by Niyati Keni
The apartment slowly filled with people. I recognised only a few of them, but they all knew who I was and looked at me with pity. The women sat by my mother’s body and the air rang as they chanted. My father smeared oil on my forehead with his thumb and then on his own and on Elisa’s and so on round the room. He swayed a little; he’d been drinking. Aunt Bina lit incense and candles.
Jonah and the jetty boys came. The boys stayed in the kitchen, playing cards and sipping from the same bottle as they passed it round, curling their fingers round the rim to keep their lips from touching it. Jonah came through into the main room and, though I saw him glance towards the kitchen several times, he stayed by the coffin, by my father, for the entire afternoon.
Elisa, helping out, disappeared and reappeared constantly. Deep into the afternoon she arrived again by my side, her eyes broad, astonished. She touched my fingers lightly and leaned into me, whispering in my ear. She’d overheard her mother say that Jonah had paid for the funeral. I felt ashamed as she told me but annoyed too, with her and with Aunt Bina. I looked at my father but I didn’t know how to ask him. I went with Elisa to find her mother. Aunt Bina was outside in the hallway. She spoke authoritatively, like a teacher, as if a vigil was for her an everyday event, although I couldn’t remember another in our building. ‘To start with, he refused to accept any repayment from your pop,’ she said. ‘But you know your father. Dante wouldn’t take the money except in loan, so Jonah’s agreed to take instalments. He won’t charge any interest on it though. Almost came to blows over it,’ she added with satisfaction, though she broke her eyes away from mine as she said it. Interest, instalments. I wished Elisa hadn’t told me at all.
Elisa held my hand through most of the evening and I let her. She squeezed my fingers every now and then. Her hand felt dry and rough. She seemed older, smarter, and I wondered more than once how it was that she too seemed to know what to do when it was my mother who’d died, when I felt like a visitor in my own family’s apartment.
My brother and sister returned for the vigil, arriving together late in the evening. Luisa brought with her two small children I’d never seen, laying them down to sleep, amid all the noise and the passage of people, on a mat under the dining chairs that had been pushed back against the wall for want of room. Her husband didn’t come with her. My father asked after him but seemed barely to hear her answer. Luisa had married young but reasonably well, at least that was what everyone said at the time. Her husband was considerably older and had a steady job with prospects. She’d done well enough, my mother had once said, for a girl who never finished high school. Behind her, my brother Miguel took his cap off as he came through the door and stood next to my father, his face serious, his back straight like a soldier’s. He watched me for a minute, as if wondering who I was. Soon after they arrived I was sent to get some sleep in Bina and Elisa’s apartment. The next morning as we stood by the grave Miguel rested his hand on my shoulder all the way through the eulogy.
After the funeral my father told me to wash and, as I stood at the tap in the yard, he came over to me and scrubbed my hair roughly with soap, holding my head down as he sluiced pail after pail of water over me to rinse the suds away. When he stopped and I looked up at him in astonishment, I saw his eyes were wet. He turned away without a word. Elisa came out with a towel and wrapped it round me, rubbing the ends of my hair with it, gently.
Luisa stayed for a couple of days, making sure our father ate and keeping the place swept and clean. Miguel left straight after the funeral. Before he went, he pushed some coins into my hand and said, ‘If Pop asks, it’s for Our Lady, but if you want to get some candy, that’s ok too.’
It wasn’t much but I slipped the coins into my father’s bedside drawer, leaving them on top of his Bible, before I set off back to Aunt Mary’s; all but one, which I clung to, the metal growing damp in my palm in the heat. In the street outside our building I waited for America, who’d come to collect me and pay her respects, though she’d barely known my mother at all. My father stood with his back to me, in the stairwell, talking to Pastor Levi while America talked to Aunt Bina and waited to catch my father’s eye to tell him she was taking me back to the boarding house.
On the ground floor of our building, to one side of the street entrance, there was a small general store. It was owned by our landlord, who owned most of the building and one or two others in the centre of town. The store was open and I thought of what my brother had said. I bought a handful of Juicy Fruit candies and some chocolate and three hard sugar cookies, one each for my father and America and one for me.
