Frankie smiled—they could have been him and Winston. He smiled also because his uncle looked to be in a good mood. “So,” he said low. “Uncle, can I talk to you a minute?”
“Come, Nephew.”
Frankie followed Joe along a path that led away from the shacks and into the bush, legs brushing against waist-high ferns. Joe always liked to talk and walk. Even at night. Frankie wondered, not for the first time, what his life would have been like if Joe had been his father and not Samson. The thing was, while Joe could be fierce, Frankie could talk to him about things—learn things—that Samson would never know. Joe was also powerful, and though he didn’t flaunt his money, he had to be pretty wealthy. Frankie wouldn’t even need the scholarship to do the things he wanted to do—
“So, what’s on your mind, Nephew?” But Joe was already smiling knowingly. “Garnett?”
Frankie froze. Had Winston already spilled about the fight?
“Don’t worry, Nephew.” Joe stretched his arms, turning them in small circles. “My eyes is long.”
Frankie nodded. “I think… I’m pretty sure he might be looking for revenge.” He stopped short of asking for help. He wasn’t about to get himself in a situation where he was indebted to his uncle. Asking for advice was as far as he could go.
Joe dismissed Frankie’s concern with a pffft. “Garnett works for Taqwan, but Taqwan isn’t going to cross me over some little fight. Other things, maybe.”
Frankie remembered the scowl on Garnett’s face, the eyes that didn’t seem to have any life to them. “But Uncle—”
“Is no problem, Nephew.”
Frankie wasn’t going to push; Joe knew his business. “Okay.”
“So, how is you father?” He didn’t ask about his brother very often. “Him find a job yet?”
Frankie felt a fleck of embarrassment for his dad. “He’s looking, Uncle.” His father had been out of work for half a year now—but he refused to take Frankie’s money for groceries or anything. Samson’s freakin’ pride was a roadblock. He was going into the bushes to get their food every day, digging yams, picking bananas and grapefruits. No way was Frankie going to tell his uncle that.
Joe spat, leaned closer and closer to a guava tree, inspecting it. Then he began to prune the dry limbs with an intensity that reminded Frankie… of Samson. Joe paused. “Your father can give help but him can’t take help.” He started back at the branches.
It was true. Samson would help out other people even before family. Not a month ago, Frankie had found a basket full of yams, breadfruit, and mangoes on the doorstep as he was heading to school. A note was taped to the basket. Childlike handwriting said that the family down the road had sent it. Samson had built them a new roof and hadn’t charged, because, “They got it hard, Frankie. Not like us.”
Frankie had brought the package inside, already anticipating feasting on the mangoes after school; he was completely sick of the bananas. But Samson read the note, folded it back up, then gestured for Frankie to take the basket and follow him.
Twenty minutes later, along a dirt trail, the sun already hot, his school uniform soaked with sweat, Frankie wished he’d just left that freaking basket on the doorstep.
Finally his father pointed at a ramshackle house almost swallowed up by vegetation. An elderly couple lived there—so frail they rarely came into town.
Frankie got the gist immediately. He set down the basket, pulled out paper and pencil from his backpack to write a new note.
“Put that away,” his father whispered, taking the fruit and heading toward the shack. He left the basket by the door, then hurried back to Frankie.
When they were out of earshot, Frankie asked why they hadn’t left a note.
“You hold open a door fi somebody to say thank you or you do it because you feel it is the right thing?”
Frankie could almost taste those juicy mangoes—even now. It wasn’t like they couldn’t have used the extra food. But that was his father. It wasn’t that he was too proud to take charity—though that had to be part of it—it was more that Samson didn’t need to tell the old couple about the gift he left on their doorstep in order to feel good about what he’d done. Frankie’s friends at school always sported big grins and bright eyes when they reported a new like on their Instagram. Frankie’d want likes too, if he was on Instagram, which required a phone, which he didn’t have either. But his father, not so much. He was an old Jamaican man, from another time.
* * *
“You like my vineyard?” Joe was asking, standing back up, apparently satisfied with the weed-to-tree ratio in front of him. He swung his arm in a wide arc toward skinny, three-foot-tall marijuana plants, row after row after row of them, every other one set in small tires with its own soil, a trick to get more minerals from the rockier areas. His own Rastafarian Eden. The last time Frankie had been up here, the plants were barely seedlings.
What a complicated pride ran in his family, Frankie thought.
“Business must be good, Uncle.”
“Can be better. Me always looking for more good people.” Joe let the hint sink in.
“If I run into any, I’ll send them your way, Uncle.”
Joe gazed up at the moon for an uncomfortably long time, but Frankie stayed quiet. A firefly blinked by. Finally Joe said, “Come, Frankie, it’s late. Ice Box can give you a ride home. Don’t worry about Garnett. Soap and water isn’t afraid of dirty clothes.” He bunched his dreads in his hand. “Me going to send Blow Up down to talk with Garnett’s mother. She’s a reasonable woman. We will work it out.”
As they returned to the clearing, the clench in Frankie’s back muscles eased. He hadn’t started a gang war.
“Coming to my party Sunday evening? Me going to have it down in Troy. Get the people excited for the election.”
That Frankie could say yes to! “Can’t wait, Uncle.” A Joe party was a good party, always. He caught the waft of fragrance—a flowering jasmine bush must be in bloom.
Joe suddenly reached into the air and closed his fist. When he opened it, three fireflies floated away, blinking their lights against the nighttime sky. It looked like magic.
Five
frankie’s father had once told him that the old breadfruit tree—trunk broad as the door of their house and stretching five times as high—had been there longer than the town had. Frankie couldn’t imagine how it could have been there for almost a hundred years. He’d heard that in America there were Sequoia trees that were over three thousand years old. If he got his scholarship, he would go see them.
At the standpipe yet again, he filled his water bucket, carried it to the post office, and sat against that breadfruit tree. And waited. People were making their way to the bus stop en route to work. How many people had passed that tree day after day? Some rarely had never been outside Kingston. Few had ever left Jamaica. If he didn’t get the scholarship, Frankie would become one of them.
Finally he heard the telltale footsteps and the click of locks behind him. The postmaster had arrived. The man rolled up the grating. Frankie took a deep breath and followed him in.