Dolly didn’t want anybody in Raleigh to know she was unemployed. She didn’t look for work to replace her lost job in Marion or anywhere else. She decided that with a little imagination and a little hard work, which she might as well do for herself rather than for someone else, the bush and sea of Raleigh would provide her and her son with their modest needs.
Saturdays, to make sure the boy didn’t take off down the path to the beach where he might be seen and so expose her situation, she put him to work around the house. Before the day got too hot, when the pigeon-pea shrubs were laden, she would send him to fill a paper bag. When the guava came in, the branches of the trees would droop to the ground with the extra weight. One, passing some distance from a patch, would be drenched in the fragrance of ripening, bursting, and fallen rotting fruit. There were always more than enough guavas in back of the house for his mother’s needs, even when he devoured a good share right there in the guava patch.
Soup can by soup can, he would twice daily ferry water from the barrel at the side of the house to the front steps, where he would soak the sun-baked dirt of the red-painted tin cans in which sun-colored marigolds thrived. He would sweep the yard with the cocyea broom. At the end of the day he would go under the house. The chickens would strut expectantly around him, and eventually, after enjoying their display of dependence, he would scatter corn kernels, cooked rice, and bread crumbs. The cock would proprietorially flutter up onto his lap. It would never settle down but would press and transfer its weight from one foot to the next, stooping low and then stretching up. He liked the attention it paid him.
Inside the house, he picked rice or sorted the good peas from the ones with worms, shelled them, and chopped the guavas in little pieces, flicking away the worm-ridden bits with the tip of the knife. When he sat doing these chores with Dolly in the room, both of them quiet, he would miss hearing music or Mrs. Audry Talbot’s voice. He even missed hearing the somber death news and news of Mrs. Sangha’s war, which for him and his mother might just as well have ended when they left Marion on that terrible day when Narine Sangha tore apart all that was good and secure in the boy’s world.
At the end of the day, he was usually so tired he would go behind the curtain to the coconut-fiber mattress there. He would fall asleep the moment his little body hit the mattress. Sunday morning he would awaken long after his mother, to the aroma of guava, cloves, and sugar bubbling on the stove. And Sunday midday she and he would walk the beach selling the aromatic guava cheese, a penny for a square inch.
Several Saturdays of not going to Marion passed without incident. Then Tante Eugenie, walking down the beach in front of the house, noticed a flicker of movement in the yard. She hustled up the path, a washed-up bottle picked hastily off the beach in her hand in case she needed a missile for protection, to make sure the house was safe from burglars or wallpaperers. To her consternation, she found Dolly under the pawpaw tree, cursing and jabbing away at its lopsided crown with a cobweb broom in an attempt to dislodge the cock.
She heard Dolly mutter, “So much hen in the yard, and this good-for-nothing cock does just sit idle-idle up in the tree so.” She jabbed at the cock furiously and shouted, “Get down here, you little so-and-so. I will make curry out of you so fast if you don’t put yourself to work, you hear. Come down!”
Tante Eugenie didn’t wait for an explanation. “But what is this? I hearing all kind of things, and I telling people to stop their idle talk, that if you get fire I would be the first to know. So, is true? Why you not in Marion now? They fire you, child?”
“Get fire? Who say I get fire? I leave. Let people talk. They could say they fire me all they want.”
“I hear the children was in the same bed, and that Sangha fire you for that.”
“Fire me? He wish! Because he name Narine Sangha, he think he have license to keep woman left, right, and center? Listen, what harm it have in two children, little so, sleeping in the same bed? Is only a nasty, worthless mind what would see sin in that. And where you getting your news from these days? Who minding my business? Tell them to come talk to me in my face. If you see how bad he treat my child, and what good he think he do to his own child, eh? You mad to think I going back there. Nobody fire me, you hear? It is I who fire the job.”
As Uncle Mako’s age advanced, he complained that fishing the way he knew it, men waking so early that even cocks were still sleeping, pushing pirogues and rowboats into the water by the light of the moon, setting nets by hand, pulling them in the long, slow arduous way, was a dying profession. He would point in disgust to a distant group of youngsters banging on oil cans, on hubcaps, and on bottles with old enamel spoons, dancing, singing, drinking, and smoking, and he would growl, “That is not what our people, African people, would a want for us. Them children shaming us. They ain’t got no dreams. You are not African, child, but you living among us. You want to get like them? Eh? Look at them! Shameful-shameful.”
To Dolly, he said it was time the child stopped sticking up behind his mother’s back, doing woman-work. Shelling peas wasn’t man-work. He said that God showed He knew best when He brought Dolly and the boy back from Marion; in Marion the boy’s head was bound to swim with ideas that would cause him confusion and discontent later. The child was getting too accustomed to sticking up so close to a big shot’s daughter, and this was only going to cause him a lot of hurt. Better he learn to be content in Raleigh. The boy was old enough, he said, to learn a trade, and the best trade for a fellow in Raleigh, despite everything, was a fishing-related trade. The first thing he taught the boy was to mend a net.
As he and the boy worked the green net cord, heavy in the boy’s easily bruised hands, Uncle Mako would babble on about a family waiting for him across the sea. When Tante Eugenie was far enough away, for she’d had enough of his daydreaming and prattling about faraway family, he pointed his finger here and there toward where a country called Africa might or might not be. He told the boy that Africa was really the home of his ancestors, from where he was taken against his will, but the boy couldn’t understand this. It was a story Uncle Mako himself could not make sense of, let alone explain to a little boy. He said only that he planned one day to return there. If he was careless and Tante Eugenie heard him talk this way, she would suck her teeth, shake her finger, and bellow.
“Ey, old man, keep up with the times, na, man. What family you have over there, pray tell? We ent going ‘there,’ you hear? Them days dead and gone. Them people ‘there,’ you making up stories about them in your head; you think they even have time for we? They bound to laugh at you in your face, old man.” And they would start a fight about a country over there, or over this way where there was a hint of coloring on the horizon. The little boy would squint at the horizon, willing to see anything faint that might suggest Uncle Mako was right.