and had many mouths to feed, but trus was also in Rachel's view an invitation to open yourself to gossip. Rachel was a proud woman. She would rather do without than take trus, and she would rather avoid the local shops than be exposed to the knowledge of her neighbors' dependency.
She used to sew a little, earning a bit extra from the skill her father had forced her to acquire. But she gave it up at about the time Moshe was found, to shield him from inquisitive eyes and questions. People had no reason to come to her house if she wasn't sewing their clothes.
She had no relatives living nearby. Her two brothers and six sisters, who had not been as academically gifted as she was, had made opportunity for themselves and migrated to England. Her sisters moved to Canada when Canada opened up through the Domestic Workers Scheme. Her brothers, left lonely behind, went across to America. It was Rachel, the oldest, who stayed, because somebody had to look after her father after her mother died giving birth to Charlie, the youngest boy. Then, when she might have gone after her father died, there was Noah, and it was too late.
Every now and then she visited her one female friend, Miss Hildreth Porter, who lived two miles away. Otherwise Miss Hildreth visited her, and they spread themselves on mahoe-stump stools in each other's yards (that is to say, Miss Hildreth, a thick-girthed woman of great size, spread herself, while Rachel, more slender and dainty, placed her feet side by side and covered her knees with her spread skirt), and sitting in this way for an hour when Rachel visited Miss Hildreth, and three hours when Miss Hildreth visited Rachel, they discussed the foolishness of neighbors; the cruelty of some people to their children; the nastiness of people who gave their children bush-rat soup to cure whooping cough; the pedigrees of careless young men who sought to put themselves with the daughters of respectable families even though they well knew their own families were infected with yaws, consumption, madness, thievery, marley-gripe, fluxy-complaint, sugar, and other diseases; the indecency of girls who frequented the wharves in Ora when the ships came in from far countries, turning themselves into sailor-bait in exchange for English guineas and American greenbacks; the growing wildness of the young; the ungratefulness of those who had gone overseas and forsaken their relatives; the epidemic of divorce cases in the Gleaner, shameless men gleanering their wives—be it advised my wife Leonora has left the matrimonial home and I am no longer responsible for any debts she may incur—what a wukliss man, exposing his dirty linen in public like that; the coming of independence in 1962 ( Moshe was four years old) and the memory of the first time they voted, dipping their hands in red ink; the goodness of Yahweh Elohim Most High.
Theirs was a strange kind of gossip because they almost never mentioned anybody's name (except Yahweh's ), but spoke in generalities. If a name was mentioned, it was always a name from the past, someone they had heard of or who was long dead. They wove a history of districts without calling anyone's name who was living or who was not remotely dead, retailing stories without implicating anyone's reputation, as if history could be cut off from memory or kin that remained. But their gossip took this form because the two of them prided themselves on abhorring slander and backbiting, and this was why they were friends, and did not keep other women friends. (This was why Moshe so often drew people with vivid skeletons, and abstractions where their faces should be.)
Rachel had another reason for her friendship: Miss Hildreth lived alone, and Rachel's heart, despite her great pride, was compassionate.
Her other friend was Samuel. He came on Sunday afternoons, arriving in time for two o'clock dinner and leaving before sunset. He was Rachel's distant cousin from the remote district of Manyenni, fifteen miles south of Tumela. Their conversations were of a different kind from the ones Rachel had with Miss Hildreth.
Rachel and Samuel discussed the state of the world, the condition of apartheid in Rhodesia, the language of dreams, the lost codes in the distorted scriptures, the existence of satanic verses, and the efficacies of oils for healing the soul. Such oils were often stashed on the back shelves of drugstores in Jamaica's capital towns. The trade in these was brisk, a parallel economy on which the drugstores thrived because there was always a large clientele of the rural folk and sometimes the upper social echelons who believed in these remedies. Oil of Hold Him Tight. Oil of Do Wha Mi Seh Yu Fi Do. Oil of Tun Him Back (Turn Back Evil). Oil of Win di Case (for winning court cases). Oil of Tun Him Mouth Backa Him (for retributing insults).
One night, Samuel told her, it was revealed to him in a dream that there was an oil, the Oil of Patmosphere, which was a wonder cure for ancient ills, and he was astonished, when he went to investigate, that it was sold in MacKenzie's Drugstore in Montego Bay, but at a formidable price that would take him many years to save. "Man," the drugstore owner told him, "this is rare oil, requiring special composition. In more than fifty years no one but you has come to inquire of it. I cannot sell it for less."
Miss Hildreth and Samuel often saw Moshe, for he was allowed, as children seldom were, to play nearby while the grownups talked, though he was not a retarded child but overbright for his years and forgot nothing that he heard. Miss Hildreth fell into the habit of prophesying his future. "Him gwine have a hard time, Rachel. Dat skin an dat hair gwine mek him way in dis world hard-hard. Hard travail. Mi si it. Ehn-hn." This unresolved body in which history has made ructions will make his pilgrimage difficult. This is what I have seen.
And Rachel always answered her with a gentleness she showed to no one else. Having decided to "keep friend" (she felt, sometimes, against her better judgment), she had committed to accepting the obligations, including soft speech, that came with friendship, "No, him not gwine weary. It a-go sen him places, yu go si." (In her secret thoughts, "yu go si" translated into "retro me, Hildreth," a counterspell.)
Moshe learned to distrust Miss Hildreth and would never go near her. He found her unkind, and detested the things she said about him. In her presence, which he endured because his mother made him stay, he learned to close his ears, and if he allowed himself to hear anything that she said, it was only so he could discover how to guard from her his palaces, rooms of escape where like all only children he had learned to make a home. Before the closed doors of such rooms, counterspell he pinned Miss Hildreth like the donkey's tail flat against the wall. The wicked witch of the west, knocking unavailingly at the door.
Samuel he loved. For Samuel did him the grace of ignoring him, most of the time. Not only that, Samuel was a man of dreams. Moshe beheld him rise like an issue of smoke from a labyrinth, and the child was enchanted so that later when he discovered his gift of drawing, he drew, over and over again, scenes of Samuel flying, streaming tails like a comet, while his hundred eyes gleamed among columns of hair.
Once in a while Samuel noticed him, but in the strangest way, as if the child were a strand woven in his outlandish skein of dreams. One day he said, "Why yu tink this boy is the color of milk and honey?" posing this as a philosophical question, to which he fully intended to give the answer. With Samuel, a question was ever a rhetorical ruse.
Arrested, Moshe paused the toing-and-froing of his homemade horse on the squeaky verandah floor. The horse was built from a water bottle fitted at its bigger end into two condensed milk tins mounted on wheels cut from discarded Michelin tires and attached to the tins by cord strung through holes in their tops. The tins had been roped together a second time by more cord strung through the bottoms. The narrow, protruding part of the bottle formed the horse's neck and head. The horse was flexible in the space where the two tins met, but with its wheels it could have been a truck except that Moshe made it a horse, shouting, "Giddy-ap, giddy-ap, skuy!" from inside his head as he galloped it across the breathless floor.
"Hush," he told the horse now from inside his head. "Hush, brrrrr," and held his breath, waiting for the answer to Samuel's riddle which had mentioned him in it.
"Is the Oil of Patmosphere. Is the same way. Same way. The answer is there."
"Wha di answer?" Rachel asked, smiling.
"You have to come at it in a special
