The men rinsed their hands and faces with water from the garden hose and settled into chairs, or perched themselves on the veranda steps. Pearl and Covey brought them glasses of ice water and plates of chicken and rice and peas, the scents of coconut milk and garlic mingling with the distant smell of burnt wood and metal. Covey’s father was muttering to another shopkeeper about the man who had reportedly beaten up his employee.
“Is not the first time him rough up somebody,” her pa said. “Dat man only causing trouble for the lot of us.” Covey’s mummy would have glared at her pa for slipping into patois that way, but Covey’s mummy hadn’t been home in five years.
Hadn’t telephoned.
Hadn’t written a letter.
Hadn’t come back for Covey.
“And this won’t be the end of it, either, Lin,” the other shopkeeper said.
Covey wanted to hear more, but Pearl called her into the house. If you wanted to know what was going on around town, you either hung around the men in the backyard or, once your body had sprouted points and curves and you were no longer permitted to linger, you sought out the women in the kitchen, especially on laundry days. There was usually a lull in the afternoon after school, when the white clothes had been laid out on the patio to bleach in the sun and Pearl had time for a piece of fruit and a chat with other helpers from up the way.
Like everyone in town, Covey had heard complaints about Chinese merchants who didn’t pay their employees their due or who had made advances toward the women. But they weren’t the only ones doling out mistreatment. Covey knew this because the women had always passed stories of such difficulties among themselves. This was the kind of thing that happened to them or to someone they knew all the time, wherever they worked, or shopped, or went to school. No difference if they were dealing with chiney or blacka or dundus.
Pearl said the human being was born to be a ginnal and it was a rare person who didn’t take advantage of a weaker one, or pretend to be the friend of a stronger one just to reap the benefits. But even Pearl said Covey’s father wasn’t a real rat, not like some of those others. Take Little Man Henry and all his badness, for instance. Little Man, Pearl said, had taken his delinquent behavior well beyond the limits of their parish.
According to Pearl, it was common knowledge that Little Man was tekkin’ money from the politicians to help stir up violence on the west end of the island. But that was not the worst of it. Little Man was capable of murder. More than one unlucky soul who had benefited from Little Man’s so-called generosity had turned up dead after failing to pay him back. Others had limped home, all mashed up and not telling.
“Where money is involved,” Pearl said, “not everything from above is a blessing.”
The word was, Pearl said, that the woman whose body had been found farther up the coast a while back was a gyal from another town who had refused Little Man’s advances. Of all the Little Man gossip, this was the story that sent a thick vein of dread running through Covey. That a man would cause so much hurt to someone who had done so little. It was said his brother was no better. It was said that the Henrys both profited from and caused the misfortune of others all too willingly.
Perhaps Covey or Pearl should have imagined that soon, Little Man would be getting himself involved in Johnny Lyncook’s affairs. But they didn’t.
It would be a while before Covey realized that the fire had marked the beginning of the end. The pullback before the wave of her father’s debts engulfed them both. Most of the goods in her pa’s store were lost. The rest was too smoky to be sold. On the day after the blaze, she overheard Pearl telling the helper from next door that she didn’t think Mister Lin should have to be ruined because of someone else’s bad deeds. Mister Lin, Pearl said, was perfectly capable of ruining things for himself.
Lin
Who was a man, Lin wondered, if he no longer had a place to call home?
Lin knew people still saw him as a foreigner, even after he’d gone to school in the same town, run a business here, taken a wife here, and raised a child here. Even after he’d lost his brothers to the TB, like so many others. Lin, too, had always thought of himself as a foreigner, even as he slammed down his domino tiles on the table in the backyard, even as he spat out a local cuss word, and even as he sat on the veranda sucking on a Bombay mango from the tree that his father had planted with his own two hands.
But all that changed on the night that he watched his store burning up, on the night that someone set fire to one of the businesses where he had worked since he was a pickney, on the night that he found himself fretting for the safety of his daughter in the town where she had been born. On the night that Lin, out of cash and nearly out of things to barter, finally admitted to himself that he was in over his head.