1. making the mat
My people in the long-ago, according to my father, were very keen on manners and respect, usually from the young to the old, so a handle had to be put on the first name of the older ones. It got so ridiculous that you had people called Uncle Brother. This adult male might have been called
“Brother” as a pet name by his younger sibs and gone into life as a man called Brother. The ordinary young could not call this adult male Brother.
That was disrespect. You had to put a handle to his name, thus a nephew would call him “Uncle Brother” and his nephews’ age-mates would call him Mr Brother or Mass Brother.
In like manner I was introduced in absentia to an old lady whom I was instructed to call “Conut”. “Co” I knew to be the abbreviated form of
“cousin”. She was my cousin, I assumed, many stages removed. It never struck me to ask what “Nut” represented. It was in the usual eavesdropping on adults, who when they are out of the sight of children feel they can relax and call things by their real name, that I discovered that “Nut” was the shortened form of “Nothing”. And the lady was really Cousin Nothing, contracted to Conut. My mother for some reason found her name and/
or her being a great thing with which to tease my father; she could crack her sides with laughter by just saying “Cousin Nothing”. Conut was on his side of the family. Little bits from my grandfather and grandmother when Conut was in one of her deathbed episodes, and I was visiting, filled out the story of Cousin Nothing’s name.
Though I was wrapped in several names – all of us in my family, on both sides were – you could shake them out and find your formal name: Jean, John named after an ancestor, named because somebody liked the sound of the word; a major character in the book she was reading before your mother went into labour or your grandmother’s favourite character in the Bible.
Then there were additional names. These were “pet” or home names. Your formal name was private. Any and anybody ought not to be bawling it out on the street. It was for official occasions.
Pet names came from how you looked when you were born. “Tiny” was a common one and it was really amusing to see a big buxom woman like my aunt, my mother’s sister, called that. This pet name often was not an English word; more likely than not, it was a set of syllables put together, like
“Bludum”, which came to somebody’s mind when they first saw the baby, and those syllables stuck. How does someone come to be called “Nothing”
and so totally that nobody can quickly find the formal name? I didn’t ask anyone. I just pondered. Nine from eight, you can’t. Go into the tens line and borrow one. Add that to the nine and it becomes eighteen. Nine from eighteen, you can. It leaves nine. That was arithmetic of my father’s time and which he had tried to teach me. Nine from nine leaves nothing. Did Conut’s name have something to do with her approach to arithmetic?
Conut and the origin of her name come back to me as at thirty, the age of the old maid, I sit on my daybed and contemplate the hills coming in through the glass windows and doors. I feel like nothing. The Conut I first met was ancient from the perspective of my seventeen-year-old sense of things, but her eyes danced and, though she was perfectly toothless, she could turn a tune, and apparently wanted to, for she did sing. There was something happening in Conut’s head. Nothing is happening in mine except for a slight pain which is linked to nothing, not to an exposed nerve in a tooth, not to an overworked optical nerve, not to clogged sinuses. I know this, for I have just had what they call in the medical field an “executive profile” and been declared healthy. All I have in my head is a slight pain, there by itself, for it is linked to no other part of my system. I therefore cannot diagnose and treat: I must leave my slight pain hanging there.
My stomach rumbles and I go to the toilet expectantly: something
pleasant will happen. Nothing. Not even the goat-like substance which my doctor tells me is the hallmark of constipation. My parts are not speaking to each other, but thank God this situation sparks a memory. My frontal lobe is intact, so I am still human, but I remind myself that elephants too are said to be good at remembering. The evidence of the human condition, I once read, is the ability to work towards a long-term goal. This I know I cannot now do. Have I become inhuman? Am I getting to be Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, one of the few Bible-related persons with whom my father was familiar, who was condemned to eat grass like the cattle of the field and, as my father’s memory of the nonsense verses they intoned as children in Jamaica says, “spread his bed in a sardine can”? I pull forward my memory to console myself and to convince myself that even if I have had a stroke and my frontal lobe is gone and with it my claim to be above my Neanderthal forebears, I was once a thinker.
