A Tall History of Sugar. Curdella Forbes
and though they found the child strange, he was no stranger than most of what or whom they knew, except that his particular strangeness had no precedent. They wished Moshe no ill. And indeed they longed to lay down arms, but could not surrender in the face of Rachel's unyielding pride.
It did not take Moshe long to learn that it was he who was being talked about in this coded way. And he felt how his mother's contained rage, a bitter thing, roiled over him to withstand the neighbors' barbs. Rachel was determined not to answer or show in any way that their taunts affected her, but her anger and fear for her son were impossible to hide. In her effort to shield him, her disguised rage, the cloak of her protection, burned through her hands helping him undress for bed at night, and his skin broke out in great rashes that confined him to his bed once more.
Noah was at home irregularly. He went to sea in the night and sold his fish in the morning. He did this from Monday to Thursday, when he would return to Ora to sell the last of his catch and caulk the boat if it leaked. Then he would head for home and a long sleep. He sold his fish as he caught it, putting in to port at various places on the long route where he tracked his fishing pots. He laid the pots at evening and harvested them before dawn when the fish were still asleep in the cunningly fashioned cages of mesh. Working alone, Noah came in early before the sun's rays could fall on the catch and spoil it, putting out again before people had had their breakfast. His fish, with scales so fresh they were translucent, sold well, and the higgler women retailed them for good prices in the markets.
It was this habit of aloneness on the open sea that made Noah rough and impatient with standing in line, and distrustful of how to find his footing in polite company. (Rachel's aloneness was more a matter of choice, and pride, but she had great self-confidence.) Yet Noah, who, despite his social diffidence, was afraid of no one, was in awe of his adopted son, the delicate waif-child whose bleeding skin reminded him of his own long-running sore that would not heal even when Rachel took matters in her own hands and, ignoring the hospital's directives, dressed it with poultices made from bizzi mixed with oil and gave him molasses in his tea instead of sugar.
And yet the matter of sore and blood that bound father and son together was somewhat of a contradiction, for the surfeit of sugar that had given Noah his sore was the exact opposite of Moshe's affliction. The child was born allergic to sugar and could not eat it. Between the father's overconsumption and indigestion, and the child's abstention, the two were as different as two people could be could be who had grown up in the same place under the same sun under the same dominion of sugar.
It was Noah's awe that drew them together. He loved the child with an inarticulate tenderness that terrified him. Sometimes he felt the same tenderness toward Rachel, but he was unused to opening his inner life even to himself, so toward his wife he was undemonstrative except when they quarreled, and then his feeling came out in anger. The little boy's innocence made him soft, and as a result, nervous. He didn't want the child to grow up soft, though he feared it was already too late from the moment Moshe was born. Di mumma suffer, he said. Das why she trow him wheh. Trow wheh when him young, di heart weak. (Rachel, as you may expect by now, said no, and declared Exodus 2.)
When Noah was home on Sunday mornings, Rachel left Moshe in his care to go washing, but too often he was not there, and she took to fetching the river water, carrying it in buckets or kerosene tins on her head, and washing the clothes at home, but sometimes even this was not possible. Noah cursed her for a fool; why should a woman burn herself out to carry home a river, backbreaking labor the end of which could only be to hurt the child, by protecting him from what he needs must face, the tragedy of having been born? Such hard and terrible labor was the fate of everyone ever born, one way or another, Noah felt. The only difference was in the kind of tragedy that one's life became. He had no pity for himself.
In truth, having Moshe did not ease but actually increased the quarreling between them. Pania Machete, Noah nicknamed the boy, half with affection, half with philosophy, which is to say, mordant cynicism. Two-edged machete, which, facing backward or forward, would cut deep, for the child was placed like a sword between the husband and wife.
This nickname enraged Rachel. "Nuh call him so. Nuh call him so. Pickni grow inna dem name. Pania machete talk out of two side a dem mouth, an him nuh hypocrite. Nuh call him so."
Noah bared his large teeth in the humorless grin that with him passed for a laugh. "Pania machete cut sharp—cut yu, cut mi. Two a wi bleed. But machete can't work by itself, or rest by itself, enuh. Somebody haffi decide fi stop di war." Without even bothering to kiss her teeth, Rachel turned her back on him.
They were united in their love for the child and strove in their own ways to make his life good. (Good, not happy; for a people whose life began in death, happy was a child's fantasy, an immature dream.) Noah was the one who taught his ABCs and phonics. This was ironic, for, as I said, Noah could not read; he had gone to school just enough days to learn the rudiments (his ABCs; the speller's catechism r-a-t rat, c-a-t cat, m-a-t mat, look at that, look at that) before he dropped out in order to work so that his younger brother Cecil could go, their mother having died while they were young and without fathers. While Noah taught him these rudiments, Rachel taught him sight reading using her Reader's Digest, her kabbalistic brochures, and retranslated Pentateuch and psalms. There were no other books in their home, and this repertoire, beyond what he learned from eavesdropping on Samuel's luminous orations, is how Moshe came to live in the worlds of superstition, open sesame, and the cryptic arts of Byzantium.
iii
He was a quick child, and read fluently from the age of two. He was wonderfully charming, and stole their hearts.
From Noah he learned the skill of making toys from scraps and waste, for Noah spent patient hours with him, showing him how to make trucks by fitting rubber strips onto the wooden wheels he carved from flotsam; how to strike a nail without bruising his hands, which Noah wrapped for him in cloth before he allowed him to hold the hammer underneath his own, guiding the small fingers; how to make and walk on stilts of cord and condensed milk tin (the stilts heaved him high in the air with his legs wide and his head up near the stars); how to make a calaban and arrange wiss-wiss to catch birds in the feeding tree.
But the child cried and would not trap the birds, and so the father abandoned this part of his teaching. The child's inability did not seem to Noah strange or unmanly, because he himself was not inclined to kill. From the day his wife brought Moshe home, he had not taken an angelfish. If they swam into his fish pots, he let them go. Their milk-blue edges reminded him too much of his son. He was exceedingly tender with the child, and if Rachel forgave him at any time for being rough and uncouth, it was whenever she saw the two of them, heads bent close together over a simple toy, Noah's bushy wild burr that to her fury he would not comb, and the toddler's strange blond bangs and tight pepper-grainy black kinks, the two heads of hair mingling as the father explained the toy's workings in low murmurs like a forest animal communing with its young.
It was from Noah that he learned the love of the sea. He listened with shining eyes as his father recounted his adventures: his vigils in the long night; the extended silences riding the waves at daylight while seabirds perched on the edge of his canoe and watched with him the great golden ball of the sun rise out of the depths; his encounters with sea trolls that he fought with a Christian cross and his lantern; the voice of the wind when he had to put up a sail; the eyes of fish gleaming in dark pools while they slept with their eyes open; the ghosts he surprised wrestling on the surface of the water, plantation people long dead fleeing their masters; his almost drowning once, in a storm, when the boat sprang a leak too wide for him to bail, and he was picked up by a passing cargo ship.
To the child hearing these tales, his father became a hero. He knew that one day he too would go to sea. He longed for it to be now.
"Dadda Noah, duu, mek mi come wid yu. Tomorrow?" Moshe begged, his widened eyes trained on his father while he sucked his thumb and comforted his navel under the hem of his vest.
"When yu big enough, yu can come wid mi."
"Mi big now." He stretched his arms out so his father could see how wide his span was, that it was like wings.
"Yu nuh so big. Wait likkle fus," Noah said, hiding a