The Ward

We lived there, Michael and me. The others were our guests. They came, they left, they spent a night, a week, a month, but they always went home. A he, a she, a friend, a granny, a tanty—a somebody would always come for them. Even if the somebody never came on the exact day or at the exact time, somebody came. Sometimes they said that they would come at six on Monday, and they didn’t show their face until nine on Wednesday, but they still came. And from the moment the guests knew that they were going home, they would start to talk about “home,” as though home meant coconut ice cream, chocolate cake, and jokes all day. They didn’t say anything about the usual kicks, blows and elbows to the head. Home was mangoes for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and breakfast the next day. It was mangoes every day that mangoes were in season. Home was carrying buckets of water to wash down the stinking back yard, full of green, watery lumps from all the mangoes that were eaten. And if there was no water, home was covering your nose and trying to find a clear spot, without flies, where you could stoop over to empty your empty belly.

Once in a while, we had a foreign guest like the little American boy called Baby Bob. Baby Bob’s mother sat beside his crib hour after hour, for four days and three nights. She never left his crib except to go to the bathroom, or to stretch her legs for exactly five minutes when a shift changed and there was a White Dress she thought she could trust. Baby Bob’s flesh was loose, yellowish-pink, wrinkled, salty and scaly like an old man’s. The White Dresses told the mother that he was dehydrated, that he would be better soon. But among themselves they whispered other things. “Malyeux,” they said, which meant someone had given the baby the evil eye. The American didn’t know how to protect the child with Jumbie beads. The White Dresses said that she loved the child too much, and sometimes God, being a jealous God, punished mothers for loving their babies more than him. When they couldn’t find a vein as they poked and poked needles into the back of Baby Bob’s tiny hands, they muttered that the curse was strong. Little by little, Baby Bob’s skin started to fill out; he began to get fatter and fatter. But as the air filled up Baby Bob’s body, the mother grew smaller and smaller. He sucked all the milk, blood, and air out of her body from the tiny hole in her small breasts.

Some guests never made it back from the Big House. We saw them leave attached to drips, respirators, or whatever. They never came back. We knew, Michael and me, that once their crib or bed had been stripped of its sheets, we would never see them again. The bed was soon ready for another guest. We had our own beds, Michael and me. They changed the sheets once a week, whether or not any “accidents” took place. And with Michael, accidents took place almost every night. He couldn’t speak, at least not their language, but I knew when he had had a bad night, when his dreams had taken him to that bright white place where shadows chase you, where you scream a scream that never comes, with mouth and eyes frozen open. I had been to that bright white place where you try to run from the shadows, but your legs are filled with cement. Then the scream finally comes; it doesn’t sound like a scream but more like a deep grunt that has come up all the way from your toes. Michael had these dreams all the time. During these dreams he had his accidents. They smelt like a rotten-egg-red-bean-fart, but they didn’t bother me; it was Michael’s smell and that was all.

In the morning, at six a.m., just as the new...