Black Cake(15)

Like everyone in town, Covey had heard complaints about Chinese merchants who didn’t pay their employees their due or who had made advances toward the women. But they weren’t the only ones doling out mistreatment. Covey knew this because the women had always passed stories of such difficulties among themselves. This was the kind of thing that happened to them or to someone they knew all the time, wherever they worked, or shopped, or went to school. No difference if they were dealing with chiney or blacka or dundus.

Pearl said the human being was born to be a ginnal and it was a rare person who didn’t take advantage of a weaker one, or pretend to be the friend of a stronger one just to reap the benefits. But even Pearl said Covey’s father wasn’t a real rat, not like some of those others. Take Little Man Henry and all his badness, for instance. Little Man, Pearl said, had taken his delinquent behavior well beyond the limits of their parish.

According to Pearl, it was common knowledge that Little Man was tekkin’ money from the politicians to help stir up violence on the west end of the island. But that was not the worst of it. Little Man was capable of murder. More than one unlucky soul who had benefited from Little Man’s so-called generosity had turned up dead after failing to pay him back. Others had limped home, all mashed up and not telling.

“Where money is involved,” Pearl said, “not everything from above is a blessing.”

The word was, Pearl said, that the woman whose body had been found farther up the coast a while back was a gyal from another town who had refused Little Man’s advances. Of all the Little Man gossip, this was the story that sent a thick vein of dread running through Covey. That a man would cause so much hurt to someone who had done so little. It was said his brother was no better. It was said that the Henrys both profited from and caused the misfortune of others all too willingly.

Perhaps Covey or Pearl should have imagined that soon, Little Man would be getting himself involved in Johnny Lyncook’s affairs. But they didn’t.

It would be a while before Covey realized that the fire had marked the beginning of the end. The pullback before the wave of her father’s debts engulfed them both. Most of the goods in her pa’s store were lost. The rest was too smoky to be sold. On the day after the blaze, she overheard Pearl telling the helper from next door that she didn’t think Mister Lin should have to be ruined because of someone else’s bad deeds. Mister Lin, Pearl said, was perfectly capable of ruining things for himself.





Lin





Who was a man, Lin wondered, if he no longer had a place to call home?

Lin knew people still saw him as a foreigner, even after he’d gone to school in the same town, run a business here, taken a wife here, and raised a child here. Even after he’d lost his brothers to the TB, like so many others. Lin, too, had always thought of himself as a foreigner, even as he slammed down his domino tiles on the table in the backyard, even as he spat out a local cuss word, and even as he sat on the veranda sucking on a Bombay mango from the tree that his father had planted with his own two hands.

But all that changed on the night that he watched his store burning up, on the night that someone set fire to one of the businesses where he had worked since he was a pickney, on the night that he found himself fretting for the safety of his daughter in the town where she had been born. On the night that Lin, out of cash and nearly out of things to barter, finally admitted to himself that he was in over his head.

On that particular night, all the names that people had called him under their breath, all the looks of disapproval they’d once given him as his motherless, brown child followed him around town, clinging with one hand to the hem of his shirt, came back now to slice him across the chest like the tip of a cutlass. And he saw that he was not a foreigner at all, that this was his only home, that he had no other place to go. He may have come here as little Lin Jian from Guangzhou but he had spent more time as Johnny “Lin” Lyncook from Portland parish, sixty-odd miles from the capital city and a lifetime away from China. He could no longer be one without the other.

Had his ba been wrong to insist on being called by his Chinese surname and encourage the same for Johnny? Had he been wrong to speak to his sons in Hakka in public? Had Lin been wrong in going to the cemetery on Gah San every spring to sweep the tombs of his lost brothers and, later, his parents? Would it have changed anything?

No matter now. The blame that people were laying at Lin’s feet for the misdeeds of another man who happened to look like him was about to bring him down, not because he had anything to do with them but because of his own mistakes. Lin would not be able to recover from this fire because his own vices had already put him too far into debt.

Lin looked down at his feet. They were still stained with soot. He turned on the garden hose and ran the water between his toes. He looked up at the kitchen window, listened to Covey chatting with Pearl inside, the clack-clack of plates being washed and sorted. Just as Lin was coming to accept that what he had here was all that mattered, he saw that he was on the verge of losing it all.





Who are all these people Benny’s mother is talking about? What do they have to do with her ma? And what about the sister she mentioned? It’s still not clear to Benny what happened. And Benny isn’t even sure she wants to know. She feels panicky. She feels like everything is slipping away. She just wants her ma, the way she used to be.