Black Cake(8)

One week later, Pa took Covey’s hand in his and wiped the tears from her face. He said her ma would be back soon, she’d see. Pa was tipsier than usual. Pearl hugged Covey extra tight.

One month later, no Mummy.

One year later.

Five years later.

Pa spent more time than ever at the cockfights. He kept a bottle behind a carton at one of his shops, Covey had seen it. Pearl still gave Covey a hug before leaving for home. Covey still woke up in the middle of the night, sniffing at the air for the scent of roses and salt.





Lin





It took six years for Johnny “Lin” Lyncook to admit to himself that his woman would not be coming back home, not even for their daughter. He sat in the backyard with a bottle of beer, watching a lizard snap-snap at insects too small to be seen, thinking about what a struggle it had been to keep things going, with or without Mathilda. It had always been a struggle for Lin, as for his parents before him, and for all those countrymen who had crossed the oceans in previous generations.

His ba liked to tell his boys the story of how some of their people took their degrading start in the Americas and turned it on its head. Back in 1854, he told them, some of the men working on the Panama railroad got so sick they vomited a blackish bile and their eyes turned yellow. Many of the Chinese laborers who’d been brought over to work on the railroad project demanded to be sent away to a safer place. Some of them ended up on the island. Already weakened by hard labor and illness, few of them would survive for long. One of those who did make it went on to open a wholesale supply store, setting a precedent that encouraged other Chinese immigrants to do the same.

And then came the Lin family. A new century, a window of opportunity. Or so they’d hoped. Lin’s father came over from Guangzhou as a cook and somewhere in there, his documents started listing him as Lyncook. He worked off his contract, sent for his wife and their young son, Jian, soon to be called Johnny, and joined the ranks of the local shop owners. When he finally opened that first store, he put a sign above the shop, Lin’s Dry Goods & Sundries, and folks soon took to calling him Mister Lin and his eldest son simply Lin. Later, there would be another store and other sons with English names. But getting to that point turned out to be a hard path to follow.

Fish tea. That was all they’d had to eat, most days, when Lin was still a pickney. Lin’s mother would make the broth with a fish head and serve it with a bit of scallion and a Scotch bonnet pepper for as many days as she could. It was years before Lin realized that other families on the island made the broth with actual pieces of fish meat, with green bananas, and maybe even shrimps. By that time, his parents could afford other things. The family’s shops were finally making a profit. His father would cure pork and hang slabs of it on hooks around the veranda and the boys would sit in the yard and watch the pieces twisting in the breeze.

But that was later.

In the early years, only Lin’s arithmetic lessons kept his mind off his stomach. Teachers said the boy had a gift. But Lin already sensed that it wasn’t enough to be good with numbers, you had to be willing to defy their logic to succeed in this world. You had to be willing to take a chance. Even as a boy, he could watch the men play Sue Fah and guess at the odds. In high school, he started betting on horses. Then he discovered the cockfights and held his first fistful of dollars. Breathed in the smell of paper money mixed with dust and blood. Breathed in his first real chance at a future.

Lin learned that you could improve the odds of winning by keeping tabs on how a man bred his birds, on which supplements he gave them. The extra cash helped to modernize his father’s stores, helped his parents to buy a house with tamarind and breadfruit trees. It was a good thing, too. In all, Mamma Lin had given birth to four boys but there were only two of them left after the tuberculosis, and only Lin had remained in town.

Lin had always been loyal to his family. This was the way he’d been raised. When the betting brought in good money, he always gave something extra to his brothers’ widows and children. And when Covey was born, he hired a helper, Pearl, the best cook in the parish, because that was what Covey’s mother wanted. But then the money stopped coming in.

In time, the breeders of gamecocks found steroids that could plump up a bird, but they also made an animal harder to handle, especially when it was fitted with blades. One owner up in the next parish died after his own bird slashed through his arm. No one even saw when it happened, only saw the life flying out of the man’s wrist in a spray of red.

Lin had been counting on that bird to win big. Instead, the slashing incident triggered a long losing streak, during which time Lin’s woman grew louder, more argumentative, then quieter, then altogether silent. One day, she simply disappeared, leaving behind a brief note and their twelve-year-old daughter, who kept trailing Lin around the house, gazing up at him with her mother’s round eyes.

Lin suspected Mathilda had left him under the influence of all that Rasta-black-power-independence business that was going on in the streets, though she used to complain because Lin wouldn’t give her a formal marriage. That, and because he kept going to the cockfights.

“You don’t like the betting?” Lin asked her one time. “Where do you think I get the money to keep the shops going? Half of our customers are buying on credit, which they will never pay off, by the way. Am I supposed to let them go without? And where do you think this house came from? You tink all dat money fall out a de sky?” The woman’s face took on that vexed look she used whenever Lin spoke patois around their daughter.