Читать книгу A Tall History of Sugar - Curdella Forbes - Страница 12

Chapter II

"Sit," she commanded without speaking, patting the bench beside her, her uniform skirt spread out around her like a queen's robe. The stiffly starched navy-blue pleats made him think of a peacock's feathers. Their preening matched her hair, which was done up in short, fat plaits and decorated excessively in the fashion of the time, with a fantastical array of ribbons and clips.

Many years later, when he was in art school, he saw a portrait of Queen Elizabeth the First in peacock costume, and he thought that he had been right about her even then, all those years ago. She did resemble a queen, in the way she carried herself. But he adored her more as a goddess than a queen. Yet the most thing was, she was his friend.

Obedient to her command, he sat, taking care to leave enough space between them so he wouldn't mash her pleats. He wriggled himself into a comfortable position, still sucking on his right thumb and without removing his left hand from under his shirt where it was kneading his navel, as it always did when he sucked his thumb, the perfect coordination of comfort that he had known in all of his six years. The two of them were suck-fingers.

She sucked her left index finger, her right hand feeling her navel under her skirt which was rucked up in the most unladylike manner in the midst of its queenly spread. The middle pleats would no longer be immaculate when she got up from the bench. She sucked the tip of her finger daintily, like an upper-class lady sucking on a pipe pretending it was only a pose. He, on the other hand, stuck his entire thumb in his mouth, and bunched his hand so that two fingers could fit up his nostrils. It was a sign of their two personalities: he wanted everything immediately, viscerally; she ambushed and claimed everything in a more circuitous way. And yet he was timid and held his wants in secret even from himself, and she was tallawah and fearless, with horned hair and bold, flashing eyes.

They came here every recess to watch the chickens.

"Dah one-deh deh call egg," she announced, again without speaking, pointing to a large Dominican hen that had detached itself from the clutch and was strutting around the coop, making the familiar rhythmic noise in its throat, like coconut husk being rubbed on a grater. It meant that the hen was about to lay. "That one is summoning eggs."

Arrested, the two children leaned forward, their eyes glued to the disturbed hen. The other hens ignored her, sitting sleepy-eyed on their own eggs or pecking desultorily at the feeding troughs in the hope of dislodging some overlooked grain of corn or slice of coconut from the morning's feeding. From his perch above the ground the rooster flapped his wings, once and again, his eyes bright and expectant as they followed the hen.

"Shi go lay," the girl said again, inside her head, and the boy heard her as always. He heard her voice filled with triumphant satisfaction. She removed her right hand from its secret encounters with her navel and pulled her uniform tunic in close, so that it no longer described a distance between them. Then, as if this action initiated a tacit code, they began inching across the log, he to the left, she to the right, until they were touching at shoulder and thigh. Then her hand went back in her navel and they settled again, absorbed, with the deaf-ears concentration of which children are capable. Their silence, secret and companionable, fell like a wrapped sheet around them. The hen slowed down, looking for a place to sit.

Behind, the schoolyard was abrasive with noise, but they hardly noticed: the din came to them like a rumor from a far country, vague and distant. This was their secret place, this coop on the edge of the school grounds pungent with the smell of chicken waste—pee, feces, sometimes offal. The big boys, the ones who after years in school still could not read or write, were charged with feeding the chickens morning and evening before and after school, but otherwise the coop and its vicinity were out of bounds. Nobody except Moshe and Arrienne minded, because nobody else was interested in chickens, of which the district children saw plenty everywhere. Some had chickens of their own, specially assigned for them to take care of, pets that would later be ruthlessly butchered for the family pot.

Moshe and Arrienne routinely broke the rule, and were routinely punished. In the beginning he cried because she got beaten and he did not. She was a big, tall girl, larger than her seven years, with Maroon features. She was fierce and refused to cry, no matter how many and how hard the blows the headmaster, the man-teacher, inflicted. Moshe, on the other hand, could not be touched. At the slightest stroke of the cane his skin broke and gushed blood, which even in those days could bring a court case or the police, if your mother was Rachel Fisher, a cantankerous woman even by Tumela standards.

Then, for some reason, the man-teacher stopped beating her and the two of them began to receive the same punishment. And since this more often than not included staying in late to clean up the classroom (this was sometimes punishment for recalcitrants, more often duty for the whole class, when there were no recalcitrants to punish), they did not mind. Or rather, she did not mind since punishment of any kind meant little to her, and he had learned to welcome this punishment because it meant they would be set free after all the other children had gone. Then they could walk home alone, without fear of the ridicule that he dreaded. She wasn't bothered by the ridicule. She would simply fight to defend him from it. But she felt it was okay too, to walk home without fighting, if one didn't have to.

