Janisette had made a suck-teeth sound of irritation and left.
Tan-Tan wouldn’t let Antonio hold the hot compresses to her aching back. “Leave them on the table,” she’d told him, then turned her face to the wall.
She’d thought he’d left, but then she’d heard him whisper, “Doux-doux, I sorry this happen.”
“I tired.”
“I sorry too bad. I sorry you sick.”
He didn’t dare say it plain, what he’d done. She didn’t answer, didn’t trust herself to.
“I sad and I lonely and sometimes you is my only comfort, the only thing that come with me from back home. You know I love you, sweetness. I never want you to hurt.”
Was this good Daddy or bad Daddy talking? Confused and angry, good Tan-Tan and bad Tan-Tan just lay silent. Finally they’d heard the sound of Antonio walking away. The rags stayed in the cooling water in the pail. Eventually the cramping had gotten less and Tan-Tan had fallen asleep.
She healed. Antonio still stroked the bad Tan-Tan from time to time with too-familiar touches, but no more of the thing in the night that had sent her to Aislin. He never spoke about it again. Bad Tan-Tan knew that he’d stopped loving her because she’d gotten pregnant. Good Tan-Tan got increasingly jumpy with fright that the thing in the night would start again. Neither of them slept well, ever.
Never mind. Tomorrow she would be old enough to set out on her own. She was going to live in Sweet Pone Town, her and Melonhead. No hanging tree there, no tin box. Sweet Pone had running water. And no sullen, skulking Antonio. Melonhead could have left two years before, but they were friends. He had waited for her. The two of them had been pestering the douens, pumping them for news from Sweet Pone and for advice on how to get there.
Old Pappy was coming back from the riverside with his three goats-them. “Evening, Pappy. Walk good.”
“Seen, sweetheart. Getting so pretty! You almost old enough to give this old man a kiss now, ain’t?” He cackled and reached out to tap her under her chin.
Tan-Tan scowled and stepped back from his long, bony fingers. “Old enough to push you my own self through the door of the box,” she threatened. Pappy glared at her. He spat to one side. The spittle landed in the mane of one of his goats. The animal shook its rank, smelly head. Pappy took his stick to them angrily, walked on without saying a word more to Tan-Tan.
Is messing with young girls why Pappy had climbed the half-way tree in the first place. Aislin had long ago warned Tan-Tan and Quamina to stay away from Pappy’s wandering hands. Pappy had nearly died the time that One-Eye put him in the box for sticking his hand up Quamina’s skirt. Three hours of that heat and they’d had to pump his chest to get his heart started again.
Round the corner, Tan-Tan bucked up Rick doing his deputy rounds. His eyes slid slowly over her body, down to her crotch, back up to her chest. “Evening, Tan-Tan.”
Tan-Tan smiled slyly at him and walked away, twitching her hips. She could almost feel his eyes on her retreating behind. Rick, Pappy, Antonio; you could rule man easy, with just one thing. Sometimes she wished for something more, wished that they wouldn’t make it so easy. She’d get vex at all the stupidee men in stupidee Junjuh. Then she’d go and talk to Melonhead whose eyes met hers and who talked to her face, not her bubbies.
She took the riverside path to Gladys and Michael’s iron shop to avoid passing the hanging tree. The woman’s body was beginning to smell in the hot sun. One-Eye would have to cut Patty down soon before the maggots came. He kept bodies up on the hanging tree two-three days so everybody could see and learn. Patty had beaten her baby boy to death after she’d been up three days and nights from his crying. The child had been colicky from birth. One-Eye said he was sorry but in Junjuh, murder must always get repaid with murder. “Them is the rules,” he’d said, then brought out his rope.
Tan-Tan had only gone once to see a hanging. She’d vomited out her lunch by the side of the road.
She had a brief vision of Antonio hanging from a rope, his swollen tongue protruding from his mouth.
What would she wear for her fête tomorrow? Oh yes; the new sarong and blouse that Chichibud’s wife had sent for her. They were yellow, her favourite colour. Little black figures were woven all along the hem of the skirt. Some were dancing, some were climbing trees. One had a knife in its hand. Chichibud had said that as his wife wove the cloth for the sarong and blouse specially for Tan-Tan, she’d breathed on it and with her breath, Bois Papa had sent her the story she’d woven into it. “Is the story of your life, doux-doux. You go have plenty adventures.”
It was loud at the iron shop today. Tan-Tan had always liked the clang of the hammer on the anvil, the red clouds of steam that would billow from the shop when Gladys or Michael quenched the metal. Husband and wife been running the smithy five years now, trading with the other human settlements for scrap iron and melting it down to make new things. They were in fierce competition with the douens, oui; many of the things they could make from iron, the douen people made better from wood. Douens were masters at that craft. Plenty prison settlement people preferred to trade with them for bowls and pot spoons and baby bassinets and so, rather than chance human iron, which had a way to rust. The few runner people on New Half-Way Tree were reviving hard labour crafts as fast as they could, but they hadn’t yet perfected making steel with the primitive resources on New Half-Way Tree. Too besides, douen work pretty, seen. The douens etched indelible designs on the inside of their bowls: vine patterns; ratbats flying; douens leaping. They made baby bassinets from a lattice-work of smooth peeled twigs that they had trained to grow into a bowl shape. Every one had a different lattice design. The pliant wood that made them grew deep in the bush where only douens could go. On the days that Chichibud appeared in Junjuh Town with his cow-sized packbird Benta, people would mob him to see what douen woodwork he was carrying. When Tan-Tan was little Chichibud had told her that tallpeople couldn’t help but like douen makings; it was because the douens had worked obeah magic upon the wood.
“Douen man grow them, douen woman paint them,” he would say with pride. “The woman-them does work obeah into them as they painting them. Is for so the patterns come in like they alive. You don’t think so?” He would hold up a beautiful bowl for her to admire, perhaps one that had a favourite douen symbol on its inside, a spreading banyan tree design. “Men make things and women magic them. Is so the world does go, ain’t, doux-doux?” Then he’d laugh shu-shu.
Old trickster! For years, Tan-Tan had believed him about douen magic, but now she knew he’d only been making mako ’pon her. It wasn’t magic, it was craft and cunning. And it was vexing Gladys too bad. When she and Michael had come to New Half-Way Tree, the douens-them were still using bone-chip knives. Now every douen had at least one iron blade to call his own. There was good trade with the douens for sculpting tools; the tools the douens used to compete with Gladys and Michael. Gladys was always complaining about how ungrateful douens were. Chichibud laughed in private with Tan-Tan about it. “Yes, oonuh tallpeople show we plenty of new ways, and we does learn fast. Why you think we always right there to meet new exiles when them climb the half-way tree?”
Wouldn’t have been Tan-Tan crossing Gladys. Gladys was big and beefy. Her tree-branch thick arms came from slamming that hammer down onto the anvil plenty times each day. Her temper was sour and too besides she ain’t too like Tan-Tan already.
The tall, thick metal door to the iron shop was closed. Strange. It got too hot in there to do that. Tan-Tan turned the handle and pulled. It was bolted from the inside. Gladys and Michael must be burning up with heat. Were they all right in there? She leaned closer to the door. She could hear the roar of the flames, the ringing of metal on metal, then a mechanical noise, a kind of cough: “Kuh-hunh! Kuh-hunh!” Is what that? The sound reminded Tan-Tan of something, something from long time ago, back on Toussaint…