“She just want to better know the people she working for.”
“And what you know about them.”
“They don’t have much money.”
“They have family.”
“Yes. Yes, they have family.”
“Everybody together?”
“I believe so.”
His mother made one of her guttural sounds that could be either scorn, uncertainty or approval. This conversation, though brief, was the longest he could recall since his father’s death.
Sometimes he came home to hear Mona reading from her books in a childish voice to his mother. “Once on a dark winter’s day, when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted and the shop windows blazed with gas as they do at night, an odd-looking little girl sat in a cab with her father and was driven rather slowly through the big thoroughfares.”
His mother listened attentively, but when the girl was finished, she said, “That little girl too stupid. She going to get kill for nothing.”
“Is not that kind of story, grandma. And why you want a poor little girl to get killed?”
Another day he heard her saying, “Don Quixote. Try to say it.”
“Donkey Hotay.” When his mother noticed him standing by the front door, she pointed with her cane to Mona. “Donkey Hotay. That is she name.”
The girl looked embarrassed, and Orbits recalled his shame at the nicknames he had been assigned when he was a boy. His mother had used many of these and, in the fashion of the island, had seen nothing wrong with using a disability as a name. He felt a sliver of anger at her unstudied, reflective cruelty, but he said nothing. Mona must have noticed because she told him the following morning, “Grandma beginning to make jokes now. She coming out of her shell.”
The girl’s statement lessened his guilt about not alerting his mother that she should be more sympathetic to a stranger who — even for a salary — was treating her unusually kindly. He had heard horror stories of old people, helpless and alone, mistreated by caregivers whose sympathy swiftly faded as they were ground down by demands. Years ago, when he was working in the capital, he had listened to a woman on the bus say that caring for an old man was like taking care of an ugly wrinkled baby with diarrhoea and a bad temper and a horn in his nose. She had been speaking of her grandfather. A man on the opposite aisle who had been listening asked in a high-pitched way, his head bobbing like a pigeon, “You know why old people does snore? To make it easier to shoot them in the night.” Those within earshot had exploded even though there were a few sighers.
His mother was lucky she had someone like Mona. Orbits was a bit confounded at the affection he felt for the girl and his desire to protect her, and once, when he was dressing for work, he imagined his daughter in Mona’s place, sitting with his mother, reading to her, brushing her hair.
During the weekend, Orbits interrupted her father’s talk of rice and lagoons to tell him that his daughter had been studying over the last months. The father became apologetic. “These children pick up all they bad habits from they mother.” Orbits told him he did not mind; in fact, he was happy the girl was trying to further her education. The man was relieved; he began boasting in his unusual self-deprecating manner. “You know I tired warn these lazy children about they reading all the time. But they wouldn’t listen. And Miss Moaner is the worst because all of them taking a example from she. Coming out third and fourth in test. Winning prize. What they will do with all that fancy-pancy education?” He paused for Orbits to answer the question, pushing his tongue in front of his upper teeth, sniffling and nodding as if he needed further convincing. “People does call me Cascadoo, you know. The mudfish.” Almost as an afterthought he added, “I happy with my dunciness.”
Soon Cascadoo began calling every other day, giving Orbits a rundown on his blockheadedness and pretending to deplore his family. “The teachers always say my head hard like banga seed and who is I to disagree. I reach till the two times table but ask me anything after that and is like you asking me what the sky make from.” He always ended the conversation by saying, “My head too hard to encourage Miss Moaner, but a man like you with a ton of degrees she might listen to.”
Orbits never confessed his own lack of qualifications, but he began to feel more obligated to encourage Mona. He brought her folders from the office and realms of paper with the ministry’s stamp for her to write her notes. She accepted these shyly, almost suspiciously, as if she believed it was expected that favours should be returned, and Orbits, when he realized this, told her that he never had the opportunity to help or even witness his daughter’s progress from high school to university and that he was just happy to assist someone with ambition. As he said this, his voice grew heavy and perforated with unstable pauses, and he realized that he was not simply making excuses to the girl; that he had carried this unexamined loss for a long, long time.