The hen had found a corner that suited her, and was sitting. The children grew tense with excitement, their heads stiff and close together. The rooster, who had spun around like a weather vane following the hen's every movement, turned around on his perch, flapping and squawking in her direction.

But the hen was taking a long time. She lay quiet and unmoving, her bottom cocked, her eyes closed, as if she were asleep.

The children were growing tired of the waiting, afraid that nothing would happen before the bell for end of recess rang. Without a word spoken and in exact coordination, they began kicking the space beneath the bench, to and fro, their upper bodies rocking in unison with the movement, the habitual choreography of twins who communicated in their own secret ways. Without speaking, they sped up the movement, never taking their eyes off the hen or their fingers from their sedate communication with their belly buttons.

They were trying to hypnotize the hen into doing their will.

Straining, he directed the force of his will toward the hen. Please. Please.

"Is Sylvia Pettigrew an Lionel Harper wen inna di grassroot yessideh. Dem did a-do badniss," the girl said, without apparent rhyme or reason.

She broke his concentration. This time she had spoken aloud, which she almost never did. His eyes opened wide; with fascination and fear, his imagination shifted to the other side of the land bordering the school grounds. This section was prohibited as well. At the border between the school and the red river was the dry-stone gateway over which a log was laid like a bridge. The gate led out into a bow-shaped clearing encircled by trees that gave it an intimate and eerie feeling.

The trees were the first thing that made it impossible to keep the children away from that place, despite prohibition. They were naseberry trees, which fruited in the summer just before school was out. The succulent brown fruit fell and broke on the ground with a splash and turned bees, flies, and children luminescent with desire. Beyond the shadow cast by the trees was the slope that the teachers feared and fought unsuccessfully by prohibitions to keep the children from haunting. There the sun blazed unhindered from an open sky and they could slide flailing on coconut branches down to the river, or play at hide-and-seek in the tufts of guinea grass that grew in abundance all the way down. The guinea grass was where the bad children like Lionel Harper and Sylvia Pettigrew misbehaved themselves, showing their cheelies and cocobreads and doing other things to which his imagination could not assign a concrete image.

"Sandra chat. Shi tell Man-Teacher dis mawnin. Man-Teacher go bus dem ass wid pepper-lick." She flashed her hand in the motion that meant a beating, clicking her thumb and index finger together. They made a sound like a whip. She returned her hand to her navel and continued kicking, finger-sucking. Sandra welshed on them and now Man-Teacher is going to give them a serious beating, a bust-arse. The thought delivered an extraordinary satisfaction.

He shivered, shocked at the news and, as always, at the daring of her language. She was never afraid to swear out of the hearing of adults, whereas he censored even his dreams. He was so afraid to dream that he struggled every night not to fall asleep. He dreamed of a large gray mattress coming in the night, scooping him up and whirling him far away from his mother, while he stretched out his hands to her, crying, but his mother was in the other room and did not hear. He dreamed this dream often when his parents fought, and he thought his mother would be killed; he thought his father would kill her.

"Shhh. Look deh. Look deh." The gossip over, she had returned to speaking to him without words. He always heard the echo in his head, clear as his own voice.

The hen had raised its behind in the bed of straw and the round brown egg was protruding from its extended anus, which was pushing it out with quick, pulsating movements. It fell out and the children thought "Plop!" in unison, their eyes shining with the unbearable thrill that never waned no matter how often they watched this event which was to them a vast miracle.

"Shi go dweet again," the boy whispered in his head, breathing through his mouth, and sure enough the hen raised herself again, the process was repeated, and soon two bright speckled eggs lay like jewels in the straw. This had never happened before. The children heaved a mutual sigh of satisfaction, long drawn out, in tandem, first she, "Hah," and then he, "Hah." The hen started cackling, announcing the birth. The rooster, cockadoodledoing loudly, announced his accomplishment, beating his wings and springing down on top of another of the hens. The gaggle scattered, calling and protesting in outrage.

