A Simple Distance by K. E. Silva Page B

one.
    Lessons learned, we drove home in the warm breeze of the growing darkness. My hands sunk underneath my legs in the passenger seat, fingers trembling and my breath coming shallow and fast, shallow and fast.
    Dinner, I took out to the porch, sat in my grandmother’s chair, and stared at her moon.

CHAPTER 9
    Uncle Martin was always looking to be someone more important than the man he really was: always in the shadow of Uncle George. One of Baobique’s lesser mountains.
    He won his chance when he and Mr. Williams followed us into the gardens at Godwyn, through the bush to the far end of the estate, watched Susan and me pull each other close.
    And he ran with it, ran us all the way back to Tours, just as Mr. Williams ran down to Sommerset. Both men bursting with the news— a Hill and a Pascal, two women, caught in the dirt, acting like one a dem shoulda been a man. I tell you, it was a SIGHT to see. Neither man believing the luck he’d unearthed out there just past Grampy’s grave.
    At Tours, it was decided. Uncle Martin and Uncle Charles discussed the settlement over a bottle of rum around the dining table, as Susan and I sat, prey to a movement we couldn’t control, at either end. My mom and Auntie Clara busying themselves making sardine sandwiches in the kitchen, and Granny listening from her lawn chair on the front porch, the sea blast carrying their angry voices and our silence straight to her ears on pregnant beads of moisture.
    Uncle Charles did the speaking.
    He screamed. Five years in prison, Jean! Five years! This isn’t San Francisco, woman. What filth have you brought here?
    Dirt and clay caked to the back of both my elbows, eyes to the floor, all I could see was my own shame—stripped and naked with nowhere to hide.
    How could you do this to us? How could you do this to George? Are you trying to kill him?
    Uncle Martin chimed in, Do you know what will happen if Mr. Williams tells the local police? They’ll lock you up for gross indecency. And what could we say, na? George wrote the law himself!
    Uncle Charles: You’d put that choice to him? You’d make your dying uncle lock up his favorite niece for this?
    Susan and I sat silent at the dining table, its white cloth glowing in the coming of the dark.
    The women were silent: Granny on her porch, Auntie Clara in the kitchen, my mom in the doorway just watching.
    This was men’s work. If Susan and I had been men ourselves, we’d have been facing ten years, not five.
    Looking back, I see how much danger we were really in. I didn’t have to be scared all those years I’d stayed away from Baobique, but I’d been wise to keep my mouth shut about being gay.
    No one is out in Baobique. They can’t be.
    Susan and I were never to see each other again. My uncles said since neither of us lived on the island, and I rarely even visited, they would be able to laugh off the rumors certain to spread from Sommerset. They would simply deny it ever happened.
    From his bedroom, Uncle George overheard the whole thing. He didn’t have to be dead to roll over in his grave, turn his slouching back to me. The next morning, the morning of the Hill funeral, bright and early, he had Uncle Charles give him a shave, a proper shave with his straight-edged razor from London. And just as Granny began working herself up over company expected after the funeral, Uncle George called me over to his good side. I fed him a sip of grapefruit juice I had just squeezed in the kitchen to keep myself from the vulnerability of idleness.
    Very slowly, through heavy, heavy lips, Uncle, the orator, took me into his confidence: There is something about an island, Jean. It gets in your blood. I could have stayed in Canada for treatment. I would have lived longer. But there are worse things than death, to me.
    His breathing was even, from the depth of his lungs. Calm.
    When the people in Sommerset had only the river and rain water to wash their clothes and supply their houses, I put in two water