The Laments (10 page)

“There must be some country that’s pulled it off,” said Howard, with a gentle rallying glance at Julia.

“Not one,” asserted Buck.

Julia suddenly remembered Chip Howitzer’s remark about that Irish Catholic senator in the United States.

“What about America?” she said.

“America?”

“Yes, Buck. Blacks have the vote, and the walls haven’t come crashing down. The trains run on time, the telephone system works better than ours, and they have the highest standard of living in the world. If the Americans can give everybody the same rights, why isn’t it possible here?”

It was at this moment that Buck issued an urgent cry for more cold beer from the kitchen, and Julia’s words were put to an end by hasty offers of assistance.

Tunnel to China

Julia’s pregnancy seemed to be advancing at an unnaturally fast rate. Her doctor concluded that she was carrying twins, and Howard, whose fascination with the natural world knew no bounds, tried to demonstrate the creation of twins to Will by splitting a navel orange down the center. This was upsetting to Will, who was grappling with the prospect of one competitor for his mother’s affection, and now had to grapple with two. He said that he hated oranges, and would never eat one again.

But later, when Howard picked up an orange and thrust a pencil through the center to explain the relative positions of Africa and China, Will felt a sudden twinge of compassion for his siblings.

“Don’t do that, you’ll hurt them!” he cried.

“Who?” replied his father.

“Them.” Will pointed at his mother’s enormous belly.

“Nonsense,” Howard said. “
That
orange, I mean, egg, is inside your mother!”

“Howard, I think you’re confusing him,” said Julia.

ONCE A WEEK, ON MONDAYS
, Abraham arrived with a headache, and spent the morning cross-legged in the shed, his hands pressed to his temples, moaning. In return for Will’s fetching him a soothing cup of tea from the kitchen (so that Abraham’s condition wouldn’t be observed by Julia), the gardener was willing to answer any question that came into Will’s head.

“Abraham,” Will began. “How deep do you dig the flower bed?”

“Very deep. Roses like a deep bed.”

“Did you ever dig all the way to China?”

Abraham winced. “China! It makes my head ache just to think about it, Master Will!”

From this, Will concluded that such an endeavor required a sound head, and a rose bed was probably a good place to start. He also learned to clutch his head in imitation of the Bushman’s hangover. Julia noticed Will gripping his head this way at the dinner table.

“What’s the matter, Will?”

“Hangover,” Will explained.

“Bloody Abraham,” Howard muttered.

Julia became deeply concerned with some of the other habits Will had taken up—sucking on a makeshift pipe made of a stick and a thread bobbin; stowing an old vanilla bottle in his back pocket like a hip flask; and stroking an imaginary beard.

One morning the cook complained that his daughter, Ruth, had nothing to do for the school holidays.

“Joseph,” she said, “why don’t you bring Ruth over to play with Will?”

And that was how Will met his first sweet love.

RUTH WAS AS GRACEFUL
as a crane walking along the riverbank, and she was vain; under one arm she carried the lid of a biscuit tin to admire her reflection. As if this were not enough, she was two years older than Will and thus possessed all of life’s important secrets.

“Ruth,” Will would ask, “why does your father have marks on his cheeks?”

“His mother and father cut his cheeks to keep away evil spirits.”

“Why does that keep away evil spirits?”

“I told you this before, Will”—Ruth would sigh—“evil spirits make their home in a healthy soul. If they see scars on the face, they think the soul is unhealthy, so they leave it alone.”

“Why don’t you have marks on
your
cheeks?” asked Will.

“Jesus watches over me and my brother, baby Joseph.”

“And why is your skin dark?”

“Jesus made it that way,” she replied, raising the biscuit tin to admire herself.

Will leaned over and peered at his own reflection beside hers. “And why is my skin different from yours, Ruth?”

Deciding that Will had exceeded his quota today, Ruth arched her long neck and replied:

“Because when Jesus got tired of making beautiful people, he made some ugly ones.”

Stung, Will offered no reply, which was, of course, what Ruth wanted.

That Will could accept such an insult without comment was a credit to his love for Ruth. On the other hand, it provoked more questions for his mother.

“Will your babies be black?” he asked Julia.

“No, darling, they’ll be just like you.”

