To the Ends of the Earth

The houses in style were perhaps West Indian. They were certainly the sort I had seen in the rural South, in the farming villages of Mississippi and Alabama, but they were trimmer and better maintained. There was a banana grove in each mushy yard and in each village a general store, nearly always with a Chinese name on the store sign; and most of the stores were connected to another building, which served as a bar and a pool room. There was an air of friendliness about these villages, and though many of the households were pure black, there were mixed ones as well; Mr. Thornberry pointed this out. “Black boy, white girl,” he said. “They seem to get along fine. Pipeline again.”

Thereafter, each time the pipeline appeared—and it did about twenty times from here to the coast—Mr. Thornberry obligingly indicated it for me.

We were deep in the tropics. The heat was heavy with the odor of moist vegetation and swamp water and the cloying scent of jungle flowers. The birds had long beaks and stick-like legs and they nosedived and spread their wings, becoming kite-shaped to break their fall. Some cows stood knee-deep in swamp, mooing. The palms were like fountains, or bunches of ragged feathers, thirty feet high—no trunk that I could see, but only these feathery leaves springing straight out of the swamp.

Mr. Thornberry said, “I was just looking at those palm trees.”

“They’re like giant feathers,” I said.

“Funny green fountains,” he said. “Look, more houses.”

Another village.

Mr. Thornberry said, “Flower gardens—look at those bougainvilleas. They blow my mind. Mama in the kitchen, kids on the porch. That one’s just been painted. Look at all the vegetables!”

It was as he said. The village passed by and we were again in swampy jungle. It was humid and now overcast. My eyelids were heavy. Note taking would have woken me up, but there wasn’t room for me to write, with Mr. Thornberry darting to the window to take a picture every five minutes. And he would have asked why I was writing. His talking made me want to be secretive. In the damp greenish light the woodsmoke of the cooking fires clouded the air further. Some of the people cooked under the houses, in that open space under the upraised floor.

“Like you say, they’re industrious,” said Mr. Thornberry. When had I said that? “Every damn one of those houses back there was selling something.”

No, I thought, this couldn’t be true. I hadn’t seen anyone selling anything.

“Bananas,” said Mr. Thornberry. “It makes me mad when I think that they sell them for twenty-five cents a pound. They used to sell them by the hand.”

“In Costa Rica?” He had told me his father was Costa Rican.

“New Hampshire.”

He was silent a moment, then he said, “Buffalo.”

He was reading a station sign. Not a station—a shed.

“But it doesn’t remind me of New York.” Some miles earlier we had come to the village of Bataan. Mr. Thornberry reminded me that there was a place in the Philippines called Bataan. The March of Bataan. Funny, the two places having the same name, especially a name like Bataan. We came to the village of Liverpool. I braced myself.

“Liverpool,” said Mr. Thornberry. “Funny.”

It was stream-of-consciousness, Mr. Thornberry a less allusive Leopold Bloom, I a reluctant Stephen Dedalus. Mr. Thornberry was seventy-one. He lived alone, he said; he did his own cooking. He painted. Perhaps this explained everything. Such a solitary existence encouraged the habit of talking to himself: he spoke his thoughts. And he had been alone for years. His wife had died at the age of twenty-five. But hadn’t he mentioned a marital disaster? Surely it was not the tragic death of his wife.

I asked him about this, to take his attention from the passing villages, which, he repeated, were blowing his mind. I said, “So you never remarried?”