He Drown She in the Sea

by Shani Mootoo

  “Who is this Persad, I wonder? Come with me. I don’t need no trouble now, you know.” She fixed her dress, and they went around to the front.

  The man had taken a seat on the front step. He got up when he saw them. “Miss St. George?”

  “Well, I was married once. But that is all right. What it is you come about?”

  “I got your name from Walter, the taxi driver you used to ride with. I didn’t see you for a long time, and I asked him what happen to you and the boy.”

  Dolly started to frown. He was never a passenger in the car, so how and where had he seen her and the child? And what business did he have asking about her? From his polite manner, the way he spoke, and his dress, he looked more like someone the Sanghas might know. He was a short, balding man, an Indian man with a mustache and gold that flashed from the back and front of his mouth when he spoke. He wore spectacles. Dolly looked at her son. He shrugged.

  When Dolly didn’t respond, the man continued. “Walter told me you not working in town now. I was wondering if you are working at another job.”

  Dolly didn’t immediately respond. She didn’t want to give this stranger any information about herself, but she also didn’t want to be impertinent to a man of his apparent standing by asking him what business it was to him. “You have a job for me?”

  “You are not working?”

  “I might be looking for something to do.”

  The child remembered having seen the man, and he blurted it out: “You is the man from the gas station.”

  Dolly looked at the boy quizzically. He held her hand and said, “Ent you remember Mr. Walter used to stop when we reach Marion to get gasoline?” He pointed to the man and whispered up to her, “He used to be in the station, in the building—behind the counter.”

  The man heard him. Smiling, he said, “You remember. That is my station. I am the proprietor. I used to see you every Saturday morning.”

  Now that she knew more, Dolly was less apprehensive. So that she might offer the visitor a soft drink, she sent the boy five minutes up the beach to get a glass of ice from the iceman, the only person in Raleigh to own a freezer, though it was rusted from the salt air and hummed loudly. The boy pulled off his hair-covered shirt and raced back up the beach. When he returned, Dolly was sitting at the kitchen table waiting. The visitor had already gone.

  “He want a full-time. I tell him I can’t take full-time because I can’t leave you day in, day out. He ask if you not going to school. I tell him hardly any children in Raleigh go to school, but you know how to read. He say bring you and he will get a school for you, and I will start work same time the school start, and finish up in time to fetch you by the time school bell ring for the day.”

  The boy’s heart pounded with fear and excitement. “Where, Mammy?”

  “In Marion.”

  Marion. Certainly that would mean they would see Mrs. Sangha and her daughter again. What would Mrs. Sangha say if she knew he was attending school. School! That frightened and appealed to him at the same time. The suggestion alone, that he, son of Dolly the servant, a boy from Raleigh, was being considered, being given the opportunity, to attend school—regardless of his mother’s intention—made him feel different. A sweat broke above his upper lip. He spoke as calmly as he could. “What you say, Mammy?”

  “School? Well, everybody want for they child to get education. I suppose I ordinary, too. You don’t want to go to school?”

  He was overcome by an overwhelming desire to attend a school, an activity he had never before thought about. In his mind, an image of Narine Sangha appeared and, almost immediately, vanished. No formed thought accompanied the image of Narine Sangha, but for a brief moment the boy imagined he could smell the cologne. He was simultaneously terrified and delighted. He held his breath, afraid to utter a word, terrified his mother would not accept the man’s offer.

  Thinking his silence meant that he was uninterested, she said with exasperation, “All you children in this village don’t know what is good for you, yes. This place going to get swallow up one day”—he thought then she meant by the sea—“and all of we with it. Listen, forget about Raleigh, you hear. All Raleigh is good for is fishing, and you ent stepping foot in any boat as long as I have a say in your life. The only thing left save for idleness in Raleigh is to drive taxi, and even so the taxi will never be your own, you will always be a driver for Bihar company. You want to be a taxi man? Is true I didn’t think about all this before, but I get a glimpse of my son teaching in a elementary school. My son, a teacher! Or even set up behind a table writing letters for people who can’t read or write themselves. Is not like we suffering, but education is a kind of freedom, child.”

  It was too much for him to imagine, but he could tell she was already seeing the future and they were about to head for it.

