The mistress didn’t look enough like a millionaire to suit Precious, who had expected a flabby old woman with a greedy face soiled by money and stomped on by bird-foot wrinkles. Instead, what she disappointingly got was a middle-aged blond woman whose frame was fashionably strung with modern-day sinew and gristle but whose posture bore a pronounced tilt to the right, possibly, Precious surmised, the result of being knocked out of plumb by a primary schoolteacher’s box and never quite straightening. This constant incline had cocked the mistress’s left eyebrow, giving it the arched look of being jammed on an unfired wink, and clouded her face with an expression of unappetizing quizzicality.
According to Mannish, who told Precious gossipy stories at nights when they shared a few moments of peace and quiet, the mistress had made her money the old-fashioned way: through death and widowhood. She had been married to a man who had invented a useful valve. Precious had only a vague idea of what a valve was and did, but Mannish explained to her that the principle behind a valve was regulation. This appealed to the disciplinary Christian in Precious, who was of the opinion that lack of personal regulation in the world was the chief cause of worldwide smut. Man and woman alike these days could not regulate bad habit, vice, misguided opinion, and wayward appetite, she lectured Mannish, who listened with his inscrutable Coolie face while Precious digressed with a little uplifting postprandial rant in the kitchen.
“Personally, if a woman make her money off regulation, I am for dat. Regulation is important to everyone who professes to be upright and moral.”
“That, however, is not the sort of regulation that a valve performs,” Mannish insisted. “Valves regulate flow. Flow of water. Flow of oil. Flow of liquids and gases. Valves have nothing to do with moral regulation.”
“I am aware of dat, Mister Mannish,” Precious replied sharply. “I am not stupid. I’m just saying dat lack of regulation is de blight on today’s youth.”
Mannish did not know what was the blight on today’s youth; he only knew that the mistress’s husband had invented a valve originally intended for toilets, but it was such a valuable device that its use quickly spread to oil and chemical pumps. The husband patented the device, licensed its manufacture, and then was good enough to drop dead, leaving all his worldly wealth to his bereaved wife.
“But she was not much bereaved,” Mannish added, snippily, “which is why you cannot find a single picture of the dead gentleman in this house.”
Precious rose stoutly to the mistress’s defense.
“Dat’s why I would never marry a Coolie, because you are a people who want woman to sit ’round and do nothing but bawl out her heart and eyewater for you when you dead. Some of you even burn de widow when you dead, as if a woman was nothing but firewood. When you dead, man, you dead. Take it like a man! If you live a wholesome life, you gone to heaven. If you did not live a wholesome life, all de bawling in de world can’t reclaim you from de fiery pit.”
“I am only telling you what I know about the mistress,” Mannish insisted, blinking at this harsh criticism. “I know when I am dead that Beulah will cremate me, even though it is against my wishes. But that is the price I must pay if my soul is to grow.”
“De everlasting Beulah again!” groaned Precious. “Go on with de story.”
“There is little else to tell. Except that the mistress has made many fortunes several times over. Riccardo is her financial advisor. If she is considering an investment, she will invite the broker for a visit. If Riccardo bites him, she will not invest. But if he urinates on the broker’s shoe, she invests a lot. She says that the dog is a prophet who has never been wrong.”
“De dog is a false prophet,” Precious pronounced grimly.
Mannish said he knew nothing about prophets, he only knew that Riccardo had never bitten any broker whose schemes made money. And he had yet to urinate over the shoes of one whose projects had failed.
“How can anybody in deir right mind invest thousands over dog wee-wee?”
“Millions, Precious,” Mannish murmured. “Millions.”
A slab of mansion stillness intruded on their discussion, which they were holding in the cathedral kitchen. Three hallways and a living room deep into the house, as they spoke quietly, the investment dog was snoring on a cotton bone sheet, while his mistress had gone out for a nighttime romp with a-date.
“A madhouse, dis America, you know dat, Mannish!” Precious finally observed, shaking her head with Christian bewilderment. “You ever consider dat dis is a country where everybody mad at de same time, and because of dat, it seem like nobody mad, when in fact, everybody mad?”
Mannish said he hadn’t looked at it that way. He raised his hand to voice philosophical objection when the alarm went off and they saw in the security monitor that a car had pulled into the driveway and that the mistress was being ushered to the front door by her escort.
Precious went to help the mistress prepare for bed and found her sitting sourpussed at her vanity, pawing at her limp blond hair with a brush.
“What’s the use of men, Precious?” she asked bluntly.
“We need dem to have children, mum,” Precious ventured.
“That’s no good. I’ve never wanted children.”
Precious considered a secondary use for man.
“Dey are idlers, drunkards, and sinners whose souls need saving, mum. All a Christian woman need is to save one of de-brutes’ soul and heaven will be her reward.”
“Religious bunk. Men have no souls.”