New to Jamaica’s slums and only twenty, I was one of those few chosen to do this piece of field research. I was bright then. We were to survey household heads in a depressed part of town. We not only had to be bright; we had to be wise. We were advised that as fieldworkers we should have no emotions. Having emotions and, worse, displaying them while in the field was a methodological sin. I was a bad scientist; I broke the law; I sinned.
Approaching a clearing, I saw a little structure no more than five feet by five feet. It had a covering and was wattled up to about a quarter of its height. In it was this six-foot-tall man with his head leaning on one side of the structure and his feet stretched diagonally to the other side. Was this man building a house in which he couldn’t even fit? I saw this as funny and had to break the laws of science and laugh. I was in dangerous territory; I was a foreign student and had no large network of locals to protect me: he could be a gunman. How could I laugh at a gunman? I was breaking the laws not only of science but also of survival and wisdom. He empathized:
“Laugh, sister, laugh,” he said, “for the situation really ridiculous.” Had to ask him my raft of questions: Was that where he lived? Yes. Was he the head of that household? Yes. He was. So the little house was a household.
Items and their cost. I was not blind: I could see that he had nothing in it.
No chair, no table, no bed, no sofa, no knife, no fork, nor spoon. He and I played the game of completing the questionnaire. It was his time to laugh as he showed me the only thing that he owned: a plastic bottle of tablets. He hadn’t even bought this, for he had no money. He had gone downtown to relatives who were well enough off, being proprietors of a drugstore, told them he was ill and had scrounged this bottle of tablets from these relatives who were ashamed of their connection to him and eager to get rid of him.
What were the tablets for? Constipation. “You see, sister,” he offered, “mi don’t even have that to put out.” He delicately avoided the four-letter word.
That is me now. I am and have nothing.
The phone rings and I rush to answer it. Might be someone telling me something that could stimulate. I reach it too late and there is only a dial tone to greet me. Nothing. A car passes by slowly. It is burdened down like a baby with poo in his diaper. It is burdened with sound. Some dancehall rendition which sounds like a tug-of-war between voice and instruments, between throat and nose, between lyrics and music. A dead heat. No one is winning. Stalemate. I am in a sea of nothingness. Is this like “wandering lonely as a cloud”? No. After that wandering came a “host of golden daffodils” and mental stimulation for the poet. What do I see before me as my mind wanders? I see the trumpet tree, that tree whose behaviour informs us about the journey of a hurricane. Its leaves are doing a little shake and wave, the action as taut and controlled as the dancehall rendition.
It reminds me of the eye of the storm. No action. The flat phase of the hurricane. Stasis. I see a faded yellow leaf attached to a group of healthy green leaves by a string. The yellow leaf spins in the breeze but it won’t fall because it is tethered to a spider’s web and cushioned by the green leaves which are still secure on a stem. This ballerina is secure. I remember Conut.
What I saw I still cannot and have not put into words. But me? I can put me into words, but wherever are they? Words describe something and I am no thing. They have abandoned me who was once a wordsmith. “Lovely prose,” they used to say. I feel like the Arizona of the Zane Grey novels: swaths of light brown sand; no cowboy on the horizon and not even one buffalo or Indian footprint. Nothing is happening. Nothing. Not attached.
Not even a dream in my heart.
I have a wish, though. I wish I could see a boy with a kite. He would send the kite up and keep the stick of cord in his hand. He would be looking up anxiously to guide the kite past the electric wires and the tree limbs. I can see him jerk it, and in this gentle wind, I see it going higher and higher. It would be alone in the sky but it would be rooted in the boy’s hands. Do I need religion? Cousin Nothing had been singing or trying to sing some religious thing about “anchor” the first day I met her. I didn’t catch all the words: “I have an anchor” something something, then, “Will your anchor hold in the storms of life? We have an anchor. ” Do I need an anchor? I remember this line because my grandmother joined her. She had talked too about heaven and the rapture and joining her master in the sky.