  The school term, something he had never considered before, was to begin in three weeks’ time.

  A BUSTLING TOWN

  First week he had neither uniform nor books. His mother, having long been out of work and therefore short of money, couldn’t easily have afforded even a pencil. However, Saturday, when they caught Mr. Walter’s taxi to Marion, they did not get out at the gas station, as they had done during the previous weekdays. They carried on in the taxi to the heart of the town and got out on a corner of the busiest commercial street.

  If there had been a war in the world, there were few signs of it in Marion. The narrow street was lined by tiny dark shops packed with goods. The stores had their names painted on them in large block printing, some in scrolled letters that were harder to read. J. J. RAM AND SON HARDWARE STORE, PATEL DRY GOODS, THE AMERICAN SHOE AND HANDBAG STORE, BISSEY BOOKS AND OFFICE SUPPLIES. The stores must have felt some competition from the vendors hawking just outside their doors; a store clerk stood in each doorway greeting passersby, inviting them to enter and browse. The trays perched on the vendors’ laps were bright groupings of items arranged by color and size. There were orderly rows of bicycle bells, back scratchers, sandals, embroidered handkerchiefs from China, and from the other islands, potpourris of vetiver and lavender for placing among clothing in dressers. These particular scents excited the boy and provoked a longing in him. They were the same smells he remembered from the drawers of Mrs. Sangha’s front room armoire, the scent of her linen, and of the pajamas he wore that unforgettable night passed in her house. There were playing cards, key rings, mirrors, handwritten song sheets, glass bangles, wood combs. There were spools of gift-wrapping ribbon, wood swizzle sticks, sticks of cocoa, pencils, socks, incense, windup tin toys, handmade windmills on sticks, nail clippers, and penknives. A tray of china ornaments—chickens, dogs, and horses of several different breeds—caught his attention. He pulled down on his mother’s hand. They stopped and watched. The vendor picked out a slim, shiny brown and white horse and held it, tiny in the palm of his large coarse hand. He adjusted his hand so that the sun caught the ornament’s iridescent glaze. He said, “Imported. From China. Good price. Shilling for one, shilling and a half for two. For a nice mother, I offering a little break, but for today only: two for the price of one. Pick what you like, boy.” The boy didn’t answer. His mother did: “It nice, but we don’t have no place to put it.” She pulled him along. He trailed a step behind her, thinking of the minute and perfect details of the horse’s mane and tail. He wondered how he might earn a shilling, but lately they had no time back in Raleigh, nor his mother any more need to make and sell the guava cheese, or for him to do chores for Uncle Mako that might bring him a few pennies here and there, a shilling over time. He shrugged and caught up with his mother’s pace.

  The noise of traffic (a clear sign of the availability once more of car petrol) and of people chanting the attributes and prices of their goods, greeting one another, haggling (some on the verge, it would seem, of fighting), and the heat of the inland town were dizzying. Food vendors lined the street. The nutman with six different kinds of nuts, all hot and packaged in brown paper cones, sang out,
“Hot nuts, nuts hot, hot-hot.” The skinny barra and channa lady was so busy serving a long line of customers (impatient in the hot sun) that she never lifted her eyes from the basins of curried channa and barra to look at the customers who were putting their money on a tray and taking their own change from the same tray. And there was the anchar man and the salt-prune man and past them, a row of baked-goods vendors all selling the same goods—currant rolls, coconut cakes, sweet bread, and more. The scent of car exhaust mixed with the smells of oil used in frying, of cardamom, vanilla, coconut, roasted peanuts, and sesame seed. A shaved-ice man was there, melted ice wetting the ground all around his bicycle that doubled as transportation and vending stall. And sitting on low benches, the Indian ladies held on their laps wood trays containing colorful Indian sweets arranged by color—pinks, yellows, blues, whites. The child eyed these goods. His mouth watered, his fingers dangled only inches away from the trays. His mother held his hand and walked swiftly to Rahim School Supplies. She followed a salesclerk to where the school’s uniform was shelved. Dolly pulled a shirt from a pile, opened it, and held it up against her son’s chest. She held a pair of the short pants up to the air. She marched her son to the cubicle that had been curtained off to make a child’s dressing room.