The children had seen this mating a hundred times before and were not at all as interested in it as they were in the miracle of the egg being born. Still, they liked to watch as the rooster tried to anchor the next hen's head in place with his beak, before wriggling on and then off her. This wriggling to them was stupid, unsatisfactory; they thought he looked ridiculous, and sometimes he did not catch the hen, but this time he did.

Recess was almost over. They could hear it in the receding quality of the schoolyard noise. Soon the bell would ring. Another silence descended, but not as secure. They were waiting for the bell, which they could hear before it rang, a jangling noise that made their bellies feel stiff and unwell. Slightly shocked, a little lost, they stood up and began to tidy themselves. She straightened her pleats with meticulous care and patted her braids to make sure they were staying down, which they were not, but pressing them down made her feel she had tidied away her and Moshe's secrets. It was like putting things away inside a secret drawer, where inquisitive people could not find them. Struggling to stuff his uniform shirt into his short pants, he was clumsier. She helped him as the bell rang, dusting him down with quick pats of her hands, removing imaginary fluff.

They dawdled behind the crowds pressing toward the schoolhouse doorway, a headlong rush that braked at the steps and slowed to a massed shuffling punctuated by quick, urgent whispers, shovings, angry hisses, and finally silence as the man-teacher appeared in the doorway to inspect the perfect lines and the hush into which the rowdy mass had resolved itself at the door.

He stood erect and tall—to the littler children, a colossus—a great high-brown man with a bullet head, flexing, with slow, deliberate movements, the cane that was the same color as himself, while his eyes, the color of fresh molasses at the bottom of a gourdie, surveyed the pack with a libidinous gleam, waiting to catch just one out of line. He caught two, shirt out of pants or imperfectly tucked, and the cane descended with gusto, raising a vague dust from the flour-bag drawers the boys wore beneath their short khaki pants.

One boy leaped from side to side, sticking his bottom out to deflect the force of the blows. He got a double portion for his pains.

The other boy, more savvy, merely roared for mercy, standing still except for the staccato jerking of his body each time the lash descended. "Mi mumma, mi mumma! Woie, Teacha, Man-Teacha, mi nah go dweet again. Mek mi put in mi shirt inna mi pants, Teacha, duu, Teacha, duu!"

Man-Teacher gave him a few more as well, for creating shame and disgrace on his school. "Boy! Anybody killing goat around here? You is goat? Anybody cutting your throat? This is a school, not a abattoir! Stop your cow-bawling!"

But the other, who was guilty of the greater crime of evading punishment, got a greater portion of licks.

A few girls giggled, amused by the triple entertainment: the boy leaping and calling "Sight!" while he stuck his bottom out so that he was contorted almost in the shape of a saddle; the other calling down God from the cross and bawling for his mother to convince the man-teacher that he was dropping dead from the licks. Above all, they were amused by the way the licks exposed the boys' poverty. With every fall of the cane, flour dust rose in the air. Only the very poor, which none would admit was most of them, wore flour-bag drawers, and who wore them was a secret poorly kept—exposed by the man-teacher's zealous cane, for no matter how well the mothers washed, some stubborn residue of flour remained, and flaked up in an aerial smoke when the cloth was beaten.

No one confessed to the crime of giggling, so the head teacher distributed a rain of licks on the heads, shoulders, and breasts of the girls standing in the general vicinity of the giggles. After this, Man-Teacher sweating in streams, the children were allowed to chant in unison, "Thank you, God, for work and play, and all the good things you give us every day," before proceeding inside in an orderly manner, dispersing into their various classrooms, which were separated from each other not by doors but by folding blackboards, so that the activities of all the classes, which included many chants of lessons learned by rote, resonated, with astonishingly musical cadence, throughout all the other classes and the doorways of the school.

Holding fast to Moshe's hand as they crouched without crouching at the back of the line (Man-Teacher beat for poor posture), Arrienne could feel him trembling beside her. She squeezed his hand in their secret signal, and as his fingers squeezed hers in return, the great wings unfurled and pushed them forward and they plunged, invisible, into the darkness of their classroom where, with instinct and without sight, they found their bench (three children to a bench fastened to one desk) and slid onto it without speaking to the third child, who was already sitting there. The wings that made them invisible also robbed them of sight for the small moment that the miraculous protection lasted.

Man-Teacher, counting the children streaming inside to make sure all were present, missed two, but his eyes were blinded from the sun and he thought he'd miscounted. Something brushed past his ear with a feeling of bats, as it often did, and it annoyed him, because he knew there would be a buzzing in his ears for the whole of the next week.