Free Eden Burning by Belva Plain Page B

over her kid gloves, and they’d ride in the coach with their fine horses and the coachman with his gilt buttons—”
    “Did you ride in the coach, too?”
    “Who, I!” She laughed. “Of course not! I worked my feet off for the Mauriers! I had the job because my maman had been parlor maid there and when she died, they gave me a position. My maman died with her fifth baby, you know.”
    “And your daddy?” (He half expected the answer.)
    “He went away.”
    Patrick nodded. Daddies usually did. His mind sped on. “Tell me what happened on the boat?”
    “Well, then, we landed here on St. Felice and found everyone spoke English! I stood on the wharf and wanted to cry. But I wouldn’t, because a crowd was there waiting to hear what was happening in Martinique and I was too proud to cry in front of them all. I didn’t know where to go. Then a white man came and leaned out of his carriage and spoke to me in French, queer French, though he told me later that was the way they spoke it in France. I didn’t believe that but I found out it was so…. Well anyway, that’s how I came to work for the Francis family.”
    “At Eleuthera?”
    “What? What do you know about Eleuthera?”
    “You took me there once.”
    “Lord, you’re ten now. You couldn’t have been a day over three!”
    “Well,” he said proudly, “I remember it. Mr. Virgil Francis died at Eleuthera. I read it in the paper a while ago.”
    “Yes, I know.”
    “It was a beautiful house, wasn’t it?”
    “Beautiful? Falling apart! That house hasn’t been fixed up properly since Lord knows when.”
    “It was beautiful,” Patrick insisted. “On top of a hill. Were they nice to you?”
    “Oh yes…. Young Mr. Francis, so gentle he was, reading all day till his eyes hurt. He fell sick soon after he married. I helped nurse him till he died and then I—”
    “He died?” Death interested him.
    “Yes. Oh, that’s enough, I’m running off at the mouth. Listen! The storm’s over.”
    It had passed and crickets had started their music.
    “Tell me about France,” he said suddenly.
    “I don’t remember much about that. It was a long time ago.”
    “The volcano was much longer!” he cried.
    “Anyway, I don’t remember.”
    “You don’t want to! And I like to hear about true things that happened—you know I do!”
    She ruffled his hair. “Sometimes you’re like an old man.” And as if she were not talking to him at all, but into the air, she said, “I hope things will be easy for you.”
    “That I won’t be caught in a volcano, you mean?”
    “A human being is so small,” she said, still talking to the air. “You can squash him like a bug.”
    He persisted. “The volcano, you mean?”
    She looked at him now. “No. Life is what I mean. So go to sleep.”
    Those were the years of his childhood.

FOUR
    At thirteen or fourteen a boy became a man. Then it was that he might earn his first wage, cutting fodder for the animals on the sugar estate. He would become aware of the ways that were open to him. The most frequented led through the estate, first doing odd jobs on a day-work gang, planting and weeding. If he did well he would probably be hired permanently. By his early twenties he would have learned enough and his arms would be strong enough to cut cane. There would be, then, years of that, the larger portion of his life. When he grew too old to cut cane he would
go
back among the young boys to care for the animals. All this, of course, depended upon whether he was “taken on” by one of the local estates; if not, he might sail away to try his luck on some other island.
    The other path was narrower by far. If a boy was ambitious and smart at his lessons, and if the money could be foundsomehow, he might go on to Boys’ Secondary School in Covetown. Then someday, wearing a suit and tie, he would go to work in a shop or bank or perhaps in the customs office or the courthouse. Boys’ Secondary was a white building set among tended