The week following Samuel's first visit downtown, the memory of Priscilla, the white dove, and the narrow streets had begun to affect his perception of the house. The world inside the house had suddenly grown small. The objects by which he had once navigated had lost their mystery, and the smooth, warm expanse of the floor was no longer a sea. Rooms had become just rooms because now there was an outside to measure against. He knew he preferred to be outside because that was where he would find Priscilla.
That the house only occupied a very small corner of the world had diminished its presence and increased his own. He began to traverse it's dark rooms and to stare back at the old man looking out at him from the pictures on walls and tabletops. He crept down the porch stairs to the backyard and gazed at the towering fence constructed from corrugated sheets of iron and wood. Looking up, he was sure the clouds grazed their belly on its jagged edges.
When he next saw Angelita lay Mrs Chirstus's black dress on the bed, he knew where she was going. He waited till he heard the sound of her walking shoes on the wooden floor and then ran to the door to join her. By the time he got there, she was already at the gate. Understanding now that he was to be left behind, he let out a piercing wail. Caught in midstep, Mrs Christus turned to find him sobbing and beating the veranda floor with his skinny legs. Astonished by his behavior, she could at first find no appropriate reaction and continued down the street. But he followed her, shoeless, yelling at the top of his voice. People in the street stared at her and she returned home and stood back in alarm. Angelita brought him his shoes, and, sobbing still, he went down the steps to the gate. Unable to summon up a firm voice, Mrs Christus joined him at the gate, and they walked together in silence.
That the child was capable of asserting himself was a nasty surprise. In one determined retaliatory action, he had broken the boundaries she had set him. Mrs Christus opened her umbrella. It shaded her from the sun, but, more importantly, it protected her from the street. The child did not want the shade. He ran ahead, stooping to pick up a stone. She wanted to shout and make him walk with her under the umbrella, but his outburst had taken her unawares, and now she was unsure whether she could restrain him. Again, she felt her loss. It was an old, decrepit feeling.
By the time Mrs Christus reached Lazario's, she was still smarting from the experience. As before, they walked single file down the brick passage, and, having regained her composure, she was able to take hold of his hand and restrain him as she had wanted to do, just moments before. He struggled but eventually climbed the stairs beside her.
Lazario opened the door to his few rooms, his hair untidy and his eyes squinting at the light. There was music coming from the radio, and newspapers were strewn across the table. A pile of shop ledgers was stacked next to his chair and loose scraps of paper with sums and figures tallied in small, neat script were scattered about the floor. Samuel remained obstinately at the doorway, looking into the sitting room, then leaned against the corridor wall with his hands behind his back. He saw the cake and three silver forks shining beside it. Lazario approached him, smiled into his sullen face, and opened the main door to the apartment. "Go," he said.
Outside, it was a cloudless day and a sudden breeze stirred the leaves on the mango trees at the edge of the yard below. The mangos, bright yellow and orange, glowed like lanterns. He saw that the dove had returned just as the woman had predicted. Again, it was fluttering in its cage. The noise made him feel cold inside. A door slammed somewhere behind him. He turned and saw Priscilla standing with a nylon shopping bag in her hand. She looked at him for a moment then turned to the stairs. The continuous flutter of the bird was making him feel colder and colder. Priscilla's voice from the floor below stilled the bird a moment, "Ah noh wahn wait all day fi yu!" He joined her.
The street was busy with cars and bicycles. Two street vendors had set up their carts beside the rum shop opposite, one selling peppered oranges and the other cooked food from large plastic tubs covered with cloth. On the porch of the rum shop, a man lay sprawled out. Samuel instinctively pressed close to Priscilla, placing his palm on hers. But she knocked it away like a fly. "Baybi!" she said, and her look told him that the word was meant to be an insult. He did not want to be a baby, and so he kept his distance. She sauntered across the street and stared at the man. Flies had gathered around his mouth and his feet stuck over the edge of the porch, one shoe on the ground below. She tiptoed up the three porch steps.
"Dis da fi yestudeh, yu peelhed bubuman yu!" She said and, giving the man a hasty kick in the shin, ran down the street. She beckoned him with her hand, but he could not move. The man swore, tried to steady himself onto his elbows but losing balance swayed and fell back again. It was not until Samuel felt the sting of a stone against his leg that he was released from his paralysis and able to run. Priscilla turned into an alley and skirted around the back of houses, occasionally opening a gate, hurriedly cutting across someone's yard and exiting through another gate to yet another alley. Samuel had not recovered from the sight of the man on the porch, red-eyed and stinking of alcohol, and, by the time he got to the store, he wore the wide-eyed expression of an escaped animal.
