Tamboo Bamboo to Steel

Cane Fire

> NOTICE. The public is warned that bands carrying lighted torches will not be permitted to pass through the streets of the town on the night before Carnival. By order. February 1881.

Augustin Dorival was rubbing tallow into the skin of his drum when the policeman's notice came into Jubilee Yard folded inside a loaf of bread.

The bread belonged to Mathilda. She had bought it from the Chinese shop on Charlotte Street, and the shopman had wrapped it in whatever paper lay under his counter, which that Sunday happened to be the printed warning that had been pasted on walls all over Port of Spain for a week. She tore the loaf in half at the kitchen shed, shook the crumbs off the paper, held it to the last of the daylight, and read it out to the whole yard in the voice she used for prices she did not believe.

"By order," she finished. "By order of who? The order did buy bread?"

The women at the three firesides laughed. Old Ma Tibby, who rented the room by the latrines and had been born before freedom, spat neatly into the ashes.

Augustin did not laugh. He kept working the tallow into the goatskin with his thumb, in small circles, the way his own father had shown him, until the skin went from dull to the sheen of a wet stone. The drum sat between his knees. It was a long drum made from a hollowed log of wild cedar, and it had been in the family since before there was a family name to put on it.

"They say that every year," said his son Felix, who was fifteen and stood very close, as if closeness made him a man. "Every year a notice."

"Every year a notice," Augustin agreed. "This year a captain."

He had seen the new captain of police ride past the Eastern Market on a gray horse, looking at the fish stalls the way a person looks at a floor that needs scrubbing.

Mathilda folded the notice into a small square and pushed it into the fire under her pot, and the paper curled and went up yellow and was gone.

"Now nobody could say we read it," she said.

---

The yard had been named Jubilee by the first people who rented it, the year the last of the apprenticeship ended and freedom was full, more than forty years back. That generation had chalked the name over the gate, and every few years somebody chalked it again. The rooms ran in a long low barrack along two sides of the yard, each room one door and one window wide, built of boards gone silver with age and roofed with galvanize that clicked and ticked all day as the sun worked on it. In the middle of the beaten earth stood the standpipe, a green iron post with a brass tap that every woman in the yard had her opinion about. Behind the back wall the land dropped away to the Dry River.

In the rainy season the Dry River was not dry at all. Augustin had watched it come down brown and roaring, carrying whole branches and once a door. In February it was a wide bed of stones and gray sand with a thread of water in the middle, and the children played cricket on it with a stick and a green orange, and at night the frogs in the last pools sang like rusty hinges.

That Sunday night nobody slept. The smell of the kitchen shed filled the yard: salt fish soaking, cornmeal, the coconut oil Mathilda had pressed herself, and above it all the black smell of pitch.

The torches were Felix's job. He had been making them since Christmas: lengths of bamboo as long as a man's arm, split at one end and packed with rags and old sacking, the rags soaked in a mixture of coconut oil and the soft pitch a carter brought up from the south in a kerosene tin. Felix stood them in a row along the back wall like a fence of black-headed birds. His hands were black to the wrist and he had a smear of pitch across one eyebrow, which gave him a look of permanent surprise.

"Twelve," he told his father.

"Twelve torches, fifteen people."

"Clementine cannot carry a torch."

"Clementine," said Clementine from her mat in the doorway, "can carry two."

She was eight. She had her mother's long neck and her father's way of watching a thing before she touched it, and she had decided some time in January that she was going to Canboulay this year and nobody was going to stop her.

"You are going nowhere," said Felix.

"I am going where Ma going."

Augustin looked at Mathilda across the yard. She was stirring the pot and did not turn, but he saw her shoulders and knew she was smiling.

---

Canboulay was the burning of the cane. The old people said it began in the time of the estates, when a cane field caught fire and the enslaved were driven out at night with torches and whips to cut the burning cane before it was lost, and that after freedom the people had turned that night into their own: the torches carried by choice now, the drums beating, the sticks raised in the dance and not under the whip. On the morning Carnival began, before the sun, the bands came down out of the yards with fire held high and walked the town while it slept. Augustin's father had carried a torch in the first free Canboulay. Augustin had carried one every year of his life since he could walk.

Mathilda had a song for it. Every band had its songs, but this one was hers. She had made it the year they married, sitting on the back wall over the Dry River with her feet hanging, and the yard had taken it up the next Canboulay and never let go of it. It began low, three notes climbing like a torch lifted from the ground to shoulder height, then a fourth held long and steady, the flame burning straight up in still air, and then it came down, not in steps but in a slide that dropped and caught and dropped again, like sparks falling from the torch head onto the road. The band answered it with a short shout of a phrase that hit on the drum. Then she began again, higher.

Clementine could sing every turn of it. Augustin had heard her that afternoon at the standpipe, filling the bucket, singing it to the water.

---

At three in the morning the yard stood up.

The torches were lit one from another, Felix holding the first into the kitchen fire until the pitch caught with a soft bang and threw a smell like a road being laid. The flames were orange and greasy and smoked black, and in their light the yard changed. The rooms leaned in. The breadfruit tree threw shadows the size of houses.

He tied the drum across his body with a strip of canvas. His friend Josiah, who beat the small high drum, came over the wall from the next yard with it on his shoulder. Two stickmen from down the street arrived in white shirts with their sticks oiled, and the kalinda men began to move at once, slowly, without touching, the sticks circling over their heads in the torchlight, feet shuffling in the dust, each man dancing the fight without making it. Ma Tibby sat on her step with a torch planted beside her like a flag and said she would watch the yard for robbers, of which there were none, because every robber in Port of Spain was out in the road too.

Clementine was dressed. Mathilda had dressed her in a white frock and tied her head with a red cloth and put her own small torch, a short one, in her hand.

Augustin opened his mouth.

"She walking with me," Mathilda said. "You walk with the drum."

---

They went out through the gate into Duncan Street and turned toward the market, and other yards were coming out too. Torches appeared at every alley mouth until the street was a river of fire flowing downhill, and the noise came with it: drums from every direction, each band beating its own rhythm until the rhythms collided and argued and found one another, conch shells blown somewhere out of sight, the clack of sticks, women singing, men answering, dogs losing their minds in every yard they passed.

The heat of the torches was on the backs of Augustin's arms. Sweat ran into his eyes and he let it. His palms found the drum and the drum found the street, and for a while the whole of Port of Spain shrank to the skin under his hands and the road under his feet and Mathilda's voice ahead of him, lifting her song over the crowd, three notes up, one held, sparks falling, and the Jubilee people roaring the answer.

Then the drums ahead stopped.

It was not like a song ending. It was ragged, a few at a time, like rain thinning. The singing broke up into talk. The crowd in front slowed and bunched, and Augustin, who was tall, looked over the heads and the torches and saw, across the wide road by the market, a line of police in their white helmets with their staves held across their bodies. On the far side the gray horse tossed its head.

Between them was a strip of empty road with dust hanging in it in the firelight.

He knew how such nights went. He did not need to see it.

He reached into the crowd and found Felix by the shirt. "Your mother," he said. "Your sister. Now."

Felix did not argue. That was how Augustin knew afterward that his son had seen the same thing.

They found Mathilda already turning, Clementine's hand in hers, the little torch still burning. Her face was very calm, which meant she was angry enough to break something. Josiah was beside them with his drum. They pushed sideways through the crowd, saying excuse, excuse, toward an alley Augustin knew that ran down between two yards to the riverbed.

Behind them the shouting started, and the sound of sticks on something hard, and a horse.

They went down the bank in the dark with the torches held low, sliding on the gravel, and the Dry River took them in. It smelled of wet stone and the green scum of the pools. The frogs stopped singing as they passed and started again behind them. The noise from the market came down over the bank and was swallowed by the riverbed until it sounded far away, a fight in another town.

Clementine said, "Pa, the song."

"Hush."

"We didn't finish the song."

Mathilda stopped walking. She stood in the middle of the stones with her torch, and she looked back toward the glow over the market, and then down at the child. Augustin saw her decide.

She sang it. Quietly, not for the town, for the riverbed. Three up. One held. Sparks falling. And Clementine, without being asked, sang the answer in her high thin voice, and Josiah, who had a sense of occasion, gave it one soft stroke on the small drum.

Then they walked on, upstream, and climbed out by their own back wall, and handed Clementine over it to Ma Tibby, who said, "That was quick," and went back to watching for robbers.

---

The torches burned out one by one on the back wall. Nobody went to sleep.

Light came gray and then pink over the Laventille hills. The galvanize roofs began to tick. The standpipe was turned on, and the women filled their buckets and talked low about who had come back and who had not come back yet, and one by one the ones who had not came back, over walls and through gates, dusty, hoarse, some laughing, some not.

Josiah's brother came in at full light and told the news at the standpipe between swallows from the tap. There had been a fight at the market and on the streets around it. The police had been pushed back. Then the governor had come out himself and talked to the crowd, and the word now going all over town was that the police were ordered to their barracks, and Carnival would go on today as it always did.

"Go on," said Mathilda. "With what? They mash up the morning."

"The morning mash up," Augustin said. "The day not mash up yet."

She looked at him. He was still wearing the drum. The canvas strap had rubbed a raw line along his neck.

He sat down on the step of their room and settled the drum between his knees. The goatskin was cold and slack from the night air. He pressed it with his thumb, testing, and it gave a dull flat word, like a man answering from another room.

"It need sun," said Felix.

"It need sun," Augustin agreed, and tilted it toward the light coming over the wall.

Clementine came and sat beside him with her red cloth still on her head and pitch on her white frock that would never come out. Mathilda put a tin plate of fried bake and salt fish in his lap and a cup of cocoa tea beside it, and he ate with one hand and kept the other on the skin, feeling it warm and tighten under his palm as the sun reached it.

When it was ready he played. Not loud. He played the rhythm of the answer, and the yard, standing around the standpipe with its buckets, gave him the shout back, and Mathilda, at the kitchen shed, turned with her spoon in her hand and began the song again, from the bottom, the three notes climbing, while the kalinda men, who had come back too, took up their sticks and began to circle each other in the dust in the bright plain light of a Carnival Monday morning.

Green Bamboo

> PUBLIC NOTICE. Under the new ordinance, no procession of persons carrying torches shall take place in the town, and no drum or like instrument shall be beaten in any public road or place at the Carnival season. Offenders will be prosecuted. January 1884.

The rain had been falling on the galvanize for three days when Felix Dorival's father climbed onto the table and put the drum in the roof.

It was November, the tail of the wet season, and the yard was a red pond. Water ran off the roofs in ropes and dug holes in the earth along the drip line, and the women had laid planks from door to door so that a person could get to the standpipe without losing a slipper to the mud. The kitchen shed smoked because the wood was damp, and everyone's clothes smelled of smoke and wet cotton. Behind the back wall the Dry River was a brown roar. Felix had stood on the wall that morning and watched a whole breadfruit tree go past with its roots in the air, turning slowly, like a woman dancing alone.

Augustin wrapped the long drum in two crocus sacks and tied the sacks with cord and stood on the table in their room with the bundle over his head, feeling along the rafters for the place where the galvanize met the wall plate and there was a gap the width of a forearm. Mathilda held the lamp. Clementine, who was eleven now and had grown so fast that her frocks stopped at her knees, held the table steady with both hands as though it might bolt.

"Nobody will look up there," Augustin said.

"Rats will look up there," said Mathilda.

"Rats doh play drum."

He pushed it in. The bundle scraped and settled. A little dust came down into the lamplight and hung, and then he climbed off the table and stood looking up at the rafter with his hands at his sides, and Felix saw that his father did not know what to do with them.

---

The ordinance had not been passed yet, not officially. But everybody knew. It was in the way the police walked now, in pairs, slowly, looking into yards. It was in the talk at the market. The torches would be finished. The drums would be finished in the road. A man found beating a drum could be taken before the magistrate and fined, and if he could not pay, he would go to the jail. People said it the way they said the rain was coming: it was certain and there was nothing to argue with.

"Is three years they want this," Ma Tibby said from her step, where she sat with her feet on a brick out of the wet. "Since the morning at the market. Three years they sharpening this."

"Let them sharpen," said Mathilda. But she said it without any heat.

Felix was eighteen. He worked on the wharf loading bags of cocoa onto lighters, and his shoulders had grown wide and sore and he liked the soreness, because it meant he was a man who earned money. He had beaten the small drum at Canboulay since he was twelve. He had been planning to beat the long drum this year, for the first time, with his father beside him on the small one.

Now the drum was in the roof with the rats.

---

It was Josiah's uncle, a man from the country called Mr. Cuffie, who told him about the bamboo.

Mr. Cuffie came to town every few weeks with a donkey cart of charcoal and stayed a night in Josiah's family's room next door. He was small and dark and wrinkled as a dried plum and had a laugh that started somewhere under the ribs and took a long time to reach the surface. He sat in the kitchen shed out of the rain with his feet stretched toward the fire and a cup of Mathilda's cocoa tea, and when he heard about the drum in the roof he laughed that laugh all the way up.

"In the country," he said, "we been playing bamboo since my grandfather. When a man have no skin for a drum, and no money to buy a goat, what he have? He have bamboo. Bamboo grow by every river."

"Bamboo," said Felix. "You beat it?"

"You stamp it. You knock it. You cut it." Mr. Cuffie held up three fingers. "Three voices. And a bottle."

"A bottle," said Augustin from the doorway. He did not come into the shed. He had been quiet since the drum went up.

"A bottle and a spoon. You never hear a bottle and a spoon? Is the best time-keeper in the world. It never get tired and it never drink rum."

The women laughed. Felix did not laugh. He was looking at the rain.

"Where it grow here?"

"Up so." Mr. Cuffie lifted his chin toward the hills behind the yard. "Up the river. Up the valleys. Big green bamboo, thick as your leg. But you can't play it green. You must cut it and leave it to dry, in the shade, three, four weeks, till it ring. Green bamboo is like a young man, all noise and no music."

"Thank you," said Felix.

"Eh heh," said Mr. Cuffie, pleased. "So you have a little sense."

---

They went up on the first dry morning in December, Felix and Josiah and Mr. Cuffie, with two cutlasses borrowed from a man who cleared lots, and a coil of rope. They walked up out of the town along the edge of the river while the sun was still behind the hills and the air was cool and full of wet leaves, rotting mango, woodsmoke from the shacks on the slopes. The river was still high and loud, the color of milky coffee. Where it came out of the valley, the bamboo stood along its banks in huge clumps that leaned over the water and creaked in the wind like the rigging of a ship.

