by Shani Mootoo
By the time they were in the country, the curfew was lifting. Dolly looked out the window the whole time, with one arm around the boy’s shoulders. They passed a few cars, a man with a donkey, a bullock cart, and a handful of people making their way to work. Dolly kept her face turned so that the child couldn’t see her tears, but he knew she was crying, as she kept daubing her eyes with a cloth she had taken from her bag. She broke off a slice of bread and, still not watching him, handed it to him. He had never seen his mother like this and was too upset, too frightened, to eat. Although he knew, he asked why she was crying. She pulled him against her and told him to try and sleep.
VISITORS BEARING TRUTHS
It had been several months since the boy last saw his little friend from Marion. His mother knew they were coming. All he knew, though, was that they were having visitors. She hadn’t told him who they would be. She washed him and told him to wear something clean and proper. When he insisted on knowing who the visitors were, she said only, “Visitors. Why you have to know everything? If I tell you, it wouldn’t be no surprise. You don’t want a surprise?”
The girl and her mother arrived, driven by one of Narine Sangha’s chauffeurs on the pretext that they were going to the fish market. Mrs. Sangha, huffing up the sandy path, saw the boy in the yard and rushed to hug him. She held his face in both her hands and kissed his cheek. He wished his mother had told him in advance. He looked at the sand, afraid to meet Mrs. Sangha’s eyes, lest she see that his had filled with tears.
“I miss those eyes, boy. Why you crying, darling? You not happy to see us?” Mrs. Sangha said with unabashed emotion. She hugged Dolly.
The girl wouldn’t look at him. She looked in the direction of the ocean, at the ground, at her feet, at nothing in particular. She seemed taller, thinner. She kept a hand on her mother’s elbow as they walked to the house. When they got to the steps, he pulled her by the hand and asked her to stay in the yard with him. She said it was too hot outside. She pulled her hand out of his and followed her mother and Dolly up the stairs. He followed uneasily. Her mother occupied one of Dolly’s two straight-backed wood chairs; the girl stood, leaning against her mother’s body. Dolly looked genuinely happy to see Mrs. Sangha, and seemed not to hold any grudges against her. The boy asked the girl if she wanted to go down to the beach. She looked directly at him, silent. Then she shook her head and stared at the ground again. He asked if she wanted to see the chickens in the avocado tree, or perhaps the four baby chicks in the crawl space under the house, or, better than that, if she wanted to crawl under the house and take fresh eggs from the hen’s hiding places. She turned away entirely, whispered something in her mother’s ear. Her mother said out loud, “You asking for him all the time, and now you here only a few minutes and you ready to go home?” He had never seen the girl look so before. She pouted, her face turned red, her eyes filled with tears. She whispered again in her mother’s ear. Her mother said rather sharply, “We will go in a little while. I want to see Miss Dolly for a little bit. Now stay quiet.”
The boy told his mother he was going outside to play, and was surprised by the weakness of own voice. The yard that day seemed to smell more strongly than he ever remembered, of chicken mess and coal ash. He could have choked on the stench that had never been apparent before. He left the yard and ambled down in the direction of the sea. He broke into a run along the sandy path crisscrossed with sea-grape vines to the beach.
He sat heavily on a fallen coconut tree trunk amid the tidalline debris, a blue bottle cap, a shriveled mango seed, sand-smoothed chips of green and brown glass. Despite the breeze blowing in off the water and lashing his body, the high sun burned his skin, and the sand scorched the soles of his feet. The wind stung his eyes and caused them to water. He dug his toes into the sand, flicking up clumps of the colder damp sand from beneath the surface. He looked back toward the house and saw a tiny weather-worn shack that had a tilt he had not previously noticed. Even though it would have been impossible, with that strong breeze and aromas coming from the ocean, he felt as though the odors of the yard were trapped in his nostrils and chest.
