The men burst out laughing, even Daddy. “Pickney-child,” said Claude, “is a human that?” His voice was dry and rough like after you eat stinkin’ toe pods.
“No,” Tan-Tan replied doubtfully.
“So how he could call we Compère?”
“I don’t know.” She felt stupid.
Chichibud headed off down the dirt path. “I taking them to Doctor Lin, seen?”
They needed a doctor. Daddy was swaying on his feet. He had rested his good arm on Tan-Tan’s shoulder, and dark blood was seeping through the bandage on his broken arm. Tan-Tan patted his hand and looked up at him.
“Yes, doux-doux,” he said. “Come make we go.” One-Eye and Claude walked along with them, balancing their calabashes.
Farther down the road was one set of wattle-and-daub cottages squeezing up against the bumpy gravel path. Some of the houses had provisions growing in their front yards. Tan-Tan saw pigeon peas and sorrel bushes and a plant she didn’t recognise, with big pink leaves and fat, tight buds like cabbages, only aqua blue. She could hear hammering and sawing off in the distance. As they passed one cottage, two men and a woman with thick heavy sticks were pounding some kind of paste in a hollowed-out tree stump, THUMP-thump-thump, THUMP-thump-thump. “Mortar and pestle,” Antonio said quietly. “I only ever see that in pictures.”
An old man was hanging out washing to dry on a clothes line strung up between one house and the next. He sang to himself in a cracky voice.
They drew level with another cottage, much like the rest. “Let we just put down this water,” One-Eye said. “Then we go escort you the rest of the way.” They rested their burden in a shady part of the porch. One-Eye ran round to the back and returned with a banana leaf that he’d just cut. It was the same height as him. He used it to cover the two calabashes. They set off down the road again. One-Eye spoke to Tan-Tan: “Your daddy say you name . . . what?”
“Tan-Tan.”
“Tan-Tan. A pretty little girl with big brown eyes like toolum sweetie. What a sadness for a pickney to come here.”
Antonio said to him, “So what you get exile for?”
The man replied gruffly, “We don’t ask people questions like that.”
“Oh, yes?” Tan-Tan knew that tone. You didn’t cross Daddy when his voice got that edge. “So is who going to stop me from speaking what on my mind?”
“Me. And this.” Claude had stepped between the two of them, was patting the truncheon he carried. He smiled a crocodile grin.
With one bright eye and his one dead one, One-Eye stared Antonio down. “Mister,” he said soft and low, “it have rules here in Junjuh. No Anansi Web to look after we.” Antonio looked startled, then thoughtful. “I is the one who does enforce the rules,” One-Eye continued. “Claude is my deputy.”
“And so? What I care for your rules?”
“After a day in the tin box, most people does care.”
“A-what that?”
“You go see it soon.”
Chichibud laughed shu-shu-shu. Claude challenged him: “You have something to say?”
“No, Boss. Is tallpeople business, oui?”
“You know so. Take that child sling from she. She looking tired.”
Balancing the mako jumbie beak on his head with one hand, Chichibud made a whistling noise as he lifted her sling off her shoulder. He was limping more now. Now that she didn’t have the weight dragging her shoulder, Tan-Tan felt a little less tired. She looked round more, paid more attention. She liked the way that the pinkish rockstones that made up the gravel path had glints in them. The lowering sun made them sparkle. A few people were sitting on their front verandahs watching them as they passed. A woman hoed in her garden. Her belly was big with baby, and her short-zogged hair was twisted up in little picky-plaits like she never had nobody to do it up nice for her. Everybody looked old and callous. Tan-Tan had never seen so much hard labour and so many tired faces.
“Nanny save we,” muttered Antonio. “Is what kind of place I bring we to any at all?”
Some of the vegetable patches had bright flowers twining amongst the food plants. A morning glory vine clambered up the side of one cottage, flowers just opening up in the evening cool. Things mostly looked neat and clean, but Junjuh had a weariness to it.