  The boy tugged at her. “I don’t want to try them on. Why I have to try them, Mammy?”

  She said, “Don’t talk back, child, put them on, let me see.”

  When he had the right fit, she made a pile of two of everything, picked up the lot, and marched to the cashier. To his wide-eyed surprise, his mother had enough bills rolled up and concealed in the cleavage of her brassiere. After that transaction, she counted out the remainder of the money and announced that they were able to go to the bookstore. He thought of the little china horse and wondered if there might be enough money left to go back after, but he also felt shy to ask again after she had already turned it down. The school uniform store and the bookstore were right next to each other, and although they appeared to be different stores, there was a narrow and lopsided doorway at the back that connected one with the other. There Dolly purchased two copybooks, a pencil, a ruler, a sharpener, an eraser, a textbook for comprehension and writing, and one for sums. It was a typically hot Guanagasparian type of dry-season day, but he was sweating more than usual, frightened that she was spending all her hard-earned money on him. He couldn’t help wondering where she had been keeping so much money. As the cashier was writing up the bill, he pulled her aside and whispered in her ear.

  “Mammy, you don’t have to buy everything one time. How we will eat? How we will catch taxi if you use up so much money now-now?” She, too, was sweating. With the paper on which the school had written down the child’s needs, she fanned herself. Breathless, she told him the money was extra. Mr. Persad had given her that money, on top of her regular pay, so that she could buy whatever he needed for school.

  He had indeed wanted to attend school. Yet he felt confused. Before catching a taxi back to Raleigh, his mother bought a barra and channa for him. He halfheartedly took a bite of it, wrapped it back in its greasy brown paper, and held on to it until they arrived back home.

  BETTERING ONE’S SELF: A MOTIVE FOR ALL REASONS

  After some months, it was evident that the boy was able to read and write, but no matter how diligently he studied, he lagged behind his classmates, especially in arithmetic. Mr. Persad offered to help after school in whatever way he was able to (although he had not himself completed elementary school). In any case, it would have meant that he and his mother would have to stay in Marion for two or three hours longer than usual.

  Mr. Persad persisted. He suggested that they leave Raleigh and move into his house, where he would employ Dolly as a full-time servant. The boy told his mother that he was from Raleigh, that it was his birthplace, that his friends were all there, and that Tante Eugenie and Uncle Mako were there, and Uncle Mako needed him. She marched up to him, her raised hand ready to hit him when he said outright that Mr. Persad was not his father and not her husband. She would not speak with him for what seemed like an interminable amount of time. He was sullen for days. Her lips remained pursed also, for days. Finally she spoke, calm but firm. She was disappointed and ashamed, she said, that her own son could be so ungrateful for a chance to better himself, and that since it was not his fault, as he was too young to know better, she had decided he would have no say in the matter; she knew what was best.

  Dolly went to speak with Tante Eugenie about the move to Marion. Tante Eugenie answered first that if Dolly and her son were to leave Raleigh, it would be as if she and Mako were losing their own child and grandchild, but they would survive. She sighed and said that their people were survivors by nature. Then she advised Dolly to tell Mr. Persad she wouldn’t go and live in his house with him just like that. She said, “Say no, and see what he will do next.”

  So Dolly did just that. In response, Mr. Persad asked her to marry him. Tante Eugenie said, “You see? You have to use your head with these men. Don’t let them get away easy-easy so.”

  After Dolly and Bhatt Persad were married in the Canadian Friends Presbyterian Church, she and the boy (he anxious yet excited at once) moved, all their possessions, including a cage crammed with four chickens and the cock, packed tightly in Mr. Persad’s car.

  THE DAYS OF THE WEEK IN A TOWN

  There was always something going on in the street directly in front of Mr. Persad’s house. The Americans maintained a base on the island. On their days off, soldiers in uniform swept into Marion. The townspeople were often awakened by their aggressive singing, shouting, and laughter as jeep loads of them sped by, uninhibited by the lateness of night.