The mistress prowled agitatedly around the enormous manless room, looping the perimeter of the gigantic bed where she slept alone every night, looking exasperated and vexed.
“For once in my life, I just want to meet a man who’s more of a man than I am. You know what I mean?”
“But dat applies to every old negar man off de street, mum!” Precious protested.
The mistress did not quite get “old negar man,” but the drift was plain enough to merit rebuttal.
“It does not. It applies to none of the men I have ever known,” she snapped, glaring. “Like tonight. I went out with Harold. He tries to screw me. I say ‘No,’ and you know what he did? He started to cry. Can you imagine that?”
Precious could sympathize with this outrage, which reminded her of the too-too wretch. She sneered without mercy, “I’d box his face and say, ‘Who you bawling to, wretch! Hush up and get outta me sight!’ Den de next Sunday, I’d drag him into church.”
Mistress Lucy looked startled. “Why didn’t I do that?” she exclaimed enviously, clouting herself on her forehead with an open palm at her gross omission. “I’ll call him on his car phone.”
She rushed to the telephone, dialed, and putting on a bogus smile and manner, purred, “Harold, turn around and come back at once. I want to continue our conversation … Yes, yes. I said turn back.”
Hanging up, the mistress threw on her housecoat and rushed into the living room and out the front door to ambush Harold while Precious, who had only been playing the battle-axe, followed with a gaping mouth, fretting about revocation of her green card for inciting assault. “But I also say, Mistress Lucy,” she sputtered, “dat I’d carry him to church de next Sunday!”
“You carry him to church,” the mistress threw scornfully over her shoulder from her shadowy ambuscade. “I’m just going to slap his face silly.”
They were interrupted by the distinctive crunching of tires in the driveway and the garish creaminess of headlights spilling over the dark landscaped grounds.
Precious slunk in the shadows of the living room, unsure of what to do next. She was weighing rushing down the hallway to Mannish’s room and pleading for the factotum’s intervention when the front door suddenly banged shut, the mistress stalked past, and Harold’s car roared away.
Poking her head timidly through the ajar bedroom door at the end of the long hallway, Precious spied the mistress standing under the pearly glow of the bathroom light. She was soaking her right hand under a rushing tap.
“That was a wonderful suggestion, Precious!” she chortled triumphantly. “Go get Riccardo for me, will you please? I want some company in my bed tonight. What a refreshing whack that was! Keep coming up with such wonderful ideas and I’ll-give you a raise.”
Grumbling under her breath about being innocent in the vicious assault on Harold, Precious went to the dog’s bedroom where she roused him snarling from his slumber atop the cotton bone sheets and coaxed him into the mistress’s bedroom. The dog immediately jumped up and snuggled beside the mistress on the bed, who engulfed him in a bosomy hug.
“You’re more man than a thousand men,” she cooed at the dog, who slushed her face repeatedly, greasing it with dog mouthwater.
Later that night Precious went under her bed to talk to Jamaican Jesus and explain that she had not meant for the mistress to attack Harold, that she had only been using a manner and tone of speaking that Jamaican wives habitually use on their own verandas to cuss and berate worthless husbands, and that she didn’t feel it was fair that she should be charged with inciting assault and possibly get an undeserved singeing of her bosom if she should die tonight. (Precious always imagined with a shudder that if ever she got a broiling on hell’s spit, which she was determined she never would, it would be atop her tender, swollen breasts that malicious demons would gleefully plop glowing rivets.) Jesus said he quite understood, for he had sat on the same verandas night after night and heard plenty plenty Jamaican old wife rant about what they intended to do to the worthless brute, once the worthless brute finally crawled out of the rum bar and staggered home, without ever giving the brute more than hot cocoa and a tongue-lashing. However, Jesus counselled against talk that advocated violence because he could see that Americans were plainly a people who took everything at face value and didn’t understand Jamaican veranda chat. Precious said, yes, she saw that herself, though she refrained from the criticism that here was evidently a serious flaw in the creation.
Nevertheless, Precious sighed, as she settled wearily under her sheets, she still didn’t understand how a woman could let a dog sleep with her and couldn’t even visualize the way the dog had licked up the mistress’s face without a spasm of disgust.
Jesus said he didn’t understand it, either. It was a mystery to him. Americans were a strange and perplexing people about their dogs. Sometimes he felt like just turning around and going back home. Precious said she felt that way every day. And she would, too, as soon as she made a little more money and didn’t have to return to wallow penniless among peak.
How much money did she have saved up now? Jesus wondered, and Precious told him that she had just exceeded $1,600, which made Jesus whistle once he did the arithmetic on conversion into Jamaican dollars at the black-market rate.
Just before dozing off, Precious muttered a sincere prayer of thanks that her Jesus was a native Jamaican who understood her ways. God only knew what she would do had he been a foreigner.