Two-three of the houses had douen men working in the gardens, digging and hoeing. They all called out to Chichibud as he passed, in a language sweet like when your mother sing to you in your dreams. Glancing back at the houses to see if the humans would notice and stop them, some of the douens came hopping out to greet Chichibud. They crowded round him, nuzzling his shoulders and face and grooming his eye-ridges. Two of them took the mako jumbie beak halves and leaned them up against their bodies. A whole ring of them clasped arms with him and just stood there in a circle, twitching their heads from time to time in that jerky birdlike motion that Chichibud did. They opened and closed their mouths but no sound came out.
“What them doing, Daddy?” Tan-Tan asked.
“Me ain’t know.” Antonio looked at them with a sneer. “Them look bassourdie for true, like them crazy from the sun or something.”
“Is so douen-them does greet one another,” One-Eye said. “You could run a donkey cart through the whole pack of them right now, and them would barely notice.”
And just so, quick as the circle had formed, it broke up. Two of the douens picked up the mako jumbie beak halves. They all started walking with Chichibud, talking steady-steady to him the whole time, looking in his pack and touching the beak. All Chichibud was limping, he was only making style in the street, dancing and waving the mako jumbie feathers in the air. Tan-Tan was mad with curiosity. She called out, “What them saying to you, Chichibud?”
“Glad I reach safe. And how me wife going to love me even more when she see the gift I bringing she.”
For the first time, One-Eye seemed to really look at the douen man limping along beside them.
“But eh-eh, Chichibud, what stupidness you go and do to yourself? Is mako jumbie allyou meet up with in the bush?”
“Death bird herself, yes! And it done dead! Is me it buck up in the dark; me, Chichibud!” He did a little dance on the gravel path, hopping from side to side, bad leg or no. The other douens joined in. Tan-Tan giggled. Claude rolled his eyes. They kept walking, leaving Chichibud to catch up. Twittering the whole time, he and his friends came along behind.
With the truncheon, Claude pointed out a galvanized metal box on one side of the path, suspended between four wooden posts. It looked scarcely big enough to hold a grown man. It had a ladder leaning up against it, leading to a door in its side. Above the door, it had one little air hole drilled in the galvanized metal, about big enough for Tan-Tan to stick her fist in. The door had four big bolts all round to hold it shut.
“The tin box,” One-Eye told them. “One morning in dry season I put a gully hen egg inside that box. When I open it up come evening, the egg did boil to a jelly, right inside it own shell. Man or woman, anybody break the rules, is at least a day in the box for them. I warn you so you know.”
Something complicated happened to Daddy’s face. Tan-Tan imagined being shut inside the dark box, no choice to leave, no room to move, drowning in your own sweat. Skin burning with from your own stinking piss, from the flux of shit running down your leg. Like crêche teacher had told them. Like her nightmares.
Antonio didn’t say anything for a while, just leaned on Tan-Tan as he walked, blowing a little from the exertion. Then he looked sideways at One-Eye and asked, “So how the rules go that allyou have in this place?”
One-Eye laughed. “I see you is a man does figure the odds fast. That go do you good. You have to understand, Antonio, that this is a prison colony. The Nation Worlds send all of we here because them ain’t want nothing to do with we. Either we do something them ain’t like, or we ain’t do something them would have like we to do.”
Antonio didn’t say anything.
“Now you,” One-Eye continued, “I
mad to know is what make them send you here with a pickney. But by we code, you can’t ask people why them get exile, but people could choose to tell you. You could share confidences, seen? Me, I lose my temper one day and beat up the lying, cheating, motherass mongrel who call himself my business partner. Bust him up bad before the sheriffs reach.”
“You tell me wasn’t the first time you hit he, neither,” Claude interrupted. “Nanny and your Mocambo decide you too violent.”
“But I woulda do it again too. That ain’t any way to do business.”
“I stab a man who thief my woman,” Antonio said boastfully. Tan-Tan looked up at him. His eyes were bright. She remembered the sight of Uncle Quashee after Daddy had stabbed him; lying flaccid in the dust of the fight yard with his breath sticking in his throat. “Me and Daddy fool them,” she said. “We run—”
“Hush up your mouth, Tan-Tan. This is big people story.”
Stung, Tan-Tan pressed her lips together. They pushed out into a pout. Pride. She could just hear Nursie saying it. One-Eye frowned at her, flashed a strange look at her daddy, then said:
“Is just so. Most of we get send here because anger get the better of we too often. Almost any other crime the Grande ’Nansi Web could see coming and prevent, but Granny Nanny can’t foresee the unpremeditated, seen?”
