Fatboy Fall Down

by Rabindranath Maharaj

  He stood there for hours until the night faded, the morning light filtering through the trees, weak and unsteady, bringing the old school into relief. He imagined the sounds of children’s laughter, the scraping of chairs, desk covers opened and closed, chalk on a blackboard. He pictured a slim little boy walking alone, his body straight, watching the games, three-hole marbles and hoop, briefly interested in one game before moving on to gaze at another. No one was interested in him and he returned their indifference, this frail child. At that moment, Orbits felt such a tenderness for his little brother that his knees buckled and he was forced to squat on the road. Eventually, he went to his closet and took out his white shirt and khaki pants. His hair was damp from the dew and his one-week beard was flecked with grey.

  Later in the morning, Mona asked him if everything was okay, and he told her that he was thinking of the end of his term in office so he could retire peacefully. She seemed relieved and explained her worry that he was regretting the sale of his burnt house. When her father had bought the property, her sisters were overjoyed they could finally move away from the back road, she told him. Her father, though, insisted he would remain in the old house. “He is really like a cascadoo fish, you know. If you take him out of the mud he will begin to gyap.” She tittered and returned to her desk. She returned a few minutes later to say, “I wonder what grandma would have thought if she knew I would be living in her house. Maybe her spirit will still be around, telling me, ‘Girl, you and your fat bottom. You better keep the place nice and clean.’”

  How did I manage to escape? Over and over the question came to him until he sometimes felt like a fraud and pretender, not because of his qualifications or his job but because he had survived.

  ***

  For half a year, Mona daily gave Orbits an update of all that her father was doing in the property: demolishing the old structure, building a new frame, putting up the cedar walls and laying the mahogany floor, installing doors and windows, running electrical wires and copper pipes, dropping the roof, painting and varnishing everything. During all this time, Orbits was brought back to one question: What will be the cost I must later pay for escaping from my family’s blight? Will the torment unfold slowly, dragging me along, or will it fall swiftly, with no warning? His constituents mistook his malaise for disinterest, and in the rumshops they speculated on the reasons. He had been bribed by Halligator. He was just waiting out the end of his term. His true colours were finally showing. Among the farmers, Cascadoo offered a sturdy defence. “Eef he was interested in bribe and money why then he sell the old property to me for next to nothing?”

  “Who could tell,” a neighbour responded once. “Maybe it have spirit roaming around. The house take three people from what I hear. Father, mother and brother. And a dog. Nearly take him too with the fire. You better make sure you bless it good and proper before you move in.”

  One afternoon, as Orbits was about to leave, Moon entered his office. With her was a child, a boy of about four or five. “I thought you had packed up and gone,” she said in the brash manner he recognized. She was dressed in tight jeans and a halter top and Orbits, just for a minute, wondered if she had made herself up for this visit.

  “My term is not up as yet. What are you doing here?”

  “Listen to you,” she said in an amused manner. “Asking me these questions like if you is my husband. I had to take the boy to the doctor.”

  “What’s wrong with him?” The boy was looking around in a disinterested manner at the folders on the shelves and the photographs of the prime minister on the wall.

  “Shots.” She noticed his gaze and added, “He look just like his father, not so?”

  “Where is he?” Orbits asked uneasily.

  She laughed loudly, and Orbits noticed Mona looking through the doorway. “Exactly where you expect him to be.” To the boy, she said, “Did you hear what that man asked?” The boy nodded so rapidly that Orbits wondered if he was right in the head. “Tell him that your father is a councillor.” The boy nodded again, and Orbits noticed that his feet were close together. He thought of the bobbing toys he had seen on the dashboards of taxis. “Tell him that your father is out campaigning and just now this office will be his. Would you like to visit him when he begin to work here? Look, there is a dentist office.” She picked him up and walked to the window. “Over there.” To Orbits, she said, “He is my little pet.”

  Be careful. The world is a cruel place.

  “What was that? What are you talking about?”

  Orbits realized he had spoken aloud what was running through his mind. “Little pets grow up and . . .” He tried to complete the thought. He saw the impatience on Moon’s face. Mona was still watching through the door. She moved aside when Moon stormed out.

  “Did that woman want you to help her husband?” she asked.

  “I can’t help anyone.”

  “That is not true. You help your mother so much. You help me and my father and my sisters. And all these people who you encourage to stop depending on the government. Why you don’t pass by the house and see all the construction going on. So much noise!” She placed both palms against her cheeks and imitated the sounds of hammering and nailing.

  She kept this up over the following weeks, almost as if she suspected that he liked the descriptions of old things pulled apart and replaced, bit by bit, with more durable materials. He listened carefully to all the little details and Mona, when she noticed this, described the lath and plaster and sidings and the tools and carefully outlined all that was still to be done.

  “One day a old bald-headed mechanic come up and tell him, ‘Mister you have a whole army of daughters building this house for you. Mixing concrete and hefting big-big plank like hardback men. I never see anything like it before.’”

