from you,’ and smiled. But then a dark frown swiftly replaced that grin. ‘Did your mistress send you out with a message for me in this storm?’ he asked. There was such agitation in his tone that July, well practised to deny anything pronounced with passion, nearly yelled ‘no’.
‘I cannot believe,’ he carried on, ‘that even she would require you to step out into this weather.’
This overseer then commenced to blast aspersions at her missus’s character with eagerness. What could possibly be so important? he wondered. He had never known anyone make so many demands, he said. Why did she have so many messages to give? He had only seen her early this morning, what could be so urgent now?
Soon the air grew so thick with these reproaches that July began to feel a curious concern for her missus. Come, July feared that soon she might defend her fat-batty missus and announce that Mrs Caroline Mortimer was not so villainous. Luckily he left her mouth no opening, for he spoke rapid as hail upon a roof.
‘My father,’ he went on, ‘always taught me that even servants should be treated with respect and not ordered here and there at a whim. But I fear Jamaican planters have learned over the years to behave another way.’
And then he stopped to sit down hard upon his chair. With his arms folded and his lips pressed firmly together, he glowered at the desk in front of him—searching it with intent, as if some mislaid fortitude were scattered there.
July was now finally free to deliver her message and would have, if it were not for two large brown dogs that chose that moment to rush in upon the room. Ungainly bounding, slipping and scraping on the wooden floor, they knocked into July and stumbled her against the overseer’s desk. These barking, playful dogs immediately brought the negro boys to their feet as they ran to shoo them. The overseer cried, ‘Wait, wait,’ as the boys ran gleefully out of the room after the hounds. He then sighed forlornly and slumped lower within his chair. Only Elias remained.
July was about to deliver her message again when Elias arrived at the overseer’s desk and set down before him a box. This wooden box, which was no bigger than a serving plate, held within it an ugly squabble of floundering black cockroaches. Some dead, some crushed, some crawling for release, some being crawled over, some upon their back with their legs flailing the air, some with their armoured shells and fidgeting feelers scratching their distress upon the wood of the box as they writhed within it. Elias had run off as soon as he had laid down the item. He took little notice of the overseer, who at once sat up within his chair, and called out after him, ‘Elias, don’t leave this here!’ His houseboy’s voice was small and very far away when it came back saying, ‘Soon come, massa.’
And at once July knew the nature of this fuss—the overseer was trying to rid his house of the hundreds and thousands of cockroaches that lived with him there.
Casting a hasty glance to July, who still stared down upon him, the overseer coughed into his hand, then purposefully moved an ink stand, a pen, and a blue and white patterned side plate—with the drying pips of an orange upon it—a little way away from the bug-a-bug box. He then swallowed hard, sat back upon his chair, folded his arms, took a breath of composure, and said to July, ‘You have a message for me?’
At last.
‘Me missus,’ July began, ‘wan’ to know . . .’ But this overseer’s eyes would not stay upon her. Gradually they returned their gaze to the restless creatures within the box. ‘She has beef,’ July said, hoping a greedy stomach might wrest back his attention.
‘Beef . . .’ he repeated, heedless.
‘Me missus say—you wan’ come to eat beef for dinner? Heifer be killed in the pen and me missus . . .’
‘Heifer . . .’ he said.
July thought to yell, ‘A tiger be gnawing the missus and a monkey be wearing her petticoat!’ Tiger . . . monkey . . . softly spoken would surely be this man’s careless reply, for his focus rested so fast upon that box. When one brave cockroach hooked its scabrous legs over the rim while calling on all who were still alive below to follow in this escape, the overseer slowly began to push his chair away from