She got up, twisting her hands, her eyes on the floor. She wished her father was as encouraging. Orbits told her of his conversations with her father and he saw how her face lit up with surprise. Perhaps as a means of repaying Orbits’ encouragement, she redoubled her efforts with his mother, who responded with more life, renewed energy, more inventive insults. “How long you going to keep she here for?” she asked Orbits. “Look how fat she getting eating out all we food.”
“She not fat and she not eating out the food,” he told her angrily. “You even know that she start back the backyard garden?”
“Start back what? The garden was good all the time. She just spoiling it.”
Yet there were times when he returned from work and would watch his mother, her eyes closed, listening to Mona read from a book. Although the girl bore the assaults well, he wished he could find some way for his mother to relent, to treat the girl as she would a family member. In the meantime, Cascadoo always assured Orbits that his daughter was lucky to find her way into a decent family and, despite all his earlier condemnation of her, began to sneak in little snippets about her brilliance. “All these big plans that she have does just give me a headache. Teacher! I ever tell you how she use to line up she dolly like if it was a classroom and teach them arithmetrick and alzebra? Poor dolly and them.” Then he would push his tongue between his upper teeth and lip as if he was searching for a bit of errant food and make his sniffling sounds, waiting for Orbits to correct him.
Orbits never knew what the father expected of him, and he was uncomfortable when the other man heaped praises on him, too, as if he were a scholar consigned to a village field station instead of a man who got his first real job vaille que vaille, through the sympathy and perhaps the rebelliousness of a lonely and frustrated official. He tried to see himself through Cascadoo’s eyes and was bothered by the false image the other man apparently possessed. What would Cascadoo say if he knew that Orbits had failed exam after exam and had hated school for the taunting he had received? That he was less the man he appeared to be and had never truly rid himself of the fear of being discovered and humiliated? That he always felt he was one step away from being dismantled, the remaining bits of him rearranged to be the boy cowering before his bullies?
There were times when he would think of his unfinished course in meteorology and of his fantasy of reading the weather reports with a parrot on his shoulder, and for a moment, he would be stiffened with determination to improve himself. Then he would consider the fact that he was close to fifty and was living alone with his mother and her helper.
One Friday evening, he heard Mona reading on the porch to his mother: “When someone is crying, of course, the noble thing to do is to comfort them. But if someone is trying to hide their tears, it may also be noble to pretend you do not notice them.”
“Who you see crying?” She raised her cane. “I notice everything because my eye strong like a crazy old bat.” She cackled, short, high-pitched bursts that sounded scandalous in an old woman. S
urprisingly, Mona joined in the laughter as if his mother had made a great joke. Her father pulled up then and from the car he, too, began to laugh, the sound like water gurgling through a bloated hose. Later while Mona was getting her things, he began to talk in his lugubrious way about happiness, claiming that he was too stupid to be unhappy and how he was glad that god didn’t give him a brain to think too much ahead. “You know eef I dead tomorrow not a cyat or a dog will quack.”
“You have a wife and children.”
“Wife? Children?” He shouted to his daughter who was approaching. “You hear that Miss Moaner? You will miss me when I gone?”
Orbits by then suspected that Cascadoo’s manner of pulling himself down was just a conversational ruse and he didn’t mean a word of it, but the conversation lingered in his mind and he tried to gauge his own life. He was comfortable if not happy. But neither state had ever been a permanent fixture; for as long as he could remember, each period of calm had transitioned so smoothly into turbulence. He had learned to appreciate the quieter periods, to wait for the turmoil. He felt his old anxieties returning. He tried to still his mind by thinking that perhaps he had expended all the misery in his life and was now on a new track. I have a good job. I am secure. My mother is still alive. She has someone who seems to care about her. But he knew these were all temporary conditions and could change the next day. Doraymay’s situation was proof of this fickleness.
