by Sharon Maas
‘And so, brethren in the Lord, be alert, for Satan walks among us. Brothers and sisters, let not your eyes be blinded by the illusion of his works, nor your ears be made deaf by his lies! He walks among ye in many a beautiful guise, so let the words of your Lord stand guard over your heart! Let the sign of the cross be written in light above your heads as you go about your daily lives! Let the Holy Book accompany you on your journey through life…’
He held up the enormous black Bible and pumped it as if gauging its weight, which Dorothea knew, was several pounds, for, under Pa’s eagle eye, she spent a part of each day strutting about the house with that very same Bible balanced on her head. A young lady must keep a straight back and a high head, Pa said, and the Bible must be her refuge at all times. Only thus could Satan be kept at bay.
But that fly must be Satan, out to tempt her, for there it was again, tickling the nape of her neck, just beneath the hairline. She wrinkled her face and once again swung her pigtails, keeping her hands folded on her lap. The fly was not one bit bothered. There it was again.
The game might have gone on all through the sermon but a smothered giggle and some shuffling behind her made Dorothea glance around. And at once she knew.
It was those dreadful Quint brothers, most specifically, Freddy Quint, the youngest.
There was not a time when Dorothea had not been aware of the Quint boys. They were an integral part of her childhood. Their jungle backyard swarmed with them, a horde of loud, rambunctious boys who claimed it as hunting territory. Dorothea had never stopped to count them; might as well count a cage full of monkeys, and anyway, throughout the years they had been heard rather than seen, their shrill boy-voices yelling blue murder above the backyard treetops or from the alley that linked their homes. Rumour had it there were eight of them.
They lived in a big timber house in Lamaha Street, just a few yards down the alleyway from Dorothea’s own house in Waterloo Street. In fact, Dorothea’s upper-storey bedroom window at the back of the house overlooked the Quint backyard and, though you could not see what was going on beneath the treetops, you could certainly hear the yelling and the screaming from the wild games they played. True, as they grew older the yard grew quieter, but somehow their reputation as ‘mad’ and ‘wild’ remained. All boys. No girls. She’d known them all her life but never spoken a word to any of them, because Pa said they were bad company; but mostly because they were boys, and a van Dam girl never went near boys.
When she had seen them, it was in the street, for they had claimed Waterloo Street – her street! – as part of their territory, Lamaha Street being far too busy for serious boy-action. Most afternoons the Quint boys came tearing around the corner, still in their St Stanislaus school uniforms, into the calm tree-shaded avenue outside the van Dam house, and converted it into bedlam. They would ride back and forth with no hands or perform circus tricks, swinging their lithe boy bodies over their saddles or handlebars, riding backwards or piling on five to a bike, and of course, racing each other up and down the street. They would weave through traffic as if it did not exist, ramming on the brakes till they squealed and rearing up to ride on one wheel, cowboys on thin iron horses.
Dorothea could not tell one from another, not put names to all the faces, but Freddy, being the wildest of the bunch, had gained Pa’s attention when he, Pa, had caught him up the mango tree last year at the height of the season, with a bucket full of the plumpest mangoes. Pa had chased him away and lodged a formal complaint with his mother, that dark-haired Englishwoman, who had accepted it with an apology on behalf of her son, a dismissal along the lines of ‘boys will be boys’, and a gift; a basket of sweet, ripe, White Lady guavas from the Quints’ own backyard.
Freddy Quint was the worst of the lot. He was the only one she could identify by name, him being the youngest and thus the smallest. The rest of them seemed simply an amorphous blob of gangling animal maleness; she had not deigned to separate the whole into its separate fidgeting parts. She only knew they were dreadful, because Pa told her so. All of them were older than her; in fact quite a few years older, but Freddy seemed about her age, thirteen. Normally, they’d have met at primary school but Freddy had gone to the liberal private school in Camp Street whereas she, of course, had attended the Mission School in Croal Street. And now he, like all his brothers, was at the all-boys Saint Stansilaus College. Dorothea had attended the female pendant, the all-girls Catholic St Rose’s High School, until, a year ago, Pa had fallen out with the Sister Antony on a small (in his eyes, big) matter of doctrine. Since then Dorothea went to the Government School, Bishops’ High. Pa didn’t like Catholics anyway, and Bishops’ was just as strict. She was safe there, safe from the likes of Freddy Quint.
