child's abstention, the two were as different as two people could be could be who had grown up in the same place under the same sun under the same dominion of sugar.
It was Noah's awe that drew them together. He loved the child with an inarticulate tenderness that terrified him. Sometimes he felt the same tenderness toward Rachel, but he was unused to opening his inner life even to himself, so toward his wife he was undemonstrative except when they quarreled, and then his feeling came out in anger. The little boy's innocence made him soft, and as a result, nervous. He didn't want the child to grow up soft, though he feared it was already too late from the moment Moshe was born. Di mumma suffer, he said. Das why she trow him wheh. Trow wheh when him young, di heart weak. (Rachel, as you may expect by now, said no, and declared Exodus 2.)
When Noah was home on Sunday mornings, Rachel left Moshe in his care to go washing, but too often he was not there, and she took to fetching the river water, carrying it in buckets or kerosene tins on her head, and washing the clothes at home, but sometimes even this was not possible. Noah cursed her for a fool; why should a woman burn herself out to carry home a river, backbreaking labor the end of which could only be to hurt the child, by protecting him from what he needs must face, the tragedy of having been born? Such hard and terrible labor was the fate of everyone ever born, one way or another, Noah felt. The only difference was in the kind of tragedy that one's life became. He had no pity for himself.
In truth, having Moshe did not ease but actually increased the quarreling between them. Pania Machete, Noah nicknamed the boy, half with affection, half with philosophy, which is to say, mordant cynicism. Two-edged machete, which, facing backward or forward, would cut deep, for the child was placed like a sword between the husband and wife.
This nickname enraged Rachel. "Nuh call him so. Nuh call him so. Pickni grow inna dem name. Pania machete talk out of two side a dem mouth, an him nuh hypocrite. Nuh call him so."
Noah bared his large teeth in the humorless grin that with him passed for a laugh. "Pania machete cut sharp—cut yu, cut mi. Two a wi bleed. But machete can't work by itself, or rest by itself, enuh. Somebody haffi decide fi stop di war." Without even bothering to kiss her teeth, Rachel turned her back on him.
They were united in their love for the child and strove in their own ways to make his life good. (Good, not happy; for a people whose life began in death, happy was a child's fantasy, an immature dream.) Noah was the one who taught his ABCs and phonics. This was ironic, for, as I said, Noah could not read; he had gone to school just enough days to learn the rudiments (his ABCs; the speller's catechism r-a-t rat, c-a-t cat, m-a-t mat, look at that, look at that) before he dropped out in order to work so that his younger brother Cecil could go, their mother having died while they were young and without fathers. While Noah taught him these rudiments, Rachel taught him sight reading using her Reader's Digest, her kabbalistic brochures, and retranslated Pentateuch and psalms. There were no other books in their home, and this repertoire, beyond what he learned from eavesdropping on Samuel's luminous orations, is how Moshe came to live in the worlds of superstition, open sesame, and the cryptic arts of Byzantium.
iii
He was a quick child, and read fluently from the age of two. He was wonderfully charming, and stole their hearts.
From Noah he learned the skill of making toys from scraps and waste, for Noah spent patient hours with him, showing him how to make trucks by fitting rubber strips onto the wooden wheels he carved from flotsam; how to strike a nail without bruising his hands, which Noah wrapped for him in cloth before he allowed him to hold the hammer underneath his own, guiding the small fingers; how to make and walk on stilts of cord and condensed milk tin (the stilts heaved him high in the air with his legs wide and his head up near the stars); how to make a calaban and arrange wiss-wiss to catch birds in the feeding tree.
But the child cried and would not trap the birds, and so the father abandoned this part of his teaching. The child's inability did not seem to Noah strange or unmanly, because he himself was not inclined to kill. From the day his wife brought Moshe home, he had not taken an angelfish. If they swam into his fish pots, he let them go. Their milk-blue edges reminded him too much of his son. He was exceedingly tender with the child, and if Rachel forgave him at any time for being rough and uncouth, it was whenever she saw the two of them, heads bent close together over a simple toy, Noah's bushy wild burr that to her fury he would not comb, and the toddler's strange blond bangs and tight pepper-grainy black kinks, the two heads of hair mingling as the father explained the toy's workings in low murmurs like a forest animal communing with its young.
It was from Noah that he learned the love of the sea. He listened with shining eyes as his father recounted his adventures: his vigils in the long night; the extended silences riding the waves at daylight while seabirds perched on the edge of his canoe and watched with him the great golden ball of the sun rise out of the depths; his encounters with sea trolls that he fought with a Christian cross and his lantern; the voice of the wind when he had to put up a sail; the eyes of fish gleaming in dark pools while they slept with their eyes open; the ghosts he surprised wrestling on the surface of the water, plantation people long dead fleeing their masters; his almost drowning once, in a storm, when the boat sprang a leak too wide for him to bail, and he was picked up by a passing cargo ship.
To the child hearing these tales, his father became a hero. He knew that one day he too would go to sea. He longed for it to be now.
"Dadda Noah, duu, mek mi come wid yu. Tomorrow?" Moshe begged, his widened eyes trained on his father while he sucked his thumb and comforted his navel under the hem of his vest.
"When yu big enough, yu can come wid mi."
"Mi big now." He stretched his arms out so his father could see how wide his span was, that it was like wings.
"Yu nuh so big. Wait likkle fus," Noah said, hiding a smile.
"When mi fi wait, Dadda?" Moshe's face screwed up, he was ready to cry.
"Till yu stop suck yu finger," his father said, not in a teasing voice, but gravely.
The boy came to see not sucking his finger as the mark of manhood. He knew he would not attain it for a long time to come. "Mi go stop suck mi finger," he consoled himself and his father. "An den yu go car' mi."
"Yes," his father promised, and Moshe believed him. It was enough. He waited for the day when he would no longer need his suck-finger. And though he did not know it then, it was in these communions, after tales of fishing, that the seeds were sown that later caused him to run away from home and the familiar sea.
He grew used to his father not being there all the time, though at first he cried each evening when Noah left. But it was all the life he knew, these bright Monday afternoons when his father said goodbye, these calm Thursday mornings when he came home again, bringing the sea with him; and moreover, he had his mother, with whom he spent every day of his life, and so he was not overdisturbed.
The child passionately loved his mother and father, and it grieved him that they quarreled and could not be at peace. And indeed, the story of how two people so tender-hearted married and lost each other and could not be reconciled, even with a fairy-child between them, is one of the great mysteries that can never be explained, though there was a history that might go some way toward an explanation, which later Moshe was told, and which he told me.
iv
It was in keeping with Rachel's superstitious logic that the riverside attacks on Moshe ceased not as a result of her precautions, but as a result of events outside her control.
One evening, missing the river, and tired of being locked
