go lay," the girl said again, inside her head, and the boy heard her as always. He heard her voice filled with triumphant satisfaction. She removed her right hand from its secret encounters with her navel and pulled her uniform tunic in close, so that it no longer described a distance between them. Then, as if this action initiated a tacit code, they began inching across the log, he to the left, she to the right, until they were touching at shoulder and thigh. Then her hand went back in her navel and they settled again, absorbed, with the deaf-ears concentration of which children are capable. Their silence, secret and companionable, fell like a wrapped sheet around them. The hen slowed down, looking for a place to sit.
Behind, the schoolyard was abrasive with noise, but they hardly noticed: the din came to them like a rumor from a far country, vague and distant. This was their secret place, this coop on the edge of the school grounds pungent with the smell of chicken waste—pee, feces, sometimes offal. The big boys, the ones who after years in school still could not read or write, were charged with feeding the chickens morning and evening before and after school, but otherwise the coop and its vicinity were out of bounds. Nobody except Moshe and Arrienne minded, because nobody else was interested in chickens, of which the district children saw plenty everywhere. Some had chickens of their own, specially assigned for them to take care of, pets that would later be ruthlessly butchered for the family pot.
Moshe and Arrienne routinely broke the rule, and were routinely punished. In the beginning he cried because she got beaten and he did not. She was a big, tall girl, larger than her seven years, with Maroon features. She was fierce and refused to cry, no matter how many and how hard the blows the headmaster, the man-teacher, inflicted. Moshe, on the other hand, could not be touched. At the slightest stroke of the cane his skin broke and gushed blood, which even in those days could bring a court case or the police, if your mother was Rachel Fisher, a cantankerous woman even by Tumela standards.
Then, for some reason, the man-teacher stopped beating her and the two of them began to receive the same punishment. And since this more often than not included staying in late to clean up the classroom (this was sometimes punishment for recalcitrants, more often duty for the whole class, when there were no recalcitrants to punish), they did not mind. Or rather, she did not mind since punishment of any kind meant little to her, and he had learned to welcome this punishment because it meant they would be set free after all the other children had gone. Then they could walk home alone, without fear of the ridicule that he dreaded. She wasn't bothered by the ridicule. She would simply fight to defend him from it. But she felt it was okay too, to walk home without fighting, if one didn't have to.
The hen had found a corner that suited her, and was sitting. The children grew tense with excitement, their heads stiff and close together. The rooster, who had spun around like a weather vane following the hen's every movement, turned around on his perch, flapping and squawking in her direction.
But the hen was taking a long time. She lay quiet and unmoving, her bottom cocked, her eyes closed, as if she were asleep.
The children were growing tired of the waiting, afraid that nothing would happen before the bell for end of recess rang. Without a word spoken and in exact coordination, they began kicking the space beneath the bench, to and fro, their upper bodies rocking in unison with the movement, the habitual choreography of twins who communicated in their own secret ways. Without speaking, they sped up the movement, never taking their eyes off the hen or their fingers from their sedate communication with their belly buttons.
They were trying to hypnotize the hen into doing their will.
Straining, he directed the force of his will toward the hen. Please. Please.
"Is Sylvia Pettigrew an Lionel Harper wen inna di grassroot yessideh. Dem did a-do badniss," the girl said, without apparent rhyme or reason.
She broke his concentration. This time she had spoken aloud, which she almost never did. His eyes opened wide; with fascination and fear, his imagination shifted to the other side of the land bordering the school grounds. This section was prohibited as well. At the border between the school and the red river was the dry-stone gateway over which a log was laid like a bridge. The gate led out into a bow-shaped clearing encircled by trees that gave it an intimate and eerie feeling.
The trees were the first thing that made it impossible to keep the children away from that place, despite prohibition. They were naseberry trees, which fruited in the summer just before school was out. The succulent brown fruit fell and broke on the ground with a splash and turned bees, flies, and children luminescent with desire. Beyond the shadow cast by the trees was the slope that the teachers feared and fought unsuccessfully by prohibitions to keep the children from haunting. There the sun blazed unhindered from an open sky and they could slide flailing on coconut branches down to the river, or play at hide-and-seek in the tufts of guinea grass that grew in abundance all the way down. The guinea grass was where the bad children like Lionel Harper and Sylvia Pettigrew misbehaved themselves, showing their cheelies and cocobreads and doing other things to which his imagination could not assign a concrete image.
"Sandra chat. Shi tell Man-Teacher dis mawnin. Man-Teacher go bus dem ass wid pepper-lick." She flashed her hand in the motion that meant a beating, clicking her thumb and index finger together. They made a sound like a whip. She returned her hand to her navel and continued kicking, finger-sucking. Sandra welshed on them and now Man-Teacher is going to give them a serious beating, a bust-arse. The thought delivered an extraordinary satisfaction.
He shivered, shocked at the news and, as always, at the daring of her language. She was never afraid to swear out of the hearing of adults, whereas he censored even his dreams. He was so afraid to dream that he struggled every night not to fall asleep. He dreamed of a large gray mattress coming in the night, scooping him up and whirling him far away from his mother, while he stretched out his hands to her, crying, but his mother was in the other room and did not hear. He dreamed this dream often when his parents fought, and he thought his mother would be killed; he thought his father would kill her.
"Shhh. Look deh. Look deh." The gossip over, she had returned to speaking to him without words. He always heard the echo in his head, clear as his own voice.
The hen had raised its behind in the bed of straw and the round brown egg was protruding from its extended anus, which was pushing it out with quick, pulsating movements. It fell out and the children thought "Plop!" in unison, their eyes shining with the unbearable thrill that never waned no matter how often they watched this event which was to them a vast miracle.
"Shi go dweet again," the boy whispered in his head, breathing through his mouth, and sure enough the hen raised herself again, the process was repeated, and soon two bright speckled eggs lay like jewels in the straw. This had never happened before. The children heaved a mutual sigh of satisfaction, long drawn out, in tandem, first she, "Hah," and then he, "Hah." The hen started cackling, announcing the birth. The rooster, cockadoodledoing loudly, announced his accomplishment, beating his wings and springing down on top of another of the hens. The gaggle scattered, calling and protesting in outrage.
The children had seen this mating a hundred times before and were not at all as interested in it as they were in the miracle of the egg being born. Still, they liked to watch as the rooster tried to anchor the next hen's head in place with his beak, before wriggling on and then off her. This wriggling to them was stupid, unsatisfactory; they thought he looked ridiculous, and sometimes he did not catch the hen, but this time he did.
Recess was almost over. They could hear it in the receding quality of the schoolyard noise. Soon the bell would ring. Another silence descended, but not as secure. They were waiting for the bell, which they could hear before it rang, a jangling noise that made their bellies feel stiff and unwell. Slightly shocked, a little lost, they stood up and began to tidy themselves. She straightened her pleats with meticulous care and patted her braids to make sure they were staying down, which they were not, but pressing them down