Felix had walked past bamboo all his life without looking at it. Now he looked. The stems were green and polished, some yellow striped with green, each joint ringed with a dark band. They rose thirty and forty feet and bent their heads together at the top, and the light came through the leaves in green coins. When the wind moved, the whole clump knocked and groaned and whispered, and Felix stood under it with his mouth open, hearing it for the first time, because now he was listening for music.

Mr. Cuffie went around the clump slapping stems with his flat palm and listening the way a woman at the market listens to a melon.

"This one." He put his hand on a stem as thick as Felix's thigh. "For the boom. The boom is the bass. You stand him up and you stamp him on the ground, and he go doom, and the whole road feel it in the foot." He moved on. "These two, thinner, for the knockers. You hold one in each hand and you knock them together, or you knock them on the ground, and they talk to the boom." He found a slender stem, bright and hard, and tapped it with his knuckle and smiled. "And this one for the cutter. The cutter go on your shoulder, and you beat him with a stick, and he cut through everything. When the cutter happy, everybody happy."

They cut all morning. The cutlass bit into the green wood with a wet chock, and sap ran clear and sticky over Felix's hands and smelled sweet and grassy. A stem, once cut, did not fall but hung in the clump, held by the others, and had to be dragged out with the rope while the whole clump shook and showered them with old leaves and ants. Josiah was bitten on the neck and danced, and Mr. Cuffie had to sit down on a rock. They measured the lengths with their arms and cut them between the joints so each piece kept a closed end, and by noon they had a pile of green tubes like a heap of giant bones.

They carried it down on their shoulders, Felix with the biggest boom stem across his back, its weight pressing his shirt into the cocoa sores on the wharf side of his body. People on the road stopped to watch. A woman selling oranges asked if they were going to build a house.

"A band," said Felix.

"Out of that?"

"Out of that."

---

They laid the bamboo to dry under the back eave of the barrack, out of the rain and the sun, on a rack of old planks raised on bricks. Every day after the wharf Felix went to look at it. Every day he picked up a piece and knocked it, and every day it gave back a soft wet sound like a fist on a mattress. Green bamboo, all noise and no music. Mr. Cuffie had been right.

Augustin watched him from the step. He did not come over. He did not say it was foolishness. But he did not touch it either.

By the second week the green had begun to go out of the stems, toward yellow. By the third the boom, stood on end and dropped onto the beaten earth by the standpipe, gave a deep round voice that went into the ground and came up again through the soles of Felix's feet. He did it again. He did it five times. Women came to their doors.

"That is a drum," said Ma Tibby, pointing her pipe. "Somebody tell the police."

"Is bamboo, Ma Tibby. They can't charge bamboo."

"They can charge anything they please, boy."

Josiah took the knockers. Another wharf man, a tall quiet Grenadian called Sonny who rented the room by the gate, took the second boom, which was shorter and higher. Felix took the cutter. He held it on his left shoulder like a musket and beat it with a stick of hard guava wood, and the first time he hit it right, it gave such a high sharp crack that a fowl flew up off the kitchen roof.

They had no rhythm at first. They had three rhythms, and they fought. Then Clementine came out of the room with a rum bottle and a tablespoon she had taken from her mother's shelf without asking, and she sat on the concrete step around the standpipe and began to beat the bottle, steady, steady, steady, a bright clink that did not care what anybody else was doing. And the three rhythms heard the bottle and leaned on it like men leaning on a rail, and found each other.

Felix laughed out loud in the middle of a stroke.

His father had come to the door of the room. Felix saw him, and kept playing, and did not look at him again, because he was afraid of what he might see.

---

On Carnival morning, 1884, there were no torches in Duncan Street.

There were police at the corners in pairs, in their white helmets, and some of them carried lanterns, though by the time the bands came out it was already gray light. There were people in the road, a lot of people, but they did not know how to walk without the fire, and they milled and talked and looked at the police and looked away.

Jubilee Yard came out of its gate with eight lengths of bamboo, a bottle, and a spoon.

They did not wait. Felix stamped the boom on the street, doom, and Sonny answered on the second boom, and Josiah began to knock, and Felix swung the cutter to his shoulder and beat it, and Clementine walked in front with the bottle, her chin up, as if she were the band leader and the rest of them were her servants. The sound was not like drums. It was drier, wooden, hollow, with the boom underneath it like a heart and the cutter screaming over the top. It bounced off the house fronts. It filled the street from wall to wall.

The two policemen at the corner looked at each other.

One of them stepped forward and raised his hand, and Felix kept stamping, and the policeman looked at the bamboo, and at the bottle, and at the girl, and opened his mouth, and closed it again. Felix could see him going through the ordinance in his head. No drum or like instrument. Was a piece of bamboo like a drum? Was a bottle?

"Is bamboo, officer," said Josiah helpfully, knocking. "From the river."

"I can see is bamboo."

"Is not a drum."

The policeman stepped back. He did not wave them on. He just stepped back, onto the pavement, and folded his arms, and his partner looked at the sky as if waiting for a decision from up there, and Jubilee Yard went past them down Duncan Street with the people of the street falling in behind, at first a few, then many, as if a sound had been the thing they were waiting for all along.

Felix's mother was singing. She was walking beside the boom with her head tied in red, and she lifted her song, the three notes up and the one held long, and the band answered her on the bamboo with a great hollow shout.

But when the song came to the falling part, the sparks coming down off the torch head, the bamboo could not follow her. It had no notes, only voices. Felix heard the gap where the drum used to slide down with her, and he heard her sing through it alone, clear and high over the clatter. It made the back of his neck cold in the morning heat.

He looked round once, at the corner by the market.

His father was there, standing on the pavement among the watchers, in his good white shirt. He had come out after all. He was not playing. He had his arms folded like the policeman. But his foot was moving on the stones, on the boom, doom, doom, doom, keeping the time.

The Corner Room

> TO LET. Front room on Duncan Street, opening on the road, with use of yard and water. Suitable for a small shop. Apply within to Miss D. Thomas. 1896.

The first thing Dularie Ramlogan learned about Jubilee Yard was that the standpipe had a law, and that nobody would tell her what it was.

She found out by breaking it. On her third morning in the corner room she went out at first light with her brass jug and her bucket and stood at the green iron post with the brass tap and filled the bucket, and then, because the water was cold and clean and came out with such force, she rinsed her face and her arms to the elbow and the back of her neck, and when she straightened up there were four women standing in a line behind her holding buckets, looking at her the way people look at a goat in a parlor.

"Morning," said the first of them. She was tall and very pregnant, with a long neck and a head tied in faded red, and she shifted the bucket on her hip. "You finish bathe?"

"I am sorry," Dularie said. Her English was the English of the estate office and the market, careful and slow. "I did not know."

"Water first," said the tall woman. "Wash after. Wash at the back, by the bath shed, with your own bucket. Not at the pipe."

"Yes," said Dularie. "Thank you."

The tall woman looked at her a moment longer. Then she nodded once and stepped up and put her bucket under the tap, and the line moved, and Dularie went back to the corner room with her face burning and the water slopping cold against her shins.

Her son Harry, who was nine, was sitting on a sack of rice in the doorway. He had seen everything.

"Ma," he said, "you bathe in the road."

"Be quiet."

---

They had come to town from the Caroni plains with a cart, a bullock they had sold at the edge of the Savannah for less than it was worth, and everything they owned. Sookdeo had finished his five years on the estate thirteen years before. They had stayed on afterward, renting a patch of cane land, then a patch of rice land, and the rice had been good and then had not been good, two years running, the water wrong, the price wrong. And Sookdeo, who had always been a man who looked at a road and wondered where it went, said one evening by the fire that there were shops in Port of Spain run by men who had come off the same ships, and that a man who could count could do better behind a counter than in a field.

So now there was the counter. It was a plank laid across two barrels in the front of the corner room, and behind it were shelves Sookdeo had built himself from packing crates, and on the shelves were the things that people in a barrack yard cannot do without: rice, flour, salt in paper twists, cooking oil, kerosene in a drum with a brass tap of its own, matches, soap in long yellow bars that she cut with a wire, salt fish in a stiff gray stack that perfumed the whole room, sugar, tea, candles, cigarettes sold one at a time. The street door opened straight onto Duncan Street. The back door opened onto the yard.

That was the thing Dularie had not understood when Miss Thomas, the landlady, showed them the room. A shop on a street belongs to the street. A shop with a back door into a yard belongs to the yard.

---

By the end of the first month she knew the yard by its sounds.

Before dawn: the cocks, then the tap. Then the women's voices, low and hoarse, and the clink of buckets, and someone coughing in the room by the latrines where an old woman called Ma Tibby lived and coughed as a kind of conversation. Then the firesides in the kitchen shed being blown up, and the smell of woodsmoke, and later of frying: bake, accra, plantain, a smell of hot coconut oil that seemed to soak into the boards of the rooms. Then the men leaving for the wharf, the market, the carpenter's shop, calling out to each other. Then the long morning of the women, the washing beaten on stones at the back, the children, the long rope of talk that never stopped and that Dularie could only half follow, because they spoke a quick English that slid and dropped its ends, full of words that came from somewhere else.

At night, under it all: bamboo.

It came from the back of the yard most nights in the dry season, after the men came home and ate. A deep hollow thump, then a knocking, then a high hard crack, again and again. It came through the wall of the corner room and through the floor and into the bones of her pillow. The first night Dularie had thought someone was breaking down a door.

"Is the band," Harry told her. He knew everything already. He had been in the yard every hour he was not sweeping the shop. "Felix and them. They practicing. For Carnival."

"Practicing what? It have no tune."

"It have a tune, Ma. You have to listen."

She listened. She lay in the dark beside Sookdeo, who was snoring, and listened to the bamboo, and could not find a tune at all. Only the boom under everything like a tired heart, and the cutter screaming on top. And under the cutter, very faint, a woman singing. That she could hear.

---

The tall woman's name was Clementine. Dularie learned it from Harry, who learned it from the children, along with the fact that Clementine sold sugar cake and sweet bread from a tray on the steps of the market and had no husband, and that her mother was the old lady with the strong voice who ran the kitchen shed, Mathilda, and her brother was Felix, who led the bamboo. The baby was due any day. The whole yard was waiting for it the way it was waiting for Carnival.

Clementine came into the shop the week before Carnival for coconut oil and stood at the plank with her belly against it and watched Dularie measure the oil out of the tin with the small copper dipper.

"You put a finger in the scale," she said.

Dularie looked up, shocked. "I do not."

"Not you. The last one. Before you. Mr. Charles had a finger like a stone." Clementine held up her own long finger and pressed it down on an imaginary pan. "A pound of rice from Mr. Charles was three-quarters of a pound and his thumb."

Dularie, without knowing she was going to, laughed. It surprised her so much that she looked round to see who had done it.

Clementine was looking at the griddle. Dularie had it on the back shelf, the griddle her mother had given her, the flat round iron gone black and smooth with use, which she used every evening at the fireside the women had let her have at the far end of the kitchen shed.

"Is that you make the bread," Clementine said. "The flat bread. On the iron."

"Roti."

"Roti. The children say it smell like..." She stopped, looking for it. "Like when you burn sugar a little bit."

"You want to taste?"

Clementine thought about it. She thought about it with her whole long serious body, as if it were a question of state.

"Tonight," she said. "I will bring you sugar cake. You will bring me roti. And we will see who win."

---

Carnival Monday came before the sun, as it did in this town, and Dularie was awake for it because nobody in Duncan Street could sleep through it.

There were no torches now. Harry had told her, gravely, that there used to be torches, before the police stopped them. There was only the noise in the dark: bamboo from every direction, from every yard on the hill, booms going like guns, the cutters screaming, bottles clinking, people singing and shouting and blowing on conch shells, and somewhere a fiddle sawing away at nothing. The galvanize roof of the corner room shook with it. Harry was already gone.

She lit the lamp and opened the shop door a crack. Duncan Street was full of people in the gray light. Some had their faces painted white or covered in mud, some were men dressed as women and women dressed as men, laughing, holding each other up. A group went by in nightgowns carrying candles in bottles. The smell of rum came in through the crack with the smell of dust and sweat.

Then someone was hammering on the back door.

It was Felix, his shirt already wet, a cutter of bamboo still on his shoulder. Behind him the yard was full of lamplight and women.

"Mistress," he said. "Ma say, you know babies?"

---

She did know babies. On the estate there had been no doctor nearer than a day's ride, and the women of the barracks had brought one another's children into the world with their own hands, and Dularie had been at her aunt's elbow since she was twelve, holding the lamp, boiling the water, learning when to hold a woman's back and when to leave her alone.

Clementine was on a mat in the Dorivals' room, kneeling, holding on to the bedpost with both hands, her face wet. Mathilda was beside her. The room was crowded with women talking, and Dularie, without thinking about her English or her place, put them out, all of them except Mathilda, with three words and her two hands, the way her aunt had done. They went. Mathilda looked at her with her eyebrows up and did not argue.

Outside, the bamboo kept coming. Band after band went by in Duncan Street, their booms shaking the floor, and in the yard itself Felix's band had gathered and was waiting, not going out, beating softly, the boom slow, the knockers whispering, the cutter silent on Felix's shoulder.

"Tell them go," Clementine said between pains. "Tell them go in the road. Felix! Go in the road!"

"We going when you finish," Felix called through the wall.

"I will never finish!"

Dularie laughed, and Mathilda laughed, and Clementine, in the middle of the next pain, laughed and swore at both of them.

The baby came as the light turned from gray to gold. It was a girl, small and furious, with a great deal of black hair and a voice that climbed straight up out of her as soon as she had the air for it. Dularie wiped her and gave her to Clementine, who held her and stared, and then began to cry and laugh at once.

Mathilda stood up. She went to the door of the room and opened it and looked out at the yard, at the band waiting there with its bamboo, the faces turned toward her, and she raised one hand.

And she sang. It was the song Dularie had heard at night through the wall under the bamboo, the woman's voice under the noise. Now she heard it plain. It climbed, three steps, and held, a long bright note held straight up like a pole, and then it came down in a long falling slide that caught and dropped and caught. It made Dularie think, for no reason she could name, of the way rain ran off the edge of a roof in drops after the rain had stopped.

The band answered with one great boom and a shout. And then they went out through the gate into Duncan Street, playing, and the noise of them went away down the hill toward the town.

---

That evening, when the yard had calmed and the baby was asleep and Clementine was asleep beside her, Mathilda took Dularie to the kitchen shed and showed her the post.

It was the corner post of the shed, a thick square column of hard dark wood that held up the roof. It was covered, from just under the beam almost down to the height of a man's waist, with small cut marks. Dularie had thought they were the marks of a cutlass, or of children playing. They were names. Some were letters, cut clumsy and deep. Some were only signs, a cross, a fish, a star, a ring. They went down the post in a crooked column.

