from the tree, I was never blamed for killing the tree. To this day, like the scars on my body, this secret of my slaughtering that damn guava tree will come with me to the grave.
Dena Simmons teaches seven th graders at the Urban Science Academy in the Bronx. She spent a year in the Dominican Republic as a Fulbright Scholar, and last summer worked in the Directorate of Gender Affairs in Antigua, where she initiated a project aimed at providing better support and health services for Dominican sex workers.