He built the fire with his whole body. A pair of loose fitting jeans hung on his hips and sagged several inches below his navel. Above his belt buckle was a spray of black coils. Across his stomach stretched ropes of muscle some flat, some concave, some creased—all taut. I sat behind him, on a stone he had prepared for me. He lifted a machete above his head and brought it down into the V of a thick branch that he secured with his foot. It cracked and I thought of Manuel. Biggah had locks that swung below his shoulder blades so my aunt called him the Nyabinghi. The definite article gave him presence in our mouths and in our lives as our Nyabinghi. Nyabinghis were the strictest of the Rastafarian sects believing in non-violence, loving Jah—the only one with the right to destroy and create, and adhering to a strict ital diet. Biggah the Nyabinghi wasn’t a Rastafarian. He raised my aunt’s pigs and ate pork. But, the word Nyabingi, its strength and its undulations over and about our tongues, suited him.

His back spread wide. His shoulders rounded out and stretched into manual labor built triceps and biceps. His hands each had a glove of callouses developed from years of work outside. He once told me that when he made boiled dumplings he barely touched them. My mother and I knead the dough for some time, our hands sunk deep into the pliant mixture, then we stretch and round out coaster sized dumplings with all ten fingers and drop them into a pot of boiling water. He rounds out his dumplings in his palms, “boom one-two around, squeeze the middle, and boom finish,” he said. He pressed his thumb into the thickest part of my upper-arm as he said the last word to describe how tender the touch should be.

As he made the fire, rolling basketball-sized rocks into place and pushing chopped pieces of wood into tight spaces in the mound that grew, I watched. A pull from inches below my navel caused my knees to press together. An air of sex eased about and around us in the Country. The mating pigs squealed when the too tight wood enclosure pressed them into each other. Women took out both breasts to feed their babies, their brown nipples thick and firm. Mango juice coated lips like a woman’s moisture. The stone I sat on became uncomfortable. Manuel flooded my thoughts, his mouth, his hands, my breasts, his back, my bottom. I was tangled up with him once again. I found the Nyabinghi desirable, but I didn’t desire him. The muscle ache lining the insides of my thighs belonged to Manuel. And so it was.

Manuel had a mistress or several. I allowed and encouraged them in the beginning. In a way, they were all he had. Or all he had that were of value. Certainly he valued them more than me. It was an easy choice. I wouldn’t have respected him if he didn’t. I wouldn’t have loved him if he hadn’t. They were there before me. But at what stage do the needs of your mistresses bow to your wife, or purported love? Manuel had entered my life without knocking. He didn’t know what he was walking into, but arrived every day with his seams unstitched. Grief will do that to you. And you won’t feel the draft until the numbness leaves. But I held him together, especially when he didn’t ask because that’s what you do for your lover who shows up without threading.

I saw him a few nights earlier, when I’d arrived. I was in the Country. He was in Kingston. I felt the chasm of our long distance relationship beneath my fingernails and in the back of my throat. But Jamaica, my sight, my touch, the weight of my bosom, filled my lungs and belly. I stood on her soil and felt her between my legs, especially in the Country. I could have Jamaica without him. Unknot them. He was Kingston, the city—car horns and heeled shoes and button-up shirts. She was roots and culcha, yo! That’s how the selector yelled it into the crowds at the dancehall and that’s how I repeated it in my mind while loving the Country, roots and culture, my mistress.

Poor Man’s Corner, in the country part of Jamaica, woke up at 5:15 every morning. You noticed things like that when your hand was your lover and the activity on the street your only connection.

“This is not Kingston, my dear,” Bev chortled when I asked about wireless.

It was not. Kingston was an hour and lifetimes away. Bev was a family friend and owned the house on Poor Man’s Corner. It was a long walk and short drive away from the remnants of the house my mother grew up in, where my aunt had hogs, mango and breadfruit trees, and acres of land that pressed up against mountains. Throughout the day I would make plans to do many things: write, read, research, edit, iron, flip the switch for hot water ten minutes before my shower. But what are plans when the low hum of connectivity drops of like a drum beat? When the electricity in the town went out everything slowed down as the quiet of the country crept up. It was unsettling until my shoulders relaxed and the tension eased into the calm. Each time I became ensconced in that calm I thought about a life in the Jamaica, in the country. Ease. It’s not an easy life but living was handled with a float-like, learned coaxing as if greasing and oiling the sticky joints of existence was imprinted upon them during childhood—a first language.

When I had first arrived, Petunia, Bev’s helper acknowledged me with a nod. I liked the way she brushed her natural hair up into a small bun. I liked her denim skirt that had a center split and a hem that reached the middle of her shins. She buttoned it at her round midsection. “It had been so long I didn’t even remember how to kiss or sex.” She was talking about the two years after she and her husband separated. She began to tell me her story this time without prodding. The day before she had not. I helped her wash dishes because I was staying for free and Bev served me breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I didn’t eat breakfast or much of a lunch in the States, but saying no to Bev would be a rudeness I couldn’t pull off. In exchange for my room and board and their words, I washed dishes.