But all this was mostly in the past. As the boys grew up, so had the neighbourhood gradually returned to its original state of leafy, sun-filtered serenity; one by one the Quint boys approached the more serious pursuits of manhood, and, occasionally, one or the other abandoned home for studies abroad. Only Freddy remained wild, and, to Dorothea, conspicuous. She had never been this close to him, never spoken to him.
* * *
Now, she glanced behind her again, and frowned. He was up to no good, for sure. He sat immediately behind her, hands tucked demurely under his thighs. It was the broad grin across his face that gave him away, and the smothered giggles of his brothers at either side. All eight of them sat in the pew behind her, book-ended by their parents.
The Quint boys were all tall and lanky, but that was the only resemblance between them. Otherwise, they were as unalike as a random handful of seashells, ranging in skin colour from almost-white through cinnamon to mahogany brown – Freddy being the darkest – and with hair colour and texture ranging between straight blonde to crinkly black. Freddy’s hair was a compromise; a mane of dark curls that hung over his forehead and down his neck, almost as long as a girl’s, over it a wide-brimmed straw hat which he wore constantly, even in church, even though it was by now worn-out and floppy and quite grimy.
Dorothea wondered why Ma Quint didn’t insist on a better turnout for church; but Ma Quint was herself eccentric; ‘crazy’, was Pa’s word for her, as it was for almost anyone who wasn’t in his congregation. She was a dark-haired Englishwoman with a ‘reputation’; she’d broken all the rules, people whispered, though Dorothea had never quite understood which rules she’d broken. Together with her husband, a dark, tall, African man, she added a few more ingredients to the genetic stew that was British Guiana’s population. As, of course, had Dorothea’s own parents; Pa was white, a first-generation Englishman, and Mums was black, her own parents the children of emancipated slaves.
Dorothea had often wondered what had brought her parents together; she couldn’t ask directly, of course, but finally she had got to the truth through Miss Percival, the gossipy best friend of Aunt Jemima, her mother’s equally gossipy sister. Giggling, Miss Percival had whispered to her during an unobserved moment at last year’s Easter Revival, held at their house.
‘Your father was a handsome man, above that dog collar!’ Miss Percival had said, ‘But most of all, he was white. Your mother was the most ambitious of the Williamson sisters. An unmarried spinster! Getting on in years. And proud. Only the best was good enough for Emily. She wanted a white man, and in the end she caught one.’
Miss Percival giggled wildly at that and poked a finger into Dorothea’s chest.
‘You!’ she said. ‘You were on the way, and what would the world have said if Pastor van Dam had made of her a Fallen Woman?’
Another wild flurry of giggles, and she scurried off before Dorothea could ask more. She was confused. What did her being on the way have to do with her mother being a Fallen Woman, or catching a white man? If she, Dorothea, was on the way then of course they were already married. You had to be married to have children. Everyone knew that. And what, exactly, was a Fallen Woman’? Dorothea knew it was something extremely shocking, but nobody ever explained exactly how or why.
Now, Dorothea frowned, mouthed the words ‘Stop it!’ to Freddy Quint, straightened her hat once more, and turned back to Pa’s sermon; but unfortunately Pa had noticed the little skirmish and now glared down at her with blazing eyes, not missing a beat in the sermon.
‘Satan walks in flesh and blood among us!’ he boomed. ‘He is everywhere! Be ye alert at all times and in all places! Be ye not deceived by the works and the words of the Devil, for they lead you from the Straight and Narrow along the dark winding pathways of Sin!’
After the sermon they all rose for the last hymn, during which the collection was taken. ‘Immortal, invisible, God only wise!’ sang Dorothea. Behind her, she was aware of the cacophonous croaking emitted by eight adolescent male throats and repressed a smile of amusement. Boys! What a strange invention; what a weird, gangling chaos of humanity; almost as if God was having a joke.
