Conrad came tearing into his mother’s kitchen like hell hounds were chasing him. Took up refuge behind Maude. Which wasn’t all that unusual. His father, Cleo, tearing in after him wasn’t unusual either. The boy was always on his father’s bad side for his own-way-ness. Cleo couldn’t understand how Conrad managed to be both own-way and a mama’s boy at the same time; none of his other children vexed him so. He banged Maude’s kitchen door so hard in his haste and vexedness that, instinctively, her grip tightened around the chopping knife she held in her hand.  

Cleo breathed heavy; ready to charge Maude to get to the boy. Maude drew herself up tall and expanded her chest. Her breathing slowed. She bounced on the balls of her feet. 

Maude never let anyone flex on her, not in her own house, and it was her house. It stood where Cleo’s parents’ wooden house had once stood but had been built around the old house, bigger and in wall, and it was hers. Cleo had presented all the keys to her when it was done. When Maude accepted them, it was in silent agreement that she and Cleo were as good as married.  

Maude didn’t play about her house. A new paint job every year, the latest furnishings and the ability to lock her door to all but her two children, to keep even Cleo out when she felt like.   

He have nerve coming in banging door like he own the place. Better go do that by one ah he other women an’ dem. Go by Saadie or Germaine or Jen and do that. Not in my kitchen.  

The greens were only half chopped, but the water was already hot and seasoned, and Maude’s knife was always sharp. She waited. 

Wha we doing? 

Cleo huffed in frustration. 

Maude didn’t relax, not yet. 

‘Wha the boy do?’ she asked. 

‘He can’t hide behind his mother skirt forever. Nine he be. Time enough he start learn fu be wan man.’ 

‘With your fists?’ 

Cleo looked insulted.  

‘Is beat I was going beat the boy, not fight him.’ 

‘Beat him for what?’ 

‘He and Sweet-Ting was up by … pond. They know they not supposed to play there.’ 

‘And yet is Conrad you here to beat.’ 

‘Sweet-Ting will get his too. But Conrad ah de ringleader, and you know it. Plus look how he soak dung. A kill he near kill he brother, holding him down under the pond water.’ 

Maude felt a shiver. 

She half-turned to look at Conrad. Sweet-Ting, so named because of his gentle disposition, was one of Jen’s boys. Despite their mothers not particularly getting along, those two boys were like two peas in a single pod. Something wasn’t adding up. 

‘Talk!’ Maude barked at Conrad. 

‘We were just playing’, he said. 

Maude huffed a breath and cuffed Conrad’s ear with her free hand, the other still gripping the knife vaguely pointed in Cleo’s direction. 

‘Ent we warn you from up there.’ It wasn’t a question, and Conrad knew better than to answer. He looked at the ground where there was nothing in his eyesight but the kitchen tile and his feet. 

Feeling he had company, Cleo said, ‘He near kill Sweet-Ting.’ 

Maude whirled on him. ‘Oh, is that Jen, Sweet Jen-Jen, say? Or you see um wid yuh own two yeye?’ 

Cleo’s mouth opened and closed like a fish drowning on air. 

His eyes were locked with hers, and they looked haunted. Cleo didn’t go to the pond anymore. Maude didn’t either. Not that she had any reason to without Cleo. When he first brought her to the village, wi’chile, too stupid and in love to be scared, it had been their special place. He grew up going there to fish with his daddy, and in the time between when he brought her home and when they lost the first baby, he would take her there and press his ear up against her belly. Maude would smile to herself as they sat on the mucky bank and spun dreams. 

Maude, who had had to drop out of Antigua Girls High School on account of her belly, felt, looking back, that she should have known even then how dreams could turn to nightmare. 

Jumbie Pond was her nightmare. Cleo’s too. His children with Maude, Jen, Saadie and Germaine knew they weren’t supposed to go there. It had been hammered into their heads like the Bible parables at Sunday school. Should have known Conrad would be the rule breaker; it was how he was. Always with a ‘why not?’ from the time he could speak.  

Now the memories were back, like jumbie, to haunt both she and Cleo, judging by the look in his eyes. Jen’s panicked call when Sweet-Ting ran home wet and bawling, as she imagined he did, scared after being dunked, scared of his own shadow that one, had clearly spooked Cleo. Now his reaction had her rattled. Maude tried to speak but found that her words were lodged in her throat like under-chewed food going in the other direction. She coughed.  

