At another time, Lenworth would have been in a school helping students with chemistry experiments or tutoring a student in math, teaching Pythagoras’s theorem and square root and cube root. Now, he was on the verandah of the abandoned house in Anchovy, again looking down the hill, across the overgrown plot of fruit trees on the land he had claimed as his refuge, and at a house with a rusting zinc roof. Algebra seemed abstract, and the symbols and rules to solve the equations like something that belonged to another era. Even the elements of the periodic table seemed like a useless thing to teach. Nothing he had taught had any use for him here on the hill, and he imagined that his former students who didn’t go on to a university would eventually say the same about advanced math or chemistry.
This—the detour from teaching high school math while saving toward an engineering degree—was temporary. He didn’t know yet how he would get back on track to his ultimate goal—the engineering degree—but he knew one thing: Picking up and starting over was far easier for him as a man than it would have been for Plum. Single fathers got pity; single or unwed mothers generally didn’t, and more often than not, they suffered setback after setback that hardened their hears and blunted their future.
The sun dusted everything with a pale yellow. Dew glistened on the grass and to the left of the verandah, water dripped from a broken gutter onto the house’s exposed concrete footing. Away from his property and in the flat land below, a woman hung clothes on a line. Lenworth stood for a long while looking on, trying to decipher the woman’s age. He saw no children, no other person walking around the yard, and from that distance he thought the woman was older, a retiree perhaps.
Looking out like that on the acre of land, the houses in the valley, Lenworth imagined the pride a rich planter must have felt when he looked out from his verandah at the acres of sugar cane or tobacco or banana spread out before him—all his own. Not that Lenworth owned anything at all. Not the old house or the fruit trees. He was simply making do. Lenworth was used to it, this business of making do with what he had. After all, he had grown up with a mother who did just that, who made soups out of next to nothing; who stretched a tin of corned beef with canned beans or cabbage or tomatoes and ketchup; who planted coco and coffee and peas, selling a little here and there; who reaped pimento berries from the trees that grew on their own and the surrounding land, dried the berries and sold crocus bags full at the cooperative market. She simply made do. That first week, Lenworth repaired the dipping floorboards, sprayed insecticide to rid the house of duck ants, and shored up a leaning door frame. And now he had the germ of a plan to solve the problem of who would help him take care of the week-old baby girl.
Already, Lenworth was failing his daughter, whom he had named Opal for no other reason than she looked up at him with eyes that reminded Lenworth of a precious stone. She cried incessantly as newborns are wont to do, but it was hard for Lenworth to comfort her. In his arms, she squirmed, more agitated than comforted, shifting as if, even at that young age, she knew she should have been somewhere else.
Lenworth, with Opal in his arms, headed downhill. At the gate, he turned left, looking for the blue house with the rusting zinc roof, a verandah with a white railing, and clothes on a line in the back.
When he came up to the blue house, he hesitated, waiting for a dog’s bark or the scuttle of paws on the grass, then called out, “Hello.”
The woman, the front of her dress wet from washing, came out onto the verandah. She wiped her hands on the already wet dress, stopping for a moment to push aside a cat that had sidled up beside her. She was, as he suspected, older—perhaps in her seventies.
“Morning, ma’am,” Lenworth said as he walked toward her. “How you do?”
Closer to her, he said his name, “Lenworth,” and held out a hand to grasp hers. “I’m staying up there at the Ramsey place.”
“Sister Ivy. Yes, I heard that family come back to take over the place.”
“Yes, me and my daughter.” He looked down at Opal, who slept with her head on his shoulder. “Don’t want to bother you. I come down here ’cause I’m looking for somebody to help with the baby girl. Just during the daytime.”
“Where her mother?”
“Died in childbirth.” How easily Lenworth’s story formed.
“Sorry to hear. Such a painful thing to have to grow up without her mother.” Sister Ivy also looked at Opal, at the wisps of hair visible under her hat and her tiny fist laying on Lenworth’s shoulder.
Lenworth felt a pang of guilt, but he didn’t let on. He simply shifted his eyes away as if he were blinking away tears.
“What you feeding her?” Sister Ivy shifted the conversation so easily it seemed like a practiced move.
“Formula.”
“Arrowroot porridge good for young baby. Easy on the stomach.”
Lenworth nodded as if he knew about feeding a baby arrowroot porridge or even how to make it.
“Let me see. Miss Daisy daughter looking work. Gwennie too. Let me ask them.”
“Thank you.”
“Come back tomorrow.”