When we were ready to leave, after Pastor Levi had gone, I pulled the cookies and some of the candies out of my pocket and offered them to my father. I thought he might take one, or maybe shake his head and leave them for me but, his face alive with rage, he swiped at my hand and scattered my offerings across the sidewalk. I was stunned. America said nothing to me but put a hand on my father’s arm and said, ‘Think what you want the boy to remember about today.’ My father pulled his arm away and glared at her, but he watched us as we walked away through the alley towards Esperanza. When we got home, America made coconut cakes and champorado, rice cooked with chocolate, and let me eat only sweet things for the rest of the day.
Stevedores
Aunt Mary gave me every Sunday off, but after my mother died, I lost the greater part of these to God, fidgeting silently beside my father in the chapel while he prayed. Sometimes I prayed too, mostly that my father might decide to skip church the following week, but my appeals were never answered. Afterwards we’d return to his apartment for lunch, where he’d try to make conversation to stretch out the afternoon, turning a cup round and round in his hands while I watched him from across the table, the dirty plates stacked between us. Eventually we’d end up back at the jetty, though Jonah always saw to it that my father had Sundays off too. As soon as we got there, my father seemed to relax. It never struck me as strange; somehow the jetty was the proper backdrop for him. Even now, when I think of him, the first image that arises is always of a man balanced on the cross-pole of a newly moored outrigger, his hard brown feet curved round the bamboo, one hand on his hip, the other on the boat’s canopy.
The jetty was always a relief after the sobriety of the boarding house and the chapel, and every Sunday I found myself straining my eyes towards it as we walked down the hill.
As always, Jonah pretended to be surprised to see us. ‘You’re getting big,’ he said to me. ‘How old are you now?’ Though he knew very well.
‘Fifteen.’
‘Can’t tell you apart.’ He made a show of looking from me to my father and back again, and I was pleased, even though I knew it wasn’t true; I took after my mother. My father rolled his eyes.
We settled ourselves on the sea wall. As usual for the hour, business at the jetty was slow. In the shallows, under a hard blue sky, two of the jetty boys splashed ashore with bunches of flustered chickens like sprays of flowers. Behind us, near the road, two more heaved pigs one by one into the trailer of a waiting motor rickshaw, the animals screaming as they were lifted by ears and tails and swung over the side like sacks. In the shade cut by Jonah’s office, three of the boys were shooting hoops at a basket nailed to a palm tree, watching out for any signal from Jonah in between shots. The rest sat along the sea wall, perched like gulls, retreating under the visors of caps, eyeing the line of boats that rocked in the swell.
Jonah patted his belly absent-mindedly. On a clear day, I could distinguish him from the rest of his boys from as far back as the crest of the hill by the bulge of his belly, out of proportion with the rest of his wiry frame. He referred to it as his pregnancy and said, with slightly exaggerated joviality, that it just went to show he didn’t need a woman. Jonah’s wife had left him a couple of months before.
With little else to do, the boys on the sea wall started up a noisy game of poker, tossing single cigarettes into the centre as stakes. We watched them for a while. Then
Jonah said, ‘Well, she came back.’
‘Who?’ said my father, his eyes on the game.
‘Margie. Long enough to get the armoire. Some antique her grandmother left her.’
‘Is it so bad to just do what she wants?’ my father said. Then, softening, unwilling perhaps to sound critical, he added lightly, ‘She leave you with any furniture?’
‘You heard about the note?’ From the way my father smiled, I guessed he already had, but he sat quietly, attentively, as Jonah told it again. Jonah started off as if it were just another of his anecdotes. ‘A man gets home after a hard day at work to find his wife gone. She’s left him a note at least, but she’s made him a ham sandwich and impaled the note in the middle of it with a toothpick. Like the sail of a boat, you know. A joke maybe about me belonging at the jetty? Only this time, unlike all her other departures, the note was real short.’ And he said in a high voice, mimicking his ex-wife, ‘It’s just not enough anymore. What does that mean, anyway? This time she didn’t even bother to cut the sandwich in half. Now, I like my sandwiches whole anyway. Whole and square, not cut into little triangles with the crust trimmed off like the First Lady’s expected round for tea.’ He crooked his finger daintily. ‘You think she did it so I could finally have something my own way? A last kindness for the condemned man?’