‘I will deal with the boy’, she said. Another breath and she was feeling more like herself. ‘You nar bang fu me pickney fu none of yuh other woman an’ dem.’ 

Cleo looked betrayed, and Maude knew that she wasn’t being fair — he wasn’t the type to beat one child to appease another baby-mother. 

Maude didn’t always feel like being fair. 

If she had to accept that the days of her being Cleo’s one and only were ancient history, it would have to be with a pinch of spite now and again. She had stayed, hadn’t she, and even remained on cordial terms with the other three in the village. She wasn’t superhuman, after all. But nobody could say she ever mistreated any of the other children. They all played with each other and worked with their father, either over at his garage or round back in the family ground. She fed them all when they came up to the house, took pride in the fact that they preferred her cooking to their mothers’. No one batted an eye. Even the Bible thumpers gave their precious village boy Cleo a pass because at least ‘he tek care ah he pickney an’ dem’. The church mothers encouraged Maude and the others to send the children to church and Sunday school, and they did for the most part. Maude herself only went on special occasions like Easter and Christmas, the children and herself all decked out in new ready-made clothes from overseas after her barrels came in — excess items sold or given away depending on her mood. Maude got what was hers even though she and everyone knew Jen-Jen was Cleo’s favourite. Maude scoffed mentally at that. Jen-Jen was just the easiest, gave Cleo no trouble.  

Many in the village agreed that while Maude was brighter and Cleo’s first, Jen was prettier ‘wid she nice butta skin and good hair’. Just the type Cleo’s mother had hoped for her Grammar-School-educated son, despite Jen not even finishing post-primary. Maude had gotten into High School, but Cleo’s mother had never truly taken to her, though there was grudging acceptance after a time and peace with her son’s first choice before she died. Junior had had something to do with that; babies were miraculous that way.  

Which is why losing them can be such a heartbreak. Which is why so many still felt sorry for Maude, treated her still like a hurt animal, liable to bite, forgiving of her off-putting-ness, considering what had happened.  

Maude lost two children and was 19 before she brought a child to term, with the help of Cleo’s mother, who, once she finally decided to help, was knowledgeable about what bush to use to keep the child anchored inside his mother. ‘Third time’s the charm’, village people joked, happy to hear a baby’s cries after so much heartbreak, though, truth be told, there were some who thought the best outcome would have been for Maude to go back to school after the first pregnancy and miscarriage. But by then, her own family had washed their hands of her, and she belonged to the village. Like she grew up there and had always been out in the ground with Cleo’s mother or sneaking off up to pond with Cleo, the boys on the corner grinding them about making another. When Cleo’s mother got sick and died, and his father got down old before his time in grief, it was Maude who took care of everything and everyone, and by the time their miracle baby-boy was five, it was just she and Cleo in that house, barely grown themselves but happy and thriving. 

Cleo was by then running taxi, but he wasn’t no regular taxi man. Taxi and tourism weren’t big-big yet, and Cleo pitched what he described as a chauffeur service to any hotel he could, in addition to ferrying villagers to and from town. In time, he had about seven taxis and three buses operating out of a garage he built on the vacant lot where Mr Massey’s house had burned down. He had his own fleet of drivers. Mothers chided their sons: ‘See why it’s good to study your book and learn a trade.’ Because while Cleo’s mother and father had been farmers like most everyone in the village, and he still worked the ground, filling up crocus bags of provisions to be dispensed evenly to his various households, he also knew his way around car engines.  

He had won a rare scholarship to go to Grammar School in the city. He had to board in the week, and the church got him to board with a family headed by an old white man, a doctor, who saw patients upstairs while he and the Mrs and their boarders lived downstairs.   

Cleo lingered over the errands he ran for the doctor’s Mrs, most often finding himself at the old converted horse stables at the governor’s official residence, a centuries-old building between his school and the house where he boarded. The garage held one horse-buggy and several of what, even by then, were considered vintage cars. Cleo would linger there until the stable man — they still called him that, though there was only one old, sad-looking horse left — told him to make himself useful. That was his first job. After school, with the permission of the Dr and Mrs, once they found out what was keeping him every time, he worked cleaning the cars in the stable and, after a time, even helping with tune-ups. His first time driving was when he got a chance, in third form and finally considered big enough, to take one of the cars around the block, as they did for the lesser-used vehicles to keep the engines humming and the batteries from running down.  

