Collected Short Fiction Read Online Free PDF

to the gardener of the big house. He was a good-looking brown man, and he loved his flowers. I liked the gardens he looked after. The flower-beds were always black and wet; and the grass green and damp and always cut. Sometimes he let me water the flower-beds. And he used to gather the cut grass into little bags which he gave me to take home to my mother. Grass was good for the hens.
    One day I missed Popo’s wife. She wasn’t waiting for me.
    Next morning I didn’t see Popo dipping his finger in the glass of rum on the pavement.
    And that evening I didn’t see Popo’s wife.
    I found Popo sad in his workshop. He was sitting on a plank and twisting a bit of shaving around his fingers.
    Popo said, ‘Your auntie gone, boy.’
    ‘Where, Mr Popo?’
    ‘Ha, boy! That’s the question,’ and he pulled himself up there.
    Popo found himself then a popular man. The news got around very quickly. And when Eddoes said one day, ‘I wonder what happen to Popo. Like he got no more rum,’ Hat jumped up and almost cuffed him. And then all the men began to gather in Popo’s workshop, and they would talk about cricket and football and pictures – everything except women – just to try to cheer Popo up.
    Popo’s workshop no longer sounded with hammering and sawing. The sawdust no longer smelled fresh, and became black, almost like dirt. Popo began drinking a lot, and I didn’t like him when he was drunk. He smelled of rum, and he used to cry and then grow angry and want to beat up everybody. That made him an accepted member of the gang.
    Hat said, ‘We was wrong about Popo. He is a man, like any of we.’
    Popo liked the new companionship. He was at heart a loquacious man, and always wanted to be friendly with the men of the street and he was always surprised that he was not liked. So it looked as though he had got what he wanted. But Popo was not really happy. The friendship had come a little too late, and he found he didn’t like it as much as he’d expected. Hat tried to get Popo interested in other women, but Popo wasn’t interested.
    Popo didn’t think I was too young to be told anything.
    ‘Boy, when you grow old as me,’ he said once, ‘you find thatyou don’t care for the things you thought you woulda like if you coulda afford them.’
    That was his way of talking, in riddles.
    Then one day Popo left us.
    Hat said, ‘He don’t have to tell me where he gone. He gone looking for he wife.’
    Edward said, ‘Think she going come back with he?’
    Hat said, ‘Let we wait and see.’
    We didn’t have to wait long. It came out in the papers. Hat said it was just what he expected. Popo had beaten up a man in Arima, the man had taken his wife away. It was the gardener who used to give me bags of grass.
    Nothing much happened to Popo. He had to pay a fine, but they let him off otherwise. The magistrate said that Popo had better not molest his wife again.
    They made a calypso about Popo that was the rage that year. It was the road-march for the Carnival, and the Andrews Sisters sang it for an American recording company:
    A certain carpenter feller went to Arima

Looking for a mopsy called Emelda
.
    It was a great thing for the street.
    At school, I used to say, ‘The carpenter feller was a good, good friend of mine.’
    And, at cricket matches, and at the races, Hat used to say, ‘Know him? God, I used to drink with that man night and day. Boy, he could carry his liquor.’
    Popo wasn’t the same man when he came back to us. He growled at me when I tried to talk to him, and he drove out Hat and the others when they brought a bottle of rum to the workshop.
    Hat said, ‘Woman send that man mad, you hear.’
    But the old noises began to be heard once more from Popo’s workshop. He was working hard, and I wondered whether he was still making the thing without a name. But I was too afraid to ask.
    He ran an electric light to the workshop and began working in the night-time. Vans stopped outside his house and were always