I grew up in England and was on my last days of sixth form. I had one paper left to be done. I had opted to do a long paper rather than sit a formal exam and had the summer in which to complete it. We were given a choice of topics – Margaret Mead’s contribution to the study of the family, headless tribes in East Africa, or the West Indian family. With roots in the West Indies, I thought this last was tailor-made for me. All I had to do was get family trees from my parents. My father, always eager to help me with my work, was ready. We were going to use our own family as the base for my research and would look at its structure. His first. I assumed we would get to hers later. We set to work, drawing lines and arrows between them. Too often I would hear him say, “Then where does X fit in?”
My mother, more in jest than assistance, once called out, “You first of all have to admit that yours is the ‘alternative family’; you are going to fit neatly into no mould. Where are you going to put Conut, your mother’s sister who isn’t your mother’s sister?” We persevered. Then a nice thought hit my father.
“Why don’t you go down and spend some time with your grandparents and check out these names. They are in their late eighties by now – how time flies! – but still very bright, I can see from their letters. Just the right time to be visiting old people.”
My mother did not think that identifying these people would help my paper. “They would have to be born again and in some order,” she said, but added that it would be good for me to go down there.
Like my father, I had attacks of asthma and I think my mother was thinking that a little time out of the London air might clear my bronchials.
That’s how I came to be with my grandparents visiting Cousin Nothing and hearing her sing about her anchor. My grandparents had looked knowingly at each other when she talked about heaven and the sky. Guess they were congratulating themselves on coming in time.
This lady had the habit of falling down, “dropping down”, they called it. Seems she had high blood pressure, and having no blood kin around, my grandparents, her closest relatives as far as the village people knew, would be sent for on these occasions. The telegram had come: “Conut drop down. Come at once.” My grandfather obediently hired the only car in the village and we set out for Cousin Nothing’s abode. It was not that the old lady looked sick; she just looked vulnerable, and I had assumed that my grandparents would take her home with them for there was ample space there. This was not to be. Seems this was something proposed from time to time and vetoed by the self-same Nothing. My grandfather did the next best thing. He sent for somebody from the village who would stay with her and see to her personal needs.
I could see from their faces that this was not a new suggestion, and the helper would before long be sent on her way for the old lady would declare herself able to see to herself. I am adventurous but I am not the type to take care of my own domestic needs, let alone someone else, and in the deep rural at that, so my offer to stay with Cousin Nothing came when I was certain that a helper would be employed. From their nod and smile, I could see that my grandparents approved of this. I think they were mindful of my project and felt that for my father Herbert’s sake they had to expose me to as much information as was there for me to get. The lady helper would look after both of us and get a bit more money than she would have for seeing to Cousin Nothing alone. The lady helper, of course, did not mind. I had heard in the discussions in the car coming down that Conut was a lady who would, as soon as you turned your back, fire the helper but pay her to pretend that she was still working. I suspected that my grandparents felt that with me there, the old lady would have to keep the helper. I stayed with Cousin Nothing.
I had brought no clothes but that was no problem. From the time I reached that village and started going up Nothing’s hill, I was hearing those who came out to stare at us and enjoy the drama of Cousin Nothing’s “drop down” saying, “What a way she look like Conut. Same fine body.” Conut had a wardrobe full of clothes she was yet to wear, clothes that were in style
– I should say, had come back in style – that could fit me. My underwear I was prepared to wash nightly and partially dry in a towel. I had learnt this in camp. Having towel-dried them, I could put them behind the fridge –
Cousin Nothing had one – and have clean dry underwear for the morning.
In any case, there was what they called a “dry goods” store only two miles away where it seemed I could get all sort of things. I had money. Did I have the capacity to walk two miles? I imagined my underwear recycled to infinity, or whenever they came back for me.
