Their house was small. High-tide nights, in darkness and quiet, the roaring ocean would seem to be upon them. The house itself, though, lifted a yard off the sand by nine stumps of shaved teak, three sets of three, had never so much as swayed in any of the storms that frequented this unprotected archipelago strewn to one side of the Caribbean Sea. It was but a room, well built, and thanks to Seudath her Indian, it was hers.
One Saturday evening, tired and looking forward to a restful evening—she had in mind a dip in the ocean—Dolly returned with her son to find her house unrecognizable. Except for the placement of the outhouse, the cooking lean-to, and the pawpaw tree with the cock sprawled off in it, she might as well have gotten out of the taxi at the wrong trace. The house ahead, her house, had been—well, she didn’t know what to say it had been. Its walls were a garish mishmash of color and pattern. It had been attacked. Attacked by the man known, by reputation only until this day, as the wallpaperer. Her son was too short to see what over the bushes had made her shriek, but when she broke into a run toward the house, he followed right behind. This man, not a resident of Raleigh, had heard about the foreign art of decorating walls with patterned paper. He had decided to become a wallpaperer. Finding jobs hard to come by, the art as yet little known, little desired, in Guanagaspar, he took it upon himself to give gifts of his services as a form of advertising. Dolly had heard about him but had not seen evidence of his skills anywhere, and had only, along with other beach gossips, laughed at the idea of his outrageousness. Suddenly two walls of her own house had been papered with pictures and articles from newspapers and foreign magazines.
She was stomping and cursing, pelting her own house with stones from the yard. Same time, some people who been walking along the beach heard her above the roar of the ocean. Coming up the shore, they saw the startling cacophony of color jumping out of the greenery and clashing with the blue sky. They came running to the front of the house along the path that connected to the beach.
They stood, watched, walked around, inspected, and gasped.
“Oh God, the wallpaperer reach Raleigh. Miss Dolly house get attack!”
“And he calling this art? This is a art?”
“It colorful.”
“Ey, all you. You lucky it ent your house. If it was your house, you wouldn’t be talking free so, na.”
“But what wrong with this fella, in truth?”
“Let he come near my house, I go catch him and buss his arse. Art my arse!”
Dolly sank on her knees and regarded the handiwork. “He trying to make a fool of me? He don’t see I is a hardworking woman? And them useless birds can’t even keep away a vandal?”
Tante Eugenie huffed her way down the path and went directly to Dolly to throw her arms around her and console her. “And yes, you right, you working hard for so, and this worthless fellow, worthless-worthless, come and deface your house.”
Those in the yard made a quick decision: they ran to the back of the house, where they broke off thick lengths of guava trunks, dispersing, promising Dolly to catch the “asstist,” as they dubbed him, and to bury him alive right there and then.
The boy didn’t understand why the new look of the house was so troubling to everyone else. In some places the concoction of found, weather-beaten wood boards on the house overlapped for no reason besides lack of carpentry expertise on the part of his father. To his mind, the work of the wallpaperer had transformed the structure into something to walk around and admire. Inside and outside had, up until this morning, flowed easily through the unmatched planked walls of this house, but the wallpapering, he saw, had sealed the gaps between the warped boards. He stood not three feet high, his hands on his hips, mannish, his mother would say, and contemplated the new look of his house. True, from inside there wouldn’t be the view of coconut trees and the ocean, or the sandy yard all the way past the cooking shed. During the days when the windows would be shut against heat and sandstorms, he wouldn’t be able to peep through the cracks and watch his hen and her chicks, or see the pigeon pea boundary and the outhouse beyond. But to him, the side of his house, previously bleached dry and gray by the sun, worn thin by rain and sea breeze, was now decorated. It was pretty. He hoped Mrs. Sangha and her daughter would have the chance to see it. He waited until his mother went inside the house, accompanied by Tante Eugenie, as Dolly was afraid of what might be found there, too. Then he went around to one of the walled sides. The cock came fluttering down noisily from the pawpaw tree, falling with a clumsy thump onto the dry ground. It fluffed its feathers and strutted alongside the boy, as if it, too, were surveying and approving. The child stooped to stroke the coarse, oily back feathers of the bird. He stood up and went closer so that he could see the pictures on the paper covering the side of the house. He was rather pleased that he recognized a number of words plastered on his house. He found the words “at,” “a,” “the,” “this,” “man,” and “he.” He looked long and longingly at the shapes of thousand of others, could almost taste them, feel them fully formed in his belly.