As they got close to the silent doctor house Tan-Tan could smell food cooking. Her tummy started to rumble. They went inside. There wasn’t a lot of light there. Rusty iron chandeliers hung from the ceiling: smelly, smoky candles burned in them. Tan-Tan stroked a wall for light, but nothing happened. The voices in the candle flame were stronger now. She could almost hear what they were singing. Her ears itched, particularly the left one. She tunnelled her little finger into it to scratch it, but it didn’t help.
“I been busy all day,” Aislin told them. She went to something that looked like a stove, only flames were burning in the top of it. There was a big frying pan on the flames. Aislin reached for a cloth hanging beside the stove and used it to lift the lid off the frying pan. A fry-popping sound came from it, and a delicious smell. Aislin stuck a spoon inside. She tapped something from the spoon onto her hand and tasted it. “I ain’t have time to do nothing fancy. Quamina, put down that dolly, nuh? Show Tan-Tan how to wash she hands, then allyou sit to table.”
“Yes, Mummy.” There was a big wooden barrel of water beside the wooden sink. A calabash dipper hung from a string on the wall. Quamina dipped water over Tan-Tan’s hands while she washed them. The soap smelt nasty and made her skin dry. The cool water made her shiver. “Dip some for me now,” Quamina told her. She did, awkwardly. “Now come to table.”
Three rough, uneven chairs stood round a hand-hewed table. Tan-Tan’s chair wobbled. The plates were a blue glaze with red birds painted on them. In the candlelight they seemed to flap their wings. Were they singing? Ah, chi-chi bird, oi. Some of them a-holler, some a-bawl. No, that’s not what they were singing. Tan-Tan couldn’t understand the words.
Aislin brought the frying pan over to the table and emptied its contents onto the three plates. “You like metamjee, child? Oil-down, some people call it? Chichibud give me some of he mako jumbie meat, and I fry it up with some ground provisions and coconut oil.”
“What happen to your Cookie?” Tan-Tan asked her.
Aislin frowned. “Doux-doux darling, nobody here have any artisans to gift them with their skills. You and Antonio going to have to cook your own food that you grow in your own yard, or that you hunt and kill yourself. You going to have to fetch your own water, and take your own clothes down to the river bank to wash. Anything we have here, we make with we own two hand. You understand, Tan-Tan?”
“Back-break not for people,” Tan-Tan quoted at her scornfully.
“We not people no more. We is exiles. Is work hard or dead.”
“I does work hard,” Quamina said proudly. “Is me get the stuffing for my dolly from the feather pod trees it have growing in the bush.”
Aislin smiled at Quamina.
Tan-Tan said, “My daddy go take care of me. My daddy could do anything.”
“Your daddy think he could get away with anything. Is a different thing. And it look like them finally catch him out, oui? Junjuh Town go do for he.” She seemed to shake the thought away. “Well, never mind, sweetness. Let we eat.”
Tan-Tan thought she’d never tasted any food so good as the plate of oil-down she was eating with a beat-up old spoon at a rickety kitchen table. But after couple-three mouthfuls she lost her appetite for more. She still felt shivery from the cold water. Her head hurt like it had hammers inside. The voices in the candle flames were singing:
Dodo, petit popo, (Sleep, little one,)
Petit popo pas v’lez dodo, (But baby ain’t want to sleep,)
Si vous pas dodo, petit popo, (If you don’t sleep, little baby,)
Mako chat allez mangez ’o. (Big tiger go come and eat you up.)
“No!” she yelled at them. “Daddy won’t let you!”
“Tan-Tan?” Aislin said.
Eat you up, beat you up, the candles told her. Her head pounded. Brigand a miduit allez mangez ’o. Everything looked blurry. “No,” she whimpered at the candles.
“Tan-Tan, is what do you?” It was Nursie’s voice, but young. Nursie’s hand touched her forehead. “Me granny! You burning up with fever!”
“Nursie, I want to go to bed. I don’t feel good.”
Nursie picked her up. She closed her aching eyes and laid her head against Nursie’s neck. The room was swinging, swinging in circles. Her supper flew up out of her belly and gushed acidic lumps past her lips, splattering Nursie’s shoulder. Then blackness come down.
They never heard word of Maka, the runner who had made the poison that had killed Quashee. He’d promised he would join Daddy by climbing the half-way tree. Tan-Tan sometimes wondered what had happened to him. She had liked his face.
The year she turned nine, Antonio and his new partner Janisette threw a fête for Tan-Tan:
My little Tan-Tan get so big! You look just like my lost Ione.
The fête started when the three of them got home from working the cornfields that flanked Junjuh. They toted extra water, enough to wash their hair and all. When it was her turn to use the big wooden washbasin out back of the cottage, Tan-Tan sat still in the water and inspected her face reflected in it. Yes, Mummy’s eyes had been brown so, had come to tiny turned-up points at the outsides like that. Mummy’s hair had been mixup-mixup like that, some straight, some coiled tight like springs, some wavy. All the bloods flowing into one river. She looked like Mummy for true. Mummy was never coming to see her. Nor eshu, nor Nursie. They had just left her here in this place.
Janisette shouted through the window, “Pickney-child, make haste and done with that bath!” Tan-Tan looked up to see Daddy gazing at her through the mesh of the wet-sugar tree bark that formed his and Janisette’s bedroom window. He drew his head back fast. Tan-Tan stood and dried herself.
Quamina came to her birthday, with Claude and Aislin. Aislin scowled the whole time and kept calling Quamina to her. Tan-Tan had asked for Chichibud to come too. “Nanny guard we,” Janisette had said. “What you want that nasty douen in the house for?”
Tan-Tan had pouted and looked at her feet. “He tell nice stories.”
“Is true, doux-doux,” Antonio had said to Janisette. “We could have him out in the yard. He could tell ’nansi story and keep the pickney-them entertained.”
One-Eye dropped in after he had made his rounds of the town for the evening. When Chichibud arrived the whole fête moved to the yard out back. They drank sweet sorrel (Janisette gave Chichibud his in a calabash dipper, not a mug). They ate hot halwa fruit, and Chichibud told them duppy stories by the fire, about all kinda dead spirits and thing. Claude lay across One-Eye’s and Aislin’s laps, reaching up from time to time to kiss one or the other of them. Tan-Tan and Quamina screamed and laughed and held each other as Chichibud told them about the Blackheart man who steals away tallpeople girl-pickneys and chops out their hearts.
Ah, my little Tan-Tan, so sweet. Don’t ’fraid. I not going to hurt you.
Quamina gave Tan-Tan a new dolly. “I make she like a Carnival Robber Queen for you, sister.” Quamina had gained even more sense in these years. Aislin had told Tan-Tan that the douen medicine was still working on her, growing her up very slowly. The dolly had on a black jacket and pants like a masquerade Robber, and a big wide-brim hat with tassels hiding its face. Quamina had put a little wooden gun in the doll’s waistband and had tied a tiny wooden knife in a holster round one thigh. “You know is a lady dolly because I give she two bubbies,” Quamina said. And for true, the doll had two bumps of breasts like Quamina’s. Tan-Tan wondered what it would feel like when she got her own.