Cousin Nothing had not looked like I thought death should look. Her eyes were still bright and shining, and though her feet were thin like matchsticks, they were far from dead. She was marching them as she sat, to the sound of her song. She was remembering “Christian Endeavour Days”, she said, clearly enough for my grandmother to hear and nod in assent and of course for me, who didn’t have any referent for that term, to remember the words. Seems to me she would be able to answer my questions and help me with my paper. I was coming to distrust my grandparents’ answers. I think I was getting the sanitized version of things, even beginning to feel that certain people were to be left out of the family tree. The comment
“Where Herbert find these names to give you?” I read to mean We kept Herbert away from knowing those people, how come he still got to know them to be his relatives? Perhaps if I had not been there for the telegram about Conut, I would not have been invited to go with them and would not have met this cousin of mine about whom my mother teased my father and who was the responsibility of these two old people, my grandmother and grandfather.
Seeing things in the sky which nobody else sees is not new to me. One time after my return to England, I saw very clearly the big wooden bowl like a saucer in which I had bathed in that important fortnight when I stayed with Cousin Nothing. Now in my feeling of nothingness, I look in the skies and there is Cousin Nothing like Mary Poppins floating in the skies on her sisal mat, anchored by the skein of cord in the boy’s hand. I know that the Dead Sea feeling will pass, for I now feel I have a purpose: to write about Cousin Nothing. Not as I did in that paper a million years ago when I was finishing sixth form, but to complete her circles, pulling the straw back, then forward, and stitching it onto the layer before. You should have seen that mat and its evolution! What was unfolding before our eyes as we worked was amazing. It was all things bright and beautiful, and we were making it.
Some people remember their honeymoon. My two-week stay with Cousin Nothing is of that order. Most memorable, and I would like to say
transforming, though I have yet to find the courage to allow myself to be really transformed. I liked her. As they say here, “My spirit take her.” Her spirit must have taken me too, for her eyes followed me as I moved from the little back veranda on which she sat with my grandparents, to the brick oven that took up all of the kitchen, to the oil house, to the cane mill. She fell completely in love with me when I asked for a machete, cut my first root of cane and peeled it with the machete, a thing I had only heard could be done.
To this day I cannot figure out whether Conut’s “dropping down”, which had brought my grandparents to her deathbed time and time again, was a hoax or not, for with them gone, Conut put on her water boots and set out, like I imagined old plantation owners of yesteryear did, to walk around her farm, with me behind her pee-pee cluck-cluck. With each step she got stronger. “Man cannot live without plants,” she constantly mumbled.
Coming from London, I of course thought of it the other way around:
“Plants cannot live without man.” Our house had millions of plants but they were like babies, having to be sat when we went off on our annual two-week holiday to the beach, by an official plant keeper who was paid to give them water, and the orchids, their special orchid food. The rhododendrum had to have their leaves dusted and cleaned like a young baby, so that they could be shiny, and the roses had to have their spent blooms picked off.
“You are going to like this place.” “We are going to be friends.” These were the only words that passed between us as we walked, and they came from Cousin Nothing. I answered nothing, not a word. Hunger forced speech out of me. I was smelling Miss Cookie’s hand, so I suggested that we go back to the house. The table was set and the food was piping hot. Seated at the table, Cousin Nothing prayed. This was no longer strange, for my grandparents did that too. I was ready to dig in when she pulled the plate with the chicken from me. “Does your father eat the flesh of chickens?” she asked. My answer was “Yes, he does but for some reason doesn’t think he should.” Beneath my answer, I could hear my mother’s voice, for this was one of their battle pieces: “This is not red meat. It is the most innocuous of flesh foods. It will do you good. Another foolishness your family sent you out in the world with.” The interview continued: “Does your grandmother eat it?” The answer was “No.” “Why do they have this negative approach to the eating of the flesh of fowls?” I knew the answer to that, having asked it a thousand times at home. My father didn’t enjoy chicken for he was brought up to think of it as “dirty meat”. “And your grandmother? Did you ask her?”
