Collected Short Fiction (9 page)

B. Wordsworth said, ‘Now, let us lie on the grass and look up at the sky, and I want you to think how far those stars are from us.’

I did as he told me, and I saw what he meant. I felt like nothing, and at the same time I had never felt so big and great in all my life. I forgot all my anger and all my tears and all the blows.

When I said I was better, he began telling me the names of the stars, and I particularly remembered the constellation of
Orion the Hunter, though I don’t really know why. I can spot Orion even today, but I have forgotten the rest.

Then a light was flashed into our faces, and we saw a policeman. We got up from the grass.

The policeman said, ‘What you doing here?’

B. Wordsworth said, ‘I have been asking myself the same question for forty years.’

We became friends, B. Wordsworth and I. He told me, ‘You must never tell anybody about me and about the mango tree and the coconut tree and the plum tree. You must keep that a secret. If you tell anybody, I will know, because I am a poet.’

I gave him my word and I kept it.

I liked his little room. It had no more furniture than George’s front room, but it looked cleaner and healthier. But it also looked lonely.

One day I asked him, ‘Mister Wordsworth, why you does keep all this bush in your yard? Ain’t it does make the place damp?’

He said, ‘Listen, and I will tell you a story. Once upon a time a boy and girl met each other and they fell in love. They loved each other so much they got married. They were both poets. He loved words. She loved grass and flowers and trees. They lived happily in a single room, and then one day the girl poet said to the boy poet, “We are going to have another poet in the family.” But this poet was never born, because the girl died, and the young poet died with her, inside her. And the girl’s husband was very sad, and he said he would never touch a thing in the girl’s garden. And so the garden remained, and grew high and wild.’

I looked at B. Wordsworth, and as he told me this lovely story, he seemed to grow older. I understood his story.

We went for long walks together. We went to the Botanical Gardens and the Rock Gardens. We climbed Chancellor Hill in the late afternoon and watched the darkness fall on Port of Spain, and watched the lights go on in the city and on the ships in the harbour.

He did everything as though he were doing it for the first time in his life. He did everything as though he were doing some church rite.

He would say to me, ‘Now, how about having some ice-cream?’

And when I said yes, he would grow very serious and say, ‘Now, which café shall we patronize?’ As though it were a very
important thing. He would think for some time about it and finally say, ‘I think I will go and negotiate the purchase with that shop.’

The world became a most exciting place.

One day, when I was in his yard, he said to me, ‘I have a great secret which I am now going to tell you.’

I said, ‘It really secret?’

‘At the moment, yes.’

I looked at him, and he looked at me. He said, ‘This is just between you and me, remember. I am writing a poem.’

‘Oh.’ I was disappointed.

He said, ‘But this is a different sort of poem. This is the greatest poem in the world.’

I whistled.

He said, ‘I have been working on it for more than five years now. I will finish it in about twenty-two years from now, that is, if I keep on writing at the present rate.’

‘You does write a lot, then?’

He said, ‘Not any more. I just write one line a month. But I make sure it is a good line.’

I asked, ‘What was last month’s good line?’

He looked up at the sky and said,
‘The past is deep.’

I said, ‘It is a beautiful line.’

B. Wordsworth said, ‘I hope to distil the experiences of a whole month into that single line of poetry. So, in twenty-two years, I shall have written a poem that will sing to all humanity.’

I was filled with wonder.

Our walks continued. We walked along the sea-wall at Docksite one day, and I said, ‘Mr Wordsworth, if I drop this pin in the water, you think it will float?’

He said, ‘This is a strange world. Drop your pin, and let us see what will happen.’

The pin sank.

I said, ‘How is the poem this month?’

But he never told me any other line. He merely said, ‘Oh, it comes, you know. It comes.’

Or we would sit on the sea-wall and watch the liners come into the harbour.

But of the greatest poem in the world I heard no more.

*    *    *

I felt he was growing older.

‘How you does live, Mr Wordsworth?’ I asked him one day.

He said, ‘You mean how I get money?’

When I nodded, he laughed in a crooked way.

He said, ‘I sing calypsoes in the calypso season.’