The old doctor took in boys to prove his goodness but never expected much to come of them. They were Black, island boys after all, especially ones from the country like Cleo — naturally dotish in his eyes. He never pushed them towards medicine or any other profession. The boy was smart but not smart enough to go much further academically than he already had, as the doctor saw it; he would make a decent addition to the civil service once he had his GCE O-Levels. Even maths and English would be good enough. It was good for him to learn a trade just in case. Industrious of him to find work for himself.  

Maude came to board with the Dr and Mrs in Cleo’s fifth year. She was from Willikies, further east than his village, right near the tip of the island. While overlapping boarders was normal, normally they wouldn’t take a boy and a girl at the same time. They rationalised that the boy was almost finished and always out of the house anyway. The Mrs liked the idea of having a girl around to teach things to; it had been so long. She would keep Maude busy. But busy work was no match for teenage hormones, and Cleo ended up having to take Maude back to his parents’ house when she started showing. Her own family never took shame outa dem yeye. It wasn’t until Conrad was six and his little sister, Clay, was three, and Cleo had long become a man who proved himself to be worth something that they forgave Maude enough to let her bring the children to visit, so they could know their people. Maude almost always took along one of the other children as well as her own, usually Sweet-Ting, who was like Conrad’s twin anyway. Maybe she was being petty; maybe she needed a buffer; maybe both. Maude herself couldn’t say.  

She also always made Cleo drive her; to prove what, she couldn’t say. It made sense. She had never learned to drive. Cleo’s efforts to teach her had ended in vexation when, at one of his directions, delivered a tad too urgently, laka he ah talk to one ah he pickney an’ dem, she had flounced away from the car without engaging the handbrake, forcing him to scramble after the vehicle as it took off, rolling down one of the sloping back roads of the village.  

Everyone agreed he was very patient with Maude, and no one could blame him for looking out when what was at home was pure misery. Maude never had gotten over the incident. 

It happened when Junior was six, and Cleo took him fishing down by the pond. Cleo’s father had just died, and he was learning what it was to be a man, making memories with his son. His excitement at taking his boy fishing had been a sight to see; Maude would have teased him if not for the joy of seeing the gloom of his parents’ leaving seem to lift off him. 

Maude had always turned her nose up at the tilapia Cleo brought home. She came from real fishermen; when her daddy and his brothers went out, they came back with snapper, wahoo, marlin, yellowtail. But she was prepared to feign excitement and declare Junior’s catch the biggest she’d seen in all the village.  Maude kept a good house and had become quite the cook, using the big green home economics recipe book she had never returned when she dropped out of school. She would make that pond fish taste like mahi-mahi.  

Maude rarely went to the pond with Cleo by then. There hadn’t been much time for idling in the years since Junior arrived and Cleo’s parents began their decline. She preferred it that way, anyway; the days when a pond date felt romantic were long gone. Go, have your father-son bonding time over smelly fish.  

To this day her brain proved unable to process how it could have happened. Cleo said he looked away just for a minute, checking his line and setting the boy’s, and when he looked around Junior was nowhere to be seen. It took Cleo too long to realise he’d wandered out among the reeds which were tall enough for a small boy to lose himself in. 

People say they both went off their heads for a while. Maude hardly left the house, and Cleo was out in the streets like horny ram goat. When the first outside child came, Maude didn’t even seem to care, and she herself wasn’t good for any kind of loving for years — years. 

If anyone was keeping count, it was seven years between Cleo Jr’s drowning and Maude’s pregnancy with Conrad. People were surprised to learn that Cleo and Maude were still doing that. They had never seemed further apart. Though all the while Cleo had been out in the street up under other woman, he had been working on the house for Maude. She was still distant with Cleo when Conrad came, but she accepted the keys to the new house, in which she had taken no more interest than to complain about the construction noise at the height of her pregnancy when everything bothered her.  

