The Provision Tree
Nina de Gramont
In the puddle jumper to Dangriga, the pilot invited Kelly to sit next to him. “Here,” he said, patting the copilot’s chair. “You won’t take up much room.”
His crisp colonial accent made it sound like a compliment. And he was handsome in a ruddy, even-featured way. Probably 30—twice Kelly’s age. But it felt like a date, sitting beside him in so close a space, the unchosen passengers crowded in back. Whenever he touched the yoke or gas pedals, an identical set mimicked his action, moving toward or away from her with ghostly symmetry.
This morning, her sneakers had crunched over frozen grass as she walked to her mother’s car. Now, hours later, she hovered and swooped over the lush extreme of year-round summer. A tropical expanse opened up through the plane’s windshield, its multi-shaded green—that impossible fecundity—spreading out beneath her. Pelicans and frigate birds. Ramshackle fishing boats. The lazy, teal Caribbean.
The pilot didn’t speak to her beyond an occasional smile, and she appreciated this: as if his refraining from pointing out sights and explaining the contours of the journey were a measure of respect. As if she looked like someone who required no explanation.
The plane wobbled toward its narrow, sandy landing strip, and Kelly uncrossed her legs as the yoke came drifting toward her. When her knee made abrupt contact, she drew in her breath and waited for the plane to veer off course. She envisioned herself and the handsome pilot and the 10 other passengers careening and sinking into the water below.
But the pilot held his grip firmly, lowering the plane’s wheels and even sparing one hand to place on Kelly’s knee—a forgiving pat that would have been intrusive if she hadn’t liked him so much.
Still, she couldn’t enjoy the attention. For some reason—in that same instant his hand descended—she thought of her father. She had agreed to this visit on the condition that his new girlfriend not be present. And somehow the warmth of the pilot’s palm made her realize: She would have no way of knowing if her father kept his end of the bargain. She knew nothing about the woman other than her existence; name, age and occupation all details that her mother considered too heinous to relate.
On the landing strip, Kelly left the pilot behind to face her father—who stood waiting behind a wooden fence. She knew she should feel a swell of pride at her own arrival. Everyone had worried, dubious about her ability to navigate the complicated itinerary. She knew she should feel excited: her first trip to Central America and the first time she’d seen her father in six months. But as she lifted her arm to wave, the gesture felt falsely cheerful. Since childhood, Kelly and her sister Robin had been very much their mother’s project. Walking across shimmering asphalt, the air felt oppressive and foreign. Her father looked tanner, thinner. It seemed preposterous that she couldn’t remember whether his beard was new or had always been there.
“Kelly,” he said. “You made it.”
He pushed his baseball cap up on his forehead. As he stepped forward to hug her, Kelly realized she didn’t quite trust him with her care. The thought made her lonely. It made her want to go home.
Driving through Dangriga, she answered his questions—about school and Robin—with detached brevity. She did nothing to betray that the town’s rudimentary squalor astounded her. Shacks instead of buildings.
Colorful, hand-lettered signs, some uneven and some perfect. Belizean children in school uniforms poured onto the dirt street, their voices ringing and liberated like children at 3 p.m. the world over. Pointy-eared dogs—their bodies scrawny like dingos but their eyes gentle like golden retrievers—rooted through garbage or dozed on shop porches, not venturing in through the open doors.
“I need to get a couple things,” her father said, pulling up to the curb in front of Nang Kee’s Super Store. Kelly could see its spare interior from the car, shelves sparsely stacked with rum, toilet paper, and canned meat. A sign in the window proclaimed, “Fanta: taste the fun.”
“Do you want to come in?” her father asked. “Or wait out here?”
“I’ll wait,” she said, as if she hadn’t traveled all this way for his sake.
He got out of the car and headed inside, and Kelly felt strangely rejected. That was the way it always worked with him. He had that scientist’s manner, analytic and impassive. Whenever anyone—she, Robin, their mother—tried to punish him by instilling an emotion like anger or hurt feelings, they always ended up feeling that way themselves while he strode away, conjecturing about cloud formations or nesting habits, entirely unaffected.
None of the people in the street paid Kelly particular notice. She rolled down her window, imagining all the tourists who came before her, wearing safari clothes and too-white skin, sitting behind glass and staring.
Her father slid back into the driver’s seat and slammed the door closed.
A Belizean man with bleary eyes and missing teeth peered in through Kelly’s window.
“Can I have a dollar?” he asked her father, staring past Kelly as if she didn’t exist. He looked unsteady on his feet. Drunken or malnourished.
Her father turned the key in the ignition, ignoring the man as the man ignored Kelly. She reached into her pocket for her velcro travel wallet; but by the time she’d extracted it, the car had pulled away. Kelly watched the man walk down the dusty road through the side view mirror.