The store was dark; walls, counters, and ceiling discolored with age. Sacks of rice and beans edged the wall. Tin buckets, rubber boots, ladles and kerosene lamps hung from the ceiling. The man behind the counter was weighing pigtails dripping with brine. He rummaged around the wooden barrel, found the size tail he was looking for and added it the heap on the scales. At the far end of the shop, a glass case boasting bright nylon brassieres and discretely folded panties shared space with sticky buns and coconut tarts. People were bunched up along the counter, waiting to be served, whilst others sat in the doorway or stood outside, gossiping or generally taking it easy. Priscilla pushed her way through, using her body to part the crowd. A woman shoved out the way by the force of Priscilla's bulk cried, "Yu gat no manaz! Wayt yu turn!" and stuck her hip far out so that Priscilla could not pass. Priscilla sucked her teeth. Agitated by Priscilla's lack of respect, the woman said loudly, "Shee tink seh shee dah uman!" People laughed, and Priscilla, tossing her head to one side, pretended to examine her nails.
Not daring to follow her between the bodies of the women gathered around the counter, Samuel remained near the door. Moments later, he was pushed between a sack of flour and a sack of rice. Caught between the bellies of the two sacks, he remained motionless. He had discovered a place more cavernous than his own home, alive with the warm, humid breath of what appeared to be a multitude. Priscilla had to pull him from between the two sacks and thump him in the back to make him move. On the way home, she said vehemently, "Ah gwain kick dat bubuman agen!"
Samuel began to cry. He wanted to get back to Lazario's. He did not want to be outside anymore. He was frightened of the bubuman on the rum shop porch, and he was ashamed of his fear and his tears. He did not want to be a baby, and yet he could not stop from crying. In her nine years of life, Priscilla had seen all sorts of crying and was hardened against tears but, like Angelita, she had never seen anyone cry in so inconsolable a manner, quietly, ashamedly. Fascinated, she watched him cry the entire way back. During that time, he had remained completely absorbed in his misery, his body folded into where his fists touched his eyes. He reminded her of a small animal displaced amidst creatures and none of them his own kind. In this way, she visualized his loneliness.
"Dat bubuman, yu noa hoo he?" Priscilla asked. Samuel shook his head and she replied, "Dah mai pa."
Gradually his tears subsided and she took his hand. When they came to the rum shop, her father had gone. Priscilla took the pigtail to her mother and then joined him in the yard where they sat under the mango trees. She took out a deck of cards and asked if he knew how to play Pitty Pat. He didn't, so she taught him the rules and after the first two games said they were now going to play for money. She put down twenty-five cents, but all he could find in his pocket was five cents and a marble. He put the marble and his five cents beside her money and they played, slapping the cards down with relish. Lightning streaked the sky followed by cracks of thunder and rain.
Mrs Christus, come to check on him, found him dancing in the rain, the twenty-five cents held high between his thumb and forefinger like a trophy. It was the cue she had been waiting for. It was time he went to school. Later, when the rain had subsided, she again looked over the balcony but could not see him. A few storm flies landed at her feet and she squashed them. A few more drifted past her face and then they began settling on her hair and arms. She eventually found Samuel in the brick passage, sheltering from the swarming flies with Priscilla. She led him by the hand to where Lazario had parked the car. The car had belonged to her husband but now it was Lazario's. Samuel, sitting in the backseat of the sky blue Chevrolet, held the twenty-five cents out the window, showing it to the world. The flies, small lace winged termites, floated in through the car window.
In the house, the termites had dropped their wings and Angelita was busy sweeping them from the floors and surfaces. As she swept, the gossamer wings swirled around her like a finely spun skirt. Something glittered on her hand. It was a diamond ring. Mrs Christus sighed, it had been a disappointing day and the ring on the girl's finger added to her feelings of displeasure. That evening, when Lazario and Angelita had left the house, she sat alone on the veranda. Samuel was out in the street, watching the blue Chevrolet disappear into the distance. He lingered in the dark and she called to him.
"Something will get you." But her words had lost their effect. He did not believe her, because, in her stories, she had not told him about the road or about Priscilla.