I was delving into my culture, I told myself. All the while my selfish reason for asking was an hour and lifetimes away. I asked every woman Imet about marriage. At the farm a mother of six explained that married and single life look to be the same. Men would seek out relationships before and during marriage. And according to the Nyahbinghi, so did women. With Manuel that wouldn’t be the case or if it was he would say so as plainly as he would a request for steamed fish instead of fried. He was painfully honest. He didn’t have the instinct to protect himself from the anger or sadness that truths would cause. His dishonesty, if any, was in his quiet—the unasked or unanswered. Do you think we will make it? Quiet. Do you we should try? Yes.

The men loved passionately. If you had their attention you had the world. But those worlds were doled out to many. Manuel was no different, but his worlds of attention were given to his daughter and mother and sister, especially after his father died. Petunia was married for seven years. During that time her husband began to spend hours, then nights, then days away. She accepted her husband’s absences and asked that he give her some attention. The least. He provided food and clothes for the women he saw. Petunia was left to juggle the cost of their son’s schooling, food, and a home—life. He eventually moved in with the woman who occupied the most of his absences. Petunia found her self a divorced, single mother trying to keep her balls in the air. And unable to imagine a relationship with another man she padded herself with comfort soup and dumplings and bun and cheese.

After paying my way, the dishes sat stacked to the right of the stove. I watched Petunia as she stood fireside. She eventually smiled at me or at something American I said and her lips spread up and over the gap in her teeth. She had the type of beauty that rounded out and bloomed in anguish, flowering in the experiences that creased the corners of her smile and pushed at her cheeks—it made her eyes deep set and darkened at their corners. She woke up one day, after two years of mourning, and thought, “nuttin nuh wrong wit me.” She stretched out her arms as she said this and looked down at her breasts and hips. I chuckled and agreed. I was happy to join in on her self-love, women were usually so hard on themselves and other women. She had begun to go out with the men who stared at her bottom and tried to make her laugh. Petunia smiled into the pot of curried chicken at the recollection, stirred a tub-sized pot of soup, and reached for a piece of foil.

“Between you and me I date men who have a woman.” She folded twigs of dry thyme and wrapped them in the foil creating a pouch. “But they don’t treat me better than their wives.” She sealed the ends of the pouch pressing her two fingers and thumb into the edges. “Yes, they take me out, and give me ah money, but when time come him deh wit her.” She looked up at me, “I respect that. Treat your woman right, that is a good man.” She said this as she stabbed holes in the pouch with the tip of a short knife. She lifted the pot cover edge and slipped the pouch into the bubbling pumpkin soup.

***

Manuel was driving me back to Poor Man’s Corner from St. Elizabeth where we visited the Appleton Rum Estate. We were passing through Kingston. I was in the passenger seat once again. I stretched my arm across to his headrest. He leaned forward so I could comb my fingers through the curls at the nape of his neck and massage the space below his skull. I pressed my thumb and fingers into the dents on the right and left side. That would have to be enough, even though I wanted to slip my head under his shirt and press my cheek into his chest to feel the hair, which was just a bit gentler than those about his chin and jaw, brush against the creases of my eyelids. If I could crawl into his lap and sit belly-to-belly, on that long drive, I would have. Close was not close enough. I understood Neruda when he said he wanted to eat the fleeting shade of his lover’s lashes, the sunbeam flaming from her lovely body, and eat her skin like a whole almond.

Instead I told Manuel about Petunia’s last words.

“Yeah, men give ah money for sex, yes.” He spoke the words into the steering wheel.

“What about respecting your ‘main woman’?”

“Of course.”

“You expect your girlfriends to respect your wife or the woman who occupies that space?”

“Nuh bodda try draw me out.”

“Hmmm?” I pushed my eyebrows toward my scalp, my eyes widened.

“I don’t have time for that type of juggling.”

“So it’s not a matter of right or wrong, for you it’s timing?”

“Not jus timing, but what suits you. My parents were just for each other. My fadda was always around us. That’s for me. Not the juggling.”
I leaned back. The headrest curved around and held my head. My shoulders pressed down into the cushion of the seat. I felt the width of the lowest part of the passenger seat across my bottom. My body’s unknotting seemed sudden. I turned from the side of his face and watched the night smooth over the rough parts of Kingston. Blacked out were the gullies and their haunting emptiness. The night emphasized the sparks of orange that bit back off the coals and the drifts of smoke that sat under steamed fish at roadside food stops. The less-fortunate’s extended empty palms or their push carts selling shaved ice or their forced squeegee wash of windshields for a few red cents, were stilled or pocketed—quieted that night were the unanswered questions of how their lives could possibly change to a sustainable future—a future without all of the juggling.

Leesa Fenderson has published in Callaloo Journal and Uptown Magazine. She is in her third year in Columbia University’s MFA program, where she teaches in the Undergraduate Creative Writing Program. She is an attorney and lives in New York. She writes fiction and non-fiction.