"Every child born in this yard," Mathilda said. "From the first year. Who could write, write. Who could not, make a sign, and we remember what the sign mean."

She took a nail from her apron pocket and, below the last name, which said FELIX in her own careful capitals, she scratched IVY. It took her some time. The wood was hard. Dularie held the lamp.

When it was done Mathilda held out the nail.

"Your boy," she said.

"He was not born here. He was born on the estate."

"He living here," said Mathilda. "Put him."

Dularie took the nail. She did not write English letters well. So she cut, small and careful, below IVY, the first letter of her son's name in the script her father had taught her in the dirt of a village two oceans away, a little curved shape with a line along the top like a roof.

Mathilda bent close and studied it in the lamplight.

"What it say?"

"Harry."

"Hm," said Mathilda, satisfied. "Is a good mark. Like a little house."

Later, in the corner room, Dularie made roti on the black griddle, and Clementine's sugar cake, coconut and burnt sugar and a whisper of ginger, sat in a paper on the counter. She ate a piece of it. Then another. The bamboo had come home and was going again at the back of the yard, softly now, tired and happy, the boom slow under the cutter.

She listened. Under all the noise there was a tune. Harry had been right. She found it, and lost it, and found it again.

Two Kinds of Skin

> COMPLAINT. The undersigned residents of Duncan Street and environs beg to draw attention to the nightly noise of bamboo bands in the yards near the Dry River, which continues until a late hour and prevents honest people from their rest. January 1911.

Harry Ramlogan had two lives, and they met at the back door of the shop.

On weekdays he was the shopkeeper's son of Duncan Street. He was up at five to sweep the floor and sprinkle it with water to lay the dust, then to unbar the street door, then to stand behind the counter in a clean white vest and measure rice and flour and kerosene into the bags and bottles of half the street until the light went orange in the evening and his mother took over. He was twenty-three and he could total a page of the credit book in his head before the schoolmaster at the corner found his pencil, and the women of the street teased him for it and trusted him for it, which came to the same thing.

On Saturdays he took the train out of town to the cane country and became a drummer.

He played the high drum in a tassa group from Caroni: five men and a boy, two cutter drums, a big bass drum strapped across the belly, and a pair of brass cymbals as big as plates. They played weddings. They played the night before, while the women cooked under a tent of sacking and the turmeric went on the bride, and they played the morning after, walking ahead of the groom through the cane roads with dust rising behind them. Harry's drum was a clay shell with goatskin stretched across the top, and he played it with two thin sticks of cane, and when he got it right it went off like a string of crackers, so sharp and fast that small children stopped crying to listen.

He kept the drum hanging on a nail behind the counter, in a cloth bag. On weekdays he did not touch it. On weekdays the yard had its own music.

---

"Fourteen names," said Miss Thomas, holding up the paper. "Fourteen names on this complaint. Signed. Some of them signed with an X but still."

She was the landlady, a stout brown woman in a hat with a cloth rose on it, who owned Jubilee Yard and two others and walked between them on Saturdays collecting the rent in a black purse with a brass clasp. She stood at the standpipe with the paper in one hand and the purse in the other and looked at the tenants gathered there in the Saturday evening heat, the dust still warm under their feet.

"Who sign it?" said Felix.

Felix was forty-five now and had gone gray at the sides and broad in the middle, and the bamboo band was his. Every night of the dry season, since Christmas, the band had played behind the barrack after supper: seven men, two booms, three pairs of knockers, two cutters and a bottle. His son Lionel played the big boom now, eighteen years old and already taller than his father, a slow, solemn young man who stamped the bamboo as if he were planting a post.

"People who like to sleep," said Miss Thomas.

"People who like to sleep should live in a cemetery."

"Felix."

"Miss Thomas, it is Carnival."

"It is January."

"January is Carnival," said Felix's sister Clementine, from the kitchen shed. "Everybody know that."

Harry was standing in the back door of the shop with his arms folded, enjoying himself. He had seen this argument every January of his life. He knew how it would end: Miss Thomas would say the police would come, Felix would say the police had been coming for thirty years and never arrived, and the band would play a little softer for two nights and then go back to the same.

But Miss Thomas surprised him. She turned and looked straight at him.

"And you, Harrypersad. Your people coming here Wednesday?"

Harry unfolded his arms.

"Wednesday," he said.

"For the wedding in St. James? I hear you will be practicing here."

There was a silence in the yard of a particular kind: the silence of fourteen people realizing that something interesting was about to happen to someone else.

"Only two nights," Harry said. "Is a big wedding. Cousin of my mother. The group coming to town early to practice."

Felix was looking at him. Lionel was looking at him. Clementine had come out of the kitchen shed with the spoon still in her hand.

"In the yard," said Felix. "Tassa. In the yard."

"Where else? We can't practice in the shop."

"So," said Miss Thomas, folding the complaint into her purse with an air of great satisfaction, "Wednesday, the honest people of Duncan Street will get bamboo and tassa both. I will tell them prepare."

---

The Caroni men came on Wednesday afternoon, on the train, with the drums in cloth bags on their shoulders and the big bass drum carried between two of them like a sick goat. Harry met them at the station and walked them up through the town. They stared at the trams on Frederick Street, the shops with glass in the windows, the houses with fretwork along the eaves like lace. Ramdass, who led the group and was the oldest, kept his hand on his drum bag as if somebody might take it.

"So many people," he said. "Where they all sleep?"

"In yards," said Harry. "Like where we going."

Jubilee Yard looked at the Caroni men, and the Caroni men looked at Jubilee Yard. The standpipe. The kitchen shed with its three firesides. The long barrack with every door open. The washing on the lines. The children who stopped playing and came to stand in a silent row with their fingers in their mouths. Dularie came out of the shop and greeted them in their own language, and the men relaxed a little.

In the kitchen shed, Clementine was frying accra. The smell of it, salt fish and hot oil and pepper, rolled across the yard. Ramdass sniffed.

"What is that?"

"Accra," said Harry. "Salt fish fritter. You eat it with float. Fried bread. Is good."

"They will give us?"

"If you play good," said Harry. "Maybe."

---

They practiced that evening at the far end of the yard, by the back wall, where Harry had cleared a space. Ramdass built a small fire of coconut husks and they held the drums near it a little while, turning them, until the skins were right, and then they began.

It was loud. Harry had forgotten how loud it was inside walls. In the open cane country the sound flew away over the fields. Here it hit the barrack and came back, hit the back wall and came back, filled the yard to the brim like water in a bucket. The two cutters crackled over the bass drum's deep heavy pulse, and the cymbals clashed and shimmered, and the rhythm went fast, then faster, then broke into a pattern so quick that Harry's wrists burned. He played with his eyelids lowered, as he always did, feeling the drum more than hearing it.

When he opened them, the whole yard was watching.

Some of the women had their hands over their ears. Some of the children were dancing. And Felix and Lionel and the rest of the bamboo band were standing in a group by the standpipe with their bamboo in their hands, looking at the tassa men the way one team of carters looks at another team's mules.

Ramdass finished the rhythm with a flourish and lowered his sticks. Into the ringing quiet afterward, Felix stamped his boom on the ground once.

Doom.

It was not loud. It was not meant to be. It was a question.

Ramdass looked at Harry. Harry shrugged. Ramdass raised his sticks and played one short phrase on the cutter drum, a crackle like a broken branch.

Felix answered on the cutter, crack, crack, crack-crack.

Lionel stamped the big boom.

Ramdass laughed and nodded at his bass drummer, who hit the big drum twice, slow and heavy.

And then, Harry could never afterward explain quite how, they were all playing.

It was terrible at first. The tassa ran ahead like a horse. The bamboo walked behind like a donkey. The rhythms did not want each other. Harry heard the cymbals and the knockers fighting, the bottle and the clay drum fighting, everybody playing louder to be heard over everybody else, and he thought, this is how the complaint will end up with forty names, and he very nearly stopped.

Then Clementine stepped out of the kitchen shed with her bottle and her spoon.

She was thirty-eight now, still long-necked and serious. She had played the bottle for this band since she was eleven years old. She walked into the middle of the yard and stood between the bamboo and the tassa and she began to beat the bottle, steady, steady, steady, a bright plain clink that did not hurry and did not wait.

Harry heard it. He heard Felix hear it, and Ramdass hear it, and the bass drummer hear it. It went through all of them. The tassa slowed a fraction. The bamboo quickened a fraction. And the bass drum and the big boom, which had been walking side by side all evening without speaking, suddenly fell into step, one deep voice from the clay and goatskin and one from the hollow bamboo stamped on the earth, and the yard felt it in its feet.

Clementine looked at Harry across the yard, over her bottle. She did not smile. She raised her eyebrows, very slightly, the way she had looked at him over the shop counter when he was nine and had given her the wrong change.

He played until his wrists were raw. The honest people of Duncan Street did not get their rest.

---

Afterward, they sat around the fire in the kitchen shed, all of them, Caroni and Jubilee together, and ate accra and float and Dularie's roti with curried potato, and drank cocoa tea and a little rum that somebody had produced from somewhere. Ramdass was telling Felix how a cutter drum was made, holding his clay shell up in the firelight, and Felix was showing him the inside of a length of bamboo, and they understood each other perfectly in spite of each speaking a language the other only half followed.

Mathilda sat in the corner of the shed on her low stool. She was sixty-six and had grown small and fierce, and she ran the kitchen shed now like the captain of a ship. She had not sung that night. She had listened.

"In my time," she said, "we had fire."

The talk died down around her. The young men, who had heard this many times, looked into the flames. The Caroni men looked at Harry.

"She talking about the torches," Harry said. "Canboulay. Before the police stop it. They used to go out in the night with fire."

He had heard about it all his life in this yard. The torches. The night the police stood across the road at the market. The bamboo born because the drum was put in the roof. He had never thought much about it. It was the yard's old story, like the names on the post.

"Every band have a name now," Felix said. "In town. Every band in the road on Carnival Monday. The one from Belmont. The ones from down by the wharf. And we, we just say we are the band from Jubilee Yard."

"Is a good name," said Lionel.

"Is an address," said Felix.

Harry was thinking about the train, about the country weddings, about walking ahead of a groom at night on a cane road with a man beside him carrying a torch of rags on a stick to light the way, the fire swaying over the dust. Every tassa group he knew walked with fire at night. It had never seemed like anything. You needed to see where you were going.

"So call it after the fire, then," he said, mostly to himself.

Mathilda turned her head and looked at him.

"Say that again."

"The fire. The torch. If that is what the old people keep talking about, call the band after it." He felt foolish. "Torch. Torchlight. Something so."

Mathilda kept her eyes on him while the fire popped twice. Then she looked at Felix.

"Torchlight," Felix said slowly, trying it.

"They stop us carrying it," said Mathilda. "So carry it in the name."

Clementine laughed, a short surprised laugh. "The police will love that," she said.

---

On Carnival Monday, before the sun, the band went out of the gate of Jubilee Yard into Duncan Street, and the first thing it did was stop, and Felix lifted his cutter in the dark, and Lionel stamped the big boom, and the whole band shouted the name together into the street, so the other yards would know.

Harry was in the road with them. He had told his mother he would only watch. But at the gate Clementine had pushed the rum bottle and the spoon into his hands without a word, and gone back to stand beside her mother, and he had found himself walking at the front of a bamboo band in a white vest, beating time on a bottle with a spoon, while the booms shook the road behind him and the cutters split the dark open above his head.

He was not a good bottle player. He was a tassa man. His wrists wanted to play three times as fast. Twice Felix shouted at him to stop running.

But he kept the time. And somewhere behind him, over the bamboo, Mathilda and Clementine were singing the old song, the three notes going up into the dark, the long one held, and then the falling part, which he had heard a hundred times through a wall and could now hear only one way. It sounded to him like the sparks coming off a rag torch on a cane road at night, and drifting down, and going out in the dust.

Wire and Paper

> VICTORY CARNIVAL. Bands and masqueraders of every description are invited to take part in the celebrations of peace this season. Prizes for the best-dressed bands. March 1919.

Ivy Dorival bent the last length of wire around the neck of a rum bottle to give it a curve and said, to nobody in particular, "If one more person in this yard ask me if it is ready, I will make them wear it."

She was sitting on the floor of her mother's room with her legs straight out on the boards and wire all around her like the inside of a basket. It was the second week of February. The door was open for the light, and the heat came in with it, white dry-season heat that baked the yard to a crust and made the galvanize roof crack and snap overhead. Her fingers were black from the wire and cut in four places. Her mother's good scissors were somewhere under the paper. There was flour paste in a calabash at her elbow, gone gray and sour, and every fly in Port of Spain had heard about it.

"Is ready?" said Harry Ramlogan's boy Ramesh from the doorway. He was nine.

Ivy held up the wire.

Ramesh ran.

---

The war had ended in November, and in the first weeks people had walked around the town as if they had put down something heavy and kept forgetting it was gone. Then the word came that this Carnival would be a Victory Carnival, the first proper one since the fighting started, and everyone remembered at once what they had been missing, and the whole town went mad for costumes.

Ivy was a seamstress. She had been apprenticed at fourteen to a Mrs. Lewis on Charlotte Street who made dresses for ladies with money, and she had a gift for it: she could look at a woman across a room and know her measurements to the half inch, and she could look at a picture in a magazine and make the dress from it without a pattern. By February she had made sailor suits for half the young men of Duncan Street, white with blue collars, because everyone wanted to play sailor this year. She had made three Britannias. She had made a man a whole fishing boat out of cardboard to wear around his middle, with the sail on a stick over his head.

But this one was her own. Her uncle Felix had asked her at Christmas, standing at the standpipe with his cup of coffee.

"Torchlight never dress before," he said. "Always we go in the road in old clothes. This year I want them to see us coming."

"See you coming dressed as what?"

He looked at her as if she were simple. "As fire. What else?"

---

So it was fire.

She had worked it out on the back of a flour sack with a stub of pencil. Every man in the band would wear on his back a frame of light wire, rising from the shoulders in long licks and curls, covered in paper: red at the bottom, orange in the middle, yellow at the tips, so that when he walked the paper flames would shiver and flicker over his head. The bamboo players needed their arms free, so the frames had to sit on the shoulders like a harness and strap under the arms. The bottle player, who was her mother, would wear a smaller one, like a crown.

And the leader, Felix, would carry a torch. Not a real one. A great tall pole of bamboo with a flame on top made of wire and paper and strips of shining tin from a biscuit maker's offcuts, catching the sun, as big around as a washtub.

