3

Kevin decided that when he grew up he would be king of Nicaragua. For months, he had been fascinated by the idea of becoming a king. From the little glassed-in bookcase that composed the school library, he had taken a book entitled A Boy’s Life of Napoleon. The book fired his imagination. He decided that when he became a man, he too would make himself a master of men and empires. Searching through an atlas for a likely country, he regretfully abandoned France, Spain, Germany, and Italy as too large and powerful. He doubted his ability to enlist sufficient volunteers to overthrow their governments. Finally, he chose Nicaragua, a tiny, purple blotch on the map. Yes, he would make himself ruler of Nicaragua. In his exercise books, he drew up time schedules and plans of campaign, fording rivers with a movement of his pencil, eliminating frontiers with a swipe of an eraser. In 1953, when he was twenty, he would raise an army of freebooters — perhaps one hundred men. They would seize a ship and sail to the Caribbean. In 1954, he would be crowned king. His Majesty Kevin I, by the Grace of God and the Constitution of the Kingdom, Commander-in-Chief and King of Nicaragua. Then, perhaps in 1955, he would invade Honduras and annex it to his domain. In 1957, he would plant his flag in El Salvador. In 1958, he would lead his troops into the capital city of Guatemala. By 1960, he would be Emperor of Central America.

With wax crayons, he made designs for flags, settling finally on a golden cross with a golden circle on a field of white. And he invented names for ships and regiments, pages of them. He would christen his first battleship El Gringo, and his personal bodyguards, whose uniform, which he spent an entire evening designing, bore a strong resemblance to the garb of a guardsman as depicted in A Boy’s Life of Napoleon, would be known as King Kevin’s Royal Hussars.

He supposed he would have to marry. Kings needed sons to continue their dynasties. And Princess Margaret Rose was only a little older than he . . . Then he remembered that Napoleon had divorced Josephine because she could not provide him with an heir. This puzzled him. He asked his mother: “Why couldn’t Josephine have any children, Mummy?”

“Josephine who, sweetikins?”

“You know, Josephine, the one that married Napoleon.”

Laughing, Mary threw her arms around him. She slid her hand inside the back of his shirt and ran her fingers up and down the little bumps in his spine. This was one of her favourite ways of caressing him.

“Oh, Scampi darling, you ask the craziest questions!”

He drew away sulkily. “I don’t see nothin’ crazy about that.”

“No, it isn’t really crazy. Just funny, sort of. But I don’t know, lamb. I really don’t know why Josephine couldn’t have children. I suppose someday you’ll find out all about it. When Mummy’s little sugar baby gets to be a man, he’s going to know all sorts of wonderful things.”

Grandmother O’Brien spoke from her rocker, beneath the clock shelf. “Yer spoilin’ the boy, Mary. Yer spoilin’ the boy with yer foolishness.”

Mary stroked Kevin under the chin and winked at him.

“We’re poor people,” Grandmother O’Brien said. “It ain’t fittin’ fer people like us tuh put on airs.”

Mary winked at Kevin again.

Grandmother O’Brien said this often, to rebuke what she called the false pride of Kevin and his mother. “People like us should be willin’ tuh take what’s handed out tuh us. We’re poor as dirt and allus will be. Puttin’ on high and mighty airs ain’t gonna change things none.”

To ease the perpetual pain in her stomach, Martha O’Brien held a brick, heated on top of the stove and wrapped in an old wool sock, against her waist. She lived on crackers soaked in milk until they’d become an oozing pulp, but her soul was nourished on the flesh offered in sacrifice to the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob.

“The O’Briens has allus been poor, boy. But they allus knew their place. And they was allus willin’ tuh work. The same with my people, the Havelocks; when a man hired a Havelock he knowed he was a-gonna git a day’s work outta him. Yuh never caught a Havelock givin’ hisself no stud-horse airs. They knew what they was and they never pretended tuh be nothin’ else. I don’t like that false pride I see in yuh, boy. ”

“Oh, my goodness, Grammie! Scampi just asked a simple little question!” Mary’s voice rose in irritation.

Martha adjusted the pin in her black, bowl-shaped hairdo. “Mark my words, Mary, yer a-spoilin’ that boy. Children should be seen and not heard, I allus say, children should be seen and not heard.” Rocking complacently, she looked at Kevin with undisguised disapproval. “If that was my boy I’d Josephine him! I’d Josephine him out in the garden with a hoe. There’s work tuh be done here. Ain’t no earthly use of Judd workin’ his heart out every night after he comes home from the mill. Put that boy out in the garden. Put him tuh work around the barn. He’s big enough tuh work if he’s ever gonna be!”

“Oh, Grammie, Scampi is only a baby. Things were different when you were young. You don’t realize that, Grammie.”

“I realize a long-legged cockalorum like that one should be doin’ his share of work around the place instead of askin’ questions about women havin’ children.”

Mary drew Kevin’s face against her breast. “When Scampi grows up, he’s going to work with his brain. His hands are going to be soft as a girl’s — like the hands of the men who work in offices and stores in Larchmont. When he’s a man, my baby is going to have nice, soft, pink hands just like he has now. You wait and see.”

“Eh!” This sound, half snort and half grunt, was Martha’s way of dismissing them as hopeless. She rocked vigorously, hugging her brick.

There was nothing that Kevin found more frustrating than his grandmother’s sermons on the certainty of poverty and the duty of humility before one’s betters. He writhed in vexation when she told him, as she often did, that within four years he would be working in the mill. He hated her for the grim satisfaction he detected in her voice. And his hate was made more vicious by the thought that she was probably right in her prediction.

Martha did not undress at night. She lay fully clothed on her bed, and when the pain became unbearable she came downstairs and heated bricks. Then, in the darkness, with the brick clutched to her belly, she rocked and sang hymns. Often, Kevin awoke and heard her voice rise like the cry of a ghost in the darkness at the other end of the house.

This was the hymn that she most often sang:

 

There is a fountain filled with blood,

Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins,

And sinners plunged beneath that flood

Lose all their guilty stains.

 

E’er since by faith I saw that stream

Thy flowing did supply,

Redeeming love has been my theme

And shall be till I die.