I had, but she had only said that fowls were nasty things; they ate lizards and centipedes and all sorts of ugly things which they scratched from garbage dumps. “But,” I wondered to her as my mother had wondered aloud to my father on several occasions, “that was domestically grown chickens. The chickens served on tables in this day and age do not run wild and therefore do not eat nasty things; they are in coops and are fed corn.” I could say this confidently and see my mother’s point, for I had been on a field trip to a chicken factory. I was hardly finished with my answer before Cousin Nothing moved into her informative speech and poor me, having no tape recorder with me at that point to record it!
She talked about how my grandmother had come back from Panama sick to death from one of those fevers they seem to manufacture there. One day she got so sick that Cousin Nothing and Cousin Nothing’s mother or adopted mother, or whatever, were discussing what they would bury her in and where. Then suddenly they heard a commotion in the yard and saw a conference of the fowls. A hen flew up, higher than she had ever seen one fly, and dropped heavily to the ground, dead. On what they had thought would any minute be a deathbed, there was a shuffling, then feet dragging on the floor; it was my grandmother holding tentatively to the wall and coming out to see what all the noise was about. It was she who said, “Give thanks,” asked for some vegetable soup and sat in the rocking chair, while Nothing and her mother stared in disbelief. Apparently grandmother was healed from that moment. And of course was more resolved than ever never to eat chicken’s flesh from that day on.
Nothing explained to me what I think is called a “sympathetic relationship”: my grandmother and the fowls were in a sympathetic and dependent relationship – “symbiotic”, I think the word is. All things have their duty on earth but all things sometimes face tragedy and cannot do their work. My grandmother, though she didn’t know it all along, was aware that chickens had their work to do, Nothing informed me. Calling them nasty was just a rationalization which kept my grandmother, from childhood, a non-eater of the flesh of fowls. The chicken gave its life to save my grandmother for it knew that she had work that only she could do; my grandmother in return continued to respect and protect chickens and their cleaning tasks even more from that day, and felt within herself that she must fight to allow them to do this. To kill and eat a chicken is to keep it from cleaning the earth. My grandmother knew this, Nothing said; has known this in some way or another from childhood and that is why she does not eat the flesh of fowls and that is “why your grandmother fostered a negative attitude towards the eating of the flesh of fowls in your father as a child”, she made me know.
My grandmother’s match in the animal world was the fowl and they both knew that they were each other’s guardian in this world of sin and woe, Nothing continued with her lecture. “Don’t eat this chicken child and your father shouldn’t be eating it either,” she strongly advised. “Your family has the task of keeping this cleaner cleaning the earth. Your children shouldn’t eat it either. This is a world of corruption. Everybody and everything needs a little protection,” she ended and called Miss Cookie to prepare some vegetables with cheese for me. I noticed that she was making headway with the plate of chicken, and asked why. She pushed a plate before me.
“This is dasheen. You may eat this. I cannot.” I asked no more questions. I realized then that my grandmother and Cousin Nothing were not as close kin as I had thought. Nothing did not stop there. For reasons which I was to understand not much later, she called Cookie and asked her to bring a dasheen for me to see and feel. She brought one clean and one dirty. I duly saw and felt and asked questions to which I got answers: “Yes. It comes out of the earth. That one has been cleaned; the other has not been.”
The next day we walked again, “ran the farm”, I think it is called. This was after breakfast so I didn’t have the desire to go back home from this walk prematurely to eat. We walked as far as a little bamboo house with thatched roof. Nothing did not knock or call out; she simply pushed the door and what I saw challenged me to revise the notions of evolution I had learnt at school. I saw Keith, a large version of a dasheen. He was sitting in the corner on the dirt floor. This dasheen had not been cleaned of the dirt from which it had come: that he was sitting on the earthen floor with his hands around his knees and that he was pigeon-chested made the image more stark, for the human features – the hands and the feet – were disguised and all you could see was a blob, a big blob, a big ball, earth-toned and hairy like the dasheen which has just been dug from the earth. He tried to speak and his tongue escaped – a bluish thing, the dead stamp of the thing I had eaten the night before. Nothing went over and tilted him. His eyes opened but this made very little difference to his non-human look, for they were just slits mirroring the ringed marks of the dasheen, an illusion firmly supported by the so-called shirt he was wearing. It was earth-toned, from dirt, I think, but originally must have had stripes running horizontally, like the indentations in a dasheen.
