"Yo' heah ne, ni, Seenie? An' don' fuhget to blow de kerosene lamp out befo' yo' go."
The whole thing seemed to follow as a natural sequence. For Jack Captain, a Berbice mulatto, was an energetic wooer.
And then one rosy dawn, a dozen Hindu fires kindling the lamahau, the gold-digging macaume lured from Seenie the seed of her all.
II
Outlawed by the sorrowing blacks of Bordeaux, Seenie, "to exculpate she wickedness," fled to Waakenam, a sparsely populated isle on the Essequibo Coast. There she took refuge in a hut deep in the Guiana woods. Until a lackey on the constable's staff had dubiously led her to it, the cabin was deserted, cane trash crowned it like a wreath of callaloo mist. Box square, inside it was dark and cloudy. The peon originally occupying it had evidently had a vivid contempt for the tropical sun or wind. And it was here that Seenie, hardly able to survive the social consequences of lust, felt happy in raising Water Spout.
Inside the hut, by way of a bit of color, Miss Esteena, the niece of the Negro head of the Waakenam constabulary, had given her an old canopied mahogany bed.
Into the boy's flower-like mouth she pried a spoon with the crusted refuse of the previous day's stewed cassava.
"Eat um, sah," she cried, "an' don't put on no 'ears, lik' yo' is any man. Eat um, Oi say."
Upon Water Spout's glazed tawny body there was not a stitch of clothes. But it was fiendish hot in the cane trash hut, and he needed none. His puny body, which the obeah midwife had despaired of so, had flecks of porridge, and hardened bread swobbed in tea, on it. He had a scrawny neck. It had its base in a hollow-sounding delta. A stack of bluey veins, loosely tied in a clot of skin, connecting a hairless cocoanut to a brown, belegged pumpkin. The navel string, prematurely plucked, hung like a ripe yellow cashew. Bandy, spindling legs jutted out, to either side, from beneath a rigidly upright little body.
As a sort of aftermath to a night of studied rest, Seenie was dizzy, drowsy but she made sure of one eternal thing—Water Spout had to be fed. Feeding him was her one active passion. It was the least, she felt, she could do by him. Her ways may have been bad, her soul in doubtful retrospect, but Water Spout had to eat—hossah, cane licker, green peas, anything. And, by Jove, she had plans for him: later on, it was her idea, no matter how austere Miss Esteena was, to let him go down to the river by himself. If she had anything to do with it, Water Spout would some day walk!