  On the day she mentioned the furniture, tables, dressers, cupboards and safe that the daughters had built themselves, she once more wondered aloud what his mother would have made of this new building. He had begun to view Mona’s updates as unwitting interventions, the only time his mind was released from increasingly despairing speculations. Now she seemed to be waiting for an answer, so he said, “She would be glad that a happy family living there now.”

  “Happy? You don’t know the amount of quarrel that take place every day. What colour to paint the wall. How much drawers to put in the safe. How big to make the cupboards. Who sleeping in which rooms.” She smiled as if at some memory. “Who would ever imagine?”

  “Imagine what?”

  “I don’t want to say. Is bad luck to talk about good luck.”

  Eleven months after he and Cascadoo had walked through the property, Orbits was invited to the house-blessing ceremony. In spite of all that Mona had described, Orbits assumed that the new house would follow the fashion of the back-road structures with a boxy top on poui logs, a shallow gallery at the front and misaligned louvres on all the walls. Beneath he expected to see a hammock strung on two posts and a table nearby. At the back there would be a chicken coop. But the structure he saw from his car was concrete with a shingle roof and an L-shaped porch that reached around the left of the house where a garage had been built. The ceremony was in the garage, and when Cascadoo saw him he rushed out from the small group to escort him around the house.

  For the first time he spotted the wife, whom he had pictured from Cascadoo’s descriptions as someone made hard and unattractive by the rigours of unending pressures, but instead he saw a handsome woman with a twist of a smile that gave the sense that in her younger days, she might have been prankish and playful. The daughters he had glimpsed at his mother’s funeral; he now noticed their resemblance to their mother.

  The family trailed him until the arrival of the priest, a tall, slightly hunched and slow-moving man. Orbits sat on a chair next to farmers he knew from his time at the field station and listened to the priest chanting and instructing the family to scatter the zinni
a and hibiscus flowers, light a fire, sprinkle incense, bring scented water to their lips, take a brass cup around the house, offer little saffron cloth satchels to the fire, touch their foreheads, link hands, think of a secret wish. He spoke slowly, grimacing with each word but murmuring tunefully as the rituals were carried out. The smoke curled lazily upwards and carried the scent of the burnt offerings, the incense and pitch pine and camphor and clarified butter, and Orbits, who had so often ascribed the stagnant lives of the farmers to practices like these that celebrated solemnization instead of innovation, for the first time in almost a year, felt a quiet drip of peace. In closing, the priest said to the family in English, “Before we finish here, I want you to offer your thanks to everything you see here.” He mentioned particular plants and animals and the sky and the weather and the materials that went into the house. He paused, consulted his book and mentioned several more.

  Over the following weeks, Orbits tried to understand the manner by which grief could be shuttered and the mind offered a temporary repose through the sanctification of every trivial thing. So often he had seen this stunned gratification drawn from rituals and signs as a mark of backwardness. He had compared the adherents to rain flies briefly energized and given flight by the rain before falling to the ground to be carted away by wingless insects. He had thought of Doraymay, who seemed so accepting of his situation.

  One night while he was on his porch, the rain beating down on the roof and the water gurgling down the spouting and crashing on the landing, he decided to simply accept the reprieve from a year of despair. I tried to do what I could, he thought. I, too, have been scarred. But I survived. Why? He repeated the sentiments aloud, in the same chanting voice used by the priest, as if an answer would be forthcoming just by imitating the other man. He closed his eyes and heard what sounded like the distant whoop of a water fowl although it could have been the wind tugging at the trees and the creak of the bamboo. Breeze funnelled through the half-opened jalousie and he imagined he could feel the coldness slicing at his hands and chest and face. This is a strong old house, he thought, surprising himself with the arbitrary determination. It’s older than I am. It will outlast me.

  As the days passed, he began to appreciate the solitariness of this almost hidden and abandoned village. There was no definable crop, cocoa long gone, and the few men and women he spotted on the roads, who showed no interest in him, were old and most likely holdovers from the exodus to the towns over the years. He drew comfort from the coolness of the nights, the shade of the day and the lush quietness broken only by the birds on the guava and pommecythere trees at the back of the house and the lemon at the sides. Maybe all over the world there were forgotten places like this village, untouched by progress yet hanging on, stuck forever at a point between desolation, neglect and permanence.

  He stopped dwelling on his purchase of the property and particularly in the nights he was reminded of his first sight of the village. Yet there were times when, resting on his bed, he felt the soft slap of loneliness. During those moments the night sounds were transformed so that the drone of the crickets took on an ominous note, and when a sudden ruffle of breeze disrupted the cacophony, he imagined that the night birds were screaming in anguish and the frogs moaning their distress. He missed, then, the continuity of a conversation, the softness of a woman, even the promise of a trivial argument. And he supposed that while he was alone on his bed, in other houses couples were engaged in intimate acts. He envisioned these acts, torturing himself until disgust took over and unexpectedly he began to worry about his former wife and about his daughter. What if they were in abusive relationships? So he fell asleep worrying, but when he awoke the world seemed a different place.