‘And that last you the rest of the year?’

‘It is enough.’

‘But you will be the richest man in the world when you write the greatest poem?’

He didn’t reply.

One day when I went to see him in his little house I found him lying on his little bed. He looked so old and so weak that I found myself wanting to cry.

He said, ‘The poem is not going well.’

He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking through the window at the coconut tree, and he was speaking as though I wasn’t there. He said, ‘When I was twenty I felt the power within myself.’ Then, almost in front of my eyes, I could see his face growing older and more tired. He said, ‘But that – that was a long time ago.’

And then – I felt it so keenly, it was as though I had been slapped by my mother. I could see it clearly on his face. It was there for everyone to see. Death on the shrinking face.

He looked at me, and saw my tears and sat up.

He said, ‘Come.’ I went and sat on his knees.

He looked into my eyes, and he said, ‘Oh, you can see it, too. I always knew you had the poet’s eye.’

He didn’t even look sad, and that made me burst out crying loudly.

He pulled me to his thin chest and said, ‘Do you want me to tell you a funny story?’ and he smiled encouragingly at me.

But I couldn’t reply.

He said, ‘When I have finished this story, I want you to promise that you will go away and never come back to see me. Do you promise?’

I nodded.

He said, ‘Good. Well, listen. That story I told you about the boy poet and the girl poet, do you remember that? That wasn’t
true. It was something I just made up. All this talk about poetry and the greatest poem in the world, that wasn’t true, either. Isn’t that the funniest thing you have heard?’

But his voice broke.

I left the house and ran home crying, like a poet, for everything I saw.

I walked along Alberto Street a year later, but I could find no sign of the poet’s house. It hadn’t vanished, just like that. It had been pulled down, and a big, two-storeyed building had taken its place. The mango tree and the plum tree and the coconut tree had all been cut down, and there was brick and concrete everywhere.

It was just as though B. Wordsworth had never existed.

BIG FOOT WAS
really big and really black, and everybody in Miguel Street was afraid of him. It wasn’t his bigness or his blackness that people feared, for there were blacker and bigger people about. People were afraid of him because he was so silent and sulky; he
looked
dangerous, like those terrible dogs that never bark but just look at you from the corner of their eyes.

Hat used to say, ‘Is only a form of showing off, you know, all this quietness he does give us. He quiet just because he ain’t have anything to say, that’s all.’

Yet you could hear Hat telling all sorts of people at the races and cricket, ‘Big Foot and me? We is bosom pals, man. We grow up together.’

And at school I myself used to say, ‘Big Foot does live in my street, you hear. I know him good good, and if any one of all you touch me, I go tell Big Foot.’

At that time I had never spoken a single word to Big Foot.

We in Miguel Street were proud to claim him because he was something of a character in Port of Spain, and had quite a reputation. It was Big Foot who flung the stone at the Radio Trinidad building one day and broke a window. When the magistrate asked why he did it, Big Foot just said, ‘To wake them up.’

A well-wisher paid the fine for him.

Then there was the time he got a job driving one of the diesel-buses. He drove the bus out of the city to Carenage, five miles away, and told the passengers to get out and bathe. He stood by to see that they did.

After that he got a job as a postman, and he had a great time misplacing people’s letters. They found him at Docksite, with the bag half full of letters, soaking his big feet in the Gulf of Paria.

He said, ‘Is hard work, walking all over the place, delivering people letters. You come like a postage stamp, man.’

All Trinidad thought of him as a comedian, but we who knew him thought otherwise.

It was people like Big Foot who gave the steel-bands a bad name. Big Foot was always ready to start a fight with another
band, but he looked so big and dangerous that he himself was never involved in any fight, and he never went to jail for more than three months or so at a time.

Hat, especially, was afraid of Big Foot. Hat often said, ‘I don’t know why they don’t lose Big Foot in jail, you know.’

You would have thought that when he was beating his pans and dancing in the street at Carnival, Big Foot would at least smile and look happy. But no. It was on occasions like this that he prepared his sulkiest and grimmest face; and when you saw him beating a pan, you felt, to judge by his earnestness, that he was doing some sacred act.