In the chasm between them which only grew with her doting on Conrad, Cleo doubled the energy he put into building his business up. No one knew how he had stamina or time left with all the running around he did, but he managed. After a time, he even gave up the hotel auditing night job he had taken on, following the low-level, low-paying, high-burnout clerking job he had landed after school. Daylight wasn’t enough time to turn the skills he had picked up at the Government House stable to purpose, along with whatever pedigree he had as a former Grammar School boy. He got a bump when the doctor died and named in his will all his former wards, the ones who had graduated, which Cleo had, barely. When the Mrs wanted to leave the island, she sold him the property in town cheap, and he converted it into his first rental property. When Government House updated its fleet, he grabbed up what was left of the vintage stock of cars and souped up the engines himself, expanding his fleet of taxis. His buses though were imported. 

People liked riding Cleo’s buses because they were on time, and the drivers weren’t allowed to play their benna too loud. Whether serving his hotel or local clientele, you had to wash your foot and button up your shirt to drive for Cleo.  

Conrad and Sweet-Ting both spun fantasies about driving for their daddy someday; it was one of the things they shared with each other up at Jumbie Pond, which they had all to themselves. Besides, they weren’t afraid of no jumbie, not together anyway. They had so many siblings they didn’t bother to keep count but always counted each other. Peas in a pod. People found this funny because of the way Maude could barely stomach Jen. She never said anything outright, but she was clearly friendlier with Saadie and Germaine than with Cleo’s pale yellow-white flower whom he handled gentle like water lily. Because she light-skinned, people speculated. Wha dat mek de rest? The four in the village and all the others.  

Yes, Maude knew there were others whose lives didn’t really touch hers, not like the ones in the village, the outside children further away who were more like distant cousins than brothers and sisters to Conrad and Clay. If she wasn’t so numb to all of it, she might be bothered. But Maude had as much of Cleo as she wanted, and she wasn’t fighting any woman over the parts of him she didn’t want. It wasn’t that she didn’t want Cleo. If that was the case, she could have left the village many times. After she lost the first baby, the second, after Junior, after the first outside child, the third, the fifth — the world was changing. She didn’t have to tie herself to a man just because she hadn’t finished school. She was a good cook, and there was always call for that, either in someone’s home or in a cook shop or restaurant. Plus, she had a good head for math — she sometimes even gave Cleo’s papers a second look before he took them into Inland Revenue; she could’ve gotten a cashier job or something at one of the stores on Scotch Row. She could have made something else of herself but found she didn’t want to. Despite the fact that Cleo was sometimes painful to be around — when he was angry, when he was trying not to be angry, when he tried to draw her in, when he threw up his hands and slammed out of the house.  

She preferred when he was gone, liked knowing that he would always come back. That was their dance.  

‘You too easy on the boy’, Cleo grumbled now. 

‘Ent ah fu me he be’, Maude said. It wasn’t a question, and Cleo knew better than to answer. She’d trusted him with Junior and lost him, and there was no coming back from that. Cleo cast a frustrated eye up to the roof where he spotted a beam of light coming through the galvanise and took note that he’d need to fix that before hurricane season.   

And wasn’t that what he was trying to do with the boy, ward off danger? Maude knew as well as Cleo did why Conrad and Sweet-Ting shouldn’t be hanging around Jumbie Pond. No, there wasn’t any jumbie there, but it was haunted nonetheless. The memory of Junior out there in the high reeds, in the squishy mud, among the tauntingly beautiful lilies, in the deceptively deep water, drowning within shouting distance of his daddy. You didn’t hear him calling? He must have been flailing about; the water didn’t look disturbed to you? Maude’s eyes refusing the truth of it when they finally fished him out.  

‘Stupid boy don’t know his own danger’, and that wasn’t Cleo grumbling; that was her, Maude, and her breath hitched wetly. She could just picture it, Conrad and Sweet-Ting roughhousing, not knowing how treacherous pond water could be.  

Cleo was still twisted up at Maude defending the boy when she knew why he had to punish him. His breath hitched too. He wasn’t about to lose another one; he didn’t know why Maude was being so obstinate when she knew it was his job to teach the boy right from wrong. He could’ve killed his brother, dunking him like that.  