From that distance he could see that the galvanized roof, curled at the corners, was rusted. He had become so used to the wallpaperer’s handiwork that he had stopped noticing it. Now he saw that most of the pages had been peeled by the wind; some flapped about noisily; some he himself had ripped off in moments of idleness. And exposed behind the wallpaperer’s work was the blandness of weather-bleached boards. The house looked like someone else’s foolishly decorated shack. He felt weak and ill in that hot sun. Looking at his thin, bare legs in his khaki short pants, he noticed that his skin, as deep purple as that of a caymit fruit, was dry. He thought of Narine Sangha’s light-colored skin. His own always seemed to be covered in a gray film.
It was as if hours had passed before his mother came looking for him. She found him kneeling on the sand, trying to shove the tree trunk one way and, failing that, leaning his back against it, his knees raised, heels dug in the sand, trying to force it backward. With the wind rushing into the trees at the shoreline, the crashing waves behind him, the confusion broiling in his head, he didn’t hear her shouting.
“But what wrong with you, child?” She grabbed him by one arm and yanked him upright. He began to kick the trunk over and over with one foot and then the next.
“What stupidness is this, child? You gone mad or what? You don’t have no manners?
“What you leave the house so for? Shut up your mouth nownow, or I will give you something to cry for in truth. You too old to be crying over this kind of stupidness. Behaving like this over nothing. You hear me? Nothing!”
She tried to contain his flailing arm, the knot of his small fist. Finally she grabbed him under his arms from behind and tried to pull him backward to the house. He dug his heels into the powdery sand and was dragged. By the time they reached the house, his rage was spent. She spun him around to face her and, kneeling on the sand in front of the house, she pushed his face into her shoulder, pressing his head hard against her. She rocked him from side to side and whispered, “Shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh. I know, my baby. Don’t cry. You hear? Listen to me, son. Let me explain something to you. They not our friends. Maybe I myself mislead you.” She felt him try to pull away from her, but she held on to him tightly and spoke. “When we used to go by them, it was no social occasion. I work for them, and I used to take you to work with me. They wasn’t our friends, you hear me? You must remember that. They different, son, but they not better than you or me.” She was speaking to him softly, almost cooing to him. He understood nothing of her words, yet the bitterness in them was clear. “All of we cross Black Water, sometimes six and sometimes seven months side by side in the same stinking boat, to come here. Same-same. All of we. One set leaving something unsavory behind, another set looking for a fresh start. How, child, how out of those beginnings some end up higher than others and some end up lower, tell me this? Well, God alone know. We come here same time, same boat, same handling. They not better than we, and that you should remember.”
The boy had by this time relaxed. She cupped his head in her hands and lifted his face to hers. He let her direct him, but he refused to look into her eyes.
“Where the cock gone, my child? You see it today? Come, my baby, I will mix up the corn. Come and feed them. Is strange, eh, how they does only eat when is you feeding them.”
Years passed before he saw her again.
MEETING ENDS
Dolly didn’t want anybody in Raleigh to know she was unemployed. She didn’t look for work to replace her lost job in Marion or anywhere else. She decided that with a little imagination and a little hard work, which she might as well do for herself rather than for someone else, the bush and sea of Raleigh would provide her and her son with their modest needs.
Saturdays, to make sure the boy didn’t take off down the path to the beach where he might be seen and so expose her situation, she put him to work around the house. Befo
re the day got too hot, when the pigeon-pea shrubs were laden, she would send him to fill a paper bag. When the guava came in, the branches of the trees would droop to the ground with the extra weight. One, passing some distance from a patch, would be drenched in the fragrance of ripening, bursting, and fallen rotting fruit. There were always more than enough guavas in back of the house for his mother’s needs, even when he devoured a good share right there in the guava patch.
Soup can by soup can, he would twice daily ferry water from the barrel at the side of the house to the front steps, where he would soak the sun-baked dirt of the red-painted tin cans in which sun-colored marigolds thrived. He would sweep the yard with the cocyea broom. At the end of the day he would go under the house. The chickens would strut expectantly around him, and eventually, after enjoying their display of dependence, he would scatter corn kernels, cooked rice, and bread crumbs. The cock would proprietorially flutter up onto his lap. It would never settle down but would press and transfer its weight from one foot to the next, stooping low and then stretching up. He liked the attention it paid him.