One day a big crowd of us – Hat, Edward, Eddoes, Boyee, Errol and myself – went to the cinema. We were sitting in a row, laughing and talking all during the film, having a good time.

A voice from behind said, very quietly, ‘Shut up.’

We turned and saw Big Foot.

He lazily pulled out a knife from his trouser pocket, flicked the blade open, and stuck it in the back of my chair.

He looked up at the screen and said in a frightening friendly way, ‘Talk.’

We didn’t say a word for the rest of the film.

Afterwards Hat said, ‘You does only get policeman son behaving in that way. Policeman son and priest son.’

Boyee said, ‘You mean Big Foot is priest son?’

Hat said, ‘You too stupid. Priests and them does have children?’

We heard a lot about Big Foot’s father from Hat. It seemed he was as much a terror as Big Foot. Sometimes when Boyee and Errol and I were comparing notes about beatings, Boyee said, ‘The blows we get is nothing to what Big Foot uses to get from his father. That is how he get so big, you know. I meet a boy from Belmont the other day in the savannah, and this boy tell me that blows does make you grow.’

Errol said, ‘You is a blasted fool, man. How you does let people give you stupidness like that?’

And once Hat said, ‘Every day Big Foot father, the policeman, giving Big Foot blows. Like medicine. Three times a day after meals. And hear Big Foot talk afterwards. He used to say, “When I get big and have children, I go beat them, beat them.” ’

I didn’t say it then, because I was ashamed; but I had often felt the same way when my mother beat me.

I asked Hat, ‘And Big Foot mother? She used to beat him too?’

Hat, said, ‘Oh, God! That woulda kill him. Big Foot didn’t have any mother. His father didn’t married, thank God.’

The Americans were crawling all over Port of Spain in those days, making the city really hot. Children didn’t take long to find out that they were easy people, always ready to give with both hands. Hat began working a small racket. He had five of us going all over the district begging for chewing gum and chocolate. For every packet of chewing gum we gave him we got a cent. Sometimes I made as much as twelve cents in a day. Some boy told me later that Hat was selling the chewing gum for six cents a packet, but I didn’t believe it.

One afternoon, standing on the pavement outside my house, I saw an American soldier down the street, coming towards me. It was about two o’clock in the afternoon, very hot, and the street was practically empty.

The American behaved in a very surprising way when I sprinted down to ask, ‘Got any gum, Joe?’

He mumbled something about begging kids and I think he was going to slap me or cuff me. He wasn’t very big, but I was afraid. I think he was drunk.

He set his mouth.

A gruff voice said, ‘Look, leave the boy alone, you hear.’

It was Big Foot.

Not another word was said. The American, suddenly humble, walked away, making a great pretence of not being in a hurry.

Big Foot didn’t even look at me.

I never said again, ‘Got any gum, Joe?’

Yet this did not make me like Big Foot. I was, I believe, a little more afraid of him.

I told Hat about the American and Big Foot.

Hat said, ‘All the Americans not like that. You can’t throw away twelve cents a day like that.’

But I refused to beg any more.

I said, ‘If it wasn’t for Big Foot, the man woulda kill me.’

Hat said, ‘You know, is a good thing Big Foot father dead before Big Foot really get big.’

I said, ‘What happen to Big Foot father, then?’

Hat said, ‘You ain’t hear? It was a famous thing. A crowd of
black people beat him up and kill him in 1937 when they was having the riots in the oilfields. Big Foot father was playing hero, just like Big Foot playing hero now.’

I said, ‘Hat, why you don’t like Big Foot?’

Hat said, ‘I ain’t have anything against him.’

I said, ‘Why you fraid him so, then?’

Hat said, ‘Ain’t you fraid him too?’

I nodded. ‘But I feel you do him something and you worried.’

Hat said, ‘Nothing really. It just funny. The rest of we boys use to give Big Foot hell too. He was thin thin when he was small, you know, and we use to have a helluva time chasing him all over the place. He couldn’t run at all.’

I felt sorry for Big Foot.

I said, ‘How that funny?’