"That is not a torch," Felix said, when she showed him the drawing. "That is a bonfire."

"You want them to see you coming or not?"

He looked at it a while longer. "Make it bigger," he said.

---

The wire came from a hardware shop on Charlotte Street, in coils, galvanized, thin as a knitting needle and stiff as a bad temper. It had to be cut with pliers and bent by hand and bound at every joint with fine binding wire, twisted tight with the pliers' nose. A man's frame took a whole evening. She had eleven men.

The paper came from wherever she could get it. Tissue paper from Mrs. Lewis's dress boxes, red and pink and yellow. Crepe paper from a stationer's, which was dear, and which she bought by the sheet. Brown paper from Dularie Ramlogan's shop, dyed in pots in the kitchen shed: red from a bark the old women boiled, yellow from turmeric that Dularie gave her by the handful, the shed full of a bitter earthy smell that got into the sweet bread her mother was baking and made everyone sneeze.

"My hands will be yellow till Easter," said Dularie, laughing, holding them up. She was fifty-seven, and she had become the person in the yard who knew where everything was. "My husband will think I am getting married again."

Ivy pasted. She sat in the doorway in the evenings with the paper cut into flame shapes in a pile beside her, and the paste in its calabash, and a frame across her knees, and laid on the paper one tongue at a time, overlapping like feathers, red, then orange, then yellow. The flour paste dried stiff and a little shiny. When the wind came through the yard at night the finished frames hanging along the eave of the barrack shivered and whispered all together, a dry papery sound like a cane field before the cutting.

---

The thing nobody talked about was Lionel.

Lionel was Felix's son, her cousin, four years older than her. He had gone to the war in 1916 with the regiment from the islands, in a new uniform, with half of Duncan Street at the wharf to see the ship off and Torchlight playing him down to the water on the bamboo. He had written letters. Not many. He was not a man for letters. They had come from Egypt, from Palestine, and the last one from Italy, three months before, saying that the fighting was over and the men were waiting for ships, and that it was cold, and the food was bad, and that he hoped the bamboo was seasoning well.

Felix had read it aloud at the standpipe twice and then put it in his shirt.

The big boom of Torchlight had stood in the corner of Felix's room for three years. Nobody else played it. Other men had played booms, but not that one. When Ivy measured the band for the flame frames she had made twelve, not eleven, without saying anything to anyone. She had made the twelfth from Lionel's old shirt, which she took from the nail where it still hung, and when she was done she put the frame in the roof, wrapped in a sack, on the rafter where her grandfather had once hidden a drum.

---

Before Carnival, Felix took the band to have its photograph made.

It was Ivy's idea. A man called Mr. Gomes had a studio up a flight of stairs on Frederick Street with a painted backdrop of a garden and a balustrade, and he made photographs of brides and soldiers and families in their best clothes, and she had seen in his window a photograph of a band, some Belmont people in sailor suits, and she wanted one.

"Is money," said Felix.

"Is once," said Ivy.

So on the Saturday before Carnival eleven men in paper flames and one woman with a paper crown went up Frederick Street in the afternoon sun with their bamboo on their shoulders, and people came out of shops to look, and small boys ran ahead shouting. Mr. Gomes, a thin anxious man with his sleeves rolled up, looked at them on his stairs, and at the size of Felix's torch, and at his narrow door.

"You will have to go in sideways," he said.

They went in sideways. They stood in front of the painted garden, in two rows, with the booms on the floor and the cutters on their shoulders, and Felix in the middle with the great paper torch, which went up past the top of the backdrop and bent over against the ceiling. Mr. Gomes went under his black cloth. Everyone held their breath. There was a soft flat flash and a smell of burnt powder.

When the print came, the following week, it was small and brown and beautiful, and nobody in it was smiling, and the torch went off the top of the picture. Ivy took it home and turned it over, and passed it around the yard with a pencil, and on the back each of them wrote their own name in the place where they had stood, or made their mark, and she wrote beside each mark whose it was. Her mother wrote CLEMENTINE in capitals, slowly. Felix wrote his name and then, after a moment, underneath it, in small letters, the word boom, and an arrow pointing to the empty end of the back row.

---

Victory Carnival was the hottest Ivy could remember. The sun on Monday came up red over the Laventille hills and stayed there like a coal. The road was white with dust. The whole town was in the street in sailor suits and soldier suits, in Britannias and kings, in clowns and devils and bats with great wings of black cloth on wire, and the smell was rum and sweat and hot tar and fried food and horse dung. Torchlight went out of the gate in its flames, and the people of Duncan Street screamed when they saw it.

She walked beside them. She had made nothing for herself; there had been no time. She walked at the side of the band in her work dress with a needle and thread through her collar and a roll of binding wire in her pocket, and every time a frame slipped or a flame tore she darted in and mended it on the march, while the man went on stamping his bamboo. By noon she had mended thirty flames. The paper was going soft and limp with sweat on the men's backs, and the red dye from the bark was running down their shirts in pink streaks, so that they looked, Harry Ramlogan said, like they had been in a fight with a mango.

Felix's torch was magnificent. Every time he lifted it, the tin strips caught the sun and threw bright flashes across the house fronts, and people on the balconies cheered. The band did not win a prize. A sailor band from Belmont won it. Nobody in Torchlight cared.

---

Lionel came home in August, in the rainy season, on a ship that came into the harbor in a squall.

The word came up from the wharf at noon. Felix put on his good shirt with his hands shaking. By the time they got down to the harbor the rain was coming down so hard it bounced, the sea gray and hissing, the ship a dark shape behind the curtain of water, the wharf crowded with people under sacks and cloths and broken umbrellas, all of them wet to the skin and all of them waiting for one face.

Ivy did not see him come off. She saw Felix go forward through the crowd and stop, and a tall thin man in a soaked uniform come toward him, and the two of them stand looking at each other in the rain with their arms at their sides. Then Felix put his hand on the nape of Lionel's neck, the way he did with the boom when he was settling it, and kept it there.

They walked him home. Torchlight had brought its bamboo, of course, wrapped in sacks against the wet, and halfway up through the town, in the rain, someone stamped a boom, and then they were all playing, soaked, the bamboo dull and fat-sounding in the wet, people coming to their doors along the way.

At the gate of Jubilee Yard Ivy ran ahead into the room and climbed on the table and took down the sack from the rafter and shook out the twelfth frame. The paper was crisp still. It had waited in the dry.

She came out into the rain with it. The whole yard was out, under the eaves, and Lionel stood in the middle of the mud by the standpipe with water running off his cap, looking at the barrack, at the post of the kitchen shed, at the faces.

She held up the frame. He stared at it while the rain ran off his cap.

He bent his head and let her put it on him. She tied it under his arms with the soaked cotton tapes. In the rain, before her eyes, the red paper began to run, and the orange, and the yellow, all of the colors bleeding together and down the back of his uniform in a long bright stain, and the flames went soft and drooped, and the wire showed through.

Lionel stood there in it. Then he went into his father's room, and came out with the big boom, and stamped it once on the wet ground.

It sounded terrible. Dull and soaked. He did it again, and again, and Ivy stood under the eave with her ruined work running down him, laughing and crying, while the rain beat on the galvanize so loud that she could not hear her mother beginning to sing.

Biscuit Tins

> POLICE NOTICE. Owing to disturbances in previous years, bamboo bands will not be permitted in the streets during the coming Carnival. Lengths of bamboo carried by persons in the road will be taken up. January 1934.

The biscuit tin came to Lionel Dorival empty, which was not how his nephew Cyril had promised it.

"It had biscuits," Cyril said. "When I took it. It had a whole layer."

"And now?"

Cyril looked at the tin. Lionel looked at the tin. It was a big square tin from the shop, the kind Ramesh Ramlogan bought from the wholesaler on the wharf, filled with plain sweet biscuits that he sold out of it by the half dozen in paper. It was the size of a small suitcase and had a lid that fit so tight you had to stand on it to put it back. There was a picture on the lid, once, of a garden with a lady in it, but the paint had worn down to a ghost.

"They was stale," said Cyril, who was twelve and had crumbs in the corner of his mouth. "I did him a favor."

---

Lionel was forty-one. He had been leading Torchlight since his father's knees gave out, and he worked as a crane man on the wharf, sitting high in a glass box over the ships, swinging nets of cargo up out of the holds and down onto the lighters. He was good at it. He was slow and patient and he never dropped anything. People said that if you wanted to see Lionel Dorival hurry, you would have to set fire to him, and even then he would think about it first.

He had thought about the police notice for two weeks.

It was not a surprise. It had been coming for years, the way the notices always came. Every Carnival there had been more trouble in the road between the bamboo bands, one yard against another, a quarrel at a corner over who passed first, and a length of seasoned bamboo was a hard thing to have in your hand when a quarrel started. Torchlight had kept out of it, mostly. Lionel saw to that. He had seen enough fighting in Palestine to last him, and he walked at the front of the band on Carnival Monday with his big boom like a man walking a large calm dog, and if another band came at them he turned down the next street. But there were other yards, other leaders. And now the order had come.

The bamboo was in the roof. All of it. Fourteen lengths, wrapped in sacks, laid across the rafters of three rooms, the way his grandfather's drum had once been laid there, the year his father went up into the hills with a cutlass.

"Three times," said his father, Felix. He was sixty-eight, and he sat most of the day now on a low chair by the door of his room with his bad legs stuck out across the doorway and his walking stick across his knees, watching the yard as if it were a play. "Three times in one family they take the music. Drum. Torch. Bamboo." He counted them on his fingers. "Next they will take the singing. Then they will take the feet."

"They can't take the feet, Pa."

"You watch."

---

So it was the tin.

Cyril had been beating it for a week. He beat it in the yard with two sticks of guava wood, sitting on the step of his mother's room, and the noise was like the end of the world. Lionel's aunt Clementine, who was sixty-one and still sold sugar cake every morning at the market steps, said that if the boy did not stop, she would put him in the tin and put the lid on, and stand on it.

But Lionel had been listening. Under the noise, there was something. The tin was not like bamboo. Bamboo had a hollow, wooden, round voice. The tin had a bright flat crash that jumped off the walls and seemed to come from everywhere at once, a voice like a man shouting in an empty room. It was a terrible voice. But it carried. You could hear it from the street. You could hear it, Ramesh said, from the wharf.

"Give me that," Lionel said.

Cyril gave it to him. Lionel sat on the step and turned it over in his hands, the wide flat bottom up, and struck it in the middle with the guava stick.

It roared.

He struck it nearer the edge. It roared differently. Not a different note. He could not have said it was a note. But a different color of roar, higher and thinner.

"Is not a drum," Cyril said, watching him. "They can't say is a drum."

"They can say anything they like," said Lionel, who had heard his father say it, who had heard his grandmother say it, who had heard it all his life.

He struck the tin again.

"Go and ask Ramesh," he said, "if he have any more that stale."

---

By the end of the week Torchlight had eleven biscuit tins, all of them empty, and Ramesh Ramlogan had sold more biscuits in one week than he usually did in a month, because Cyril and the boys of the yard had gone up and down Duncan Street telling everybody that if they bought the biscuits, they would be helping the band.

"You are a businessman," Ramesh told Cyril, and gave him a biscuit for his trouble.

There were also: four dustbin lids, round, dented, galvanized, which had come from somewhere none of the boys would say, and which Lionel decided not to ask about. A big steel drum that had held caustic soda, from a soap factory, with its top cut out, which Sonny's grandson found and rolled up Duncan Street at dawn like a barrel, and which gave, when struck in the middle with the fat end of a stick, a deep dull boom that almost, not quite, sounded like the bamboo. A brake drum off a truck, from a garage on the Eastern Main Road, solid iron, heavy as a stone, which Lionel hung from a string and struck with a bolt, and which rang high and hard and clean, a voice like the bottle, but with iron in it.

And there was Clementine's bottle, which nobody was going to take, because a bottle is a bottle.

They practiced at the back of the yard, as Torchlight always had. The first night was the worst noise Lionel had heard since the war. It was not music. It was a kitchen falling down a flight of stairs. Women came to their doors and shouted. Dogs ran in circles. The Ramlogans' baby granddaughter, Kamla, who was four, sat on Dularie's lap in the back door of the shop with her hands clapped over her ears and her face screwed up, and then took her hands away, and put them back, and took them away, laughing, a game she had invented on the spot.

"It sound like a riot," said Harry Ramlogan, leaning on the shop doorframe. He was forty-six now, and had gone soft in the middle, and still went out to the country weddings with his drum some Saturdays. "Why you doh just play softer?"

"Is metal, Harry. It have no softer."

"Everything have a softer."

Lionel thought about it. Then he put his stick down, and took the stick out of the hand of the boy beside him, and showed him. Not the middle of the tin, the edge, near the rim. Not a blow, a tap. He showed the dustbin lid men to hold the lid by its handle, close to the body, so it did not ring so long. He showed the caustic soda man to hit it once and leave it, and not to hit it again until the sound had died. He did it the way he worked the crane on the wharf: slow and patient, one thing at a time.

By the second week the kitchen was still falling down the stairs, but it was falling in time.

---

Carnival came in February. On Carnival Monday, before light, Torchlight came out of the gate of Jubilee Yard into Duncan Street with no bamboo at all.

There were police at the corners. There were always police at the corners now. There were other bands coming out of other yards, some carrying bamboo anyway and the police going after them, some with nothing and singing only, some with bottles. And there was Torchlight, eleven biscuit tins, four dustbin lids, a caustic soda drum and a brake drum on a string, and the boys of the yard walking behind with the spare tins under their arms in case one split.

Lionel stamped his foot on the road. It was the habit of the boom. There was nothing in his hand to stamp. Then he lifted his stick and struck the caustic soda drum, which hung on a rope around his neck, and the band came in.

In the gray light, in the narrow street, the sound was enormous. It hit the house fronts on both sides and rang. Windows rattled. A dog on a balcony lost its head. The other bands nearby stopped playing to listen, and in the gap the whole street could hear Torchlight, clanging, crashing, ringing, the tins and the lids and the drum and the brake drum all at once, rough as a gravel road and steady as a clock.

The two policemen at the corner of Duncan Street looked at the band. One of them was young, and new, and Lionel could see him searching his orders for the word for a biscuit tin.

The older one shook his head slowly. Lionel thought he might be smiling.

"Bamboo," said the older one to the younger, and pointed at the tins. "You see any bamboo there?"

"No, Sergeant."

"So."

They let them pass.

