Thandi feels exposed, walking next to a boy this way, with her dress clinging to her. She’s soaked from head to toe. But there’s something comforting in being led. Following one step behind Charles, she observes the back of his heels, crusted with dirt. He carries his shoes in one hand and Thandi’s shoes and sketchpad in the other, whistling lightly as he walks. Occasionally he looks back at her. Thandi bows her head shyly. Had it not been for Charles, she would have drowned. “Thank you.” She peers up at him when she says this, emboldened by gratitude.
“Let’s get you a towel,” he responds. He leads her inside his yard, where two big hogs are walking around inside a pen. By the fence there is a chicken coop where the cackling fowls are squared away, high-stepping over each other and digging holes in the ground with their beaks. Thandi is familiar with this yard, her childhood memories rich with adventures with Charles’s younger sister, Jullette. While Miss Violet and Delores swapped ingredients from their kitchen (“Beg yuh a cup ah salt. Gimme jus’ a throw ah rice. Fill dis up wid some syrup. Yes, yes, dat will do. Likkle more.”) Thandi and Jullette would climb the soursop tree that once hovered above the chicken coop, pretending to be leaders of the squawking birds. What remains of the tree is a stump. Through the wire fence Thandi sees the ocean in which she nearly drowned. Miss Ruby’s shack is not too far away. Like Miss Ruby, Charles and Jullette’s father made money selling fish. Asafa was a fisherman who used to walk around River Bank with lobsters and crabs. He used to scare all the children by reaching into a white plastic pail and holding up the creatures with their scissor claws and antennas poised for attack. The children screamed. Dread would send their little feet running, some tripping over stones and gashing knees and elbows in search of safety behind their mothers’ skirts. Though this was a terrifying event, every child in River Bank looked forward to Asafa cutting across the lanes with his bucket. They eagerly anticipated it like they anticipated Christmas market and the Junkanoo parade in the square. Asafa was the only fisherman who went beyond Pregnant Heidi to catch fish, his thick dreadlocks knotted on top of his head and shorts hiked up his long, skinny legs. Every morning he would be out at sea, patiently sitting with his rod or snorkeling, his bright yellow, green, and red boat docked in the bluest part of the water. The last time Thandi saw him was eight years ago, before he met a woman who bought a lobster, took him back to her villa, and invited him to go with her to America. He never returned.
Thandi remembers Delores offering Charles and his siblings some of her chicken-back soup with lots of boiled yam, boiled bananas, and dumplings on Saturday evenings the year Asafa left. Jullette went to live with relatives, since Miss Violet could not afford to feed all her children and send them to school. It was easier for Miss Violet with the boys, since boys can survive on their own. Charles, the oldest, was hired by neighbors to wash fences, move stones, haul fallen branches, cut grass, carry bags, and push vehicles that got stuck in the potholes up the steep incline on River Bank Road. But Charles couldn’t feed his mother and his three brothers with the little money he made, so Delores and Miss Gracie offered to help. Charles would be the one sent to collect the food, his eyes lowered to his bare feet, his broad shoulders raised like a protective wall against the many whispers and the shaking of heads. Of course, they must have blurred in the periphery of his vision as he carried the pot of food the way pallbearers carry a coffin. He used to mumble his gratitude to Delores as though he expected such generosity and resented it at the same time.
Four dogs roam the yard, two of which follow Charles and Thandi. Charles shoos them away, picking up two sticks to throw. “Fetch dis!” He throws each stick as far as he can and the dogs limp and wobble after them. “That’s Cain and Abel.” Charles points to the dogs.
“You name yuh dogs?” Thandi asks.
“Yeh, man.” Charles looks at his dogs, scratching the tip of his nose. “That one there wid the chain ’roun him neck is Cain,” Charles says, pointing to a spotted white dog. “An’ di brown one is Abel.” He points to the other dog. He then turns to the hogs in the pen. “That’s Mary wid di titties, and that’s Joseph wid one eye.” Thandi looks at each hog, paying close attention to Mary, the fat one with taut nipples who wobbles around. “We sell her babies last summer,” Charles explains. “But she breeding again.”
“Yuh talk about them like people,” Thandi says.
“Of course!” His enthusiasm elevates one side of his face and spreads to his eyes. “Dey jus’ as smart, if not smarter than us.”
The outhouse is a few feet away from the shack, which is built on stilts like many of the other shacks. The planks are still painted in that same red and blue paint that Asafa layered before he left. Under the dense shade of trees, a zinc shack stands away from the main shack. “This is where ah sleep,” Charles says.