“Black babies are beautiful,” he said.

“Yes.” Julia smiled, thinking that this comment would shock her mother out of her shoes.

“Don’t you
want
black babies?” Will continued, attempting to reconcile Ruth’s widsom with his mother’s, for it seemed to him that Julia’s desire for more children must have been prompted by some dissatisfaction with him.

“I think white babies are beautiful, too,” she said.

Will went back to Ruth and repeated what his mother had said.

“Yes,” said Ruth, “but Jesus thinks black babies are
most
beautiful.” She picked up her biscuit tin and gave herself a pretty smile.

“Why does he bother to make ugly babies, then?”

“For the same reason that when Baby Jesus got tired of making leopards and gazelles,” explained Ruth, “he made a few warthogs and hippos: for a laugh.”

“Oh,” said Will. “But girl warthogs must think boy warthogs aren’t ugly.”

Ruth closed her eyes, growing weary of this discussion. When Will feared that he had lost her interest, he tried another tack. “Ruth,” he said, “did you know that China’s right on the other side of the world? If somebody dug a hole all the way down, that’s where—”

“Will,” Ruth interrupted with a yawn, “would you do something for me?”

“Of course, Ruth,” he replied.

“Dig me a hole.”

“Why?”

“I want to see a Chinaman,” Ruth replied with an idle smile.

Will was only too happy to accommodate Ruth’s wish, but he was troubled by one difficulty: “What if they’re sleeping when I get there, Ruth?”

“That’s good,” said Ruth. “I want to see a Midnight Chinaman.”

WILL BEGAN HIS HOLE
in the flower bed, where the mulched soil was loose and easy to shovel; in a short time, he had removed two rosebushes with blooms the size of mangoes. The deep red clay beneath was pungent and cool.

Ruth lay on a hammock, fanning herself with a banana leaf and imagining herself floating down a river, like Cleopatra, waited on by scores of adoring attendants.

“How’s this, Ruth?” cried Will.

The brilliant whites of her eyes simmered in the direction of a boy waist-high in a hole.

“Deeper, Will!”

“How far is it to China?” Will asked, but Ruth was already sailing down the Nile.

THE GNARLED ROOTS
of four prize rosebushes lay with their tendrils reaching up to the sky. When Abraham fetched himself a drink of water from the kitchen, he noticed their distressed positions.

“Will!” he cried, pointing with horror. “Your mother’s roses!”

“I’m digging a hole to China!”

The distraught gardener rescued the plants and gave them a spot in another flower bed. He’d have spoken more harshly, but he had supplied the shovel for this deed while in the throes of a headache.

“What is it, Abraham?” said Julia when the gardener appeared at the kitchen door rubbing his temples.

“Master Will is digging a hole in the flower bed. I saved the roses, but . . .”

Julia waddled to the side door and called out, not wanting to step into the blazing sun.

“Darling, this digging can’t be good for the flowers!”

“It’s a hole for Ruth, Mummy. I’m doing it for her.”

“A hole for Ruth?”

“I promised I’d make one for her,” Will replied.

“A hole? Why?”

Will paused. “I love her.”

This first evidence of her son’s passion filled Julia with a sweet sense of pleasure.

“That’s lovely, darling,” she replied. “Try not to make a mess!”

Only when Howard saw the red stain around the bathtub that evening did he realize that his son had been busy in the garden.

“What’s up, Will?” he inquired.

“Digging a hole. To China.”

“Ah. Long way away, China is,” replied Howard.

“How far exactly, Daddy?”

Pleased that his son was showing an interest in geography again, Howard took out an atlas and explained the relative positions of the continents, the depth of the earth’s core, and the distance between Albo and Peking.

“So,” Howard explained, “when we’re having dinner, they’re about to wake up for breakfast.”

Will was delighted by this fact. Howard decided that Will was a born geographer.

Whether for geography or love, Will tore out of bed the following morning, determined to reach China before nightfall.

WILL’S ACTIVITY IN THE ROSE BED
had soon been noted by every child in the neighborhood. As his visitors appeared at the rim of the hole, Will enlisted their cooperation. By nine-thirty, there were four shovels at work, along with a steady stream of yard-high recruits lugging buckets to remove the loose soil.