The ‘fly’ alighted once more on her neck, but this time Dorothea was ready. She swung around and grabbed it, and then she held it up: Freddy Quint’s wrist, and in his hand, a hen’s feather. Dorothea squeezed and twisted the wrist till Freddy dropped the feather and his face convulsed with pain. Ma Quint, at the end of her pew, leaned forward to see what was going on and the other Quint brothers croaked louder than ever to mask the scrimmage.
Mums had noticed too, and slapped Dorothea’s hand. Dorothea immediately let go of Freddy’s, not without flashing him a gloating grin of triumph. She turned away and stood once again demurely in the pew. She had not missed a beat of the hymn.
‘Most blessed, most glorious, the Ancient of Days!’ she sang, ‘Almighty, victorious, Thy great name we praise!’
Pa had left the pulpit and now stood at the altar performing some ceremony, his back to the congregation, and hadn’t noticed a thing, which was good. But even if he had noticed, she didn’t care. Causing and witnessing Freddy Quint’s comeuppance made her Sunday: for that, she would gladly have committed several psalms, collects and prayers to memory, taking her punishment as a fair price for revenge.
Nobody, just nobody, made a fool of Dorothea van Dam.
* * *
That very Sunday afternoon, Dorothea was down in the garden cutting roses for the drawing room table when a piercing whistle made her jump. She swung around, but all she could see were the hibiscus bushes growing along the back palings, taller than her, luxuriant with red and yellow flowers. She shrugged and turned back to her roses.
That whistle came again, sharp and loud, and this time it was followed by a call, half whispered, half shouted: ‘Dorothea!’
It definitely came from behind the hibiscus hedge. ‘Who is it?’ Dorothea called back.
‘It’s me!’
‘Me, who?’
‘Freddy, Freddy Quint. The boy with the feather?’
‘Oh, you.’ She tried to put as much disdain as she could into her voice; or perhaps indifference. She wasn’t quite sure which was more appropriate. Maybe neither.
‘I can see you, can’t you see me?’
‘No, I can’t.’
Instead of an answer, a thump and a crack, followed by the rustling of leaves and branches, and a moment later Freddy Quint stood before her in flesh and blood.
‘You broke down the palings! You …’
‘Kicked down a paling, and here I be before you, ma’am, at your service!’ He gave her a sweeping bow, removing his hat and circling it wide so it touched the ground. Replacing the hat, he stood grinning before her.
‘Pa will kill you! And you better get out before he comes!’
‘But he’s out. I know he is ‘cause I just saw him leave in that old rattletrap of his.’
He meant the Ford, the green Prefect, Pa’s pride and joy. Dorothea was offended on Pa’s behalf.
‘It’s not a rattletrap! It’s almost new and we’ve never had a breakdown, and just because …’
‘Just teasin’. But I know he’s out, and your Mum too. Like every Sunday.’
He was right, of course, and Dorothea was surprised at how much he knew. Every Sunday Pa took the family up the East Bank of Demerara to Goed Fortuin sugar plantation, which Uncle Hendrik owned. There, Pa had managed to build up a community church to serve the converted Christian East Indian plantation workers and poor families from the surrounding villages. Services were held in the late afternoon, but Dorothea had managed to free herself from attending with the excuse of extra schoolwork; eventually, she had been permanently released from these Sunday afternoon trips; she regarded Sunday as her day off.
Now, Freddy continued. ‘… and I wanted to say sorry, for this morning. And ask how you got so strong, for a girl. ‘Course, if you hadn’t taken me by surprise, it would’ve been different. And anyway I had to let you win, ‘cause you’re a girl, an’ I didn’t want to make a scene, ‘cause it was in church.’
‘Ha! Then beat me now! Come on!’ Her eyes bristled with challenge, and she held up her forearm and open palm.
‘Well, now, you’re a right one! But sure!’
He grabbed her hand and pressed against it. Dorothea pressed back, frowning with intensity. For a full two minutes they wrestled thus in silence; hands clutched and bent arms swollen with muscle. Then Freddy laughed and relaxed, and let her swing his arm down into defeat.