My father shrugged; Jonah didn’t expect answers. He carried on, he was just warming up. ‘So I get a beer and take the sandwich through to the TV. No point wasting food. My parents are watching Kuwarta O Kahon – they love that show, never miss it. Every week they talk about what they’d do with the money if they won. Or about Pepe Pimentel’s hair. So we sit there, no one saying anything; I guess they figured she’d be back, like before. Then Pop says, “He’s my age, but he’s got a better head of hair.” And my mom says, “He’s younger than you, and anyway it’s a wig, Dexter.” “Pepe?” my pop says. “A wig? No way!” And they’re arguing about Pepe Pimentel’s hair when I notice some photos are missing from the cabinet. Can you believe it, she left behind our wedding photo but she took the one of Enrique, her dead Pomeranian. And now whenever I think of Margie, I can’t help but picture Pepe Pimentel. I’ve even imagined the two of them together, you know, together,’ and he said the last word carefully, with a glance in my direction. I saw my father’s jaw tighten as if he were stifling a laugh. Jonah’s ex-wife, Margie, was easily the most glamorous person I’d seen in Esperanza – not the sort of woman I could imagine with Jonah. I’d seen her a few times at the jetty and she seemed wrong there, like she’d arrived by accident – taken a left when she should have gone right. Her presence had felt strange, like an intrusion, and even though I didn’t know her, I’d wanted her to leave. She’d seemed startled when my father brought her a chair, eyeing the seat for dirt before she sat down.
‘She says the jetty’s days are numbered. That we can’t stem the tide of progress,’ Jonah’s voice rose to a peak, ‘That only an idiot clings to the past rather than embraces the future.’ He swept his arms out in a grand gesture. ‘I mean, do I look like an idiot?’ My father clicked his tongue, drew his legs up, dropped them down again. Margie’s father ran a freight company and her uncle owned a fleet of jeepneys. It wasn’t the first time, my father told me later, that Jonah had declined to work for either of them, preferring to make his own way. After Margie left, her family insisted they hadn’t seen her.
‘That’s what happens when you bite your own finger,’ my father said.
Jonah threw his hands up. ‘Ah, who needs an armoire?’
The jetty boys erupted loudly as another poker player folded. The nearest, Subong, often to be found in my father’s orbit, was a boy too simple and too open to bluff well at cards. He pulled back from the group now, groaning. My father glanced up at him, a half smile on his face. Subong walked a few paces along the wall, his arms folded above his head, berating himself. He stopped, looked up at the sky for several seconds, then he turned round and walked back to the group. The boys dealt him another hand. Subong sat down again, one leg dangling over the seaward edge of the wall, the other leg bent, cards propped against his knee. He eyed the growing pile of cigarettes hopefully. My father shook his head and then, catching Jonah’s eye, started to laugh, quietly at first and then more deeply, until his whole body was shaking. His mirth infected Jonah who wiped his eyes and slapped a hand again and again on the concrete coping of the wall.
I stared at them, at my father, at the unexpected spectacle of his pleasure. I would have liked to laugh too, to share the joke, but instead I watched and, without really understanding why, I felt rebuffed.
A House on Wheels
The last boats always departed earlier on a Sunday and they waited now, surging gently, loaded up and ready, for anyone who might fill the remaining seats. While the light lasted, the boatmen would hang on for as long as they had the patience, regardless of the official timetable on the noticeboard outside Jonah’s office. I knew my father wouldn’t leave until the last one had been pushed out into the waves, and so I sat, quietly, savouring the grainy lilac light that washed the jetty, the soft flare of boat lamps.