---

They played all morning. They played down to the wharf and around the market and up past the Savannah, the sun climbing, the heat coming down on the tins until they were too hot to touch and the players wrapped their hands in rags. The noise got into Lionel's bones. His ears rang. Every so often he looked round at the faces of the people falling in behind them, laughing, jumping, waving their arms, and some of them old people he knew from the yards, who had danced behind the bamboo all their lives and looked at the tins as if they had been tricked, and then danced anyway.

His aunt was singing.

Clementine walked beside the caustic soda drum with her bottle, as she had walked beside the boom for fifty years, and she sang her mother's song. The old one, with the three notes climbing and the long one held up straight like a pole, and then the falling part. The metal could not follow her at all. The bamboo had never followed her either; it had voices, not notes. The tins did not even have voices. They had crash and roar. She sang through all of it, high and thin, sixty-one years old, and Lionel heard the gap where the song came down alone, the sparks falling, with nothing in the band to catch them.

He had heard that gap all his life. He had stopped noticing it. Today he noticed it.

---

That night, in the yard, with the tins piled by the standpipe and the band asleep on the steps and the smell of pelau from the kitchen shed where the women had cooked a great pot of it, rice and pigeon peas and chicken browned in burnt sugar, Lionel sat on his father's low chair, because his father had gone to bed, and ate from a tin plate and listened to the yard.

Cyril was at the back wall, alone, with his biscuit tin.

He was not beating it. He was tapping. Lionel watched him. The boy had turned the tin over on his knees and was tapping the bottom of it with the end of one stick, here, and then here, very lightly, his head bent down close, as if he were listening at a door. He had beaten the bottom so hard all day that it had gone out of shape. It was dented in, in a long shallow hollow, with a ridge across the middle where the stick had hit it again and again.

He tapped on one side of the ridge. Then the other side.

Lionel put his plate down.

"Do that one more time," he said.

Cyril looked up, surprised. He did it again. Tap, on one side. Tap, on the other.

They were not the same. Lionel heard it. In all that day's crash and roar he had not heard anything like it. Two sounds. Not a high roar and a low roar. Two notes, one a little above the other, small and bright and true, sitting side by side in the dented bottom of an old biscuit tin.

Cyril bent his head lower over the tin and went on tapping, this side, that side, as if he were afraid the two of them might leave.

Four Notes

> WANTED. Strong boy for smithy and general repairs, Eastern Main Road. Must be willing and not afraid of fire. Apply early. October 1936.

The river came down in the night, and in the morning Cyril Dorival went to look at what it had brought him.

It was October, the deep end of the wet season, and it had rained for two days without stopping. The galvanize over his bed had drummed so loud he dreamed of the band. Now the rain had passed on toward the sea, and the sky over the Laventille hills was washed white, and the whole of Jubilee Yard steamed in the first sun like a pot of rice. Everything dripped. The breadfruit tree dripped. The washing lines dripped. The standpipe, which nobody had turned on yet, dripped from its tap out of what seemed like pure sympathy.

He climbed the back wall and looked down at the Dry River.

It was full. Brown and fast and wide, from bank to bank, carrying sticks and leaves and a whole wooden crate turning over and over and once, sliding past at speed, a white enamel basin with a red rim that some woman up the valley was going to miss. The noise of it was steady and heavy, a long rushing roar with knocks inside it, stones rolling along the bottom. The smell was mud and rotten leaves and something sweet, crushed bush, wild ginger.

He was fifteen. He had been working at the smithy on the Eastern Main Road for three weeks, and he had come to the wall that morning to see if the river had taken his pan.

---

He had made it in August, in secret, from a tin.

Not a biscuit tin. A smaller drum, round, that had held cooking oil for the shop, which Ramesh had given him for nothing when he asked, and then asked him what for, and been told it was for nothing, and laughed. Cyril had cut it down with a cold chisel borrowed from the smithy so that it stood only a hand's width deep. He had taken it down to the riverbed when it was still dry, to the place under the bank where the old cotton tree hung over and the boys of the yard went to smoke, and he had sat for days with it on a flat stone, between his knees, working on the head with a hammer.

Since the night of the biscuit tin, two years before, he had not been able to stop thinking about it. Two notes, in a dent. If a dent made two, why not three? Why not ten?

What he had found was this: if you hammered the tin from underneath, a small hard blow in one place, you raised a little bump on the top. A blister of metal, like a round hill. And when you struck the bump with a stick, it sang. Not a crash. A note. Hammer it bigger, and the note went down. Hammer it smaller and tighter, and it went up. Hit it too hard, and it went sour, and you had to hammer it back from the other side and start again, and sometimes it would not come back, and you had ruined it, and you threw the tin in the river and found another.

He had ruined six. Ramesh had stopped laughing and started charging him.

The seventh had four bumps. Four little hills of metal, arranged around the head like the petals of a flower, each one a different size. He had drawn around each one with a stub of white chalk from the schoolroom, so that he could see where one note stopped and the next started, and then, because the notes bled into each other when he struck them, he had taken a nail and a hammer and tapped a line into the metal around each chalk circle, a thin groove, to keep them apart.

Four notes. He had played them for nobody. He had hidden the pan under the bank, under a flat rock, in the roots of the cotton tree. And then the rain had come.

---

He found it on the third day, when the river had dropped enough to walk the bank. The rock was gone. The roots were there, black and wet and tangled like the hair of a sleeping giant, and wedged among them, upside down and full of mud, was a round shape. He dug it out with his hands.

It was dented on the side and its skirt was bent. The chalk was gone. He sat on the wet gravel and cleaned the mud off the head with his shirt and held it on his knees and struck the first note with his finger.

It sang. Faint, a little flat. But it sang.

He struck the others. One, two, three, four, going up. Then he struck them again, slower, and found that he was doing something without meaning to. Three going up. The fourth held. He held it, struck it again and again, softly, to keep it ringing.

It was his great-grandmother's song. His grandmother Clementine's mother's song, which Clementine had sung every Carnival of his life, which she sang at the market steps over her tray of sugar cake, which she sang in the kitchen shed when she was baking sweet bread and thought nobody was listening. Three notes up, like a torch lifted. One held.

And then the part that fell.

He had nothing for the part that fell. He had four notes, and the falling part needed others, below and in between, a long slide down that caught and dropped and caught. He tried it on the four he had. It was wrong. It was like trying to walk down a staircase with half the steps missing.

He sat there on the gravel with the river running past him and played the first half over and over, the climb and the hold, until the sun was high.

---

The smithy was a long black shed with a forge at one end and a mountain of iron at the other: cartwheels, plough blades, the springs of carriages, a broken iron gate with curls on it, buckets of old bolts, bars, rods, horseshoes. The smith was a man called Mr. Peters, short and enormously wide, with arms like hams and a burned patch on his forearm in the shape of Tobago. He had hired Cyril because Cyril was the only boy who answered the notice who did not step back when the bellows went.

"You afraid of fire?" Mr. Peters had asked.

"No, sir."

"You should be. Fire is a teacher with a bad temper."

The forge was the heart of the place. Cyril worked the bellows, a great leather lung on a wooden frame, and watched the coals go from red to orange to a yellow so bright it was almost white, and the air above them wobble like water. Mr. Peters put iron into the fire and took it out glowing and beat it on the anvil, and the anvil rang under the hammer, a clean hard voice that went into the bones of Cyril's skull and made him think of the brake drum on its string. Sparks went everywhere. Cyril had little burns up both arms like a rash.

He watched how the iron changed in the fire. Cold, it was stubborn. Hot, it moved. And after, if Mr. Peters plunged it in the water tub with a scream of steam, it came out hard, and if he let it cool slowly in the ashes, it came out softer, kinder, easier to bend.

"What happen if you heat a thin piece," Cyril asked one evening, "and let it cool slow?"

"How thin?"

"Like a tin."

Mr. Peters looked at him a long time over the anvil, his face orange in the coal light.

"It would go soft and sweet," he said. "Like a woman's temper after Sunday lunch. Why?"

"No reason."

"Hm," said Mr. Peters, and went back to beating, and said nothing more about it, but the next week, when Cyril asked if he could take home a cracked sheet of old roofing iron from the pile, he gave him two.

---

At Christmas he played it for her.

It was the night before Christmas, and the yard smelled of sorrel boiling with cloves and cinnamon, and of the ham Dularie Ramlogan's neighbor was baking in the shared oven, and of black cake, and the whole yard was out because it was too hot to be in. The galvanize roofs creaked as they cooled. Somebody had a gramophone going in one of the rooms, playing a calypso about a woman who sold fish and talked too much, and every time it came round to the chorus the whole yard sang along with it, badly, and laughed.

Clementine was in the kitchen shed with the sweet bread. She was sixty-three, with a cloth tied over her gray hair and flour to the elbows and her long neck bent over the bowl. She was humming.

Cyril came and stood in the shed door with the pan.

He had heated it. A week before, after Mr. Peters had gone home, he had put it on the edge of the forge, on the coals, and watched the head go a strange color, blue, then straw, and then pulled it off and laid it in the ashes overnight. In the morning the notes had been different, sweeter, rounder, as if somebody had sanded the edges off them. He had spent the week bringing them back into tune with a small hammer and his ear, tapping, listening, tapping.

"Grandma," he said.

She looked up.

He sat down on the bench in the shed with the pan on his knees and struck the four notes. Three up. The fourth held. He held it with soft quick strokes, so that it rang and kept ringing, a long bright note held up in the smoky air of the shed over the bread.

Clementine's hands had stopped in the bowl.

He stopped. Not because he had finished. Because he had come to the place where the song fell, and he had nothing to fall with.

"That is all I have," he said. "I can't find the rest."

Clementine said nothing. She stood with her hands in the dough. Her face did a number of things, one after another, too quick for him to follow. Then she pulled her hands out of the bowl and wiped them on her apron, slowly, finger by finger.

"Who teach you that?"

"Nobody. The tin."

"The tin teach you." She came over and looked down at the pan, at the four little hills of metal and the faint chalk he had drawn around them again. She touched one with a floury fingertip, as if it might be hot. "Play it one more time."

He played it. The climb. The hold.

And this time, when he came to the edge, she sang the rest. She sang it right there in the kitchen shed over the sweet bread, the falling part, the sparks coming down, in the thin high voice the whole yard knew. He held the fourth note ringing under her as long as he could, and then it faded, and her voice went on alone down the slide without it, the way it had done all his life.

Somebody in the yard had turned the gramophone off. There were faces in the shed door.

"Well," said Clementine, very crisply, going back to her bowl. "So now you know what you missing. Find it. And don't come in my kitchen with that again till you do. You bring iron dust in my bread."

---

On Carnival Monday he carried the pan in the road, in Torchlight, among the biscuit tins.

He had hung it from his neck on a strap of old bicycle tube and made himself a pair of sticks with the ends wrapped in strips of the same rubber, which made the notes softer and longer. In the noise of the tins, the dustbin lids, the caustic soda boom and the brake drum, nobody could hear him for most of the morning. He played the four notes over and over, his own little tune inside the great crash of the band, and nobody heard it but him.

Then, coming up Duncan Street at noon, on the way home, the band stopped at the corner by the shop to let a sailor band go past, and in the half minute of quiet, Cyril played the climb and the hold.

People turned. All along the corner, he saw them turn their heads, the way people turn when somebody calls their name. The sailors turned. A policeman turned. Old Harry Ramlogan, in the shop door with his granddaughter on his hip, turned.

His uncle Lionel, at the front of the band, turned all the way round with the caustic soda drum on his chest and looked at him. Then he looked at the pan. Then he looked at Clementine, beside the drum with her bottle.

Clementine looked straight ahead and lifted her bottle and struck it, once, to bring the band back in.

But Kamla Ramlogan, who was seven, had slid down off her grandfather's hip, and she came running through the crowd and stood in front of Cyril in the road with her hands on her knees, staring at the four hills of metal.

"Do it again," she said. "Do the sweet one."

Iron Morning

> STREET TALK. Residents of the eastern districts report that certain bands have been heard at night practicing tunes upon pieces of old iron. Whether this is music or merely an improvement upon noise, the public will judge at Carnival. February 1939.

Clementine Dorival had sold sugar cake on the steps of the Eastern Market for fifty-one years, and in all that time she had never once sold out before the sun was over the clock.

On the Friday before Carnival, 1939, she sold out by eight.

She sat on the step with the empty tray across her knees and looked at it with deep suspicion. It was a wide wooden tray, gone dark and smooth with half a century of her hands, and every morning she covered it with a clean white cloth and laid out the sugar cake in rows: the white kind made with grated coconut and sugar boiled together until it set, and the pink kind with a drop of red coloring, and the brown kind with burnt sugar and a whisper of ginger, which was her mother's way and which the old people asked for by name. Every morning she sold it piece by piece to market women and carters and schoolchildren and clerks on the way to the offices, and every morning she went home at ten with a few pieces left over for the children of the yard.

Today there was nothing but crumbs and a stain of pink.

"Everybody hungry," said the fish woman beside her, Miss Agatha, who had sold fish on the next step for thirty years and had opinions about everything. "Everybody up all night. You don't hear them?"

"I hear them."

"All night, girl. All night, on the hill. Ping, ping, ping. Like a hundred blacksmiths gone mad."

Clementine folded the cloth over the empty tray. She had heard them.

---

She was sixty-six. Her knees ached in the mornings until she had walked the stiffness out of them, and her eyes were not what they had been for threading a needle, which was why she let Ivy do the sewing now. Otherwise she was as she had always been: long-necked, straight-backed, serious, the kind of woman people stepped aside for on a narrow pavement without quite knowing why. She had buried both her parents, her brother Felix's wife, and more friends than she cared to count. She had never married. She had a daughter, Ivy, forty-two, who had married a man called Oswald, and Oswald had gone to the oilfields in Venezuela when Cyril was two and sent money for three years and then stopped, which Clementine had predicted on the day of the wedding and had never once mentioned since, which she considered a great act of generosity on her part.

And she had a grandson who had ruined her Christmas bread with iron dust two years before and had been ruining her sleep ever since.

Cyril was seventeen. He worked at the smithy all day and came home and ate standing up and went straight to the back of the yard, and from then until midnight, sometimes later, Jubilee Yard rang like a smithy itself. Ping. Ping. Tock tock. Ping. Hammer and tin. Hammer and tin. A note, then the same note again, a little higher. Then again. Then again, a little lower. Then a curse.

He had five pans now. Lionel had stopped asking where he got the metal. The biggest, which had been a caustic soda drum, had three notes on it, deep ones, low and round, and the boy called it the boom, after the bamboo. The smallest, which had been a biscuit tin of Ramesh's with the sides cut down, had eight. Eight little hills of metal hammered up from underneath, each ringed with chalk, each grooved around with a nail. Eight notes.

Eight notes, and still he had not found the falling part.