‘You only see one side of that boy, and you know it’, Cleo said. ‘He have a own-way-ness in him.’ 

Maude didn’t deny it. 

Conrad was her sweet-ting, her second, no, fourth chance. She had to remind herself every day to dole out equal attention to him and Clay because sometimes she couldn’t believe she had found herself up under Cleo long enough after everything to make him. After Cleo was back over her walls, Clay was hardly a surprise, but they both knew Conrad was a miracle. It was only right to be protective of miracles, right?  

Conrad had been a sickly baby, quick to catch anything, and Maude had tended and petted him. More even than she had Junior, definitely more than she had Clay, who, though a girl and her baby, had never needed extra from her. Maude knew Conrad was spoiled. Just as she knew spoil-and-own-way could be cute in a child but toxic in a man. Still, it wasn’t often she allowed Cleo to put hand, or belt, on Conrad, and today wouldn’t be one of those days. 

Much as the boy was given to own-way-ness, wandering off and doing his own thing, Sweet-Ting in tow, she had to be his safe haven, push come to shove. It was what she had promised herself when she first looked at her miracle baby, knowing it was rare for one such as her to get two miracles.  

Cleo had known it too, the first time he saw her looking at the fresh-born boy in the maternity ward at the hospital in town, no village midwife for this one. Known that they would never be as they once were, she and he, two young dreamers together. He had known it since the drowning, but, if there was such a thing as double-knowing, he experienced it when he set eyes on Maude and the baby snuggling up to her, the boy still literally hiding behind her skirt. 

The only thing Conrad liked more than being up under his mother and just doing as he pleased was Sweet-Ting. The two of them had been born the same year, were in the same class up at the village school. Sweet-Ting was probably fretting over him all now. Probably annoying Jen, crying over the brother he was sure was getting blows for him.  

Jen, of course, wouldn’t be worried, knowing that the most Cleo would likely get to do is take off his belt and bluster, if Maude was about.  

Jen, Sweet Jen-Jen’s imagined annoyance amused Maude. 

She smiled. 

Cleo took a step back and nearly fell out the door because what was there to smile about. A smile in a fraught situation like this was just wickedness, pure woman wickedness. His sudden skittishness only made Maude laugh. Cleo nearly tripped up himself in his haste down the kitchen steps, backing away from her. Cleo hated when she acted crazy. 

‘Go ‘bout your business’, Maude called to his retreating back. ‘I’ll deal with the boy.’ 

Cleo couldn’t get fast enough. Maude’s laughter followed him out the yard and back up the road. 

The sound of her mother’s laughter, a rare sound, drew Clay to the kitchen door. She’d been out back contemplating how to reach a guava just beyond the length of the picker and the longest stick she could swing, wondering if it was worth risking her mother’s wrath and nonsense about her blighting the tree to climb up and get it. She was sure she could do it, too, and not even the ruckus in the kitchen had distracted her. Her mother’s laughter though …  

Clay looked on wide-eyed as Maude’s laughter lingered before dying a slow death. Her mother looked at her and held her gaze, and she got ready to deny that she’d been harassing the guava tree. Maude had a way of reading minds, and it was best to get ahead of her. But then Maude turned as Conrad came out from behind her, like the coward he was, always hiding from daddy. Her mother’s soft cupping of Conrad’s head was also not a surprise. Clay rolled her eyes but remembered to do so on the inside. Maude’s body was unnaturally still as she looked between both her children, as though considering something. Her fond smile had them both looking at each other, brows crinkling, when she said, ‘Time enough.’  

Maude acknowledged to herself that it was time to tell both her children about their brother Junior and what had happened to him at Jumbie Pond. It would hurt to break the rusty lock she had used to barricade the memories of her dead firstborn deep inside herself so that she could go on living. But it was time enough. Don’t go to Jumbie Pond just because I say so clearly wasn’t working anymore. 

Maude rubbed the hand still cupping Conrad’s head over his tightly coiled curls. He looked up at her, gratitude in his eyes alongside confusion. She looked at him, at Clay and back at him, feeling fondness and gratitude well up in her too. Yes, it was time. 

But first— 

‘Go get the belt’, she said. 

And Conrad started crying. 

2025 Commonwealth Short Story Prize Shortlist