The next day, she watched him pace the picket fence by the front gate, and when he reached his hands between the pickets, trying to grasp the limitless space beyond the fence, she called him to her and explained that he would soon be starting school. She wanted him to know that the street outside the gate was no mystery. It did not lead to Priscilla or to town, it led to school. That night, before she closed her eyes to sleep, she reached under her pillow for her rosary and to each bead, she pinned a petition, that the child not leave her. In the morning, she knew that she had spent the night fighting because her nightdress had wrapped itself tightly around her body. She unwrapped herself, rubbing the skin around her neck where the collar of the dress had tightened.
After an early breakfast, she helped Samuel get dressed and took him to school; a tall, white building with a bell tower and high, wrought iron gates. She left him in a long room lined on one side with shuttered windows and on the other with doors. His teacher showed him to his desk and the day began with prayers. The cement floor and walls echoed with the movement of chairs; every sound, every object, sharp-edged and hard. When the bell rang for recess, he joined the children in the yard and jostled and played. The marbles in his pockets jingled as he ran, and he remembered the twenty-five cents he had won from Priscilla. He emptied the contents of his pockets on the grass and finding the coin, held it up to the sunlight. It was round, shining, and beautiful just like the girl to which it had belonged. The coin was snatched from his hand by a boy who, after fishing around the inside of his sock, produced a fifty cents piece. He challenged Samuel to a game of marbles with the winner taking all. Soon, a circle of children had assembled around them, and when Samuel won, a fight broke out and the two boys ended up scuffling on the ground.
By two o'clock, the sun was high and it was too hot to sit still at his desk. A bell rang and Samuel was let out. Mrs Christus was waiting for him, but, just as he made his way to her, the boy intercepted his path. "Bwai, ah waahn mi moni," he said, pushing Samuel in the chest.
Samuel pushed him back, saying "Ah noh frayd a yu." They ended up tussling in the dirt at Mrs Christus's feet. She pulled them apart and dragged Samuel home by the shirt collar. This was not what she had sent him to school for.
On the pretext that she was concerned about his education, Mrs Christus got in touch with a woman well-known in the community for disciplining children. The woman, Miss Sargasso, gave after school classes, primarily to girls but sometimes to boys, teaching them, alongside the usual subjects, such things as good manners and etiquette. She was the product of a past era when polite Creole society considered such qualities essential. Mrs Christus, herself, had never been tutored in the art of being gracious, but she understood from her friends that it would turn the boy around.
On the chosen day, Miss Sargasso arrived at the house whilst Samuel will still at school. Angelita was sent to collect him, and, when he returned home, he found the two women deep in conversation, their heads almost touching over cups of tea. As he entered the room, Miss Sargasso got up and shook his hand. She was the oldest woman he had ever seen. The skin on her face had worn so thin that, where it gathered around her mouth and eyes, it seemed susceptible to tearing. The humped curve of her back pulled her dress forward so that the front hem dropped almost to her feet. She motioned for him to sit beside her and then asked if he liked school. He did not answer because she had put her hand on his knee and in the knotted knuckles and wooden fingernails he saw the claw of a bird.
The old woman turned to Mrs Christus. "What does he know?"
Mrs Chrisus turned to him. "What do you know?"
Samuel saw that their black dresses were touching and that it appeared as if they were sharing the same garment. He replied, "I know Priscilla."
The old woman looked at Mrs Christus, who in turn looked at him and said, "He doesn't know much."
After that day, Miss Sargasso appeared twice a week after school, and he was made to sit with her at the dining room table. She taught him the letters of the alphabet, laying them out on the table, each letter the size of his hand. From the letters, he made words, and on the day that he was able to distinguish 'sea' from 'see', she opened an atlas of the world and pointed out the vast bodies of water that converged into that one small word. But because he could not comprehend the vastness implied, she brought to his next lesson a map of the world and rolled it out like a tablecloth. He lay across it, to keep it flat, and she told him to cast his hands and feet out and where they touched she read the place names. When she had gone, he sat cross-legged, with the map curling about him. He searched for evidence of the street on which he lived, hoping to find a mark, a point, something which would help him in placing himself within his own world. Finding none, he lay on his belly with his head just peaking over the dining table and observed a line of ants carrying a roach across the floor and under a cupboard. The evening shadows moved along the walls and, eventually, he fell asleep.