  Myriad odors wafted into the house in Marion: petrol from the station next door, effluvia from the gutters on either side of the street. The latter had to be cleaned daily by the city public works crew; otherwise the surface, made slick and shiny overnight, trembled with mosquito larva. Cars and trucks burned dirty oil, and their exhaust hung heavily in the air. Dolly had to dust and sweep twice daily. She could be heard uttering under her breath that even Raleigh’s sand had never invaded her house in such a manner. The boy enjoyed reminding her that the bedsheets there got so sandy, even as they slept, that she used to have to shake them out regularly, sometimes awakening even in the middle of the night to give them a proper brushing.

  It didn’t take long for the boy to forget, however. He quickly became accustomed to the cacophony of a city. Soon enough, he would tell time by the city’s rumblings. Mondays, the Syrian cloth seller called at each and every house without fail. Tuesdays, eight P.M., the bells of the Good Shepherd Evangelical Society clanged out an hour’s worth of hymns. Wednesdays, the manure man rolled his loaded odorous truck slowly through the residential quarters of the town. At precisely the same time every Thursday afternoon, the knife sharpener passed in front of Mr. Persad’s house. Fridays, the fisherman’s jitney rumbled noisily down the street. It was five A.M. when the imam’s call to prayer rose from the turret of the mosque, four P.M. when the nutman’s rubber-ball horn wheezed by, and it was six-thirty P.M. sharp when melismatic outpourings rang from the Indian cinema down the road.

  NAMING

  If he were asked, he would say he had no memory of his mother and Mr. Persad calling each other by name. In truth, if Mr. Persad wanted Dolly, he would look for her for as long as it took without ever uttering her name. On finding her, he would simply begin talking.

  “I was looking for you,” he might say, to which she might as gently answer, “Well, I was right here.” It was the most natural thing.

  She did the same. Initiating communication with him, she would utter, as if it were his name, “Ehem …” and he would look up in acknowledgment. Speaking of her to the boy, he would say “your mammy.” She and the boy spoke of him as “Mr. Persad.” This was how the boy addressed him when he was speaking directly with him; in the most muted voice he could manage, he would try, at once, to be neither heard nor impert
inent. Mr. Persad called him “son,” but he never referred to him as “my son.”

  The boy didn’t have much of a sense of his mother and Mr. Persad’s relationship as a married couple. They had separate bedrooms. He never caught Mr. Persad going into hers and knew her to enter Mr. Persad’s only when he was not in it, to clean it or to look after his clothing. And yet to his mind, neither of them seemed dissatisfied or wanting.

  Once, through his bedroom window, the boy heard them out in the backyard talking. He peeped out to see them walking in the yard, side by side, stopping to examine a rusted bit of the wire netting on the chicken coop. They were discussing things that needed to be done in the yard. His mother wondered if tomato plants would survive in such soilless gravel. Mr. Persad pointed to something in the hills behind the house. He and Dolly stood close to each other, watching whatever it was. He walked over to a clump of milk tins in which anthurium lilies were planted. He picked one up, inspected it. She bent over the ones on the ground and broke off browned, dead leaves. The boy believed he heard his name mentioned, but he couldn’t really be sure. He returned to his homework, comforted by the notion that he had been mentioned, thinking that all in all, his mother might be happy.

  In preparation for the upcoming common entrance exam, Mr. Persad paid for extra lessons. He hired a man who ran a taxi to meet the boy at the end of each school day and take him directly to a Mr. Joseph’s house, a two-story concrete structure through which no air seemed to circulate. In a room that faced an unkempt road ridden with potholes, the boy and three others took two-hour lessons in spelling, comprehension, arithmetic, and the geography and history of the world. On any given day, Mr. Joseph, who smelled of sewing machine oil, leaned out of the window no less than five times to plead for peace and quiet from less ambitious boys prancing around the potholes in a raucous game of cricket or football. Mr. Joseph’s boys sat on low elementary-school-type benches on either side of a long low table. Various words and images: flowers, body parts, airplanes, and bombs, to name a few, were etched on the surface of the table, the groves filled in with years of grime that a protractor point could, with some determination, dislodge. There were, here and there, hearts through which Cupid’s arrows were drawn. Each heart and arrow was flanked by a girl’s name on one side and a boy’s on the other. Once, when the boy arrived first, and Mr. Joseph could be heard brushing his teeth, hacking and expelling phlegm in an adjoining room, he dug the point of his compass into the soft flesh of the desk and drew a heart. He wrote no name but etched an image of a rose within the heart.