  In the early mornings he was awakened sometimes by the distant howling of dogs, and when he went to shut the window he would be met with the tangy aroma of citrus leaves and the fresh smell of grass, and he would change his mind and stand there watching the sun emerge from the bamboo grove at the back of the school. The light through the trembling leaves resembled flickering embers that had dripped from the blood-red clouds. During these moments, ten minutes at most, the sky appeared unstable and convulsive, and once Orbits felt this was how the world had looked during its creation.

  One evening he walked to the back and saw an iguana slinking around in the water grass. The animal looked at him warily, but secure in its camouflage, it did not bolt. He wondered if there was a family of iguanas close by or if he had chanced across an adventurous specimen that had crossed the bamboo patch at the back and, beyond that, the abandoned cocoa estate. He gazed at the animal for three or four minutes until his eyes began to pain and he took off his shades. Then the animal dashed off and he saw only the ripple of the grass to mark its progress. On an impulse, he followed the animal’s trail. He came to a ravine with conches stuck onto the smooth pebbles in the water. There were two bamboo trees leaning across the ravine, and tiny blackish crabs rose from the water to disappear into the plant’s hollow trunk. Farther up, he spotted flatter water pebbles and he wondered if the ravine had once extended to that area.

  Soon he came to an area of cocoa, the abandoned trees still bearing fruits, still shaded by tall immortelle and sandbox. On the ground, he noticed the dolphin-shaped seeds of the sandbox. At his primary school, some of the boys had polished and fashioned these seeds into necklaces. As he walked along, he thought: I missed out on all the activities of normal boys because I had no friends. Maybe I should now roam around the bush collecting seeds and making bamboo bows and guava tops.

  “You see a ’guana running this way, Uncle?” He jumped. Two men, each with a gun, emerged from the bushes. He pointed in the direction the animal had fled and hurriedly retraced his steps. Appreciation turned to alarm. The place was much too alive. The air was thick with insects and predatory birds. There were big bumblebees above him. Crickets and bugs leapt off leaves as he approached. Mysterious things scurried away from the grass and the dead leaves. When he got home, he locked the doors and windows.

  The next day he mentioned his encounter with the hunters to the shopkeeper, who said, “This village used to have real hunters one time. Not these little boys who can’t hit a manicou if it jump right in front of they face.” He looked at Orbits with some amusement. “You can’t get frightened of every little thing all the time. I wanted to be a stickfighter, you know. Cahraying in the gayelle like a real bad-john. Then I realize that it would take just a single busshead to rack me up. Dreams is a real funny thing. They does sound nice in you head, but once they jump out they could cause plenty drama. I happy in me little old shop.” He gazed around at the bees circling the bags of sugar with a tragic expression. Orbits wanted to believe him.

  ***

  He had never liked driving, but on the route to his office, he passed through other small villages and stretches of forest that always seemed peaceful. Sometimes he wondered why these places infused with such a melancholy beauty were still derided with names like Hardbargain and Dogpatch and Ketchass Village. During these times, he was brought back to the trips, years earlier, when he had been confused by the foreigners’ appreciative murmurs whenever they passed places like these. Maybe now that money was gone, the original inhabitants would return from the towns. Yet he hoped they would remain there and not puncture the tranquility of the village.

  He appreciated the distance from the confusion of his office, too, and it was this distance from everything that was familiar that gradually allowed him to consider the questions of a year and a half earlier. It was a cold and brutal assessment. His brother had killed himself for reasons that would forever be unknown, but the fact that he had been coddled so mercilessly by his mother had most likely given him an incomplete view of the real world. Orbits had been saved from that. His parents had arrived at their tragic ends because neither had made any preparations for loss. From this, too, he had been saved. And thinking in this manner, Orbits was able to look at all the unsatisfacto
ry events of his life with a kind of wonder, seeing the losses, the shame and deprivations not as tragedies but as preparations. He suspected this was not an accurate rendering of his life, and that he had failed many people who depended on him, and that he was far from fulfilled, but it introduced a notion of wobbly balance — of his life tilting this way and that but still moving forward. Somehow, he had managed to hang on.

  For the first time, he did not feel like a fraud or terrified that his job would be suddenly pulled away by an irate and threatening official. In fact, he now looked forward to the end of that phase of his life. He had learned to cook, using the old sturdy gas stove left by the previous owner. And the pleasure he got from seasoning and chopping and cooking was not unlike the hedonistic joy he had derived from eating. He spent long periods cutting and carving away the spiky pineapple’s knobs or peeling mangoes and slicing papaws that he took to work in an icy-hot container. In the late evenings when he got up from the porch, he would cut chunks of breadfruit and tubers like dasheen and yam, and if he had bought carite or kingfish on his way home, he would either make a broth or steam everything with pinches of shadow beni and thyme and lemongrass and wedges of lime. The aroma of the herbs lingered in the house, and one night he wondered whether his sense of smell was growing to counteract the black spots that were always swimming in his eyes like bunched, drifting cobwebs.