No matter how the child jostled against his mother’s body as she ran breathless down Timbano Trace, he refused to awaken. He was heavy, and sweat streamed down Dolly’s face. If she missed the six o’clock taxi, it would be an hour before the next one passed. By then traffic would have piled up. She would end up being over an hour late.
She made haste, and with each breath the odor of the sea—crab, fish bones, seaweed, and chip-chip—made her skin crawl. The sand was damp, too; it must have rained, there must have been a storm last night. The smell told her that the sea had pitched back up some of what it had lassoed yesterday or even years back. It had crossed her mind when she first awakened to run down to the water and check if the sea had decided to return any of her belongings. But years of doing just this had taught her that the sea had secrets it held on to and would not give up for any amount of pleading or promises.
It must have been an offshore storm. An offshore storm with the audacity to make shore people sick with its sea-bottom foulness.
It was the cock in the yard clucking, clearing its throat, flapping about like stale news in wind, that woke her. She thought something was meddling with it. Whether it was a dog come to steal the hen’s eggs freshly laid under the house, or a man prowling about in the yard, it was she who had to fend for herself and the boy. So she got out of bed and peeped through a gap in the boards. Nothing. She nudged the lopsided window open for a better view. The sea air was damp, clinging to her skin. It was just the cock out there. She recognized it strutting and dancing and prancing. Suddenly eight, nine, ten of them spread throughout the area, made ruckus enough to rouse even the dead, be they on land or tangled up in the bottom of the ocean. Lately she’d had to shoo the one that was hers off the crown of the pawpaw tree. Such an old, heavy bird in such a young and tender tree. It would have brought down the tree if she had not put a stop to it. If her son had not been so attached to that particular bird—and why it was so, she could not understand—she would have wrung its neck and stewed it a long time ago. Clucking about and waking her up like that.
Hustle-hustle: she mustn’t miss the taxi.
God, her child had grown, overnight it seemed. Five years she had been carrying him like this, at this time of the morning when he remained asleep on her shoulder, to catch the regular Saturday ride into town. How heavy he had become, too heavy to be carrying so.