“Melonhead give you he present yet?” Aislin asked teasingly.
“No.” Aislin seemed to have forgiven Melonhead finally. Tan-Tan had lain in her back room again two years ago, staring at one label in particular: “Abortifacients.” The memory of the rending pain was still strong in Tan-Tan’s mind. Is only because the cramps and bleeding had her so sick after the abortion that Janisette hadn’t striped her backside with blows over that one.
“Is Melonhead, ain’t it? Say is he!” Tan-Tan hadn’t answered.
“You little slut! You been hot for that that mamapoule boy from since, you know is true! You think because you get bubby now and your blood start to flow, you is big woman!”
Melonhead. Tan-Tan could have almost laughed out loud at the idea of making boobaloops with her friend Melonhead. He was her only agemate; tailor Ramkissoon’s son who had chosen to come into exile with him when his daddy had been sent up the half-way tree. Melonhead was Tan-Tan’s dearest friend next to Quamina, but he was about as sexy as a clod of dirt. He wasn’t like some of the older men who were already casting their eyes at her then fourteen-year-old body; not like One-Eye’s deputy Kenneth, or like Rick. Tan-Tan had smiled, thinking of how she could make them stare. And Janisette had shaken her finger in Tan-Tan’s face, spraying her with rum-scented spittle as she hissed: “I thought so! Barely old enough to smell yourself, and you carrying on with Melonhead. You leggobeast you!”
“Is not Melonhead,” Tan-Tan had mumbled. But Janisette hadn’t believed. She’d gone to Ramkissoon. He’d kept his son away from Tan-Tan while she was healing, but when she met Melonhead a few weeks later under the acerola cherry tree in the middle bush around Junjuh, Melonhead had told her that Ramkissoon was only doing what Janisette had asked because she was his neighbour.
“He ain’t believe Janisette,” he said, the bobbin of raw fibre he always had with him dropping from his fingers to spin, spin thread just centimetres from the ground. “Daddy believe me. But he say Janisette crazy like dog in the sun hot, he ain’t want to cross she. He say you and me must be careful and stay out from under she eye.”
Melonhead had never asked her who she’d been making baby for. That’s why she liked him. When she didn’t want to talk, he didn’t press her. People gave Melonhead static for making Tan-Tan pregnant, but he never defended himself, just let them think it had been him. He was a good friend.
Tan-Tan dragged her mind back to the present. “Aislin, Daddy send me. Is that same arm what he did break so long ago. He say it paining him again.”
Aislin waddled over to one of Cudjoe’s cupboards. She took a small woven basket out of it and shut the cupboard door, which promptly swung wide again, nearly catching her in the face. “Cho.” The door closed the second time. Aislin pulled the cover off the basket. She took out two papyrus-wrapped packets and held them out to Tan-Tan. Antonio had had this medicine before; an infusion of particular twigs and leaves. The tea reduced inflammation. Aislin said, “Mix two pinch of this in with some z’avocat leaf tea for Antonio, three times a day. It go ease up some of the pain, and the tea good for he pressure. And tell he, he must work he joints so them wouldn’t stiffen up. Now he stop working in the fields, he should be digging in the garden with Chichibud, or making something with he hands. It go do he good.”
“Thanks, Doctor Lin. I go tell he, but you know how he does stay.”
“Yes, sweetness, I know. Antonio have a little bit of arthritis but he only carrying on so Janisette wouldn’t make he wash no more dishes.”
Tan-Tan laughed. “For true! You should hear how he does go on: ‘What kind of thing that is for a man to be doing; washing dish and feeding chicken? You and Tan-Tan more accustomed to manual labour than me. Oonuh could do that.’”
Aislin chuckled. “It have anything in that house that Antonio does do?”
Things for send he to the tin box, cackled the silent bad voice, like an insane eshu. Tan-Tan set her mouth hard. “I just pass Quamina swinging on the almond tree swing,” she said. “She do some nice cutwork embroidery on she new dress.”
“Yes. She show it to you? She getting real good with a needle, ain’t? Ramkissoon training she to be his assistant. Glorianna and Janisette does trade she for basket and leather shoes and thing.”
“I know. I think every chair in we house have a piece of Quamina cutwork decorating the back. She keeping Chichibud wife busy busy weaving more cloth.”
“Quamina doing good for true. When she did born bassourdie so, I never think say one day she would be able to help sheself. I thank Nanny every day for that bush medicine that Asje give me. It working slow, but it growing she up little-little. She does act more like ten years now than only six.”
Tan-Tan had outgrown her half sister. More often now, she was the one babysitting Quamina.
She chatted a little more with Aislin, left her the bread Janisette had baked in return for Antonio’s medicine, then said goodbye.
It was drizzling outside, a light rain from a passing cloud. Tan-Tan stopped on Aislin’s verandah for a minute to wait for the rain to pass. It gave her an excuse to enjoy a little bit of freedom before she had to go back home again. There was someone in the tin box today, Tan-Tan had heard him groaning as she passed. The rain would cool the box, ease the torture a little.
Asje and two-three other douens were working Aislin’s garden in the rain. They didn’t mind getting wet. They were chattering and twittering happily to each other. From the way their eyes were cloudy, Tan-Tan knew they had their second eyelids drawn down to keep the rain out. They greeted her and went back to their hoeing and weeding. One of them caught a worm as long as Tan-Tan’s forearm and sucked it up like a noodle.
Tan-Tan went and sat in the old creaky rocking chair. She liked the ice-cream sweet scent of the frangipani trees Aislin had growing all around her home now. They used to be just some little fine-fine twigs jooking up into the air.
New Half-Way Tree had changed Aislin and all. The angry, bitter woman Tan-Tan had met nine years ago seemed content now, for all that hard labour had toughened her hands and wrinkled up her face. Whenever Claude came into the room Aislin lit up like is somebody turn on the sun. He was always bringing she and Quamina some nice thing: a jar of wet sugar he’d boiled down himself from tree sap; a new doll he’d carved for Quamina. Sometimes it was hard to believe this was the same Claude who would happily crack heads in the wine shop when things got too raucous.
It had stopped raining, the sun was out. A splinter in the weave of the rocking chair seat was jooking her. Time to go home, after she’d picked up her birthday present from Gladys and Michael’s forgery.
Tan-Tan stepped off Aislin’s verandah into the pink of noonday. The red light of New Half-Way Tree used to seem strange to her. But she and all had changed-up too. Just like Antonio.
Eh-eh. She’d been feeling happy before. Not any more, for some reason.
Antonio hadn’t said anything at first when Aislin and Quamina had brought Tan-Tan home after the abortion. Janisette had still been scolding her when Antonio showed up in the doorway. Fear had jumped in Tan-Tan’s belly at the sight of him. Her womb had shuddered through another cramp, thanks Nanny a small one this time. Antonio had been carrying a steaming pail in one hand and folded-up rags in the other. Compresses. He’d boiled water. He, who left all the work round the house to her and Janisette. “She tired,” he’d said to Janisette. “Let she sleep little bit.”