Her father glanced at the wallet. “You don’t have to give them money,” he said, with amused disapproval. Kelly didn’t know who had inspired the tone, herself or the beggar.
“I wanted to,” she said. They were at the edge of town now, driving past a group of boys playing volleyball on a gravelly hardtop. A billboard read, “Hug me. You can’t catch AIDS by touching.”
“I think you’ll really like these students,” her father said. “It’s a great bunch. Very dedicated.” Kelly narrowed her eyes, wondering if this were his code: extolling the virtues of his class while secretly referring to his girlfriend, who existed—in some capacity—among them.
“I’m glad you came,” her father said. “It’s good to see you.”
Ever since Kelly was a little girl, her father had brought a group here for the month of February. In all those years, this was the only time Kelly or Robin had ever been invited. Kelly decided his voice sounded more hearty than sincere. It’s good to see you: a phrase he could have used with any acquaintance, of varying intimacy. She turned her gaze out the window. Someone had used too much slack tying up a slender bay pony. It stood close enough to the road that her father had to swerve.
“Look,” he said, a few miles later. He slammed on the brakes and drove quickly in reverse. The road had become increasingly rural—palm trees and the shacks spaced farther apart. Clotheslines, each with a neat row of shirts and sheets.
“There’s a toucanet,” her father said. Kelly leaned toward him, peering through his window. She could just barely make out the shape of the bird, a small version of Fruit Loops’ Toucan Sam.
“I should have brought binoculars,” her father said.
The bird flew away, and Kelly saw a flash of amazing color—brightest orange and purest green. When she let out an unexpected laugh of delight, her father smiled, as if he, not the bird, had inspired it.To get to the biological station, her father drove up the Sittee River in a wide, yellow motorboat, a vessel Kelly wouldn’t have guessed he could operate. More familiarly, he pointed out every possible thing. At home, his conversation was always of the scarcest interest. Kelly’s mother and sister seemed to willfully forget the names of birds and plants almost as soon as he told them, while Kelly took pity on him, listening politely. Remembering when seals were due back in the spring. Learning the difference between bank and tree swallows.
Now she watched objects appear, transform and reappear as she learned their names. Contorted grey trees becoming mangroves. Swaying green canopy becoming strangler vines. What she never would have thought were mango trees, empty of fruit this time of year but in the summer dropping them by the second, splattering onto the ground or splashing into the current to float, bobbing, downstream.
“There’s Boom Creek,” he said, and she learned that crocodiles might be skulking there, beneath the top layer of water.
“There used to be two ducks at the biological station,” her father said.
One was eaten by a crocodile and now the remaining duck—who had witnessed the attack—refused to go in the water. Lonesome Duck, they called him. Before, his name had been Sam.
These stories and this information, Kelly thought. It was just what he would do for any late arriving student. The same sentences he’d formed a thousand times before and nothing to do with her.
He steered the boat toward a river bank and turned off the motor under a wide green arc of leaves, perfectly ordinary among its cousins, the river’s deep flora.
“This is called a provision tree,” he said. “Do you see the flower?”
She followed his point to the most unexpected blossom—like an explosion in response to the gorgeous teeming all around them. White tentacles spiraling into a thundering effusion of red, unruly and spectacular. The bright sort of bursting a person hopes for, inside herself, when face to face with something beautiful.
“Do you know who Frank Burroughs is?” her father asked. Kelly nodded, though she had no idea.
“He wrote that no country with a flower like this would ever have a functioning democracy.” The motor started up again. They continued on to the camp, where students had strewn the dock with flowers. Lonesome Duck waddled out to greet them, looking old and stricken.
“No, don’t,” Kelly said, when her father offered to herd it toward the water and demonstrate its un-duck-like aversion.
All the cabins, including the dining hall, stood above the ground on stilts. Her father brought her to the one where she’d bunk with a group of college girls. Then he went to wash up for dinner. Kelly stood alone on the porch, watching evening light roll in through the mangroves.
Kelly’s sister claimed not to love their father since his defection. But Kelly had begun to feel as though she herself had never loved him. A strong and shameful admission, but that was just the thing. A person she was expected to love and feel close to. Instead, this quiet distance. In some ways, his leaving them had piqued her interest: exhibiting a passion or lawlessness of which she never would have thought him capable.
Later, in the dining hall, rain on the tin roof startled her. It began without a drop of warning, the noise so without rhythm it took her several seconds to identify. Scuttling and atonal—like being inside a percussion instrument while an enthusiastic beginner played.
But comforting, Kelly decided, once she’d sorted the action from the sound. Outside loomed the tropical forest that crawled with boa constrictors and fer-de-lance. A moment ago, the good Creole dinner barely touched, she’d felt wary and self-conscious. The rain somehow shifted her mood.