***
One day after work, he visited Doraymay at his home. The man was in his hammock downstairs with a crutch laid crossways along his body, the lower half of which was covered with a patched blanket. He greeted Orbits as if this were a regular weekly visit. “Come, come, sit man. You want something to eat?” He called and a young man pushed his head out from a shed at the back.
“What is it you want?”
“Visitor, boy. Important visitor. Fellow worker. Tell you mother to bring something with ice for this heat?”
“I busy,” the boy said. “I going in the back to change the goat.”
Doraymay called again, and Orbits heard a girl’s voice saying from upstairs, “Mummy busy cooking.”
“Well, you bring it then. Some soursop or sapodilla juice.” To Orbits, he said, “The best thing for the heat.”
The girl said, “I studying right now.”
Doraymay laughed as if all of it was funny. “If I was still good I would have carry you straight to the soursop tree and pick the fruit right off the branch. You want to see something?” He removed the blanket and Orbits saw the stump where one foot had been amputated. There were scars and indentations on the flesh, which still looked raw and unfinished like a badly baked piece of meat. “The strangest thing is I does still feel the pain as if the foot right here.” He tapped the stump.
“I have to go now,” Orbits said. “I just dropped in to say hello.” He got up, imagining the odour of clotted blood and urine.
“Already? Wait, man. I have something for you to hear.” He pushed up his back and felt around the hammock. Eventually, he fished out his harmonica. “I learn a new tune. All this time alone home give me plenty practice.” He put the instrument to his lips and began playing the tune to Adios amigo, adios my friend / The road we have travelled has come to an end. He was not a good player, but all the gaps and pauses, the fluting inhalations and rasping exhalation that were not part of the song, all of these breaks seemed to reflect the sadness and the adjoining chaos that were a part of Doraymay’s life.
When he was finished, Orbits told him quickly, “I dropped in to see how you doing.”
“I understand, man. Drop in any time you want. We could have something to eat. Soursop ice cream. Pudding.”
As Orbits walked away, he noticed the walkway had been freshly swept and the poinsettia, marigolds and crotons neatly arranged and pruned. Around Doraymay, the world was operating normally; everyone was busy with their tasks, everything taken care of. On his way back, Orbits wondered how he would operate if he were struck with some disability, if he would pretend as Doraymay or rage against everyone as his mother. But perhaps the other man was not pretending. When he was a boy, he had seen a troop of ants running around a dead comrade, climbing over the body, busily hurrying from one place to another. This is the normal way of the world, he thought. The weak are bullied, the sick pushed aside, the dead forgotten.
The next morning as soon as he got to work, he wrote on the back of an application form: “I am older and wiser and more experienced. I am better able to handle everything.” (He had planned to write: “I am no longer a fat little boy afraid of the world,” but he stopped when he thought that someone, perhaps one of the two young workers at the station, might enter and spot the words on the form.) He fell in and out of this mood, thinking one day that he was unnecessarily worrying and the next that disaster was just around the corner. Without realizing it at first, he began to prepare himself, little by little, day by day.
He checked his savings and discovered that the combined amount was thirty thousand dollars. The amount stunned him; although he allowed fifteen percent of his salary to go into his savings account, he never checked the total. He withdrew ten thousand from that amount, applied for a loan from a credit union, and finally bought a foreign-used vehicle, a green Wingroad station wagon. The Kingswood he sold to a grateful Cascadoo for one thousand dollars. He now had a vehicle that he assumed would last him for ten years or so, close to his retirement at sixty. The two workers, both in their mid-twenties, who had replaced Gums and Doraymay — Spanish’s position unfilled — and to whom he had never paid much attention, he now began to see as slackers. As the senior worker, he devised a schedule to keep them both at the compound for the entire day. They both protested, but he brought out a copy of the job specification and explained how many of their duties they had been shirking. They began to make excuses: one said he was here just temporarily and was planning to do a degree in forestry at some university in New Brunswick, the other stammered about his coursework not preparing him for rough, dusty fields and drunken farmers.
