Outlawed by the sorrowing blacks of Bordeaux, Seenie, "to exculpate
she wickedness," fled to Waakenam, a sparsely populated isle on the
Essequibo Coast. There she took refuge in a hut deep in the Guiana
woods. Until a lackey on the constable's staff had dubiously led her
to it, the cabin was deserted, cane trash crowned it like a wreath of
_callaloo_ mist. Box square, inside it was dark and cloudy. The peon
originally occupying it had evidently had a vivid contempt for the
tropical sun or wind. And it was here that Seenie, hardly able to
survive the social consequences of lust, felt happy in raising Water
Spout.
Inside the hut, by way of a bit of color, Miss Esteena, the niece of
the Negro head of the Waakenam constabulary, had given her an old
canopied mahogany bed.
Into the boy's flower-like mouth she pried a spoon with the crusted
refuse of the previous day's stewed cassava.
"Eat um, sah," she cried, "an' don't put on no 'ears, lik' yo' is any
man. Eat um, Oi say."
Upon Water Spout's glazed tawny body there was not a stitch of clothes.
But it was fiendish hot in the cane trash hut, and he needed none. His
puny body, which the _obeah_ midwife had despaired of so, had flecks of
porridge, and hardened bread swobbed in tea, on it. He had a scrawny
neck. It had its base in a hollow-sounding delta. A stack of bluey
veins, loosely tied in a clot of skin, connecting a hairless cocoanut
to a brown, belegged pumpkin. The navel string, prematurely plucked,
hung like a ripe yellow cashew. Bandy, spindling legs jutted out, to
either side, from beneath a rigidly upright little body.
As a sort of aftermath to a night of studied rest, Seenie was dizzy,
drowsy but she made sure of one eternal thing--Water Spout had to be
fed. Feeding him was her one active passion. It was the least, she
felt, she could do by him. Her ways may have been bad, her soul in
doubtful retrospect, but Water Spout had to eat--_hossah_, cane licker,
green peas, anything. And, by Jove, she had plans for him: later on,
it was her idea, no matter how austere Miss Esteena was, to let him go
down to the river by himself. If she had anything to do with it, Water
Spout would some day walk!
"Come, Water Spout, come play wit' mama!" Somewhere, in the frowsy
dark, she had seized a toy, a symbol of Miss Esteena's charity at
Yuletide, and shaking it gave it to him.
Glazed-eyed, he reluctantly took it; he made no effort to wring joy and
sound out of it.
As he grew older, she saw to it that he wasn't left by himself on the
bed; not that she minded his wetting it, so that when she came home at
night she had to take refuge on the floor, if she wished a dry spot
to lie on. But time was slowly proving that there was life awake and
raging in his glazed little body, which all along had seemed to her to
lack virility. And he would, by the wreckage he'd leave behind, play,
dance, and roll--make noise!--in a fury of possession, with some jaunty
toy wagon or cart horse she had given him to play with. No, it didn't
pay to leave him up there on the bed. He might fall to the unkempt
floor. Then, again, although he refused to cry, no matter how often or
how hard he would fall, in some quiet, unobtrusive way, the idea began
to enter Seenie's head that he might not do so well, after all, from
all these constant falls and things. His refusal, his failure to cry,
started in her queer trains of thought.
At first they excited a more unobservant severity.
"Yo' too stubborn, sah, yo' too mannish--look at he dough--he look lik'
something dog no like."
"Yo' so little an' yo' so ownwayish," she'd say to him, "yo' won't cry,
ni, yo' won't cry--well, Oi gwine show yo' somet'ing," and she'd beat
him for fair.
All this, when, turning away his little head, he'd try to shove the
spoon with the fluff of corn mash away from him; or after a bowl of
cane juice, when, with only the warning of a writhing face, he would
unbosom himself, abdominally speaking.
And then Seenie, with the instinct of a heifer, began to argue that
after all there must be something wrong with Water Spout, with any
child, as lavishly fed as he was, who didn't stamp and yell and knock
things out of one's hands and dribble at the mouth and lather with spit
everything he came in contact with--the little heathen!
"Behave like a good lil' boy yo' heah?" she said, a bit penitently,
pausing at the door. She shook a chastising finger at him. "Behave
yo'self, heah, an' yo' mahmie will bring yo' a sugar plum."
Clap han' fuh mahmie
Til pahpie come
Bring sugah cake
An' giv' Seenie some!
And she went out, slamming the door behind her.
The world of Seenie's flight was a terrible green. "Me baby chile,"
she murmured, "me own baby chile." The edge and sweep--wide and
far-flung--of leaf and vine, shrub and fruit, flower and sky; the
tender flush of the river dawn--brought a barbaric peace to her soul.
Snaky cords tightened in her brain. "Yo' mek up yo' bed, now go lay
down on it," Miss Ewing, the Bordeaux sorceress had said to her. And
with Captain, with whom the whole thing was a dismal oversight, she
had implored on bended knees, to no Christian purpose, for having lost
sight of, in a heat of frenzied lust, the fruit of her innocent pride.