The main room was empty. Benta wasn’t in her weaving room. Tan-Tan couldn’t find Abitefa or Zake anywhere.
“Allyou?” she called out softly. Then, a little louder: “Is where everybody gone!”
*Up here, doux-doux!*
Tan-Tan looked up. Three-four ropes hanging from the ceiling were threaded through a round hole. The whole family was looking down on her from a next room up there.
Chichibud called down, “I still smelling the heat from the lantern, child. Bush Poopa don’t like a unwatched fire.” So she had to go back and blow out the lantern. When she returned, Chichibud told her to climb one of the ropes and join them for the day meal.
The ropes had spaced knots that she could wrap her toes round, had they been long and prehensile like douen toes. But she had always liked to climb… She kicked off her sandals and grabbed hold of a rope. The climb seemed to take forever. By the time she stuck her head through the hole, she had added rope burns to her other abrasions. The muscles in her arms were burning like pepper. Chichibud and Benta had to pull her the rest of the way, with her grinning like a fool. She had done it. “Is a good thing I know how to tie dhoti, ain’t?” she announced to the family. “Couldn’t have do all of this in that little short skirt.”
A piece of the daddy tree trunk formed one wall of the space in which she found herself. Two branches stuck out from the trunk along one wall surface, and then poked out to the outside. The trunk grew right up through the ceiling-self. There was a hole cut out for it. Thick, succulent daddy tree leaves grew from the trunk and branches; some hand-sized, some long as she. In amongst the branches, it had more of the flowerstalk that had been in the bathroom sticking through the windows. There was lots of water available for food preparation. Somebody had dug small pits in the meat of the branches-them, lined them with what looked like dried leaves, then planted herbs inside. Their roots probably tapped into the daddy tree’s own food systems. Tan-Tan recognised peppermint and scotch bonnet pepper that the douens had probably traded with humans for, but it had a whole set of plants too besides that she didn’t know.
The family was sitting or crouching on a crescent-shaped rug on the floor. It had bowls in front of them, but Tan-Tan couldn’t really make out what was inside.
“Sit, Tan-Tan,” Chichibud said.
He hopped over to a table that was right under the herbs. One set of wooden and iron bowls had been put on the table, and some piles of what looked like meat and plants. Chichibud picked up a cleaver, overturned one of the bowls and started chopping up the things that had tumbled out. The things tried to crawl away as he chopped. Tan-Tan’s skin crawled; they were the same kind of grubs she had seen in the toilet. Maggot juice flew as Chichibud diced away with his cleaver. He caught one grub just as it wormed its way off the table. He popped it into his mouth and chewed contentedly. Tan-Tan swallowed hard to keep from spewing up her belly contents right there. Mama Nanny, is what she doing here?
“I ain’t too hungry, you know,” she announced.
“Well, if you ain’t eat now, is hours before night meal.”
Chichibud said something to Zake. The boy stood and collected two bowls and a pile of wood skewers from the chopping table. He took them over to where the family was sitting. Chichibud brought the bowl of minced grubs himself. The table was set. Tan-Tan squatted down beside Abitefa, who presented her with a gap-toothed grin; smile or grimace, who knew? The sight of Abitefa’s funny half-beak-half-muzzle mouth made Tan-Tan queasy. Between these bird-lizard people and the offal they ate, is what she land-up herself in now? She leaned forward to look into the bowls-them to see is what they really expected her to put into her mouth in truth.
A tiny lizard darted from a crevice in the nest wall. It ran right over her hand, snatched a piece of salad from out one bowl, and glided back towards its hole on little wingflaps just like the ones douen pickney had. Tan-Tan yanked back her hand.
Abitefa warbled. She held out her own hand to intercept the lizard. The reptile ran right up onto Abitefa’s shoulder and stood there on its hind legs, stuffing salad leaf into its mouth with tiny claws.
“Cousin,” Chichibud cooed at the lizard, “good you come to visit.” From one of the bowls, he picked up something that had enough still-wriggling legs for twelve centipedes, oui. He waved it in front of the lizard’s face. Its eyes-them got big like cat eye when she see cockroach a-run past. It flew off Abitefa’s shoulder, straight at the centipede thing. Chichibud let it go. The lizard wrestled the centipede to the ground and bit off its head one time, just like Chichibud had done with the tree frog. The lizard settled down to its afternoon meal, crunching up chitin and all.
Tan-Tan swallowed hard. “I could just have some salad? Plain salad, with nothing on it?”
*Yes,* said Benta. The family settled down to their food, taking from the various bowls and pushing raw meat and live insects and everything into their mouths. Every so often, one of them would dip some writhing something into a bowl of lavender paste that Abitefa had put there and pop it into their mouths, making hissing noises, like if the mess they were eating tasted good for true. A delicious smell came from the bowl of chopped-up grubs. Tan-Tan’s belly grumbled at being denied. She ignored it.
“Benta,” she said, “I worried about Kret. You think he go trouble me again?”
*Kret jealous. Can’t live good with nestmates. Ain’t have no woman to take he flying. No man to share a frog with he, for he friendship always bitter. From time back, him always jealous of Chichibud, of me.*
It was the longest speech of Benta’s that Tan-Tan had heard. She struggled to understand the carolled words. Chichibud laughed. “Well, he been courting your sister steady, but so far, Taya ain’t taking he on, oui?” He turned to Tan-Tan. “Benta done warn Kret off you. Is only a madman would face down a hinte.”
Kret had looked plenty mad to Tan-Tan. She rifled through the salad bowl, pretending to look for the tenderest leaves. But really she was making sure it ain’t have nothing but leaves in there. Then she chewed it all down, dry so, to appease her hunger. You satisfy? mocked Bad Tan-Tan. This is your home now.
Yes I know, doux-doux. Things changing around you too fast. But don’t pay it no mind, this thing will happen without you or with you. Listen, make I sing you a next story:
In all she years of exile on New Half-Way Tree, with all the anansi stories exiles and douen people make up to tell about she life, Tan-Tan never hear back the tale about that escape she make from Junjuh Town on Benta back. It had one exile tale about a bird carrying someone away. But that tale put she more in mind of when the mako jumbie bird try to fetch away she daddy. Sometimes she wonder why the voice of Dry Bone remind she of another voice in she head:
Tan-Tan and Dry Bone
If you only see Dry Bone: one meager man, with arms and legs thin so like matches stick, and what a way the man face just a-hang down till it favour jackass when him sick!
Duppy Dead Town is where people go when life boof them, when hope left them and happiness cut she eye ’pon them and strut away. Duppy Dead people drag them foot when them walk. The food them cook taste like burial ground ashes. Duppy Dead people have one foot in the world and the next one already crossing the threshold to where the real duppy-them living. In Duppy Dead Town them will tell you how it ain’t have no way to get away from Dry Bone the skin-and-bone man, for even if you lock you door on him, him body thin so like the hope of salvation, so fine him could slide through the crack and all to pass inside your house.