The Sea Grape Tree by Gillian Royes Read Free Book Online

Shadrack Myers.” Her voice had gone cool, chilling him already. “You don’t want to marry me.”
    â€œI want to married to you, sweetness, but we don’t have to rush it.”
    â€œFour children and eighteen years, and we—”
    â€œI love you until sun don’t shine, you know that.”
    The mother of his children lay down again, straightening her nightgown under the sheet, her face to the wall.
    â€œBeth,” he reasoned with her back, “how many people you see married in Largo Bay, apart from the Delgados and pastor? Miss Alice and Mistah Jethro is the onliest ones, and they only marry right before Jethro died, because pastor tell him he going straight to hell when he dead.” Above the sheet he could see the baby hairs on the back of her neck and resisted the urge to stroke them.
    â€œ Boonoonoonoos, ” he said, calling her by the name Granny called him when she was in a good mood. “People in Jamaica don’t get married, you know that. It feel like bondage, from way back, from slavery days. Is only when these ministers start to come and say that we living in sin that it shame us, but you and I not living in sin. We don’t sleep with nobody else but us, you know that. The Bible say we shouldn’t commit adultery, but show me where it say we must marry in long dress and suit with a minister and plenty people in a church, and that we must feed all of them afterward.”
    Her voice was muffled. “Corinthians say every man should have his wife and every woman should have her husband.”
    An old argument that was beginning to get stale, one that even he was getting tired of, the wedding question had intensified over the past year. It had all started with the last minister, a self-righteous man who had departed over a matter related to sexual preference, but now the new minister had taken up the slack. Like all the other villagers, Beth at first had ignored the threats of hellfire for the unmarried, even though her own parents had been married. But she’d finally concluded that she and Shad were doomed and she’d been planning a wedding since late the year before. A contributing factor, Shad suspected, was that she saw that the island’s well-to-do families were headed by married parents and, since middle-class people were respected, and since she was an ambitious woman, Beth had decided to claim her place among them by becoming a married woman.
    Whenever he raised the topic of marriage, Shad had received advice to the contrary from several local residents, including his own boss.
    â€œStay away from it as long as you can,” Eric had remarked once. “If it doesn’t drive you to divorce, it will drive you to drink. A wedding ring makes a woman go crazy, I’m telling you. She suddenly thinks she can run your life.” Eric had been reading a newspaper when he said it and Shad still remembered the black eyebrows above the paper.
    Shad touched Beth on the shoulder. “Name me one thing that marriage is good for,” he said.
    â€œCom-mitment.” She pronounced the word carefully, as if she’d heard it on one of the soap operas she watched while cooking dinner.
    â€œWe not committed now?”
    â€œNo. You can go off any time and leave me with the children and—”
    â€œI come home every night to you for sixteen years now. I don’t love another woman for more than eighteen years. What you call that, not commitment? I bring home all my money, all my tips. I don’t spend a penny on another woman, on nothing outside the house, not even on liquor. I buy you a television, a refrigerator, and me and Frank put on the back room last year. You don’t call that love?”
    Beth turned over. “I know you love me, and I know you will think about it because you love me. If you can’t afford to pay for a nice wedding, like you say, you will understand that I need to have a job so we can have a