“Seen,” Antonio muttered thoughtfully.
“A whole planet full of violent people,” Claude told them.
“Everywhere? The shift towers send people to the poles too?”
“We nah know. Nobody have time for go exploring. Hard enough staying alive right here so. Granny Nanny sentence we to live out we days in hard labour.”
“When I reach New Half-Way Tree,” One-Eye said, “life in Junjuh Town was madness, you see? One set of comess. Everything you had, somebody else ready to take it from you. And take your life too, if them had them way. You couldn’t close eyes and sleep in peace come nighttime. So when me and Claude find each other”—he flashed a warm smile at Claude—“we lay down some ground rules and we find two next people to help we enforce them: no fighting; if somemaddy mark goods as them own, nobody else could claim them; if somemaddy beat their spouse, the spouse could leave and go to a next somemaddy, and them could take them own goods with them. Anybody who break a rule, is the box the first time for them, and a hanging the next time. Oh, and it have one more: is only we could enforce the rules.”
“How allyou get away with that?”
“Wasn’t easy. We had was to stand up for weself more than once, and we always have to mind each other back. Is so I lose this eye, oui? But is only my one eye gone; the man that start that argument never draw breath again to start a next one. After a while, people come to see that we judgement fair, that we don’t cheat them. I the one who usually make the judgements. And I listen to both sides before I make a decision. So Junjuh people acknowledge me as sheriff, and the next three people as deputies.”
“And no Nanny to watch everything you do. No web nowhere.” Daddy sounded like a man in prayer.
One-Eye grinned. “No nanoweb to mind you, but no-one to scrutinize you either.”
Tan-Tan was bored. Chichibud and his friends had finally caught up with them. She patted his shoulder to get his attention.
“Chichibud, your wife coming to meet you?”
The douen men laughed and clicked their claws together tick-tick-tick. Claude guffawed too. Tan-Tan didn’t understand what she had said to sweet them so.
“Pickney-child,” One-Eye said, “the day I see a douen woman must be the day I go drop dead. Chichibud does talk about he wife like she is the living goddess; Pastora Divina sheself come down to Earth. Don’t it, Chichibud? But none of we ever see she, nor any other douen woman. Douen don’t live among we, and douen women don’t come among we.”
“Them ’fraid oonuh too bad,” one of the douens said, arching a reptilian head towards One-Eye. “Them tell we allyou ugly like duppy!” And he laughed shu-shu, covering one eye with his hand to imitate the man he was speaking to.
One-Eye scowled. “All right, enough fête.” He waved his hands at the douen-them to make them go away. “Go back to work.”
One-one, they all left, except Chichibud and the two helping him. “We have to do for him, Master,” one said to One-Eye. “He too lame to carry all this by heself.”
“Hmm. All right.” He spat onto the dirt path.
“You have to watch them all the time,” One-Eye told Antonio. “Them like children.”
Chichibud said nothing. He pulled his sharp bush knife from his waist and started cleaning in between his fangs-them with it.
In a few more steps they reached a bungalow that had a white flag waving on a pole out in the front. The two douens laid the mako jumbie beak halves down in the dust beside the house. They skreeked at Chichibud and left.
“This is where Doctor Lin does stay,” Claude told them. He led them up the front steps. No house eshu clicked on to greet them. It felt strange, wrong.
It had a girl, older than Tan-Tan, sitting in a rocking chair on the verandah, rocking and singing to herself in a little girl voice. She held on tight to a tattered rag doll, so old that most of the embroidered stitches that had sketched its face were gone. Tan-Tan remembered the many dollies that Daddy had bought for her. She’d left them all behind; dollies that walked and talked and thing, and Babygreen, the special one, the one whose clothes would change colour when Tan-Tan ran a special wand over them. She missed them. Her heart hurt when she remembered all the things she missed.
The big girl in the rocking chair had her hair in two fat plaits on each side of her head. As she rocked she held on to one plait and twisted it round and round in her fingers. When she saw the procession, she grinned sloppily and called out, “Good evening, allyou. Allyou come to see Doctor Mummy?”