By lunchtime, several parents had heard of the project and were delighted that the children were busy in
somebody else’s bloody garden
.

“Amazing—the Laments willing to sacrifice their flower bed,” remarked Sandy Quinn, when little Matthew reported the length and breadth of the project. “Here, darling, take them some sandwiches!”

Another delighted parent eagerly offered up the contents of his garden shed—pickaxes, shovels, and forks.

Fortified, the children expanded their project.

Abraham took the day off. His headache had descended into a toothache.

The object of Will’s affection had been enjoying a morning in the hammock between two avocado trees all this time. By early afternoon she had noticed the steady passage of visitors, and her daydreaming ceased. Feeling that she was missing something, she marched over to the edge of the hole, put her hands on her hips, and peered inside skeptically.

A dusty red face at the bottom of the pit gazed up at her.

“This is for you, Ruth,” Will said, raising his arms.

A smile played on her lips. She was flattered. This was better than having slaves on the Nile.

“Give me a shovel,” she said, sliding down the ladder.

HOWARD WAS STILL YOUNG ENOUGH
to love the trappings of his job—the parking spot at the office, the name tag on his desk, and his engraved business cards. Now, as he rolled his cherry-red Hillman with the smiling chrome grille onto the drive of his beautiful white stucco house, he marveled at how far he’d come.

And this was only the beginning.

His father, in Howard’s estimation, had gone nowhere. Ted Lament kept his job as a government requisition clerk for thirty years, and retired with a good pension. Other elderly folk would have taken this opportunity to see the world. But Howard’s father spent his retire-ment commuting from his bed to his armchair. Like a stone in a ditch, mossy and embedded, he lived like this for ten more years. He died of a stroke—taking his wife with him three months later. Howard found fifty-seven cans of tuna in the kitchen cupboard, seventy cans of soup (creamed mushroom), twenty-five cans of baby peas, and sixteen cans of condensed milk. It appeared that his father had become a hermit, hoarding his food so that he could pass weeks without leaving the threshold of his four-cornered world.

Howard wouldn’t make the same mistake. He’d already traveled more than his father had his whole life. And he wasn’t finished by any means. The copper refinery was merely a stepping-stone to bigger things.

As the Hillman rolled silently up the driveway, Howard savored the quiet tap of the engine, the swish of another car going by, children laughing, the tinkle of a shovel. What an idyllic afternoon. Yes, this was a good life.

“Lament!” called a voice. Buck Quinn waved from across the street, limping from an old shrapnel wound sustained in Pakistan. Once a month Quinn blamed his injury for acting up, took a day off without shaving, and lurched around the neighborhood in his old combat fatigues, looking red-eyed and insane, quite the mad Englishman.

“Mr. Quinn,” said Howard. “How are you?”

Quinn frowned. “Children have been busy all damn day. No peace.”

“Have they?” said Howard, surprised at the major’s uncharacteristic interest in children.

“Damn glad it’s not in my garden,” said Buck Quinn, taking a moment to scowl at his cigarette.

“Me, too,” said Howard, tipping his head respectfully as he disappeared into the house. It was always a trap to get into a conversation with Buck Quinn—the man didn’t need a spatula to pontificate.

THE PHONE RANG
as Howard removed his shoes and padded across the cool tile, took a beer, and watched the bubbles tumble and rise in the glass. The children seemed louder now. Must be a birthday party.

“That was the Pughs,” said Julia, shuffling into the kitchen with one hand caressing her tummy. “They say we’ve got their children.”

“What would we want with their children?” shuddered Howard, giving Julia a kiss and her belly a pat.

“Apparently there’s a party in somebody’s garden. They claim it’s ours,” she said.

“Where’s Will?” asked Howard.

“Playing with Ruth, I think.”

“I’ll investigate,” said Howard, refreshed by his beer.

The flower bed was a pit as wide as his Hillman was long, and the roses were missing. Gathered around the rim were a number of small creatures covered in red dust, busily passing buckets from hand to hand. Howard blinked. This was his company house. By extension, this was a company garden and a company lawn.

Now there was a company hole, too.

“Look here,” he said.

The activity around him didn’t stop; nobody looked up.