The gap gave up the scurvy ghost. In balloons of steaming froth, the fog of drought and heat, which had settled over the gap for the entire summer, bore its way over the craggy tips of Low'rd to the red, brewing sea beyond.
Splashes of rain—a swift transfusion. The earth murmured under it; lay tense, groaning, swollen, like a woman in toil, with the burden of its inheritance. Gold and green and yellow things, near-ripe, sent up tall, nodding fronds to trumpet the bursting of the dawn.
Dawn cast a greenish gold over the gap. Over the jagged stones donkey carts slipped, wheels stuck in mud. Men got down to coax their beasts out of the muddy gutter. Gone the dust. Red mud flowed over the land. Red mud—good for beans and potatoes—crawled up the legs of dusky West Indian peasant women, up the hoofs of townbound cattle.
Once more the peewits sang. Strange—the way they found their way back to the tip-top ends of guava or breadfruit or pine. Gobbling turkeys and fowls, fond of their new, egg-crusted young, proudly stepped out of coops, traversing the broad marl highway. Worms swarmed into their paths to be devoured; plenty to go round. Mixed with the rain the marl dust made a hard resilient road.
The wind tossed the lanky guava tree. Scudding popcorn—white, yellow, crimson pink guava buds blew upon the ground. Forwards and backwards the wind tossed the guava tree. It shook buds and blossoms on the ground—moist, unforked, ground—on Ella Heath's lap, in her black, plenteous hair, in the water she was drawing from the well. Guava buds fell in Ella's bucket, and she liked it. They gave flavor to the water. All of nature gave flavor to Ella, wrought a magic color in Ella's life. Green, wavy moss—rhubarb moss—at the bottom of the frog-harboring well, with fern and broad leaf sprawled along its ribs; brought color to the water, gave body flavor to it. Gave the water a tang.
Cast up on a bare half acre of land, Ella came to know the use of green, virgin things. Ore; green ore—spread over the land. Riotously nature peopled the earth about her. In front of her cabin door there was a water course. It was filled with sparrow grass. A wild, mad, hectic green—the green of young sugar canes. Up and down the gap, horses, donkeys, ring-horned goats, on the way to Bridgetown to be raced, tugged at their tethers, crazy to eat up Ella's sparrow grass. It tempted the oxen carting tremulous loads of salty sugar cane grown on the swampy seaside of Barbadoes—tempted sheep, oracular, voiceless, dog-shy sheep bewilderedly on the road to market—tempted hens frizzly with the pip, and leaping, lap-eared dogs.
Ella had come from Low'rd—the Lower Side—that dinky bar of salty black earth jutting out to sea on the easternmost tip of Barbadoes. From Low'rd Ella had brought a donkey cart load of sea crab shells, horns, conchs, rose and orange and crimson hued, and set them in rows between the blazing hibiscus and chrysanthemum along the walk.
Inexhaustible stems of green sprang up around Ella's domain. It'd take five years to mature, but she had planted a cocoanut tree on the northernmost wing of the cabin. Half an acre of land, but it was no trifling stake. Inch by inch green overspread it. Corn, okras, gunga peas, eddoes, tannias, tomatoes—in such a world Ella moved.
As if she were on an immemorial lark, Ella experimented with the green froth of the earth. One day she was grafting a pine and breadfruit. Standing, "jooking" a foreign stalk in—tamarind, star apple, almond—and strapping it into the gummy gash dug into the tree's side.
Similarly, with the pigeons and the ground doves. Pigeons at sunrise on a soap box coop set on top the latrine cooing: