“Come,” Father said after he’d parked in front of the mill. The motorbike’s polished, red chassis seemed alien amidst the white-and-brown tedium of the cane workers. “Let’s find Uncle Amir.”
The interior of the mill was darker and noisier than Harry had expected. The conveyor belt carried the sugarcane into a central chamber filled with machines whose purposes he could hardly guess at: steel-sided shredders with rows of spinning teeth, thick pipes that ran the walls and hissed with steam, and vats filled with dark, boiling liquids. Men with heavy gloves moved like ants in an underground colony: each knowing exactly where he was going, but none saying a word to the others.
“He should be up here,” Father said, shouldering open a door labeled Management Only. They climbed a steep flight of stairs that doubled back on itself and opened into a small room with a glass wall. The whole mill was visible beyond the glass, much as fish could be watched in a child’s aquarium.
“Harry! So glad you came today.” Uncle Amir stood from behind a small oak desk, came over to shake his hands. “I haven’t seen you in so long, and now we get to see each other twice in one week! What grand luck. Would you like milk tea?”
Harry shook his head, but Father insisted on tea for the three of them.
While Amir boiled water, Father enumerated the job’s various daily tasks—invoices, vendor inquiries, customer relations, and management. “It’s tough keeping the coolies on track and making sure production is where the bosses need it to be. So much slips through the cracks. Right?” he asked, looking to Uncle Amir.
“Right,” he said with a nod as he poured tea from a steaming pot.
Father sat Harry down at a chair with a stack of invoices—“clerical work keeps the mind organized, son”—and retreated to his own desk to answer the ringing rotary phone.
Harry’s concentration left him after alphabetizing the first six. He sat beside the only window in the room that looked outside. The view was bleak—mostly men hauling cane from the trucks, staggering with the weight—but the window had a small, wooden ledge and on the ledge was a dead caterpillar. It was an enormous, bloated creature that had only recently died. He peered closer: he recognized the markings. Mother had several moths in her collection with the same rows of dots on the wings, the same shallow—
—Harry blinked. The caterpillar was dead, clearly dead, yet could have sworn he’d seen its skin ripple. Just a slight protuberance, as if some small heart, deep inside, beat once.
His stomach turned at the thought, though the beast inside him didn’t move. In fact, despite being so far from the compound, the beast had hardly protested at all. It purred complacently—contentedly, even—from the thin lining of his intestines; he could barely tell it was there.
Somewhere inside the mill, men started yelling. This was followed by the sound of metal shrieking against metal and a long hiss of steam.
“Amir?” Father said.
Uncle Amir looked up from his paperwork, keeping his gaze away from the window onto the workers.
“Amir,” Father repeated, hanging up the phone. “Would you go look into that?”
Uncle Amir feigned surprise. “Oh yes! Yes, of course. I’ll—I’ll just be back.” He nearly tripped over himself getting down the stairs.
Father gave a pained sigh and, when Harry didn’t inquire as to the reason for the sigh, he elaborated: “He’s been having trouble with the men. He’s usually so good with them, but this blasted People’s Progressive Party is driving them apart. Amir’s a reasonable man—he understands the benefits of us being here, running things. All coolies are not as reasonable as your Uncle, Harry. That’s a good first lesson.”
The caterpillar’s skin had started moving again. First, one pulse—a single, small heartbeat—but then it came again, more strongly, pushing up against the necrotic flesh, distending it. The caterpillar’s skin tore with the pressure, and a small mouth emerged from inside: two black mandibles, sharp as sickles. A pin-waisted wasp pulled itself free, its wings slicked with the caterpillar’s viscera.
Another wasp crawled up through the hole, and the caterpillar’s body began to boiclass="underline" ten more heads pushed up into the dead skin, biting hole after hole until the caterpillar was nothing more than a heap of dislocated parts, a first meal for a host of sickly-orange wasps with legs sharp as needles.
“Reginald!” Uncle Amir called from the bottom of the stairwell. “Might you—might you come down, please?”
“What’s the trouble?” Father asked from his desk. The shouting from the men downstairs grew louder as Uncle Amir kept the door propped open.
“You should bring the boy with you!” Amir yelled, and then they heard the door slam shut.
Harry pulled himself away from the caterpillar—there were just two wasps left, now; the others had taken off into the midday heat—and he followed Father downstairs.
The mill’s workfloor was chaotic: workers ran back and forth, some with pails of water from spigots outside, others with burlap tarps. The far end of the chamber was starting to fill with black smoke, and the room reeked of burning timber. One of the workers, a tall, broad black man, was yelling at Uncle Amir. His accent was too heavy for Harry to understand much of what he was saying.
Father stood paralyzed at Harry’s side. He gripped the back of Harry’s neck in his hand, squeezing just too tight.
“Should you see what’s wrong?” Harry asked.
“I—I think we should just—”
Uncle Amir jogged over. “It’s one of the processors, Reginald,” he said, his voice hoarse with inhaled smoke. “It’s lit the cane chips somehow. You should get him out of here.”
“Are you sure? I could stay if there’s anything—”
“It’s under control,” Amir retorted. He turned to go back to his men.
Father took Harry by the hand and they started out of the facility. Harry turned just before they got out, though, to see the workfloor one last time. His gaze slid from the billowing smoke to the black worker, who was standing there, watching them go. His face dripped with sweat and was streaked darkly with ash and his eyes went wide and wild with such fear, such rage, that Harry had to turn his face away.
The fires were put out, and the mill and all the cane workers survived. The mill would need some time for repairs, Father explained, but it would be back in no time at all. The fire started due to faulty machinery. All of the processors were years too old, but that wasn’t his fault, he was careful to say, that was something Amir should have told him about long before it had gotten this far.
He spoke with the bluff of bravery, but he was clearly shaken by the incident. He kept to the drawing room, fingertips stained from the endless chain of cigarettes passing through them. He came out for short, silent meals with Harry and Mother, then excused himself.
The image of the mill worker had stayed with Harry, too: he had never seen such terror carved into one man’s face. Father’s immediate retreat from the mill filled him with embarrassment, but he couldn’t bring himself to talk to Father about it, or to be there when Mother found out what had happened.
So he stayed away from the compound. Later in the week, after a day spent in too-hot classrooms thinking about his mother and her love of Frank de Caires, he found himself wandering back toward the Demerara, picking his way along a road he’d walked many times when he was a child. His mother’s house had been down this way, he thought. He had few memories of the place—he’d been so young when Father took him away to live at the compound—but there were still feelings that stayed: the croaking calls of toucans with beaks the color of ripened papaya; the static joy of hearing cricket games in countries across an ocean, broadcast over transistor radio; his mother coming home from work, her apron curry-stained, her smile wider than the river.