Inside the house, he picked rice or sorted the good peas from the ones with worms, shelled them, and chopped the guavas in little pieces, flicking away the worm-ridden bits with the tip of the knife. When he sat doing these chores with Dolly in the room, both of them quiet, he would miss hearing music or Mrs. Audry Talbot’s voice. He even missed hearing the somber death news and news of Mrs. Sangha’s war, which for him and his mother might just as well have ended when they left Marion on that terrible day when Narine Sangha tore apart all that was good and secure in the boy’s world.
At the end of the day, he was usually so tired he would go behind the curtain to the coconut-fiber mattress there. He would fall asleep the moment his little body hit the mattress. Sunday morning he would awaken long after his mother, to the aroma of guava, cloves, and sugar bubbling on the stove. And Sunday midday she and he would walk the beach selling the aromatic guava cheese, a penny for a square inch.
Several Saturdays of not going to Marion passed without incident. Then Tante Eugenie, walking down the beach in front of the house, noticed a flicker of movement in the yard. She hustled up the path, a washed-up bottle picked hastily off the beach in her hand in case she needed a missile for protection, to make sure the house was safe from burglars or wallpaperers. To her consternation, she found Dolly under the pawpaw tree, cursing and jabbing away at its lopsided crown with a cobweb broom in an attempt to dislodge the cock.
She heard Dolly mutter, “So much hen in the yard, and this good-for-nothing cock does just sit idle-idle up in the tree so.” She jabbed at the cock furiously and shouted, “Get down here, you little so-and-so. I will make curry out of you so fast if you don’t put yourself to work, you hear. Come down!”
Tante Eugenie didn’t wait for an explanation. “But what is this? I hearing all kind of things, and I telling people to stop their idle talk, that if you get fire I would be the first to know. So, is true? Why you not in Marion now? They fire you, child?”
“Get fire? Who say I get fire? I leave. Let people talk. They could say they fire me all they want.”
“I hear the children was in the same bed, and that Sangha fire you for that.”
“Fire me? He wish! Because he name Narine Sangha, he think he have license to keep woman left, right, and center? Listen, what harm it have in two children, little so, sleeping in the same bed? Is only a nasty, worthless mind what would see sin in that. And where you getting your news from these days? Who minding my business? Tell them to come talk to me in my face. If you see how bad he treat my child, and what good he think he do to his own child, eh? You mad to think I going back there. Nobody fire me, you hear? It is I who fire the job.”
As Uncle Mako’s age advanced, he complained that fishing the way he knew it, men waking so early that even cocks were still sleeping, pushing pirogues and rowboats into the water by the light of the moon, setting nets by hand, pulling them in the long, slow arduous way, was a dying profession. He would point in disgust to a distant group of youngsters banging on oil cans, on hubcaps, and on bottles with old enamel spoons, dancing, singing, drinking, and smoking, and he would growl, “That is not what our people, African people, would a want for us. Them children shaming us. They ain’t got no dreams. You are not African, child, but you living among us. You want to get like them? Eh? Look at them! Shameful-shameful.”
To Dolly, he said it was time the child stopped sticking up behind his mother’s back, doing woman-work. Shelling peas wasn’t man-work. He said that God showed He knew best when He brought Dolly and the boy back from Marion; in Marion the boy’s head was bound to swim with ideas that would cause him confusion and discontent later. The child was getting too accustomed to sticking up so close to a big shot’s daughter, and this was only going to cause him a lot of hurt. Better he learn to be content in Raleigh. The boy was old enough, he said, to learn a trade, and the best trade for a fellow in Raleigh, despite everything, was a fishing-related trade. The first thing he taught the boy was to mend a net.
