Land of Love and Drowning: A Novel by Tiphanie Yanique

church, he had not heard of the pillar of salt. It happened. He did not turn to salt exactly, but something in him did become preserved. He looked back and saw the little girl in the red dress being pulled away from him, but looking back at him as well. And from then on, it was clear what would be.
    —
    Back in Savan, Eeona decided she had to do something. Mama had said “watch out” for the boy and Anette. Perhaps the first thing she should do was to send Anette to the cousin in Tortola. This was honoring Mama’swish, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it a clean solution to all problems? The Tortola cousin was older, feeble even, but Eeona could say it was just for a visit and then a visit would turn into years. Or what of that bright-eyed Stemme woman in Anegada? But even if that woman took the child, all of St. Thomas would judge Eeona for sending her sister to Anegada to be a fisherman’s concubine. But there was also the orphanage on the less familiar island of St. Croix. Someone had written about it in the
Daily News
and it seemed a clean place. And St. Croix, Eeona had heard, was a large piece of land where no one would even know who little Anette Bradshaw really was and to whom she belonged.
    And then Eeona would be able to start. Start over. In the meantime, the mentor Eeona had decided on was off island. She was rootless, that Liva. But this was fine, because Eeona had to sew herself a blue dress, which she knew caused women to calm in her presence.
    Liva Lovernkrandt returned from her most recent New York visit just when Eeona was adding a lace hem.

25.
    The McKenzies of St. Thomas were all men. They were descendants of a Catholic slave owner who gave all his land to his one hairy bastard son. Y chromosomes were all that was ever passed down. The men were all huge, full of muscles before they made their tenth year. They could make baby boys from age nine to ninety. But this masculinity didn’t come free. In every litter there were a few who weren’t quite right.
    The McKenzie oddness was a mysterious thing that made some of the McKenzie boys never learn to dance well or read even the simplest books. Still, there were those who could calculate your birthday and the hour you were born and then tell you when your world would end, or those whocould play any instrument you put their fingers to. McKenzies were hard to love, though, because they never hugged or smiled much or seemed to need anyone—not even one another. The women were all outsiders, mothers and wives. Breeders of a race of men.
    The McKenzie men were never senators, were never doctors; they were never journalists, never major contributors to Caribbean or even Virgin Islands history. They had two truly extraordinary qualities—they always had sons and they always married well.
    With the exception of Rebekah, the McKenzie wives and mothers were of the richest, highest families, which kept the family light-skinned—easy to pass for Portuguese or Sicilian when traveling to the U.S. So the McKenzie boys who at least learned to read continued to carry on these ultramale genes, matched with all the wealth and caste St. Thomas and the other Virgin Islands had to offer. Many of the men became successful—though never all on their own merit. Always with the help of a well-connected and rich-born wife.
    Nowadays our McKenzies tend toward jobs such as police officer and security guard, fireman and military man. Those public jobs weren’t always available to natives, though Benjamin McKenzie, Rebekah’s husband and the legal father of all her sons, did manage to make it in the Navy. But still the McKenzies were always a family of class and coarseness. Every debutante sank her face into a silk-covered pillow and dreamed it was the hairy belly of a McKenzie man. Every businessman, black, white, mixed, Frenchy, or mulatto, longed for endless grandsons and so sold portions of his soul to see his daughters married and McKenzied.
    With Rebekah, however, Benjamin McKenzie