anguished reality of these farmers, these people of red sandstone? When was Pennsylvania an ocean, to lay down all this gritty rock, that stains your palms pink when you lift it?
Placatory, I agreed, “The view
is
lovely.”
“Think of poor Daddy,” she said, turning away, Mustardseed dismissed. “He has no sense of landscape. He says he wants to be buried under a sidewalk.”
The cemetery of the town where I live, like many, has climbed a hill, and the newest graves are on the top, arranged along ample smooth roadways of asphalt. Some friends of ours have buried children here. But I had stayed away until it was time to teach my son to ride a bicycle. It is safe; on weekdays few cars visit the fresh graves, with their plastic-potted morning glories and exotic metal badges from veterans’ organizations. The stones are marble, modernly glossy and simple, though I suppose that time will eventually reveal them as another fashion, dated and quaint. Now, the sod is still raw, the sutures of turf are unhealed, the earth still humped, the wreaths scarcely withered. Sometimes we see, my son and I, the strained murmurous breakup of a ceremony, or a woman in mourning emerge from an automobile and kneel, or stand nonplussed, as in a social gap. I remember my grandfather’s funeral, the hurried cross of sand the minister drew on the coffin lid, the whine of the lowering straps, the lengthening, cleanly cut sides of clay, the thought of air, the lack of air forever in the close dark space lined with pink satin, the foreverness,the towering foreverness—it does not bear thinking about, it is too heavy, like my son’s body as he wobbles away from me on his bicycle. “Keep moving,” I shout, the words turning chalky in my mouth, as they tend to do when I seek to give instruction—“the essence of the process is to keep moving!”
LETTER FROM ANGUILLA
February 1968
U NTIL ITS REVOLUTION last summer, Anguilla was one of the most obscure islands in the Caribbean. A long, low coral formation of thirty-four square miles, it seems from the air a cloud shadow, or a shadow image of St. Martin, which lies twelve miles to the south and whose green mountains loom dramatically in the view from Anguilla. Whereas from St. Martin, Anguilla, at its highest elevation scarcely two hundred feet above sea level, can easily be overlooked. It is even obscure who named it “Eel”—the Spaniards, who may have cruised close enough under Columbus to call it
Anguila
, or the French, who, under Captain René Laudonnière in 1564, definitely called there, en route to Florida from Dominica, and may have bestowed the appellation
L’Anguille
. Both nations left this modest island to the British to colonize. In 1609, a Captain Harcourt, after touching at Nevis, “disembogued” on the north side of Anguilla, where “I think never Englishmen disembogued before us.” Southey’s history of the West Indies records under the year 1650, “Theisland of Anguilla, so called from its snake-like form, is said to have been discovered and colonized by the English this year; it was filled with alligators and other noxious animals, but the soil was good for raising tobacco and corn, and the cattle imported multiplied very fast. It was not colonized under any public encouragement; each planter laboured for himself, and the island was frequently plundered by marauders.”
The lack of external encouragement sounds a constant note in Anguilla’s history. In 1707, Captain Thomas Bolton and nine other survivors of a sunken ship, after thirty-one days adrift in a small boat, were cast up at Long Bay. His journal acknowledges that “the People were very kind to us”—“The Islanders very much bewail’d our Condition, and were ready to fight among themselves, in shewing their Eagerness to welcome us to their Houses”—but complains of their stay that “the worst was, we could not have any News from other Islands; this being an Island of little Trade, and no
Placatory, I agreed, “The view
is
lovely.”
“Think of poor Daddy,” she said, turning away, Mustardseed dismissed. “He has no sense of landscape. He says he wants to be buried under a sidewalk.”
The cemetery of the town where I live, like many, has climbed a hill, and the newest graves are on the top, arranged along ample smooth roadways of asphalt. Some friends of ours have buried children here. But I had stayed away until it was time to teach my son to ride a bicycle. It is safe; on weekdays few cars visit the fresh graves, with their plastic-potted morning glories and exotic metal badges from veterans’ organizations. The stones are marble, modernly glossy and simple, though I suppose that time will eventually reveal them as another fashion, dated and quaint. Now, the sod is still raw, the sutures of turf are unhealed, the earth still humped, the wreaths scarcely withered. Sometimes we see, my son and I, the strained murmurous breakup of a ceremony, or a woman in mourning emerge from an automobile and kneel, or stand nonplussed, as in a social gap. I remember my grandfather’s funeral, the hurried cross of sand the minister drew on the coffin lid, the whine of the lowering straps, the lengthening, cleanly cut sides of clay, the thought of air, the lack of air forever in the close dark space lined with pink satin, the foreverness,the towering foreverness—it does not bear thinking about, it is too heavy, like my son’s body as he wobbles away from me on his bicycle. “Keep moving,” I shout, the words turning chalky in my mouth, as they tend to do when I seek to give instruction—“the essence of the process is to keep moving!”
LETTER FROM ANGUILLA
February 1968
U NTIL ITS REVOLUTION last summer, Anguilla was one of the most obscure islands in the Caribbean. A long, low coral formation of thirty-four square miles, it seems from the air a cloud shadow, or a shadow image of St. Martin, which lies twelve miles to the south and whose green mountains loom dramatically in the view from Anguilla. Whereas from St. Martin, Anguilla, at its highest elevation scarcely two hundred feet above sea level, can easily be overlooked. It is even obscure who named it “Eel”—the Spaniards, who may have cruised close enough under Columbus to call it
Anguila
, or the French, who, under Captain René Laudonnière in 1564, definitely called there, en route to Florida from Dominica, and may have bestowed the appellation
L’Anguille
. Both nations left this modest island to the British to colonize. In 1609, a Captain Harcourt, after touching at Nevis, “disembogued” on the north side of Anguilla, where “I think never Englishmen disembogued before us.” Southey’s history of the West Indies records under the year 1650, “Theisland of Anguilla, so called from its snake-like form, is said to have been discovered and colonized by the English this year; it was filled with alligators and other noxious animals, but the soil was good for raising tobacco and corn, and the cattle imported multiplied very fast. It was not colonized under any public encouragement; each planter laboured for himself, and the island was frequently plundered by marauders.”
The lack of external encouragement sounds a constant note in Anguilla’s history. In 1707, Captain Thomas Bolton and nine other survivors of a sunken ship, after thirty-one days adrift in a small boat, were cast up at Long Bay. His journal acknowledges that “the People were very kind to us”—“The Islanders very much bewail’d our Condition, and were ready to fight among themselves, in shewing their Eagerness to welcome us to their Houses”—but complains of their stay that “the worst was, we could not have any News from other Islands; this being an Island of little Trade, and no
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