Along the sea wall the jetty boys stirred suddenly in the middle of a hand and I turned to see Subong, on his feet now, cards and cigarettes momentarily forgotten, pointing along the coast road. In the near distance a man pushed a cart along the edge of the traffic stream, a handkerchief tied across his face like a bandit to shield him from the road dust that swirled up around him. The occupants of the cart, a woman and some kids, waved in our direction and, seeing them, Jonah started whistling and waving back. Everyone craned to see. ‘Trouble on wheels,’ Jonah said, but loudly, as if for the new arrivals’ benefit, though they were still far out of earshot.
‘I don’t want to hear later that you’ve been playing,’ my father said to me.
Lottie and Lando’s House-on-Wheels was a mobile casino and – though my father, Jonah and most of the boys enjoyed an evening spent at its tables – in deference to a promise he said he’d made to my mother, my father vetoed all such pleasures for me. The House travelled up and down the coast, returning every few months to Esperanza, moving on as soon as people started getting careful with their money again. Its usual stay was about a week. Lando had designed and built the House, which was really a cart, himself. It incorporated fold-away gaming tables that blossomed out like a lotus so that punters could bet on all four sides, though when packed up for the road it was no bigger than the watermelon vendor’s cart, compact enough that Lando could push it by himself with Lottie and all the children aboard. When the tables were out, Lottie and her eldest daughter Lorna sat back to back in the centre of the cart with the number trays and the rolling balls and a feather duster to keep the trays clean. Lando kept an eye on the younger kids, whom he’d post at street corners to tout for gamblers and look out for cops, ready to close up and push the cart away at the first sign of trouble. Packing up was a smooth operation and they had it down to less than a minute. I’d seen Lottie and Lorna haul the tables back in as Lando pushed the cart at full speed, the kids running barefoot into the alleys to rendezvous around the corner. The House was, of course, unlicensed, and if they were caught unofficial overheads could run high, especially to keep Lottie or Lando – and now Lorna, who was fourteen and almost a woman – from being arrested.
The House-on-Wheels was also their home: they slept under it and washed beside it and kept their food and cooking pots in it. On top of the bedding and the cooking pots and the half sack of rice and the folded gaming tables, Lottie kept a tray of cigarettes, which she sold individually, and a shoe-shine kit.
Of the children, Lorna was the eldest, thin and small for her age as they all were, followed by Luis, Lenora, Luke and finally Buan, because their parents had tired of the joke by then. Lorna had left school after elementary, though the younger children continued to attend sporadically.
The House-on-Wheels drew closer and I saw that since its last visit Lando had added foot-rails along bo
th flanks of the cart and carved a design like coiling snakes along its top edge. The youngest children stood on the rails, clinging to the sides as the cart rolled along, too big now to all fit inside it.
‘He could probably make anything,’ I said, eyeing the snakes.
‘He really has some talent, eh?’ Jonah nodded.
‘Talent’s nothing without money,’ my father said, and there was a murmur of agreement.
‘Kids keep you poor,’ Subong broke in. ‘That’s what my mother says.’ Subong was only a few years older than me. He lived with his mother and some nights he didn’t go home, sleeping down by the jetty on the floor of Jonah’s office or, at the height of summer, in the shadow of the sea wall. He always wore a cap with a neck guard but never wore a shirt.
‘Sex keeps you happy,’ said someone else. ‘Blame the Pope.’ There was a ripple of laughter.
The House-on-Wheels pulled up and Lando helped his wife and elder daughter out of the cart as the younger kids slid down to sit on the foot-rail and inspect their surroundings, already bored. The jetty boys fell silent for a moment, for Lorna, at fourteen, though she barely looked that, was pregnant.
‘Congratulations,’ said my father, but it came out sounding like a question. Lorna flushed. The boys all tried not to look at her belly.
‘Made your fortune this time?’ Jonah said to Lando.
‘What do you mean?’ Lando said hotly.
‘I didn’t mean … ’ Jonah glanced at Lorna.
‘He’s just being nice. He doesn’t mean anything,’ Lottie said. ‘It’s Jonah.’
Lando licked his lips and looked round the jetty boys. There were some new faces since the House had last been in town.