As he and the boy worked the green net cord, heavy in the boy’s easily bruised hands, Uncle Mako would babble on about a family waiting for him across the sea. When Tante Eugenie was far enough away, for she’d had enough of his daydreaming and prattling about faraway family, he pointed his finger here and there toward where a country called Africa might or might not be. He told the boy that Africa was really the home of his ancestors, from where he was taken against his will, but the boy couldn’t understand this. It was a story Uncle Mako himself could not make sense of, let alone explain to a little boy. He said only that he planned one day to return there. If he was careless and Tante Eugenie heard him talk this way, she would suck her teeth, shake her finger, and bellow.
“Ey, old man, keep up with the times, na, man. What family you have over there, pray tell? We ent going ‘there,’ you hear? Them days dead and gone. Them people ‘there,’ you making up stories about them in your head; you think they even have time for we? They bound to laugh at you in your face, old man.” And they would start a fight about a country over there, or over this way where there was a hint of coloring on the horizon. The little boy would squint at the horizon, willing to see anything faint that might suggest Uncle Mako was right.
THE MAN FROM THE GAS STATION
Even while smoking a cigarette, Abrahim the barber could, in five minutes or less, trim a boy’s entire head of hair. The boy had already had his turn with Abrahim, but trim-time was an event beyond the cut itself. The crowd that gathered and stayed was an opportunity for the nuts seller, the penny-ice man, the fudge seller, and the whappie trickster not to miss. So the boy stayed and listened to the flip and slap of cards on the trickster’s folding table, the cussing as money was more often lost than won, the talk and laughter, heckling, bad-mouthing, and boasting of those who had already been trimmed and those awaiting their turn. Abrahim’s younger customers, too green in the ways of the world, were exposed to conversations they didn’t always comprehend. They laughed or nodded gravely whenever any of the older people did.
The boy happened to glance toward his house to see a man in a suit, hat in hand, standing among the orange crocus watching his house. He stood up as the man approached the front stairs. The boy could see that he was calling out, but if the excitement on the beach hadn’t drowned his voice, the wind coming in from the ocean would have whipped it away.
The boy left the beach and hurried, avoiding shards of broken shell and bottle, over the patch of flowering sea-grape vines that wound about the shores at this time of year.
The man had reached the entrance to the house before the boy could get to him and was rapping on the wood frame with his knuckles. The boy knew his mother was in the backyard hanging out her washing on the hibiscus shrubs to dry. She wouldn’t have heard him. When the boy was close enough he called out to the man.
“Mister, you want something?”
The man turned to rega
rd the boy. He looked down toward the beach from where the boy had come. He saw the crowd of people. “Something happen?”
“No. Abrahim the barber giving trim. Is a trim you want?” Even as the child asked, he knew that was not what the man had come for: in this hot sun, he was wearing a brown suit, a white shirt, and a tie. He was not from around there. Cut hair caught in the fibers of his shirt had made him itchy. Suddenly pricked, he tugged at his shirt, twitched his shoulders.
“No. I come for something else. You just had a trim?”
The child ran his hands on his all but shaved head, his scalp feeling hot and prickly in the sun, strangely naked and cold in the breeze, and he nodded.
The man had a paper in his hand. He looked at it. “I don’t know if I have the right address. I am looking for one Miss Dolly St. George. Timbano Trace. She living here?” He daubed his face with a large white handkerchief.
“Yes. Wait, please. She in the back. I’ll get she. Who to say come?”
“Uhm. She don’t know me by name. Anyway, is Persad. Bhatt Persad. You the son?”
“Eh-heh. Wait here.”
Dolly undid the red band of cloth that she usually tied like a turban around her head when she was out in the yard working, shook it vigorously, and wound it back on her head. She sucked her teeth, irritated at being disturbed from her work, and said, “Persad. I don’t know any Persad. What he want with me, pray?” She looked at her son and shook her head in a mixture of pity and disgust. “Why Abrahim does always cut your hair so short, boy? That ent no trim. That is a shave.