The morning was already half-over and the sun high in the sky, but here he was returning home, climbing the hill and looking again at the old fowl coop. Each time Lenworth climbed the hill, the old chicken coop, which was enclosed with chicken wire fencing and unfinished wood, bothered him. It was too close to a cherry tree, and where it stood, to the right of the house, it seemed out of place. Had he been the original builder, he would have put it behind the house, out of sight. But there was no room in the back; the house itself backed up to a cliff and the sliver of space between the cliff and the house was wide enough only for a small body to pass. Lenworth had two options: tear it down or put it to good use. He wouldn’t be raising chickens. He was sure of that. Neither would he raise pigs or goats or even bother with a dog.
Lenworth sat on the verandah in an old rocking chair with Opal. That too, sitting on a verandah in the middle of the day, was something he would never have had time for in his past life. If not teaching, he would have been tutoring, and setting aside every extra dollar to work toward becoming an engineer. He wouldn’t think about that past life, how he had come to be here in Anchovy alone with the baby girl, who at that moment was scrunching her face as if to cry. He moved her to his chest, stood up, and walked the length of the verandah. Lenworth put his past firmly behind him, patted down and buried his guilt, and went on with his thoughts on how to reestablish his life.
When Opal fell asleep again, he put her inside and went to the fowl coop. Inside, he looked around, up at the roof and down at the sagging wood frame. He imagined it as something else: a workshop where he could remake things. For the moment, he would shelve his long-held dream of being an engineer and instead return to an old habit of turning other people’s garbage into something of value.
By evening, Lenworth had acquired and spread fresh sawdust on the ground, reinforced the sagging wood frame, built a work table out of an old door, and unearthed from the cellar and the crawl space beneath the house the first pieces of unwanted things he would convert into something useful.
Sister Ivy, halfway up the hill, called out hello. Lenworth jumped. He had fallen asleep on the verandah. Inside, Opal cried—the sound full-throated and loud. It had been years since he had worked like that—cutting overgrown grass with a machete and hauling old lumber from the crawl space beneath the house. Every muscle in his body ached.
“Come, come,” he said to Sister Ivy. He rubbed his eyes and went to get Opal.
Back on the verandah, the crying baby cradled in his arms, he pointed to a matching rocking chair. “Sit down, please.”
“Porridge for the baby.” Sister Ivy held out a bag with a bowl inside. “It can’t be easy for you. Alone with a baby so young.”
That was the pity and concern Lenworth expected. Without question, he would not have earned Sister Ivy’s empathy so easily had he been a woman. His sister hadn’t earned it—not even their mother’s—and his mother hadn’t earned it from anyone else either.
Sister Ivy held out her hands for Opal, who still wasn’t soothed. “Porridge still warm,” she said. “Put some in a bottle.”
By the time Lenworth returned to the verandah, Opal was calm, lying still and looking up with unfocused eyes at Sister Ivy. She drank the porridge easily, lying in the old lady’s arms as if she belonged there.
“So far away from family,” Sister Ivy said. “Why you come back here?”
“Where else to go?” He bent his finger back and listed his reasons. “Only child. Mother died. Father, gone abroad long time. No family to speak of.” Only the third reason he listed was true. As he spoke, he knew he was invalidating and burying his brother, sister, and mother, who were all indeed alive and well in the southeastern part of the country.
“Went to school with Walter. He your father or uncle?”
“Uncle.”
Sister Ivy nodded. “Good people them. Good people.”
Lenworth let her believe his surname was also Ramsey, allowing the second untruth—that Walter was his uncle and not a cousin—to morph into the community’s collective truth. He became Lenworth Ramsey in that moment. Up until then, he hadn’t contemplated a whole new identity, but now he assumed it wholeheartedly and developed a new piece of his autobiography that explained why his legal surname was Barrett. His excuse would have made his mother weep, though, for he knew that if anyone ever asked, he would have said that his mother had given him the wrong man’s surname to protect her own indiscretions.
“Life hard when you don’t have anybody,” Sister Ivy said. “Until you find somebody, I can watch her in the daytime.”
“I don’t want to take up your time.”
“No, no, don’t worry yourself. My children gone abroad and no grandchildren here for me to look after. So what to do with myself? I plant my garden. That’s all. I used to run the basic school up the road there, so taking care of her is nothing at all.”
He looked at Opal, asleep, content, pressed against Sister Ivy’s bosom. For the second time that day, he felt guilt at what he had done, what he had taken away from Opal. But it was too late. Once he left the hospital with the baby and without Plum, there was no returning. He couldn’t face Plum. Not ever.