Excerpt from A Thirst For Rain
Jacob
The walls of Jacob’s small room were papered in a most unusual fashion: with the yellowed leaves of a large Bible. Row after row, carefully, like a craftsman laying tiles, the previous tenant had laid the pages side by side, from floor to ceiling, turning them lengthwise along the skirting and the window-frames for contrast. Whether the intention had been to ward off some curse, incur blessings, or simply to satisfy an unusual sense of style, Jacob could not tell. He did, however, welcome the digression from the ordinary that they presented, the promise of something to do, something with which he could fill the endless idle days between customers.
The pages had been laid in random order, with no regard for the precedence divinely inspired for each book of Scripture. It was as though the layer of the paper tiles had somehow escaped the rhythmic Sunday School chanting that is inflicted upon every small child, and thus did not know the sequence of the books, no Matthew-Mark-Luke-John, no order, no place-for-everything-and-everything-in-its-place. Instead, the horrors of the Apocalypse lay next to Boaz’s wooing of Ruth, on the wall above the narrow steel bed. At the door, running down the left side, Samson was setting the foxes’ tails alight; above that, Rachel wept.
Jacob’s wallpaper entranced him. He spent hours on his knees in a parodic attitude of prayer, ignoring the spasmodic pain in his ruined left leg, peering down into a corner, shifting bed, table, chair, to reach an elusive page. He made no attempt to rationalize, to seek out the page which may have followed the one that he had just read, instead he took the pages as they had been given to him. On one day he would read at random, moving from wall to wall. On another he moved carefully from one page to its neighbour, then on to the next, enjoying in particular the pages upon which his own name appeared.
Once in a while he wondered what could possibly be printed on the backs of the pages, which had been stuck firmly to the wall with fishy brown glue, but this was idle curiosity, a passing thought. He accepted the serendipity which had decided that this side would lie face up while condemning the other to remain forever hidden from view as the result of simple caprice, and let it be.
Jacob, though just forty-eight, felt long past his prime. He was a huge burly man, with black dense skin and thick ursine limbs. The quickness of his black intelligent eyes was in startling contrast to his slow, often painful gait. He had lived his youth in glorious notoriety in the sleepy old town of Sangre Grande in the eastern countryside. He had been the neighborhood bad-john, a romantic Zorro-like hero of the barrack-yards who drank and swaggered and cursed with the best of them.
His stickfighting prowess had been a drawing card for the illegal bloodsport, and for years people gathered in furtive groups deep in the forest to watch Jacob mercilessly bring an opponent to his knees under the brunt of his huge polished staff.
Jacob loved the stickfighting, not out of any innate aggression or hatred of humanity. Far from it. He loved the dark seclusion of the woods, the secrecy of the activity, the fear of being caught and hauled before the magistrate, the roar of the excited crowds and the frenzied shouts of “Bois!” as he bludgeoned his opponent into unconsciousness. He loved the adulation, the respectful whispers of “Maître” as he passed. He was indeed a master of the stickfight, and his wooden staff, the bois he’d fashioned out of sturdy mahogany, hung on two hooks over his bed at night. Children broke into mock battles as he passed, re-enacting some of his more celebrated battles, telling each other time and again how he brought such and such a person to his knees by hitting him just so.
But the gayelle, the stickfighting ring, was not the only arena for Jacob’s conquests. The women, entranced by the circumference of his matted chest, by his bad-john reputation, his boisterous good humour, and his rumored indefatigable lust, rivaled each other for his attentions. They laid their charms before him like bazaar-vendors displaying their wares, bribing him with hot baked goods, clear bottles of bush-rum from their backyard stills, and gifts of shirts and trousers which, as they lost no opportunity to tell him, they had made with their own two hands.
Jacob accepted their attentions as an inevitable and pleasurable burden, and meandered aimlessly through his youth as through an orchard, plucking the ripest of fruit, and devouring just as avidly those that fell at his feet.
When the law cracked down on the stickfighting, imposing harsher penalties for an activity Jacob considered little more than a harmless noble sport, Jacob sought legitimate employment. With his size and reputation he had easily found himself a job as foreman of a gravel quarry in the east, and there he exercised his authority with a heavy hand but an unquestionable sense of fair play.
The day a misplaced stick of dynamite went off without warning, Jacob was standing right beside it. What followed were two excruciating and laborious years of surgery and rehabilitation. Gone were the glory days of the gayelle. Gone, too, were the days of earning his living as a man, with dignity, and by the sweat of his brow. He was reduced to living like an old man on disability pension, without pride, without power.
In his shame he skulked out of Sangre Grande one night when the moon was full and the gayelle was spattered with the blood of the fool who’d challenged the strapping young buck who’d replaced him, the new Maître. With the lure of the moonlit arena greater to the gamblers and sport-lovers than the fear of a good beating by the police, the forest thronged, vibrating with the excited cries of “Bois!”
Liked it? Try the sequel, Candy Don't Come in Gray
