The Empty Hammock Read Online Free Page B

laughing.
    Ana frowned, “the Tainos were his passion. He knows their history more than anyone in the world. It’s as if he thought they were his people.”
    Clara laughed, “well I am certain that I'm of African decent, and that my parents came here on a slave ship. Just take a look at my hair, she grabbed off her tie head and wiped her face with it.”
    Her hair was sticking up all over her head. The coarse short strands were braided in big plaits that refused to stay down.
    “How I hooked up with a man who was so fascinated with the past, I don’t know. He was lecturing history at the University of the West Indies when I went there.”
    “Oooh.” Carey and Ana looked at each other and smiled. They were never tired of hearing about their parent’s romance.
    “He came into the classroom,” Clara scrubbed her side of the chest, her tongue sticking out a bit from her mouth, “then he looked at me and I felt dizzy. He was just the most handsome man I'd ever seen. He gave me a C that semester and I went to his office to contest my grade.
    He said to me, ‘Well… Clara Sinclair, if you were not staring at me so much in class you would know what I was saying and you would have gotten a better grade’. She mimicked her late husband’s deep voice and laughed.
    “I married him six weeks after that and had Carey nine months later.  We moved to Rio Bueno so that we could be near his pet project, the Tainos. And Lord help me, that man was obsessed. He even spoke the language.”
    Ana laughed. “That’s funny. Our grandfather is Spanish. Weren’t the Spanish the ones to discover the New World and wipe out the Indians on the islands? If Daddy’s claim is true then where would his lineage start, wasn’t there some mass genocide or something.”
    Ana’s curly hair was falling from her bun and she was panting as she spoke. The uneasy feeling was coming back. For all her twenty-six years she had prided herself as a rational thinker. She was losing it. She felt as if she should hurry and so she started scrubbing the box urgently.
    She had to see what was inside. What was in the box was the key.
    “What did you say?” Carey asked wearily, as he watched his sister scrubbing as if her life depended on it.
    “I didn’t say anything,” Ana said, panting.
    “You said what was in the box is key,” Carey repeated, frowning.
    “Yes you did,” Clara said, before she could begin protesting.
    “I probably said what we needed was a key.” Ana looked up at her mother and kept scrubbing.
    They scrubbed until lunchtime and the years of dirt and grime kept coming off layer by layer. They could actually see the crease where the lid of the box met the bottom.
    “There is a pattern on the box,” Carey announced after a few minutes.
    “Good,” Clara declared. “I say, let us eat and then come back and see it.”
    “No,” Ana shouted. “We have to do it now. We have to open the box before the end of the day. Please guys, I am so anxious about this.”
    “You need rest, that’s what,” her mother declared. “This buried treasure thing has gotten to your head. We could find nothing in there. This property was only bush and thick weeds interspersed with large trees when we bought it from Schuster and Landers, the real estate dealers. The only things that could be considered familiar were the palm trees. If there is treasure in there,” she pointed to the rusty box, “somebody would have had to brave it in the dense foliage to dig up the ground and then bury it.”
    “It could be a slave hiding his masters gold that he stole from the Seville plantation,” Carey piped up, “that should fetch quite a bit of money when we show it to the world.” He grinned at Ana. “Or it could be a French buccaneer hiding his jewels.”
    “You are crazy,” Ana laughed. “The French were never here in Jamaica for any period of time. Know your history, Carey.”
    “I'm going inside to fix us some guava juice and then we eat rice and