‘Whew, you’re good, for a girl! ‘Course I had to let you win again, ‘cause me Mum wouldn’t like to hear I was beatin’ up the neighbourhood girls. Wouldn’t be a gallant thing to do, for a Quint. But really, now, how did you get so strong?’
His eyes seemed to drink her up, brimming with admiration. Dorothea smiled and looked away.
‘Tennis!’ she replied. She stooped to pick up the secateurs she’d dropped, but Freddy, seeing her intention, bent down and got there before her. Their heads bumped in mid-air.
‘Ouch! Sorry! Are you all right?’ he rubbed his crown and handed her the secateurs.
She giggled. ‘Yes, fine. You?’
‘Oh, sure, I got a head as hard as stone. Just hopin’ I didn’t maim you for life! Now, tell me about that tennis. So you swing a racquet, do you?’
‘Every afternoon, after school. I’m in the school team – we beat St Rose’s in the under sixteen doubles last week. It was in the Graphic!’
It was a good thing that Sports were compulsory at Bishops’; Pa would normally never have allowed her to take it up otherwise. But Dorothea had done well, and he had given his reluctant permission for her to join the team.
‘You were in the Graphic! With a photo?’
Dorothea nodded.
‘Well, now, I missed that. I’ll have to look for it, and I’ll cut out the photo. I don’t usually read the sports pages, but I will now, now I know you’re famous.’
‘No, I’m not, it was only a school game, but they’re considering me for the national tennis team and if I get chosen I get to play in the West Indian Tennis Championships next year, and then I’ll be famous.’
‘Can I come and watch you training, sometimes?’
Those were the words that finally woke Dorothea up. She blushed and looked away, peeling her eyes from the gaze that held hers; black eyes deep and still as rainforest pools and warm as the afternoon sunlight now filtering through the mango tree. She’d talked to this boy, this stranger, as if she’d known him all her life, chatted with him right here in the forbidden territory of her own backyard. If Pa saw her, he’d kill them both.
She dropped her voice when she spoke again, this time shy and uncertain.
‘Look, I can’t talk to you, and you shouldn’t be here at all. If my Pa sees me, he’ll …’
‘I told you, he’s out. But we don’t have to talk here. Come on over to my place. You’ve never been inside, have you?’
‘No, of course not!’
Like theirs, the Quint house was made of white-painted timber, and stood on high stone columns so that you reached the front door via an outside staircase, but there the similarity ended, for the Quint house was several times bigger, and just as wild as the family th
at lived within its walls. Probably it had started out as basic as theirs, and as practical: two stories, with a jutting gallery along the front, a drawing room behind the gallery, a kitchen behind the drawing room, a staircase leading up to the bedrooms and bathroom, above it all a roof of corrugated iron, and all around it windows and jalousies and wooden shutters.
The Quint house had a life of its own. As the family that inhabited it had grown so had the house, with extensions upwards and outwards: a high tower topped by a cupola; Bottom House rooms added on willy-nilly; and even an Annex, a separate little cottage joined to the back of the house by a mid-air passage. The house was an architectural monster, yet fascinating; it made you want to enter and explore, figure out how all its parts fit together, or even if they did at all. It fired Dorothea’s imagination, already well nourished by the piles of novels she borrowed from the library. She could imagine a wicked witch living there, keeping her prisoners victims in the various rooms, or a miser all alone, counting his fortune, or a community of elves, or a headmistress with a boarding school and a horde of giggling girls her age. But actually, truth was better than fiction and the family that lived there was far more intriguing than any witch or gathering of elves. Pa said they were Satan’s brew, and that was enough to whet Dorothea’s appetite.
Now, Freddy snapped his fingers to wake her out of her reverie. ‘Hey, come down from the clouds! You want to come over, meet my family?’
Dorothea met his eyes again. She smiled, flipped her pigtails over her shoulder.
‘Yes.’
‘Come on, then.’ Freddy held out his left hand. She took it with her right. He pulled her into the hibiscus bush, pushed away the loose board in the palings and held it as she squeezed through the hole. He followed suit. He took her hand again, and the two of them ran through the alley, along the grass verge that edged the gutter.
The moment their hands joined Dorothea knew that her life would never be the same again.