“This is supposed to be the dry season,” one of her father’s students said.
“I don’t mind,” Kelly said. “I like the rain.”
“How do you feel about bats?” the girl said.
Kelly speared a fried plantain. Her father had already finished dinner and gone off with one of his TAs. Kelly had watched him push his chair back and depart, too engrossed in his conversation to check in with her beyond a distracted nod. Kelly wondered if he remembered she was here, if he would come back to say good night.
“I woke up last night and there was a mastiff bat in bed with me,” the girl said.
Everybody here—the students, professors, biologists and teaching assistants—called animals according to species. No bats or birds, but mastiff bats and collared aracaris. Mist nests were hung throughout the camp, along forest trails and over the river, so they could catch these creatures. Hold them in their hands and scrutinize their features with fascinated dispassion.
Kelly pushed her plate away and stared frankly at the girl, whose name she hadn’t bothered memorizing. Blonde and flawlessly featured, but with a thick layer of baby fat. Her fair skin red with sun, almost but not quite enough to obscure the smattering of pimples across her forehead. Only a few years older than Kelly—too young and too imperfect to be the woman her father had followed out of their family. Kelly turned her attention to the rest of the room, searching out a more likely culprit.
Her father came back in with his TA, an older woman named Mary Ellen whom Kelly had earlier dismissed as a possibility. Now she examined her more closely, quickly surmising that the reason he hovered so near her was the fish-catching bat they’d untangled from the mist net by the river. Mary Ellen was entirely square, from her thick legs to her straight, bobbed hair. She held the animal—its long-toothed head braced and its wings folded—in her palm.
Kelly’s father waved toward her and his students, beckoning them over, commanding their observation as he began to explain, measure and weigh. The bat was paralyzed by fear as much as Mary Ellen’s fingers, too terrified to flutter the barest twitch toward escape.
Mary Ellen’s brow creased with concentration as Kelly’s father pointed out the bat’s extra long claws, like talons, for grabbing fish. He spread one gray wing across a journal page and traced it with a pencil. Then he pushed it into a small sack decorated with teddy bears and hung it on a long instrument that looked like a thermometer.
“Seven and a half grams,” he announced, then handed the sack to Mary Ellen, who carried it out to the deck. Kelly followed her.
Rain sprayed in against their faces. Mary Ellen leaned over the railing and loosened the draw string. Kelly waited for an elated flapping, but the bat fell—still paralyzed—with a thud. Ten feet below, the rain gathered in thick puddles. Kelly worried it would drown.
“Oops,” Mary Ellen said. “I guess it’s stunned.”
“The poor thing,” Kelly said. Through foggy glass lenses, Mary Ellen smiled with a condescending air. Did all scientists have this, Kelly wondered, this pronounced disdain for empathy? Was it learned, something her father taught in his classes? Or inborn? The trait which brought them all together, bending over microscopes.
Mary Ellen walked back inside. But Kelly waited, her elbows resting on the rail until the bat finally stirred below, and fluttered its sideways escape.Next morning, the breakfast bell woke her. The students had already risen and dressed. By the time Kelly walked through the persistent drizzle with Lonesome Duck waddling at her heels, dishes in the dining hall were being cleared. Myrtle, the Belizean cook, gave Kelly a plate of fried jack, papaya and bacon.
“We’re going to check the nets,” her father said, pulling on his rain coat. A small battalion of students flanked him, alert and ready to learn. “Why don’t you meet us on the porch of my cabin?”
Kelly reminded him that she didn’t know which cabin was his. “Myrtle will show you,” he said, and left with his entourage.
Myrtle sipped coffee and kept Kelly company while she ate, speaking in the loveliest Caribbean lilt. She told Kelly about the fer-de-lance that had bitten her husband while he collected mangoes, landing him in the hospital for two weeks and leaving a dramatic scar on his forearm where the doctors had extracted its poison. The snake had fared even worse—caught and killed, its seven-foot body now preserved in a long glass tube filled with rum. Myrtle promised to show Kelly before she went home. Kelly ate scrambled eggs and fried jack, thinking how much more she would enjoy these stories if her father hadn’t already told them all, puttering down the Sittee River.
On his covered porch, the students stood clustered around him. “Kelly,” her father said, as she reached the top of his steps. “You’re just in time for a really spectacular bird.”
Two other birds—presumably less spectacular—hung on a line in their decorated sacks, fastened by clothes pins. Braver than the bat had been, offering occasional outrage: the useless beating of wings immediately constricted by Mickey Mouse or paisley fabric.
Kelly had to give him credit. He handled the bird with great expertise. Its head was clasped between his ring and middle finger. To show it off, he switched it to his other hand, holding onto its feet. The bird gave a few half-hearted flaps of protest.