She knew because she listened. She listened every night from her bed in the room she still shared with Ivy, through the board wall, and every night at some point she heard him try. The three up, the long one held, and then a searching, a groping down through the notes, this one, no, this one, no. Then silence. Then hammer.

She did not ask him. He did not tell her. It was between them like a coin that neither one would pick up.

---

On Saturday Ivy brought the copybook.

It was a school copybook with a blue cover and lines in pale ink, the kind the children of the yard carried to the school at the corner. Ivy sat on the step of the room with it open on her knee and a pencil behind her ear and said, "Mammy, I want to write down the Canboulay."

Clementine was shelling pigeon peas into a basin. "Write down what about it?"

"What you remember. The night. Grandpa and the drum. The police at the market. Before everybody forget."

"Nobody forget. I tell it every year."

"You tell it. Nobody write it." Ivy licked the pencil, a habit she had picked up from Mrs. Lewis on Charlotte Street forty years ago and could not stop. "And when you gone, Mammy, who will tell it? Cyril? He will tell it wrong. He will put a pan in it."

Clementine looked at her daughter. Ivy was looking at the copybook, not at her. Clementine had a sharp thing ready to say, about being gone, about the impertinence of children who planned your funeral over the pigeon peas. She did not say it.

"If I tell you," she said instead, "you will write it just how I say. Not how you think it ought to be."

"Just how you say."

"And you read it back to me after. Every word. And if it wrong, you rub it out."

"I have an eraser," said Ivy, and held it up.

So Clementine told it, there on the step, over the basin of peas, in the Saturday heat. She told it plain. The loaf of bread with the notice wrapped around it. Her mother putting it in the fire. Felix black to the wrists with pitch. The white frock. The little torch. The road full of fire flowing down to the market like a river. The line of white helmets. The gray horse. Her father's hand on her brother's shirt. The riverbed in the dark, and her mother stopping on the stones and singing anyway, quiet, for the river.

Ivy wrote. Her pencil moved fast and small. Now and then she said wait, wait, and Clementine waited, looking at the yard.

When it was done Ivy read it back, all of it, slowly, in her clear seamstress voice, and Clementine listened with her eyes shut. Twice she said no, not so, and Ivy rubbed out and wrote again. Once she said, "I didn't say that," and Ivy said, "You did, Mammy," and Clementine said, "Then I said it wrong," and Ivy rubbed it out.

At the end Ivy turned the copybook around and held out the pencil. "Write your name."

"What for? Is my story. Everybody know is mine."

"So in a hundred years they know you say it so. Not me."

Clementine took the pencil. At the bottom of the page, under her daughter's small fast writing, she wrote, in capitals, slowly, as she had once written it on the back of a photograph and once, long ago, carved it on a post: CLEMENTINE ALEXANDER. Then, because it seemed right, and because nobody could stop her, she added underneath: SHE SANG IT IN THE RIVER.

---

Carnival Monday came up out of the dark like every Carnival Monday of her life: the noise first, then the light.

She was up at three. She dressed in a white dress she had made herself thirty years ago and a red headtie, the same red she had worn at eight, or near enough, because she had bought a new length of the same cloth every few years since. She took the bottle and the spoon from the shelf. She went out into the yard.

Torchlight was gathering by the standpipe in the light of a hurricane lamp. Lionel with the caustic soda boom on its strap. Seven or eight men and boys with biscuit tins and dustbin lids, as there had been for five years now. The brake drum on its string. And in the middle of them, with the pans, five boys from the yard and two from up the road, with Cyril among them, the little eight-note pan hung at his chest from a strap of bicycle tube and the rubber-tipped sticks in his hands.

Kamla Ramlogan, who was nine, was sitting on the shop step in her nightdress with her grandmother Dularie, both of them with shawls round their shoulders against the night cool. Dularie was seventy-seven and nearly as straight-backed as Clementine. They looked at each other across the yard, the two old women, and Dularie lifted one hand.

"You going in the road?" Dularie called.

"Where else I would go?"

"At your age."

"At my age is the only time I have left to go," said Clementine, and the yard laughed.

---

They went out of the gate into Duncan Street and Lionel struck the boom and the tins came in with their great crash, and the street rang, and the bands from the other yards were coming down too, and the noise was the noise she had known for five years now. Metal. Crash and roar. She walked beside the boom and struck her bottle and it was lost in it like a pebble in the sea.

They came down to the corner by the market as the sky went gray. There were other bands there already, bands from the hill, from up the river, from the other side of the town, packed into the wide road where once, in another century, the police line had stood. And from one of them, a band from somewhere on the hill whose name she did not know, came a sound that made Clementine stop walking.

It was a tune.

Not a rhythm. A tune. Somewhere in the middle of the crash of that band someone was playing a melody on iron, clear enough to follow through all the noise: a calypso from the tents that year, a silly song about a man whose wife locked him out of the house, that everybody had been singing since Christmas. She knew every note of it. Everybody knew. And she could hear it, picked out on metal, note after note, the whole tune, coming over the heads of the crowd.

All around her people were shouting and pointing. Somebody started to sing the words. Then the whole corner was singing them, to the band on the hill, with the iron playing the tune, and the iron getting it right.

Clementine stood in the road with her bottle. She was aware that she was crying. She was annoyed about it.

Then, beside her, Cyril began to play.

He was playing the same calypso. He must have been working on it for weeks behind the barrack; she had heard it through the wall without knowing what it was. Note after note on his eight little hills. He played it with his head down and his face hard with attention, and the boys on the other pans came in under him, and Lionel heard and turned and brought the boom in under all of them, deep and slow, and the tins came down quieter to let the tune through. And Torchlight, in the road, in front of half of Port of Spain, was playing a melody.

She looked at her bottle.

For fifty-five years she had kept the time for this band. Felix had needed her. The bamboo had needed her. The tins had needed her most of all. She looked at the bottle and the spoon in her hand and for one moment she thought: I could put it down. They don't need it now. The tune can keep its own time.

She did not put it down.

She lifted the bottle and struck it, steady, steady, steady, the bright plain clink that did not hurry and did not wait, and she heard it go into the band like a needle into cloth, and she heard the boys on the pans hear it, and lean on it, and come together.

Cyril looked up from his pan. He looked at her. Then he went back to the tune.

---

At noon, home in the yard, with her feet in a basin of cold water from the standpipe and her red headtie in her lap, Clementine sat on the step of the room and watched the band asleep in the shade of the breadfruit tree.

Dularie came and sat beside her, slowly, with a cup of tea in each hand. She gave one to Clementine.

"So," said Dularie. "Iron playing tunes now."

"So it seem."

"In my village," said Dularie, "in my small days, there was a man who said one day they would build a cart that go without a bullock. Everybody laugh at him. He was right." She drank her tea. "He was also mad. But he was right."

Clementine laughed. She had not expected to.

Behind the breadfruit tree, at the back wall, Cyril was not asleep. She could see him. He was sitting with the eight-note pan on his knees and a hammer beside him, and he was trying it again, she knew, before he even struck. The three up. The long one held. Then down, searching, this one, no, this one. Then nothing. Then the small hammer, ping, ping, under the noon sun.

She drank her tea and did not call out to him. It was his to find.

Base Drums

> MEN WANTED. Laborers, drivers, carpenters and helpers required for construction work on the western peninsula. Good wages paid weekly. Apply at the gate with proof of name. January 1941.

The sergeant's name was Kowalski, and he thought Basdeo Ramlogan was a thief, and Basdeo Ramlogan thought the sergeant was a madman, and for most of January 1941 they were both a little bit right.

"You want them," said the sergeant, "for what?"

He was standing at the edge of the dump, fists on his belt, shirt soaked dark under the arms, a red-faced man from a city in the cold north of America that Bas had never heard of, squinting at Bas and the truck and the mountain of drums. The drums were stacked higher than a house: steel oil drums, the big kind, each as tall as a man's waist and as wide as a bread oven, gray and green and rusty red, some still sticky inside with black oil or with something yellow that stank like a hospital, piled anyhow in the sun at the end of a road of crushed white stone between the mangrove and the sea.

"For music," said Bas.

The sergeant looked at him.

"Music," said Bas again, and mimed it, two hands with sticks, striking the air.

"You're going to make music," said the sergeant slowly, "on oil drums."

"Yes, sir."

The sergeant took off his cap, wiped his forehead with his forearm, put it back on. Behind him a bulldozer was pushing a wall of mud into the swamp with a roar that shook the ground, and beyond it the sea in the bay was flat and blue and blinding, and the green hills of the peninsula went down steep into the water, and over everything hung the smell of diesel and cut mangrove and hot steel and salt.

"Take as many as you want," the sergeant said. "Saves me burning them. Bring me back a song."

---

Bas was twenty-three. He was the younger son of Harry Ramlogan, who kept the shop at the corner of Jubilee Yard, and the grandson of old Dularie, who still sat in the back door of the shop most evenings, eighty years old, and knew everything that went on in the yard before it had finished happening. His brother Ramesh kept the shop now. His father still went to country weddings with his tassa drum when his back allowed it. And Bas, until Christmas, had done a little of everything and not much of anything: helped in the shop, driven a donkey cart for a charcoal man, carried bags on the wharf on the days the wharf needed extra hands.

Then the Americans came.

All anybody in Duncan Street knew was that the Americans were building, out at the western end of the island on the peninsula, and further inland in the east at the great flat field where the planes would come, and that they needed men, thousands of men, and paid in a week what a man on the wharf earned in a month.

Bas had gone out on the first morning, in the back of a truck with forty other men, along the coast road past the fishing villages and the swamp, and been taken on as a driver's helper, because he could read the numbers on the crates and could talk to anybody. He rode in the cab of a big American truck with a driver called Fitzroy from the hills behind the town, carrying gravel, cement, steel, men.

There were drums everywhere. Oil came in them, and fuel, and grease, and tar, and things for the machines whose names Bas could not pronounce. When they were empty they were thrown out, onto the dump at the end of the road. Every day the pile grew, and every day Bas thought of the back of Jubilee Yard and the little pans of Cyril Dorival, made from biscuit tins and cooking-oil drums no bigger than a bucket.

---

He brought the first four home on a Sunday in Fitzroy's truck, which Fitzroy was not supposed to take home on Sundays and did anyway, because Bas had promised him pelau. They came up Duncan Street at noon with the four great drums roped in the back, banging and booming at every pothole like a band arriving all by itself, and every door in the street opened.

Cyril was at the standpipe. He was nineteen, long and quiet, with burn marks up both arms from the smithy. He turned around with a bucket in his hand and saw the truck and saw what was in it and put the bucket down very slowly on the ground, as if it might spill something.

"Where you get them?" he said.

"From America."

"Bas."

"From the base. The Yankee sergeant say take them. He say bring him back a song."

Cyril climbed into the back of the truck. He put his hand flat on the head of one of the drums, the top, the flat round steel face with its rim and its little capped hole for pouring. He knocked it with his knuckle. It answered him deep and long, a big low voice that went on ringing after his hand had come away. He knocked it again in a different place.

His face did something Bas had never seen it do.

"This is thick steel," he said quietly. "This is much more metal."

"That's good?"

"I doh know yet," said Cyril. "I think it good."

Old Harry Ramlogan had come out of the shop and was standing on the step with his arms folded over his belly, looking at the truck. Bas's grandmother Dularie was in the back door with Kamla, who was eleven and already climbing onto the bumper.

"So," said Harry to his son. "The Americans pay you to steal their rubbish."

"They glad to get rid of it, Pa."

"And what you will do with it? You are a tassa man's son. You will play the oil drum now?"

"Maybe," said Bas.

Harry looked at the drums a long time.

"Hm," he said. "Make sure you play it better than you play the tassa."

---

They rolled the drums into the back of the yard, where Torchlight had practiced for sixty years, by the wall over the Dry River, and the yard called it the panyard now, the boys did anyway, and the women had given up arguing.

Cyril worked on the first one for two weeks.

Bas watched. He came home from the base in the evening coated in white dust from the crushed stone and washed at the bath shed at the back with three buckets, and ate whatever his mother gave him, standing, and went straight to the panyard, where Cyril would already be there by the light of a hurricane lamp hung on a nail in the wall.

First Cyril cut the drum down. With a cold chisel from the smithy and a heavy hammer, around and around, a hand's width below the top, so that the head and a short skirt of steel came away from the rest like the lid of a pot. It took an evening. Ma Ivy came out twice to complain, and then a third time with a plate of food for both of them.

Then the hammering began.

With the small tins, Cyril had raised the notes from underneath, little hills knocked up out of the flat. With the big steel, he did the same, lying on his back on a sack on the ground under the drum head with the lamp beside him, hammering upward, and the steel was so much thicker that it took ten times the blows, and his arms ached, Bas could see them shaking. But the notes, when they came, were big. Big round notes like the voice of the brake drum, but sweeter, longer, with a ring in them that went on and on. He marked them with chalk, white rings on the gray steel, and grooved around them with a nail punch, tap tap tap.

"How many you could fit?" Bas asked on the fourth night.

"On this?" Cyril put his hand on the head, measuring. "Ten. Maybe twelve. If I learn how."

Twelve notes. Bas thought about the falling part of the old woman's song, the one the whole yard knew Cyril could not find. He did not say anything. Everybody in the yard knew not to say anything about that.

---

The second drum Cyril made for Bas.

He did not ask. He cut it lower, so the skirt was longer and the drum deeper, and he hammered just four notes on it, big ones, low ones, and when it was done he rolled it over to where Bas was sitting on the wall eating a roti from his mother's kitchen and stood it in front of him.

"Tune boom," he said. "Four notes. You play the bottom of the tune. You go with Lionel."

Bas looked at it. He looked at Cyril.

"I can't play it."

"Your father play tassa. You grow up with it. You have the hands."

"Tassa is different."

"Everything is different," said Cyril, "till you play it." And he put the sticks in Bas's hand. They were the rubber-tipped sticks Cyril made from strips of old bicycle tube wound round the ends, and the rubber was warm from his pocket.

Bas struck the first note.

It came up out of the steel like a slow wave coming in to a beach. He felt it in his chest. He struck the second, the third, the fourth, walking down, and the sound seemed to go out across the panyard and over the back wall into the night air above the riverbed.

"Fitzroy will want pelau every Sunday for the rest of his life," Bas said.

"So he will get it," said Cyril.

---

On the back wall of the shop, where Ramesh kept the credit list in chalk, the names of the families who owed money and how much, Bas drew a map one evening to show Kamla where the drums came from. He drew the island the way he saw it from the cab of the truck, like a big square face looking west with a long arm reaching out toward Venezuela. He marked the yard with an X, and the peninsula with a circle where the dump was, and the big flat field in the east where the planes would land, and the oil refinery in the south on the gulf where his friend Fitzroy said the drums had started out, full, before they ever came to the base.

