"You planning to walk on the water?" Father said. "If so, don't say another word until you're midstream."
Mr. Struss looked us over. Flies had gathered on his shoulders and he was breathing hard.
"You know I'm a fair man." Father said to us. "If any of you people want to go with him. I won't stop you. Hurry on down to Swampmouth and listen to what this gentleman has to offer. Anyone interested?"
Mr. Maywit and his chicken-eyed wife looked anxiously at Father. The Zambus had started giggling.
"Excuse me, Mr. Roper, will you please—"
"Shut it," Father said, and Francis Lungley laughed out loud.
Mother said, "You'd better do as my husband says. There are some dugout canoes at Swampmouth, and I'll give you a bag lunch. You'll have no trouble getting back to the coast."
"The Lord wants me here," Mr. Struss said.
Father said, "That's what I like about you people — your complete lack of presumption. But listen, I'm not going to tempt you with martyrdom, so just shove off and don't come back."
A little while later, from the porch of the house, we saw Mr. Struss walking down the riverbank toward Swampmouth. He carried his suitcase in one hand and Mother's lunch bag in the other. He was alone.
Father said, "Imagine that hamburger coming all that way to ask a silly question." He put his face close to Mr. Maywit's and said, "Are you saved?"
"Yes, Fadder."
He then asked everyone else in turn and they said yes and laughed along with him. He asked me and I said yes, but I was at the window and I saw that, hearing us laugh, Mr. Struss glanced up. He looked sick, but he kept on walking.
The days passed. They were sunny, there was little rain, they were muffled by dust. But the nights were furious with the ringing cries of insects, and bird grunts that sometimes rose to screams. The darkness helped us hear the soft splash of monkeys on branches, and the chafing of crickyjeens was like combustion, as if every bush and tree were burning. And night heat was more suffocating than in the day, and made sleep seem like death. It was a dreamless plunge into that riot.
Father spent these days hammering. He did not say why, but his eyes told me that his thoughts were storms. And every man in Jeronimo labored with Father at the plant. It was, so far, only a skeleton, with pipes buckled to poles and men hanging like monkeys to the crosspieces, where they followed Father's orders. It was slow work, and for a long time it did not look like anything at all.
The day after the bean harvest, Father declared a holiday. It was our first day off in six weeks of work. The Zambus shot a curassow and the Maywits brought cooked cassava and plantains and fruit. Father would not allow any of the Maywits' chickens to be killed. "That's living on your capital." We had an afternoon feast in the front yard. Mr. Maywit and Mr. Haddy took turns telling stories about the Mosquito Coast — pirates and cannibals — and Clover and April sang "Under the Bam, Under the Boo."
Father gave a speech about us. We were bricks, he said. He went on to explain all the things you could do with bricks. And he got angry only once. This was when Mr. Haddy praised the food. Father hated anyone talking about food — cooking it or eating it. Fools did it, he said. It was selfish and indecent to talk about how things tasted.
He called this our first thanksgiving.
It was now August. Mr. Maywit said he knew this without looking at a calendar, because the sickla bird had arrived. The bird was shiny green and yellow, and very small, with a warbling song that reminded me of the fluting music we had heard the boy play on the beach our first evening in La Ceiba.
Work on the plant continued. The mahogany planks were hoisted into position and bolted to the poles. The floors told me nothing, but when the sides went up it took on a familiar shape, and before it was finished I guessed what it was.
14
MOST OF THEM, including the Maywits (they had seen one in Trujillo), thought that Father had run mad and built a silo.
"Shoo! What green you gung put in it?" Mr. Haddy said, speaking for everyone.
Father said he was not going to put anything into it, and certainly not grain. "But just you wait and see what I pull out of it! And keep pulling! Listen" — he whispered and stared—"this gizmo is sempiternal. It won't ever quit."
It was not the bottle that some silos are, nor was it a thermos-jug shape, and there were no feed bins. It was tall and square-sided. It had now windows and only one hatchway door, twenty feet up and no stairs to it. It was a plain wooden building, a huge mahogany closet raised up in our clearing in the jungle. A box — but a gigantic box, with a tin lid. It was an oddity of such magnificence that it was a thing in itself, like an Egyptian pyramid. Its great shape was enough. It did not need another purpose. But I knew it was the Worm Tub, enlarged a thousand times.
No sooner was it raised than flocks of people came to look. I supposed our hammering was heard in the woods. Father made these strangers welcome. They were hill Indians and Spanish-speaking farmers, and Creoles and Zambus. The Indians did not stay, but the others did — Mr. Harkins and Mr. Peaselee, old Mrs. Kennywick (the very one who had seen God in the Shouter church), and some more. They said that they had watched the house — as they called it — rising. They marveled at it. It was taller than the trees and flat-topped like nothing else around here. They had seen it from far-off.
That was an advantage, their curiosity. Just when Father needed help, these people crept out of the trees and said they were willing. With the finishing of the other buildings and the first harvest and the rest of the crops coming along fast — all we needed — everyone in Jeronimo assumed our work was done. This made the plant — as Father went on calling it — a bewildering surprise. What was it for? What was it doing here?
Father promised more marvels, but there was still wood to add to the structure proper, and still brickmaking to do.
"Where is the bricks, Fadder?" Mr. Maywit asked.
"You're standing on them." Father pointed his finger stump at the ground. "Clay! This is all bricks, just sitting there, waiting to be made!"
There was ironwork, too.
"The Iron Age comes to Jeronimo," Father said. "A month ago, it was the Stone Age — digging vegetables with wooden shovels and clobbering rats with flint axes. We're moving right along. It'll be 1832 in a few days! By the way, people, I'm planning to skip the twentieth century altogether."
There was more plumbing in this than a waterworks, but the building went on smoothly. The new people were glad to do the work and liked listening to Father, who talked the whole time.
"One of the sicknesses of the twentieth century?" he said. "I'll tell you the worst one. People can't stand to be alone. Can't tolerate it! So they go to the movies, get drive-in hamburgers, put their home telephone numbers in the crapsheets and say, 'Please call me up!' It's sick. People hate their own company — they cry when they see themselves in mirrors. It scares them, the way their faces look. Maybe that's a clue to the whole thing—"
Most of the plumbing was bends — enough to make a cow crosseyed. Some of the bends were the fixed elbows we had brought from La Ceiba, and some we made in the forge. The forge was built with the first bricks, and the bellows (a simple fire was not hot enough) was two paddles and a leather bladder. Father saved his welding torch for finishing off each seal, because he did not want to waste the cylinder of gas. The sight of Father in his welder's mask, his eyes darting in the mask's window, with his gauntlets and his asbestos apron and his fizzing torch, fascinated the onlookers. And he kept talking, even with his mask on.
"Why do things get weaker and worse?" came the echoey small mask-voice, as if out of a conch. "Why don't they get better? Because we accept that they fall apart! But they don't have to — they could last forever. Why do things get more expensive? Any fool can see that they should get cheaper as technology gets more efficient. It's despair to accept the senility of obsolescence—"