with delicate pink and canary roses, that Lillian does only allow to escape her display cupboard upon Sunday afternoons.
To your left is Miss May, my son’s youngest daughter. Be sure that she is fidgeting—playing with a piece of braid within her fingers, pushing back her chair to look upon her new patent-tipped button shoes, tapping her hand upon the table as she stares through the window. Her sister, Miss Corinne, sits beside her with folded arms and her full mouth drooping with sulk. While across the table Miss Louise, the middle child and quite the darkest of the three, sits making ugly faces at her sisters—widening her black eyes and sticking out her tongue when their mama Lillian, who sits at the other end of the table, is engaged looking elsewhere.
My son Thomas is seated at this table’s head—probably still reading some pamphlet or perhaps grinning upon his wife. While your storyteller, who is beside Miss Louise, sits wishing that just this once she might remain peaceful as she waits for the eating to commence, but is forced, as at every meal within this household, to quell the mischief of these three naughty girls by saying, ‘Sit still—stop that—be quiet at the table.’ Reprimands that their mama and papa should be composing but, alas, never do.
See now, as Miss Essie, our housekeeper, cook and busybody, arrives from the kitchen bearing the food upon a wooden platter. Be sure that what she will serve will be pork . . . again, but do not place your blame with her. Your storyteller did tell Lillian many times that the hog she decide to slay was too big for this family alone.
Reader, you must know as well as I that, if a pig is slaughtered upon this tropical island it must be eaten up soon before the meat does turn renk and wriggle with so many tiny living things that it might journey from the kitchen to your plate without aid. Wait, I tell Lillian, until she has an occasion where more mouths can be fed by that enormous sow. You think she heed me—an old woman? Her husband must suck on pig’s foot, she tell me. Her husband desire to chew a pig’s cheek. She must boil this pig’s bones so her husband might drink his favourite soup. Some was pickled and cured, but it is still five days that we have been eating pork at every meal.
So let us watch now as my son gently commands his family to start nyam. See him place some of the meat within his mouth. Then let us wait while the hot-hot pepper of the scotch bonnet that Miss Essie must use to spice-up this meat so no rancid taste does remain, sucks all his breath from out him. See his chest? Watch it jump with hiccup. Then listen as each one of his three daughters start whining with complaint that this meat be too fiery for them to swallow. Even his own mama begins to weep; for I do not have teeth enough to chew meat and must chase this burning substance around my tongue until I might chance to spear it upon those molars that are left. Yet still my son does not think to chastise his wife for the torment we are all suffering. He just hold up his hands and command that it is for Lillian to decide upon these matters.
But let me now arrive at the point of this diversion, for I have very little paper left. Come, on two occasions my son promised to restore my supply with a quarter ream of ‘superfine white wove’ or some such. Paper is paper, I tell him. And on two occasions, while his hand slapped hard against his forehead, he tell me it was forgot! However, that is not my concern here.
My tale, reader, was at last complete. My pen placed an end dot next to the final word and was laid down to rest. I dozed within my chair for the whole afternoon until the setting sun gradually dusted the room deep pink, without one of my thoughts straying fretful to our July. I even allowed my weary breast to bound with a little excitement, for soon my son would set this tale to printing and I would have not flimsy remembrance but a book to hold.
The last pages of my story I handed to my son, Thomas, when we were both sitting quietly upon the veranda in the place where