Roger’s Reality: We heard it

By Roger Owens

His son. His son. He buried his son. We heard it. Not the actual, physical interment – the funeral. For hours we could hear the black women wailing, the preaching, the church music. It was across the little branch of the Layou River known as the D’Leau Manioc. The D’Leau Manioc runs right in front of the bungalow at Zen Gardens, where we were staying, in the tiny Caribbean island known as Dominica. Zen Gardens is in Bells. Bells is a tiny village in a tiny island. To call it a wide spot in the road is to denigrate the road. When something happens in Bells, you can hear it.
    He had made the coffin. We heard it. For three awful, interminable days, we could hear him making the coffin. Sawing, scraping, sanding – all by hand – he made the coffin. And we could hear it. D’Leau Manioc runs through a beautiful, steep jungle valley in the south-central area of Dominica, and although it is difficult to see much beyond the first lines of trees, sound carries eerily well. We heard every rasp of the saw blade, every scrape of the plane, every swish of the sandpaper. This coffin was made with meticulous care.
    After listening to the saw and the plane and the sandpaper for two days, we asked our friends, Kirk and Rita, what was going on. Besides the mournful woodworking, we had seen our friends gathering flowers along the riverbank and noticed a somber tone in their voices. Their eyes held shadows we had not seen before. The flowers were for the funeral. What funeral? The clouds in their eyes grew darker. For the tree man’s son. The tree man? Across the river. The morning after you arrived. They were cutting a tree. It’s what tree men do. Only he was a pig man, not a tree man. A pig man? Yes. You remember I told you about the pig people?
    I did remember. Kirk had told me the pig people moved in up the road across the river and put in a pig farm. The pig farm had not thrilled the current residents of Bells. The noise, the stench, the filth dumped into the river. In Dominica there is no EPA to come crashing down on a pig farm. Pig farms are good for business.

So why was a pig man cutting trees? Because the pig people needed wood – for fences and sheds and cooking – and nobody else in the pig family knew anything about cutting trees, so the one pig man who did know something became the tree man. To his everlasting regret. And mine too.
    Because we heard it. We didn’t know we heard it, but we did. We arrived late on a Thursday afternoon from San Juan, on an ear-battering ATR turboprop, and rented a car from Island Rentals. Having purchased the requisite fried chicken legs, rum punches, and crackling cold Kubuli beers, we set off for our favorite place on Earth. Bells. Jungle paradise. Dinner on the porch, with the sun over the mountains, the light glinting from numberless palm fronds and banana trees, drinking and smoking with our best friends in the whole world.
    We awoke to the birds fluttering in and out of our open windows, sitting on the windowsills and eating the oatmeal we had put out for them. The night had been filled with the sounds of the forest, the tinkling of lizards, the croaking of frogs, and the screeching of enormous firefly beetles. Sometimes the firefly beetles, called clack-clacks, would fly in and rest on the ceiling. I am not exaggerating when I say you can read by their light. No place on Earth is like it. It is magical.
    In the mild morning light, we sat on our little porch drinking coffee to the sound of the river. We read our books, conversed in easy tones, and began what is often a days-long endeavor – to just relax. And at some point, we heard it. We heard a loud crack, which we learned only later was the sound of the tree falling on the tree man’s son. We heard it.
    The pig man really wasn’t a tree man yet. I don’t know if he ever became one. There were clearly gaps in his knowledge of cutting trees. Or maybe he was just unlucky. His son certainly was. But I know one thing. He was a woodworker. Or he became one that day. Because for the next three days, we heard it. We heard it.

Copyright © 2019 by Roger Owens