I knew a story was coming and that I would have to listen carefully, for again, I did not have my tape recorder with me and, more important, neither my grandparents nor my father, I was sure, knew this story. I doubt whether they knew of Keith’s existence. I was sure that even if they did know, they would not have shared their knowledge with me. Nothing didn’t even bother to wait until we were outside. She started right there with Keith listening. “But first,” she said, “the pleasant part. Sing for her, Keith.” Out of this dasheen came the sweetest sounds. I felt like Wordsworth listening to the solitary reaper. Even as he sang, Nothing spoke.
“Miss Aileen sent to call me. This is not a today thing,” she advised me.
Just as well, for I knew not who Miss Aileen was. “She was on her deathbed and wanted to confess. She and her mate had been stealing my father’s dasheens. I had heard the story of this new tuber which only my father had successfully planted in commercial quantities; how it fetched high prices on the market, but my father could not get to reap them and make the profit due to him. She said that he had given warning: “When oonoo see oonoo pickney come out looking like dasheen, a dat time oonoo a go know sey oonoo fi stop tief mi dasheen but it a go too late.” She didn’t know whether she was just red-eyed and tiefing because the things were there, or whether it was a craving, something over which she had no control, something her body desperately needed, driving her. Her young man thought it was a craving, given her state of pregnancy, something the baby needed and he would continue going to the dasheen patch even when she had stopped going. Then he stopped but her body kept craving after dasheen. She must have bathed after one intense hankering, and the baby in her stomach at an impressionable age caught her sentiment as she dried her body all over. She didn’t know whether my father knew that she was the one stealing them, or whether somebody had put a hex on her and her man and forced them to steal, but the result was a dasheen baby.
She had to keep him secret and locked away for she didn’t want people to know that prophecy had been fulfilled on her. Moreover, if they saw the child they would certainly have declared that she had brought the devil into their midst, and been tempted to chop it up and feed it to hogs like you did young banana. The father didn’t want to have anything to do with her or the child. He wanted to have more children but said he couldn’t trust her body to produce a real child. Even if he could stomach this one, who is to say that in another pregnancy she wouldn’t crave after green banana and bring a child with toes and fingers like a hand of banana, so she was alone with Keith.
It was my father, she said, who helped her out. He gave her a square of land which she worked for herself and on it he helped her to build a little house in the bush to which Keith and herself moved out of the public gaze.
He was a good child, she said, and knew to keep away from people. All they could ever hear was the singing, and since she could sing well too, she could join him and people never bothered to think who was the other being living with her. “What was I to do?” Nothing was not really asking me. Just talking to the wind. “My father must have poisoned some of the dasheens out of sheer frustration and she, poor woman or her poor mate, dug the ones that he had so doctored. After a hurricane had battered their little house, I built what I told people would be a storehouse and I put Keith in it. His mother died, but me, now I can’t die, for who will take Keith?”
Cousin Nothing had a dilemma. I could see why she couldn’t eat dasheens; I could also feel her guilt at what her father had caused. When we exited Keith’s house she said something more. “About this time my mother died. She was diagnosed by the doctors as suffering from tuberculosis but the people here say that she got quite yellow before she died. That only happens when you have been poisoned, they said, and Miss Aileen’s passed-over people must have come back and taken revenge for what my father did.
They even say that their revenge was meant for me but my mother took the blow.” I didn’t totally understand what I was told but I could empathize with her. What a secret to be keeping hidden in her outhouse! What a burden!