"So the drum travel," said Kamla, frowning at it.

"All round the island. Then it come here."

"And then?"

Bas thought about it. "Then it go in the road," he said.

Ramesh saw the map drawn over his credit list and shouted. They had to wipe the whole thing off and write the debts in again from memory, and Bas got three of them wrong in the customers' favor, which was the only time anybody in Duncan Street could remember the Ramlogans' shop losing money on purpose.

---

Torchlight went into the road on Carnival Monday, 1941, with four oil drums among the biscuit tins.

The town was full of soldiers and sailors, theirs and the Americans, standing on corners with their caps pushed back, watching the bands with their mouths open. There was a war in the world, everybody knew it, and the ships went out of the harbor at night without lights, but on Carnival Monday the war seemed very far away, somewhere past the edge of the sea.

Bas walked beside Lionel with the tune boom on a strap across his body, the big drum riding against his hip, playing the four notes at the bottom of the tune, walking down under the melody on Cyril's pans, while Lionel's caustic soda boom kept the beat beneath him. He watched Lionel's stick to know when. He was terrified and happier than he had ever been.

At the corner of Frederick Street, a group of American sailors stopped them, waving their arms, shouting something about music, and one of them, a tall freckled boy no older than Bas, came forward into the road and put his hand on the head of Bas's drum, the way Cyril had on the truck.

"This was oil?" he shouted over the noise.

"From the base," Bas shouted back.

The boy's face lit up. He turned and shouted something to his friends, and they all cheered, and the tall one pressed a coin into Bas's hand, an American coin with a bird on it, and went back to the pavement laughing.

Bas put the coin in his pocket. He would give it to the sergeant, he decided. With the song.

---

That night, in the yard, with the band asleep on the steps and the drums standing in a row by the back wall and the lamp guttering on its nail, Harry Ramlogan came out of the shop with a paper in his hand.

"They saying it in the town," he said. "In the rum shops. They say next year no Carnival. Because of the war. They say it will be stopped till it finish."

Lionel took the paper and read it, and gave it back.

"Till it finish," he said.

"Could be a year. Could be ten."

Bas looked at the row of oil drums in the lamplight. Four of them. Cyril's two pans with their chalk rings. His own tune boom. Behind them, out over the wall, the Dry River lay in its bed of dry stones under the starlight, and the frogs were singing in the last of the pools.

"So we practice," said Cyril. He was sitting on the ground with his back against the drums. "Till it finish."

"In the yard? With the police?"

"In the yard," said Cyril. "Quiet."

Old Harry looked at him. He looked at his son.

"Tassa man's son," he said, and shook his head, and went back into the shop, but he left the door open behind him, and Bas could see him in the lamplight, sitting on a rice sack, listening.

Out in the Road

> WAR IN EUROPE ENDS. The surrender is announced. Today and tomorrow are declared public holidays. Ships in the harbor will sound their sirens at noon. May 8, 1945.

The ships in the harbor began to scream at five minutes to twelve, early, as if they could not wait, and Kamla Ramlogan dropped a whole pound of rice on the shop floor.

It went everywhere. It went under the counter and into the cracks of the boards and over her bare feet, and she stood in the middle of it with the empty paper in her hand and her mouth open, listening. The sirens came up from the waterfront in one long rising howl after another, low ones and high ones, from the big gray ships that had been sitting in the gulf for four years and the little launches and the tugs, and then from the factories, the whistles going off one after another across the town, and then the motorcars in the street outside, horns, all of them, and a donkey cart going by with the donkey braying as if it understood.

"Is finish," said her grandfather.

Harry Ramlogan was sitting on his stool behind the counter with the radio on the shelf at his elbow. It was a big brown wooden radio with a cloth front, the first in Jubilee Yard, which Ramesh had bought in 1939 to hear the cricket and which had been talking about nothing but the war ever since. Now a man's voice on it, very far away, was saying something nobody in the shop could hear over the sirens.

"Grandpa?"

"In Europe. Is finish." He was fifty-seven, round and gray, and his face was wet. "Pick up the rice, girl. Your mother will kill you."

But he did not get up, and she did not pick it up, and they stayed like that, the old man on the stool and the girl in the rice, while the whole town screamed.

---

Kamla was fifteen. She went to the girls' school on Charlotte Street in a blue tunic and a white blouse, and she was clever and quick and bored, and she had two lives, like her grandfather.

In one, she was the eldest daughter of Ramesh and Savitri Ramlogan of the shop on Duncan Street, who helped behind the counter after school and helped her mother with the cooking in the evening and was going, her mother said, to be a teacher, and marry well, and live in a house in a good part of town with a garden and a gate.

In the other, she sat on the back wall of Jubilee Yard in the evening with her school shoes in her lap and her feet hanging over the Dry River, and listened to the panyard.

For three years it had been quiet. That was the strange thing. Since the war came, and Carnival was stopped, and the police took to walking past the yard gates at night with their torches, the band had practiced softly, so softly you could only hear it from the back wall. They wrapped the sticks in extra rubber. They played under the breadfruit tree with a blanket hung on the line between them and Duncan Street. They played with the doors of the rooms open and the lamps out. Cyril Dorival's pans, which had been four and then six and then nine, sat in a row along the back wall under sacking during the day, and at night they sang under the blanket like birds in a cage.

Kamla knew every one of them. She knew the little high one with nine notes that Cyril played, and the two middle ones that the boys from up the road played, and the big tune boom with four that her own uncle Bas played, when he was not at the base, and the deep one Mr. Lionel kept the time on. She knew the tunes they played: calypsos from before the war, and a slow waltz from a picture show, and some of the American songs the soldiers had brought, that came out of the windows of the clubs on the Western Main Road at night.

She knew, also, that her mother did not know she knew.

---

By one o'clock nobody was working anywhere.

Duncan Street was full. People had come out of every house and every yard and were walking up and down the middle of the road with nowhere to go, laughing, shaking hands, kissing people they did not know. An old man was standing on a box at the corner shouting about the King. Someone had found a bugle. The sun was enormous and white. It had not rained yet; it was the very end of the dry season, the dust in the road lifting at every step, the air thick and hot and sticky as syrup, the galvanize roofs too hot to touch.

In Jubilee Yard, the band was arguing.

Kamla could hear it from the back door of the shop. They were all at the panyard, at the back wall, Mr. Lionel and Cyril and her uncle Bas and the boys, and old Miss Clementine in a chair under the breadfruit tree, and Ma Ivy, and half the yard.

"No Carnival till the government say," Mr. Lionel was saying. "That is the order. Four years we keep it."

"The war finish, Mr. Lionel!"

"The war finish in Europe. The order didn't finish."

"Listen to the town!" That was Cyril. He hardly ever raised his voice. "Listen to it! The whole town in the road!"

Kamla edged out of the back door and across the yard, keeping close to the barrack wall, until she could see. Cyril was standing by the pans with his hands at his sides. Mr. Lionel was standing in front of him, sixty-something and solid as a post, his face set.

And then from the hill, from somewhere up past the Dry River in Laventille, a pan began to play.

It came over the roofs very clear in the hot air, a single high voice of steel, playing a calypso. Then another joined it. Then a boom. Then from the other direction, from somewhere toward Belmont, a second band, a different tune, and from the town below a third, very faint, and the whole of the sky over Port of Spain seemed to be filling up with iron, band after band, from yard after yard, coming out.

Mr. Lionel stood and listened to it. His face did not move.

Then Miss Clementine, in her chair under the breadfruit tree, said, very clearly, "Lionel. Take off the blanket."

---

Kamla's mother caught her at the gate.

Savitri Ramlogan was a small, quick, handsome woman with her hair oiled and pinned and a gold stud in her nose, and she came out of the shop like a hawk out of a tree and took Kamla by the arm just as the band was going through.

"Where you think you going?"

"Ma, is the end of the war."

"I can hear is the end of the war. The whole island can hear. You are not going in the road with that." She jerked her head at the band, which had come out of the yard with its pans on their straps, Cyril in front with the nine-note pan at his chest and the boys behind and Mr. Lionel and the boom and Bas with the big tune boom on his hip, and the crowd from Duncan Street falling in around them, screaming. "With them. Jumping in the street like a jamming fool."

"Uncle Bas going."

"Your uncle Bas is a big man and a fool. You are a girl in a school uniform."

"I will change it."

"Kamla."

And then a long thin hand came down on Savitri's shoulder, and they both turned.

Miss Clementine was standing behind them. She was seventy-two years old and she had got up out of her chair and walked across the yard, which Kamla had not seen her do quickly in years, and she had on a white dress and a red headtie that she must have been keeping ready in her room for exactly this, four years, waiting. In her other hand she had the bottle and the spoon.

"Savitri," she said. "I need somebody to walk with me. My knees not good. I can't walk in that crowd alone."

Savitri looked at her. "Miss Clementine..."

"I am an old woman," said Miss Clementine, who had never in Kamla's hearing described herself that way. "And I have walked with this band since before your husband's father was born, and I will not miss the end of the war on account of my knees. The girl will hold my arm. I will bring her back."

Kamla watched her mother's face. She had seen her mother win every argument of her life.

Savitri let go of her arm.

"Back before dark," she said to Kamla. "Before dark. And you hold her good. If she fall, I will hold you responsible for everything."

---

It was like nothing Kamla had ever seen.

The road was a river of people from wall to wall, flowing down toward the town. Every band from every yard was out, and they did not care about each other, they were all playing at once, tunes crashing into tunes, steel on steel, the noise so huge it seemed to have weight, to press on her face and chest like the heat. There were soldiers in it, and sailors, and Americans, and women in their best dresses and women in their housedresses and aprons and children on their fathers' shoulders and old men in their good hats. People had their arms around each other. People were crying. Everybody was dancing, the slow shuffling hip-rolling walk-dance of the road, and Kamla found that she was doing it too, in her school tunic, with Miss Clementine's arm in hers.

Miss Clementine did not walk fast. She walked straight, as she always walked, long-necked, chin up, right behind the boom, and every few steps she lifted the bottle and struck it, and Kamla could not hear it, could not possibly hear it in all that iron, but she could feel it through Miss Clementine's arm, the small steady jolt, like a heart.

"Is too loud for the bottle, Miss Clementine," she shouted.

"Is never too loud for the bottle," Miss Clementine shouted back. "The bottle is for them, not for you. Watch."

And Kamla watched. And she saw that Mr. Lionel, at the front, with his back to them, was listening for it. Every few bars he turned his head a little to one side. Cyril too. And she understood that they could not hear it either, not really, and that it did not matter, that they knew it was there.

They went down Charlotte Street and across to the big square where the public buildings stood, and the square was so full of people that the band stopped, could not move, could only stand in one place and play. There were ships' flags strung across the street from the balconies. There was a man up a lamp post. There were people singing a calypso from the old days, before the war, that Kamla's father used to sing at the shop counter about a man who lost his donkey and found it in the Governor's garden, and the whole square sang the chorus, and Cyril played it, and the boom went under it like the floor of the world.

Cyril looked round once, over his pan. He saw her. He saw Miss Clementine. He grinned, which he hardly ever did, and his face changed completely, and went back to the pan.

Kamla's cheeks were hot. It was the sun. It was the dancing.

---

They came back at dusk, as promised, Miss Clementine walking slower now, leaning on Kamla's arm with real weight, the bottle hanging from her other hand.

The light was going pink over the Laventille hills and the swallows were out, darting over the yard, and the smell of every kitchen fire in Duncan Street was in the air, people cooking for the first time all day because they had remembered they were hungry. The band was still in the road behind them, still playing, and would play all night, but softer.

At the gate Miss Clementine stopped.

"Your hand," she said.

Kamla held out her hand. Miss Clementine put the bottle in it, and the spoon.

"Keep them for me," she said. "Till tomorrow. I am too tired to carry them in the house."

Kamla stood there with the rum bottle and the old bent tablespoon. They were warm from the old woman's hand. The glass was worn cloudy where she had struck it, a patch of scratches as fine as hair, just below the neck.

"Miss Clementine..."

"Till tomorrow," said Miss Clementine. She went in through the gate, very straight, and across the yard to her room, and Ma Ivy came out and took her arm, and Kamla saw them go in, and the door close.

Her mother was in the shop door. Kamla went to her with the bottle and the spoon in her hand and her school tunic gray with dust and soaked through with sweat, and her hair down out of its plait, and her feet black.

Savitri took in the whole of her, from the loose hair to the black feet. Then she looked at the bottle.

"Inside," she said. "Bathe. Then eat."

"Yes, Ma."

"And put that somewhere safe," said her mother, more quietly, "since she give it to you."

Sinking the Head

> CARNIVAL RETURNS. After four years, masqueraders will once more take to the streets of the city on Monday and Tuesday next. Steel bands, it is understood, will be permitted to parade. March 1946.

The first blow of the sledgehammer went through the whole of Jubilee Yard like a ship's bell dropped down a stairwell, and Cyril Dorival heard his grandmother say, from inside her room, very distinctly, "Mercy, not again."

He did not stop. He could not stop now. He stood over the drum in the gray light before six in the morning, with the sledge in both hands and his feet planted wide in the dust, and swung again, and the steel head of the oil drum took the blow in its exact center and gave under it, a little, and boomed. He swung again. Again. Each blow a little to one side of the last, walking round in a circle. The drum stood on a ring of old tires to steady it, and every time the sledge came down the tires bounced and the whole yard shook.

Bas Ramlogan, sitting on the back wall with a cup of coffee, winced at every stroke and grinned.

"You going to wake up the whole hill."

"The whole hill doing the same thing," said Cyril, and swung.

It was true. From up the river, from Laventille, from Belmont, from yards he could not see, came the same sound that morning, and every morning that February: the great slow boom of sledges on steel. Every band in the city was sinking drums. The war was over, the Carnival was back, and every yard that had a pan wanted more.

---

He had learned it from a boy up the river who had learned it from someone in a yard on the hill who had worked it out during the war years, when the bands were playing quietly behind blankets and had nothing to do but think. Nobody knew who had done it first. Everybody said it was their yard.

It was simple, once you saw it. Before the war, they had raised the notes. Little hills hammered up from underneath, one by one, in the flat drum head. But a flat head had only so much room. Hills took space. You could fit nine, ten, and then there was nowhere else to put them, and they crowded each other and went sour.