He realized they were more qualified than him — though they were not aware of this — and informed both they could apply for transfers, but in the interim they had to work for their salary.
“Salary? You call this a salary?” This worker had a moustache that was parted exactly above his missing tooth. It added a weird symmetry to his face.
The other worker, who had a repertoire of unstable rubbery expressions that gave Orbits the idea he was cruel to animals and would some day maim someone, added, “Why we have to go to visit them when they could just come here? What is the purpose of a field station?”
Orbits got out a brochure and began to read. The brochure was from the Ministry of Agriculture, where he had once worked. When he was finished, he told them, “We have to move beyond all that we learned in college and interact with these farmers. My diploma was in meteorology, but you don’t see me locked up in my office staring at the clouds all day.” He had no idea why he had mentioned this, but both workers seemed sullenly impressed. “From next week get your tall boots ready.”
Ever since he had begun working at the station, he had been seen as the bookman and assigned to desk duties, but he now accompanied the two workers to the fields. His Wingroad suffered on the bumpy roads, and he winced whenever he felt the muddy ridges grating against his exhaust. He suspected the two slackers were deliberately choosing the impassable roads to discourage him, and weekly he grew more suspicious of how they had been assessing the farmers’ suitability for government assistance. They had already understood they could coast through the job, collecting little bribes and doing the minimum that was required.
The agricultural areas they covered were filled with houses that were of board and galvanize, similar structures that were distinguishable only from the arrangement of trees and plants in the yards. All the houses were on teak posts with the downstairs blocked wi
th a maze of scantlings and planks, some diagonal, some lateral, all makeshift and haphazard so that the construction seemed piecemeal and dependent on the mood of the builders. Intermittently, there were stretches of bananas on the hills, and in the valleys muddy lagoons, and beyond, shining fan-shaped dasheen leaves rising above the wispy rice. In these areas, there weren’t houses but camps, rectangular areas covered with carat leaves and containing a crude bench and a fireside.
Before many of the houses were little stalls frequently manned by forlorn-looking children who briefly perked up when they noticed an approaching vehicle. Once he stopped to buy a soursop and a golden apple from a girl who was just seven or eight. The girl, her streaky hair almost hiding her eyes, counted the money slowly, and the two workers in their Land Rover honked impatiently. When Orbits got into his vehicle, he imagined that Mona had been forced also to stand in the hot sun all day to make three or four dollars. He returned and bought the entire mound of fruits.
During these field trips, he discovered that his eyes, accustomed to the gloom of the semi-lit office, could not handle the stinging brightness of the midday sun, and he resumed wearing his sunshades. In the nights, he had to place a damp handkerchief across his face to still the itch in his eyes and the headache that the day’s foray had wrought. He bought even darker sunglasses that transformed everything that was green into purple and shifted distance so that he had to drive carefully on the unfamiliar roads. One midday, he looked up and instead of clouds, he saw an ocean of wrecked ships and jetsam floating around.
During another trip, he felt that the farmers had begun to resemble the crops they grew: the rice farmers were thin and wispy, the dasheen farmers wet and lumpy, the banana growers sly and filled with sweet-mouth. But they were all desperately poor, and they spent from morning to night in the field. He couldn’t interpret their attitudes: they drank in the evenings and sang in the camps and spoke of their livelihood both as a blessing and as a curse. The government was not interested in agriculture, they said. Poor people from backward areas were always forgotten. Everyone now wanted expensive foreign fruits. The little money that was allocated to them took months in coming. There were always promises. Their parents and grandparents had managed and so would they. Yet they drank away the little money they earned. They verged between an unstable optimism and a more comprehensible fatalism.
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