Eddoes said, ‘No, you didn’t say that, but is what I feel.’
Edward said sadly, ‘Yes, she run away. With a American soldier. And I give the man so much of my rum to drink.’
But after a few days Edward was running around telling people what had happened and saying, ‘Is a damn good thing. I don’t want a wife that can’t make baby.’
And now nobody made fun of Edward’s Americanism, and I think we were all ready to welcome him back to us. But he wasn’t really interested. We hardly saw him in the street. When he wasn’t working he was out on some excursion.
Hat said, ‘Is love he really love she. He looking for she.’
In the calypso by Lord Invader the singer loses his wife to the Americans and when he begs her to come back to him, she says:
‘Invader, I change my mind,
I living with my Yankee soldier’
This was exactly what happened to Edward.
He came back in a great temper. He was miserable. He said, ‘I leaving Trinidad.’
Eddoes said, ‘Where you going? America?’
Edward almost cuffed Eddoes.
Hat said, ‘But how you want to let one woman break up your life so? You behaving as if you is the first man this thing happen to.’
But Edward didn’t listen.
At the end of the month he sold his house and left Trini dad. I think he went to Aruba or Curaçao, working with the big Dutch oil company.
And some months later Hat said, ‘You know what I hear? Edward wife have a baby for she American.’
16. HAT
Hat loved to make a mystery of the smallest things. His relationship to Boyee and Errol, for instance. He told strangers they were illegitimate children of his. Sometimes he said he wasn’t sure whether they were his at all, and he would spin a fantastic story about some woman both he and Edward lived with at the same time. Sometimes, again, he would make out that they were his sons by an early marriage, and you felt you could cry when you heard Hat tell how the boys’ mother had gathered them around her deathbed and made them promise to be good.
It took me some time to find out that Boyee and Errol were really Hat’s nephews. Their mother, who lived up in the bush near Sangre Grande, died soon after her husband died, and the boys came to live with Hat.
The boys showed Hat little respect. They never called him Uncle, only Hat; and for their part they didn’t mind when Hat said they were illegitimate. They were, in fact, willing to support any story Hat told about their birth.
I first got to know Hat when he offered to take me to the cricket at the Oval. I soon found out that he had picked up eleven other boys from four or five streets around, and was taking them as well.
We lined up at the ticket office and Hat counted us loudly. He said, ‘One and twelve half.’
Many people stopped minding their business and looked up.
The man selling tickets said, ‘Twelve half? ’
Hat looked down at his shoes and said, ‘Twelve half.’
We created a lot of excitement when all thirteen of us, Hat at the head, filed around the ground, looking for a place to sit.
People shouted, ‘They is all yours, mister?’
Hat smiled, weakly, and made people believe it was so. When we sat down he made a point of counting us loudly again. He said, ‘I don’t want your mother raising hell when I get home, saying one missing.’
It was the last day of the last match between Trinidad and Jamaica. Gerry Gomez and Len Harbin were making a great stand for Trinidad, and when Gomez reached his 150 Hat went crazy and danced up and down, shouting, ‘White people is God, you hear!’
A woman selling soft drinks passed in front of us.
Hat said, ‘How you selling this thing you have in the glass and them?’
The woman said, ‘Six cents a glass.’
Hat said, ‘I want the wholesale price. I want thirteen.’
The woman said, ‘These children is all yours?’
Hat said, ‘What wrong with that? ’
The woman sold the drinks at five cents a glass.
When Len Harbin was 89, he was out lbw, and Trinidad declared.
Hat was angry. ‘Lbw? Lbw? How he lbw? Is only a lot of robbery. And is a Trinidad umpire, too. God, even umpires taking bribe now.’
Hat taught me many things that afternoon. From the way he pronounced them, I learned about the beauty of cricketers’ names, and he gave me all his own excitement at watching a cricket match.
I asked him to explain the scoreboard.
He said, ‘On the left-hand side they have the names of the batsman who finish batting.’
I remember that because I thought it such a nice way of saying that a batsman was out: to say that he had finished batting.
All during the tea interval Hat was as excited as ever. He tried to get all sorts of people to take all sorts of crazy bets. He ran about waving a dollar-note and shouting, ‘A dollar to a shilling, Headley don’t reach double figures.’ Or, ‘A dollar, Stollmeyer field the first ball.’
The umpires were walking out when one of the boys began crying.
Hat said, ‘What you crying for? ’
The boy cried and mumbled.
Hat said, ‘But what you crying for?’
A man shouted, ‘He want a bottle.’
Hat turned to the man and said, ‘Two dollars, five Jamaican wickets fall this afternoon.’
The man said, ‘Is all right by me, if is hurry you is to lose your money.’
A third man held the stakes.
The boy was still crying.
Hat said, ‘But you see how you shaming me in front of all these people? Tell me quick what you want.’
The boy only cried. Another boy came up to Hat and whispered in his ear.
Hat said, ‘Oh, God! How? Just when they coming out.’
He made us all stand. He marched us away from the grounds and made us line up against the galvanized-iron paling of the Oval.
He said, ‘All right now, pee. Pee quick, all of all — you.’
The cricket that afternoon was fantastic. The Jamaican team, which included the great Headley, lost six wickets for thirty-one runs. In the fading light the Trinidad fast bowler, Tyrell Johnson, was unplayable, and his success seemed to increase his speed.
A fat old woman on our left began screaming at Tyrell Johnson, and whenever she stopped screaming she turned to us and said very quietly, ‘I know Tyrell since he was a boy so high. We use to pitch marble together.’ Then she turned away and began screaming again.
Hat collected his bet.
This, I discovered presently, was one of Hat’s weaknesses — his passion for impossible bets. At the races particularly, he lost a lot of money, but sometimes he won, and then he made so much he could afford to treat all of us in Miguel Street.
I never knew a man who enjoyed life as much as Hat did. He did nothing new or spectacular-in fact, he did practically the same things every day-but he always enjoyed what he did. And every now and then he managed to give a fantastic twist to some very ordinary thing.
He was a bit like his dog. This was the tamest Alsatian I have ever known. One of the things I noticed in Miguel Street was the way dogs resembled their owners. George had a surly, mean mongrel. Toni’s dog was a terrible savage. Hat’s dog was the only Alsatian I knew with a sense of humour.
In the first place it behaved oddly, for an Alsatian. You could make it the happiest dog on earth if you flung things for it to retrieve. One day, in the Savannah, I flung a guava into some thick bushes. He couldn’t get at the guava, and he whined and complained. He suddenly turned and ran back past me, barking loudly. While I turned to see what was wrong, he ran back to the bushes. I saw nothing strange, and when I looked back I was just in time to see him taking another guava behind the bushes.