Chichibud cast his eyes down at his feet and mumbled, “Is so trade does go. If people ain’t share their talents and gifts with each other, the world go fall apart.”
One-Eye laughed and turned to Antonio. “Superstitious. Is so douen people stay.”
“Boss,” the douen say to One-Eye, “this man need the doctor bad.”
Tan-Tan scolded, “He not your boss, Chichibud.” She repeated her lesson exactly as Nanny had sung it to them in crêche: “Shipmates all have the same status. Nobody higher than a next somebody. You must call he ‘Compère,’” she explained to the douen.
The men burst out laughing, even Daddy. “Pickney-child,” said Claude, “is a human that?” His voice was dry and rough like after you eat stinkin’ toe pods.
“No,” Tan-Tan replied doubtfully.
“So how he could call we Compère?”
“I don’t know.” She felt stupid.
Chichibud headed off down the dirt path. “I taking them to Doctor Lin, seen?”
They needed a doctor. Daddy was swaying on his feet. He had rested his good arm on Tan-Tan’s shoulder, and dark blood was seeping through the bandage on his broken arm. Tan-Tan patted his hand and looked up at him.
“Yes, doux-doux,” he said. “Come make we go.” One-Eye and Claude walked along with them, balancing their calabashes.
Farther down the road was one set of wattle-and-daub cottages squeezing up against the bumpy gravel path. Some of the houses had provisions growing in their front yards. Tan-Tan saw pigeon peas and sorrel bushes and a plant she didn’t recognise, with big pink leaves and fat, tight buds like cabbages, only aqua blue. She could hear hammering and sawing off in the distance. As they passed one cottage, two men and a woman with thick heavy sticks were pounding some kind of paste in a hollowed-out tree stump, THUMP-thump-thump, THUMP-thump-thump. “Mortar and pestle,” Antonio said quietly. “I only ever see that in pictures.”
An old man was hanging out washing to dry on a clothes line strung up between one house and the next. He sang to himself in a cracky voice.
They drew level with another cottage, much like the rest. “Let we just put down this water,” One-Eye said. “Then we go escort you the rest of the way.” They rested their burden in a shady part of the porch. One-Eye ran round to the back and returned with a banana leaf that he’d just cut. It was the same height as him. He used it to cover the two calabashes. They set off down the road again. One-Eye spoke to Tan-Tan: “Your daddy say you name… what?”
“Tan-Tan.”
“Tan-Tan. A pretty little girl with big brown eyes like toolum sweetie. What a sadness for a pickney to come here.”
Antonio said to him, “So what you get exile for?”
The man replied gruffly, “We don’t ask people questions like that.”
“Oh, yes?” Tan-Tan knew that tone. You didn’t cross Daddy when his voice got that edge. “So is who going to stop me from speaking what on my mind?”
“Me. And this.” Claude had stepped between the two of them, was patting the truncheon he carried. He smiled a crocodile grin.
With one bright eye and his one dead one, One-Eye stared Antonio down. “Mister,” he said soft and low, “it have rules here in Junjuh. No Anansi Web to look after we.” Antonio looked startled, then thoughtful. “I is the one who does enforce the rules,” One-Eye continued. “Claude is my deputy.”
“And so? What I care for your rules?”
“After a day in the tin box, most people does care.”
“A-what that?”
“You go see it soon.”
Chichibud laughed shu-shu-shu. Claude challenged him: “You have something to say?”
“No, Boss. Is tallpeople business, oui?”
“You know so. Take that child sling from she. She looking tired.”
Balancing the mako jumbie beak on his head with one hand, Chichibud made a whistling noise as he lifted her sling off her shoulder. He was limping more now. Now that she didn’t have the weight dragging her shoulder, Tan-Tan felt a little less tired. She looked round more, paid more attention. She liked the way that the pinkish rockstones that made up the gravel path had glints in them. The lowering sun made them sparkle. A few people were sitting on their front verandahs watching them as they passed. A woman hoed in her garden. Her belly was big with baby, and her short-zogged hair was twisted up in little picky-plaits like she never had nobody to do it up nice for her. Everybody looked old and callous. Tan-Tan had never seen so much hard labour and so many tired faces.
“Nanny save we,” muttered Antonio. “Is what kind of place I bring we to any at all?”
Some of the vegetable patches had bright flowers twining amongst the food plants. A morning glory vine clambered up the side of one cottage, flowers just opening up in the evening cool. Things mostly looked neat and clean, but Junjuh had a weariness to it.
Two-three of the houses had douen men working in the gardens, digging and hoeing. They all called out to Chichibud as he passed, in a language sweet like when your mother sing to you in your dreams. Glancing back at the houses to see if the humans would notice and stop them, some of the douens came hopping out to greet Chichibud. They crowded round him, nuzzling his shoulders and face and grooming his eye-ridges. Two of them took the mako jumbie beak halves and leaned them up against their bodies. A whole ring of them clasped arms with him and just stood there in a circle, twitching their heads from time to time in that jerky birdlike motion that Chichibud did. They opened and closed their mouths but no sound came out.
“What them doing, Daddy?” Tan-Tan asked.
“Me ain’t know.” Antonio looked at them with a sneer. “Them look bassourdie for true, like them crazy from the sun or something.”
“Is so douen-them does greet one another,” One-Eye said. “You could run a donkey cart through the whole pack of them right now, and them would barely notice.”
And just so, quick as the circle had formed, it broke up. Two of the douens picked up the mako jumbie beak halves. They all started walking with Chichibud, talking steady-steady to him the whole time, looking in his pack and touching the beak. All Chichibud was limping, he was only making style in the street, dancing and waving the mako jumbie feathers in the air. Tan-Tan was mad with curiosity. She called out, “What them saying to you, Chichibud?”
“Glad I reach safe. And how me wife going to love me even more when she see the gift I bringing she.”
For the first time, One-Eye seemed to really look at the douen man limping along beside them.
“But eh-eh, Chichibud, what stupidness you go and do to yourself? Is mako jumbie allyou meet up with in the bush?”
“Death bird herself, yes! And it done dead! Is me it buck up in the dark; me, Chichibud!” He did a little dance on the gravel path, hopping from side to side, bad leg or no. The other douens joined in. Tan-Tan giggled. Claude rolled his eyes. They kept walking, leaving Chichibud to catch up. Twittering the whole time, he and his friends came along behind.
With the truncheon, Claude pointed out a galvanized metal box on one side of the path, suspended between four wooden posts. It looked scarcely big enough to hold a grown man. It had a ladder leaning up against it, leading to a door in its side. Above the door, it had one little air hole drilled in the galvanized metal, about big enough for Tan-Tan to stick her fist in. The door had four big bolts all round to hold it shut.
“The tin box,” One-Eye told them. “One morning in dry season I put a gully hen egg inside that box. When I open it up come evening, the egg did boil to a jelly, right inside it own shell. Man or woman, anybody break the rules, is at least a day in the box for them. I warn you so you know.”