“Yes, Quamina,” Claude said gently. Then quietly: “She ain’t have all she wits. Lin tell we she have the mind of a four-year-old.”
Antonio stared at Quamina, his lip curling up in disgust. Tan-Tan didn’t understand. If the big girl was sick, why didn’t they fix her?
One-Eye said, “She did even worse than that when she was little. Born bassourdie, and she couldn’t learn to walk good, or talk; only wetting up sheself all the time.”
“And what happen to she now?” Antonio whispered. He looked like he’d stepped in dog do-do.
Claude answered, “Asje, my douen, bring some bush tea for she. He tell Lin she must make Quamina drink a little every morning. Next thing you know, Quamina start to talk!”
“She might never come into she full age, though,” One-Eye say. “I ain’t know what Aislin make she live for. She only a burden.”
Claude scowled at him. “Quamina quiet, and she sweet, and she does help Aislin round the place.”
One-Eye hugged Claude to him, patted him on the back. “All right, sweetness! I ain’t go badtalk your woman daughter.” He kissed Claude on the mouth. Claude returned the kiss, his scowl clearing slowly. He took One-Eye’s hand and went up to the door, stopping to tousle Quamina’s hair. She smiled. He rapped on the door and called out, “Inside!”
“Claude? I here,” a woman’s voice called happily from inside. Claude’s face lit up. “What crosses you come to bother my soul with today?” the playful voice said.
“We bring you a new boyfriend, Lin.” He showed Antonio and Tan-Tan inside. “Only one thing, though; he reach in two pieces, and you have to put he back as one again.” He stood with his arms round One-Eye, waiting for her reply.
Chichibud limped over to an examination table. He put his slings down beside it and climbed up onto it. The woman washing her hands in a bucket looked up and smiled at Chichibud. She didn’t look pretty to Tan-Tan. She had little baby plaits sticking out of the kerchief she’d tied round her head. Her eyes were creased up at the corners as though she was used to frowning all the time. Although she straightened up from the bucket to greet her visitors, her shoulders had remained stooped. When she
saw Antonio, a look of horror came over her face. Antonio sighed, then said, “Well, Aislin; is you? Like me and you meet up again.”
Aislin! Nursie’s daughter that had climbed the half-way tree! Tan-Tan tried to see Nursie’s face in Aislin’s.
Aislin looked good at Antonio. “Mayor Antonio? Is Antonio allyou bring to my clean hospital for me to treat?” Her voice rose. “This . . . this piece of trash?” She strode up to him, waved her fist in his face. “Yes, you hear me right! I glad Toussaint throw you away to this hell! You ain’t mayor of nothing any more. Here I could name you for what you is—dung that dog does mash in the street! You do me wrong . . .”
“You mean to tell me your conscience really clear, Aislin?” Antonio asked softly. “You totally innocent?”
Aislin’s face purpled with rage. “Don’t give me none of that, I won’t listen to it! You do me wrong, I say! Then you send me away from my old mother so you wouldn’t have to look on your own deeds, send me away to rot here behind God back, and now look; you end up here your own self. I know it would happen; I know your liard ways would catch up with you one day.” Aislin started to laugh, but it had tears running down her face. “Take he away, Claude. I ain’t looking after he.”
One-Eye frowned. “What he is to you, Lin?”
“My baby father.” Aislin hugged Quamina, who had come in to see what all the comess was about. “You see, Antonio? You see what does happen to the child when you send a pregnant woman up the half-way tree? You greet your daughter yet?”
Antonio said nothing, just stared in repulsion at Quamina. Tan-Tan pulled on his pants leg. “Daddy? Why that lady so vex?”
“Hush, doux-doux. I go explain you later.”
“Why you don’t explain to she now, Antonio? Tell she she have a sister, nuh?”
A sister? Tan-Tan looked at Quamina. She didn’t understand. Aislin wasn’t her mummy. Quamina smiled her wet smile at Tan-Tan and held out her doll. Tan-Tan released Antonio’s hand and went to stand in front of Quamina. She reached out and touched the dolly with the tips of her fingers. It was still warm from Quamina’s clutch. Quamina released the dolly into Tan-Tan’s grasp and Tan-Tan grabbed it like a lifeline. She held it and stroked its head. She said to Quamina, “You want to play with me?”
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