“It’s a bright-rumped atilla,” her father said. It reminded Kelly of goldfinches back home. But bigger and—true to its name—brighter. Yellow as a rain coat, with a hooked beak and white feathers on its belly.
A woman Kelly hadn’t met yet stood behind him, staring over his shoulder. Of indeterminable age, bland features, and intent focus. An assistant professor or field biologist, Kelly guessed, and a likely candidate. Legs muscled and lean, like her mother’s. A hand that could almost be possessive, resting on the back of his chair.
Her father returned the bird to his palm and blew on its belly, spreading white feathers in search of distinguishing patches.
Who cares? Kelly thought. She bore less and less malice toward the woman, whatever her identity. She pondered the reasons she had, unlike Robin, agreed to come. Perhaps she’d meant to act as emissary. Or to punish him, a reminder of what he’d forsaken and lost. It couldn’t have been to bring him back to a place he’d never really been: with them. It seemed now, quite clearly, that he had always been here. Weighing and measuring amid this tropical splendor. The nameless girlfriend, Kelly thought, was welcome to him.
He inserted the bright-rumped atilla, head first, into a toilet paper roll plugged on one side by duct tape. He handed it to Mary Ellen, who placed it on a small scale.
Kelly remembered a vacation she’d taken two years before, with her mother and Robin in the Cayman Islands. Her father had been in Belize, and her mother thought the three of them deserved a respite to someplace warm.
Funny, Kelly thought, how on any exotic trip home faded into distant memory, and the last time you traveled became yesterday.
Robin, Kelly and their mother had snorkeled above a coral reef. At first Kelly disliked it, the claustrophobic and improbable breathing. But when the first yellow angelfish swam by, a deep black stripe near its head, she’d been too enthralled to mind anymore—the snot gathered at her nose, the briny taste of the plastic mouthpiece, the rumors onshore of bull sharks. Her exaggerated inhale and exhale found its rhythm, like a mantra. When she rose to the surface, sounds of breeze and water were punctuated by Robin’s happy laughter piped from underwater through her snorkel.
Afterward, at the hotel, they all discussed what they’d seen, with only the vaguest notion of what specific fish were called and little knowledge of their habits. Naming them by color—lavender, blue, electric yellow. Or feature—snubbed nose, spiny dorsal fin, large black dot like a camouflage eye.
Her father gently removed the bird from the toilet paper roll. In its own mind not a bright-rumped atilla at all, but simply itself, for the moment held captive.
He took a small scissors and snipped a pattern on the bird’s right wing, so they’d know if they recaptured it. Kelly watched as if she still hoped for a glimpse of something wonderful. She reminded herself of her plan—to walk away a disinterested party. Report back home that it was just as they’d suspected, and everyone—all three of them—were so much the better for his leaving.
“Would you like to hold it?” her father asked. At first she thought he was speaking to one of his students. But he held his hand toward Kelly. She shook her head vehemently, and he drew back, rescinding the offer with reluctance.
“You’ll love this,” he said, still addressing only Kelly.
He moved the bird to his other hand, again holding on by its feet. Mary Ellen snapped a photograph, looking so proud and territorial—making sure to include her father in the frame—that Kelly decided for sure. Without a doubt it was Mary Ellen. The chill Kelly felt surprised her.
He let the bird go. Its flight was more ordinary—less joyful—than Kelly expected. If it were her, she would have flapped her way toward the river, landing in the highest mangrove. Or in the provision tree, alighting beside that extraordinary flower and singing a fantastic trill her captors would be sure to hear.
But the bright-rumped atilla only glided ten feet or so, to the slim branches of a tree Kelly’s father hadn’t identified for her. The sound it made was brisk and strident, more of a scold than a song.
Mary Ellen unclipped the paisley sack from the clothesline, and Kelly turned away. She started down the cabin steps, leaving them to their makeshift lab.
“Kelly,” her father called. “Where are you going?” His voice sounded so disappointed by her departing—almost wounded—that she wavered, as if all her theories had been disproved.
The rain started up again in earnest. It dampened her hair, drops splattering and gathering in the well of her collarbone.
“You’ll love this,” he said again, sounding like he felt sure. “A Caribbean dove.”
Immediately, a picture appeared to Kelly. She already had an idea of what the Caribbean dove would be. A bird she’d noticed earlier: a little like a pigeon, but with the prettiest head. The gentlest shade of lavender.
The paisley sack beat in her father’s hand. Tremulous wings. She longed to know if the bird inside matched the bird in her mind.
Kelly looked back toward the provision tree. The bird had disappeared, seeking cover in the canopy beyond. She wondered which route of escape the dove would choose. The rain came down around her. Warm and tropical water, falling straight and fragrant, with no sign of easing anytime soon.
