Even while smoking a cigarette, Abrahim the barber could, in five minutes or less, trim a boy’s entire head of hair. The boy had already had his turn with Abrahim, but trim-time was an event beyond the cut itself. The crowd that gathered and stayed was an opportunity for the nuts seller, the penny-ice man, the fudge seller, and the whappie trickster not to miss. So the boy stayed and listened to the flip and slap of cards on the trickster’s folding table, the cussing as money was more often lost than won, the talk and laughter, heckling, bad-mouthing, and boasting of those who had already been trimmed and those awaiting their turn. Abrahim’s younger customers, too green in the ways of the world, were exposed to conversations they didn’t always comprehend. They laughed or nodded gravely whenever any of the older people did.
The boy happened to glance toward his house to see a man in a suit, hat in hand, standing among the orange crocus watching his house. He stood up as the man approached the front stairs. The boy could see that he was calling out, but if the excitement on the beach hadn’t drowned his voice, the wind coming in from the ocean would have whipped it away.
The boy left the beach and hurried, avoiding shards of broken shell and bottle, over the patch of flowering sea-grape vines that wound about the shores at this time of year.
The man had reached the entrance to the house before the boy could get to him and was rapping on the wood frame with his knuckles. The boy knew his mother was in the backyard hanging out her washing on the hibiscus shrubs to dry. She wouldn’t have heard him. When the boy was close enough he called out to the man.
“Mister, you want something?”
The man turned to regard the boy. He looked down toward the beach from where the boy had come. He saw the crowd of people. “Something happen?”
“No. Abrahim the barber giving trim. Is a trim you want?” Even as the child asked, he knew that was not what the man had come for: in this hot sun, he was wearing a brown suit, a white shirt, and a tie. He was not from around there. Cut hair caught in the fibers of his shirt had made him itchy. Suddenly pricked, he tugged at his shirt, twitched his shoulders.
“No. I come for something else. You just had a trim?”
The child ran his hands on his all but shaved head, his scalp feeling hot and prickly in the sun, strangely naked and cold in the breeze, and he nodded.
The man had a paper in his hand. He looked at it. “I don’t know if I have the right address. I am looking for one Miss Dolly St. George. Timbano Trace. She living here?” He daubed his face with a large white handkerchief.
“Yes. Wait, please. She in the back. I’ll get she. Who to say come?”
“Uhm. She don’t know me by name. Anyway, is Persad. Bhatt Persad. You the son?”
“Eh-heh. Wait here.”
Dolly undid the red band of cloth that she usually tied like a turban around her head when she was out in the yard working, shook it vigorously, and wound it back on her head. She sucked her teeth, irritated at being disturbed from her work, and said, “Persad. I don’t know any Persad. What he want with me, pray?” She looked at her son and shook her head in a mixture of pity and disgust. “Why Abrahim does always cut your hair so short, boy? That ent no trim. That is a shave.
“Who is this Persad, I wonder? Come with me. I don’t need no trouble now, you know.” She fixed her dress, and they went around to the front.
The man had taken a seat on the front step. He got up when he saw them. “Miss St. George?”
“Well, I was married once. But that is all right. What it is you come about?”
“I got your name from Walter, the taxi driver you used to ride with. I didn’t see you for a long time, and I asked him what happen to you and the boy.”
Dolly started to frown. He was never a passenger in the car, so how and where had he seen her and the child? And what business did he have asking about her? From his polite manner, the way he spoke, and his dress, he looked more like someone the Sanghas might know. He was a short, balding man, an Indian man with a mustache and gold that flashed from the back and front of his mouth when he spoke. He wore spectacles. Dolly looked at her son. He shrugged.
When Dolly didn’t respond, the man continued. “Walter told me you not working in town now. I was wondering if you are working at another job.”
Dolly didn’t immediately respond. She didn’t want to give this stranger any information about herself, but she also didn’t want to be impertinent to a man of his apparent standing by asking him what business it was to him. “You have a job for me?”
“You are not working?”
“I might be looking for something to do.”
The child remembered having seen the man, and he blurted it out: “You is the man from the gas station.”
Dolly looked at the boy quizzically. He held her hand and said, “Ent you remember Mr. Walter used to stop when we reach Marion to get gasoline?” He pointed to the man and whispered up to her, “He used to be in the station, in the building—behind the counter.”
The man heard him. Smiling, he said, “You remember. That is my station. I am the proprietor. I used to see you every Saturday morning.”
Now that she knew more, Dolly was less apprehensive. So that she might offer the visitor a soft drink, she sent the boy five minutes up the beach to get a glass of ice from the iceman, the only person in Raleigh to own a freezer, though it was rusted from the salt air and hummed loudly. The boy pulled off his hair-covered shirt and raced back up the beach. When he returned, Dolly was sitting at the kitchen table waiting. The visitor had already gone.
“He want a full-time. I tell him I can’t take full-time because I can’t leave you day in, day out. He ask if you not going to school. I tell him hardly any children in Raleigh go to school, but you know how to read. He say bring you and he will get a school for you, and I will start work same time the school start, and finish up in time to fetch you by the time school bell ring for the day.”
The boy’s heart pounded with fear and excitement. “Where, Mammy?”
“In Marion.”
Marion. Certainly that would mean they would see Mrs. Sangha and her daughter again. What would Mrs. Sangha say if she knew he was attending school. School! That frightened and appealed to him at the same time. The suggestion alone, that he, son of Dolly the servant, a boy from Raleigh, was being considered, being given the opportunity, to attend school—regardless of his mother’s intention—made him feel different. A sweat broke above his upper lip. He spoke as calmly as he could. “What you say, Mammy?”
“School? Well, everybody want for they child to get education. I suppose I ordinary, too. You don’t want to go to school?”
He was overcome by an overwhelming desire to attend a school, an activity he had never before thought about. In his mind, an image of Narine Sangha appeared and, almost immediately, vanished. No formed thought accompanied the image of Narine Sangha, but for a brief moment the boy imagined he could smell the cologne. He was simultaneously terrified and delighted. He held his breath, afraid to utter a word, terrified his mother would not accept the man’s offer.
Thinking his silence meant that he was uninterested, she said with exasperation, “All you children in this village don’t know what is good for you, yes. This place going to get swallow up one day”—he thought then she meant by the sea—“and all of we with it. Listen, forget about Raleigh, you hear. All Raleigh is good for is fishing, and you ent stepping foot in any boat as long as I have a say in your life. The only thing left save for idleness in Raleigh is to drive taxi, and even so the taxi will never be your own, you will always be a driver for Bihar company. You want to be a taxi man? Is true I didn’t think about all this before, but I get a glimpse of my son teaching in a elementary school. My son, a teacher! Or even set up behind a table writing letters for people who can’t read or write themselves. Is not like we suffering, but education is a kind of freedom, child.”
It was too much for him to imagine, but he could tell she was already seeing the future and they were about to head for it.
The school term, something he had never considered before, was to begin in three weeks’ time.