She was crying. No sound coming from her. Just the tears that I couldn’t help but see. Should such an old woman be crying? I don’t know that I had ever seen a person over forty crying. Anyhow, I asked what I had to ask:
“Is he my relative by blood?” “Anything can happen,” she said, and I was reminded of my mother.
Conut did not call me to keep her company the next day but she did the day after. “So you want to know your family line.”
“Yes,” I said and went for my diagram.
She glanced at it, put it on the table, and said, “Come.”
We walked down to the outhouse with our cutlasses. The thought struck me that we were going to cut Keith and see whether he had my blood in his veins. Keith came out with his cutlass and we went farther into the bush. We stopped at a very attractive but frightening plant. Reminded me of the triffids. It had multiple arms, rising stiff from its stalk like those of a ballet dancer. They said it was the ping wing macca, and I was glad to meet this plant about which my father sometimes sang: “Mi heng it pon ping wing macca. ” Its edges were serrated like a saw. Why would anybody want to hang a dress on ping wing macca?
Conut intervened into my thoughts to inform me that some plants were particularly good. We could know them by the fact that their growth progression followed the natural path. And what was this natural path? One leaf would emerge, then another, then two – the sum of one and one – then three – the sum of two and one, then five would merge – the sum of two and three, then eight – the sum of five and three, and so on, the number of leaves continuing to determine the next number of leaves to infinity. Just as there was a law of creativity laid down by the Supreme Being who did his work then saw that it was good before going on to another task, so there was a natural process of growth and it was that we should always double back to base before going forward. I was never good at botany so this lecture was not for me. What could I do with this bit of information? They say here that if certain people say something, even if it is not so, “it nearly go so”. I left Conut’s intervention there. The macca plant did observe this law of nature.
I assume that I was supposed to see it, despite its prickles, as a good plant.
We chopped this beneficent plant, releasing its various fronds. I was advised to see to it that the juice didn’t get on my skin. How could that be accomplished? So as we went home, I was the one itching. Conut was not helpful. “You think you begin to scratch yet? Wait ’til we start to clean it.” But when we went home and moved into the process of washing the separated fronds she did give me a long-sleeved plastic garment to put on, and I was able to scrape and cut and wash like everybody else without digging my skin off to relieve itching. We hit this poor plant to pulp with stones, then scraped off all its green with short knives until a stringy interior emerged.
We worked until we had a pile of strings called sisal. We washed this and left them hanging from a line. Then we called it a day and I went to my bed, Miss Cookie to her cooking, Keith back to his bamboo outhouse and Conut to wherever she went. But if Miss Cookie was seeing Keith, he could not be a secret, I realized in that half-sleep state. It was the story of Keith rather than the existence of Keith that was the secret. Well, nobody in that village, certainly not Miss Cookie, was going to hear the true story of Keith from me.
All other days, it seemed, would be devoted to using the sisal, which was now dried and coiled. Did I say that we had combed the strings? Combed them to take all the tangles out and twisted the strings into strong cord.
It was my time to send a telegram to my grandparents: “Taking one more week. Don’t come for me ’til next week Friday.” I was caught up in the activity and did not see it ending before the following week. As if to accommodate me, all farm work stopped and Keith, Conut and I, and Miss Cookie from time to time, focused on making what Cousin Nothing told me would be a mat. Strands were taken out and like the emperor’s craftsmen in just about any fairy tale, we set to work with small amounts of strands in the left hand which we curled using the first three fingers of that hand, flipping the wrist so that we made circles, then fastening the bunched curled strands at regular intervals with sisal threads from our needles propelled by the right hand.
“Your end is your beginning,” Conut advised, so that we knew the initial set of strands had to be long enough to make our circles and leave over to begin the next, which we could then gently and neatly supply with more strands as needed. As we worked, Conut talked about the family. At nights I tried to put the data into the grid I had brought. No can do. I decided to focus on the never-ending circles that we were making that seemed like a mat of family.