So instead you sank the whole head first. You took the sledge and beat the top of the drum down, down, down, in rings, from the edge to the middle, until it was a deep smooth bowl, like a wok, like a calabash, a hand's depth or more at the center. You stretched the steel. You made it thin. And then, in the bowl, with chalk, you drew where the notes would go. Big ones near the rim. Small ones near the middle, where the steel was thinnest. And then you made each note by knocking it back up a little from beneath, a little dome inside the bowl, and grooving around it with a punch.

A sunk head had room. A sunk head had more steel in it to sing.

Cyril had sunk three heads since Christmas. Two had split. The third had held, and from it he had made a pan with fourteen notes on it, fourteen chalk rings in a gray steel bowl, and it was the best pan he had ever made.

It still did not have the note.

---

The note was not a note he could hum. That was the trouble. He could hum the falling part of the song. He could hum it in his sleep. But when he tried to play it, there was a place in the slide, a little catch, where the voice went down between two notes he had and landed on something neither of them was, a note that lived in the crack between them. On his grandmother's voice it was nothing, a dip, a crack in the floor that the foot finds without thinking. On steel it did not exist.

He had told nobody this. He was not sure he had the words for it. Only Kamla, once, the summer before, sitting on the back wall with her school books while he tuned, had heard him going up and down the same two notes for an hour and said, without looking up from her geometry, "You want the one in between."

He had stopped hammering. "How you know that?"

"Is what you keep missing." She turned a page. "Every time. You go this one, and that one, and then you make a face like you bite a lime."

He had not known his face did anything.

---

When the bowl was sunk, he chalked it.

He did this in the afternoon, sitting on an upturned crate under the breadfruit tree, the pan across his knees. Kamla came after school with a new stick of chalk from her desk and sat on the wall and watched. She was sixteen and done with pretending she was not interested. Her mother had given up pretending too, more or less, after the end of the war, and now only sent Kamla's little brother to the panyard every hour to see if she was still respectable.

Cyril drew the rings. Big ones at the edge. Smaller as he went in.

"Why you put that one there?" said Kamla.

"Is where it fit."

"But the song go from that one to that one." She pointed with the chalk, leaning down from the wall. "And they on two different sides. You will have to reach right across."

He looked at it. She was right. He had placed the notes by size, the way he always had, the way the boy up the river had shown him. Not by how the tunes walked.

"Where you would put them?"

She slid off the wall and knelt in the dust by the crate, which her mother would have something to say about, and took the chalk and drew, lightly, over his rings, a line, the path the hand would take down through the falling part. Down and round and down.

"So," she said. "Next to each other. So the hand could walk."

He rubbed his rings out with the heel of his hand and drew them again, along her line.

---

When the notes were grooved, he fired it.

This was the part the yard hated most. He built a fire of old tires and scrap wood and broken crates in a ring of stones at the back of the panyard, by the wall over the Dry River, and when it was roaring and black smoke was pouring off it and rolling over the wall and down the riverbed, he set the pan face down on top of it.

The smell was enormous. Burning rubber, thick and sweet and choking. Then, underneath it, as the steel heated, the smell of whatever had been in the drum before it came from the base: a ghost of oil cooking out of the seams, black and greasy, and something sharp, like the smell of the forge at Mr. Peters's smithy, hot metal and scale. The women at the kitchen shed tied cloths over their mouths and swore at him. The children were sent inside. His grandmother, from her doorway, sent her opinion of him across the yard in four words, all of them new to him.

He watched the steel. As it heated, the oil residue burned off in little blue and yellow flames that ran along the skirt like quick small animals. The steel went dark, then darker. Then, at the edge, a faint straw color crept in, then blue, a deep bright peacock blue, and he snatched it off the fire with two iron hooks and set it down on the earth to cool slowly, in the ashes, the way Mr. Peters had said, years ago. Soft and sweet.

It ticked as it cooled. A small steady ticking, like a clock, for an hour.

Bas brought him a cup of sorrel, the last of the Christmas batch, dark red and spicy with clove, gone a little fizzy from keeping. They sat on the wall together and watched the pan tick.

"Fitzroy say," said Bas, "the base will stay. After the war. The Americans not going home."

"So more drums."

"So more drums."

Cyril drank his sorrel. "Good," he said.

---

Then the tuning. Two weeks of it, every night after the smithy. The small hammer. The pan on his knees. Tap, listen. Tap from underneath to raise a note. Tap from above to lower it. Tap at the edge of a note to make it ring longer. Tap in the middle to make it brighter. Strike it with the rubber stick. Listen. Too high. Tap. Listen. Too low now. Tap. Listen.

It was not something you could tell anyone how to do. That was what he had discovered. He could show Bas where to hit. He could not show him how to hear it. His ear knew when a note was right the way his tongue knew when salt was right in a pot. It just knew.

He wrote it down anyway. On the back of the panyard door, the old plank door between the barrack and the back wall, he had begun in January to keep a list in chalk, and every pan in Torchlight was on it: what kind of drum it had been, where it came from, who sank it, who tuned it, who played it, how many notes. Bas had laughed at him. Then Bas had taken the chalk and corrected his own entry, because Cyril had spelled his name wrong. Then Mr. Lionel had come and stood before the door with his hands clasped behind him, reading every line, and had said nothing, and the next day Cyril found that someone had added at the bottom, in old careful capitals, the bamboo: two booms, three pairs of knockers, two cutters, one bottle, and beside the bottle a name, CLEMENTINE.

---

On Carnival Monday, before light, Torchlight came out of the gate into Duncan Street for the first time in four years.

It was cool and dark, a sky of stars, the smell of the dew on the dust. The street was already full, and the noise from the hill was already enormous, steel everywhere, every band in the city out at once in the dark and none of them in tune with any other. And there were lamps in the street, lanterns and torches of old rags stuffed in bottles, carried by the people walking beside the bands, so that the road was full of moving fire.

Cyril saw it and stopped. The pan was on his chest. He felt his throat close.

His grandmother was in the gateway. She had come out to see them go. She was seventy-three, and she would not walk the whole morning now; Kamla would walk with the bottle. But she stood at the gate in her white dress and red headtie with a lantern in her hand, and he saw her looking at the road full of fire the same way he was.

He did not say anything to her. He lifted the sticks.

He played the tune of the year first, the calypso everyone knew, and the band came in behind him. And then, in the street, before they had gone ten yards, he turned the tune, the way he had been practicing, and played the climb. The three notes going up, along Kamla's chalk line. The long one held.

And the falling part, down, the hand walking, step by step, round the bowl.

All the way to the crack. To the place where the one in between should be.

He jumped it. He landed on the note above it, and then the note below, and went on down, and finished, and it was almost right, it was nearly the song, and to anybody in the street it was a pretty little phrase that the young man from Jubilee Yard had put in front of the calypso, and they cheered.

He looked back at the gate.

His grandmother had heard it. She was standing very still with the lantern. Across the dark, across the crowd and the noise, she looked at him and shook her head, slowly, once, not angry, not sad. Not yet, the shake meant. Nearly. Not yet.

He nodded. He turned back to the road. And Kamla Ramlogan, beside the boom with the bottle, struck it, steady, steady, and the band went down Duncan Street toward the town with the fire all around it.

Truce at the Standpipe

> DISTURBANCE IN EAST DRY RIVER. A clash between members of two steel bands on Saturday night was ended by the arrival of police. A number of instruments were taken up. Persons are reminded that the carrying of sticks and cutlasses in the road is an offense. January 1948.

The police came for the pans on Sunday morning at seven, and by a quarter past they had gone again, and Lionel Dorival had spent the whole fifteen minutes standing in front of the panyard door with his arms folded, making sure that nobody in Jubilee Yard said anything clever.

There were six of them, a sergeant and five constables, in khaki, with a handcart. They were polite. Lionel had been dealing with police in this yard since 1884, through his father and his own years, and he knew polite when he saw it, and he knew it was thin. The sergeant read a paper. The constables went into the panyard and came out with two more pans to go with the two they had picked up in the road the night before, and put them in the handcart, and the sergeant gave Lionel a slip with the numbers on it, and touched his cap, and they went.

Cyril stood by the breadfruit tree with his fists in his pockets and watched months of work go out of the gate in a handcart, and did not say anything clever, because Lionel had looked at him.

Desmond was not in the yard. Lionel's son Desmond, twenty-three, who had been in the road the night before, was at his mother's sister's in Belmont, where Lionel had sent him at one in the morning when he came home with his shirt torn and his eyes too bright, talking fast, with a long scrape on his knuckles. Lionel had not asked for the story. He had heard enough of it already, in pieces, from the boys who came back first.

---

It had started, as it always started, with nothing.

A fete on Saturday night at a dance hall by the river, both bands invited. A pan from Torchlight and a pan from the Riverbed Kings set up at the same end of the hall. Somebody's tune too loud over somebody else's tune. Somebody's girl. Somebody's word. Then it was in the road outside, and it was not a word anymore, and it lasted about as long as an egg takes to boil before the police whistles came up the street and everybody ran.

Nobody was badly hurt. Lionel thanked luck, or whatever it was that kept boys alive on Saturday nights. Some scrapes, a split lip, one of the Kings boys with a turned ankle. Nothing to take to the hospital. But two of Torchlight's pans had been left lying in the road, and one of the Kings' booms, and the police had picked them up, and then they had come to the yards in the morning for the rest, and now there would be fines, and court, and the Kings would be saying it was Torchlight's fault, and Torchlight would be saying it was the Kings', and next Saturday it would start again.

It had been like this for two years. Ever since the war ended and the bands came out. Every yard had a band now, and every band had a name, and every name was a flag, and the boys followed the flags.

Lionel was fifty-five. He had seen a war. He had seen what happened to boys who followed flags.

---

"We go up there," said Bas Ramlogan at the standpipe that evening. "We go up there and get back the boom they take off Desmond."

"They didn't take any boom off Desmond," said Lionel. "The police take it."

"Same thing."

"Is not the same thing."

The whole yard was at the standpipe, as it always was at the end of a day: the women with their buckets, the men washing their arms and necks, the children dodging round the legs of everyone. The sun was low and orange behind the town, and the galvanize roofs were ticking as they cooled, and somewhere on Duncan Street a radio was playing an American song with trumpets in it. In the kitchen shed somebody was frying bake, and the smell of it lay across the yard like a warm blanket.

His aunt Clementine sat on her chair by the door of her room. She was seventy-five. She had been listening.

"Lionel," she said. "How long since my mother died?"

He looked at her. "Since nineteen hundred and twenty, Tanty."

"And how long since the police put my father drum in the roof?"

"Sixty-four years."

"Sixty-four years." She nodded slowly. "Sixty-four years they been taking this band music. Drum, torch, bamboo, tin. Now pan." She looked round the yard, at Bas, at Cyril, at the boys. "And now we will help them? We will give them the pans ourselves? Fighting in the road like fowls, so they could come with a handcart?"

The boys looked at their feet.

"Tanty," said Cyril. "Is not we start it."

"I didn't ask who start it." She looked at Lionel. "I asked who will finish."

---

He went up the river alone on Tuesday evening.

He did not take the road. He went down over the back wall into the Dry River, the way the family had gone the night of the Canboulay, and walked up the riverbed. It was dry season now, the bed wide and white with stones, the thread of water down the middle gone green and slow, the frogs starting up as the light went. High walls rose on both sides, the backs of yards, the backs of houses on stilts, washing lines, a goat looking down at him from a broken fence. Sounds came down off the banks: radios, children, a woman calling, the hammering of a pan being tuned somewhere, ping ping ping, and the boom of a sledge.

The Kings' yard was a mile up, where the river bent under the hill. He knew it by the sound. He climbed up the bank on a path of old steps cut into the earth and came up over a low wall into their panyard.

There were twenty young men in it. They all stood up.

He stood there with his hands open at his sides, an old gray man in a clean white shirt, and waited.

Their leader was a big young man called Elvin, a dock worker, with a broad flat calm face and a scar through one eyebrow from some other Saturday night. Lionel knew him a little from the wharf. Elvin studied him. Then he jerked his chin at the boys, and they sat down again, slowly, still watching.

"Mr. Lionel."

"Elvin."

"You come alone."

"I am too old to come with company," said Lionel. "Company make noise."

Elvin almost smiled.

---

They talked for an hour, sitting on two oil drums at the edge of the panyard with the lantern between them. The boys listened. Lionel did not lecture. He had been lectured by officers in the war and knew it did not work on anybody. He talked about the handcart. He talked about the fines, and the court, and the four pans of Cyril's that were sitting in a police store with numbers on them, and the Kings' boom sitting beside them.

"The police love this," he said. "Every Saturday we fight, they get a handcart full of pans. Soon they will have more pans than us. They will start a band."

One of the boys laughed. Elvin looked at him and he stopped.

"So what you want, Mr. Lionel?"

"I want it settled."

"How?"

Lionel had thought about this all the way up the river.

"Come down to the yard," he said. "Saturday night. Bring your pans. Not to the road. To the yard. Jubilee Yard. You play for us, we play for you. The whole yard will listen. And whoever play sweeter, the other band will say so. In front of everybody. And that will be that."

Elvin stared at him. "A contest?"

"Call it what you like."

"Who will judge?"

Lionel had thought about that too.

"My aunt," he said. "Miss Clementine Dorival. Seventy-five years old. She walk with the bamboo since before your grandfather born. She will tell you the truth whether you want it or not. Ask anybody on the hill."

Elvin thought about it. The boys were all looking at him. Below them, out over the wall, the river was dark now, and the frogs were very loud.

"She will cheat for her own," said one of the boys.

Elvin turned his head. "You ever meet Miss Clementine?"

"No."

"I buy sugar cake from her at the market since I was six," said Elvin. "She never give me a piece extra one time in my life." He turned back to Lionel. "Saturday."

---

They came down the river on Saturday night with their pans.

Lionel heard them before he saw them. He was standing at the back wall with Cyril and Bas, and the whole yard was behind him, every tenant, every child, the Ramlogans out of the shop, people from Duncan Street who had heard. And from up the riverbed, far off, came a sound: steel, playing, coming closer. Then lights. Lanterns and torches, a long string of them, swaying, coming down the dry bed of the river in the dark between the high walls.

He felt the hair go up on his arms. He thought of his grandfather, and the torches going down the riverbed the other way, in the other century.

The Kings came up over the back wall into the yard with their pans held high, and the yard parted for them, and they set up by the breadfruit tree. Torchlight was by the standpipe. Between them was the strip of beaten earth where the kalinda men had once danced and the bamboo had first been stamped and the biscuit tins had first rung, and in the middle of it, on her chair, with a cup of tea on the ground by her foot, sat Clementine.

The Kings played first.

They were good. Lionel had known they would be. Their tuner had a trick with the low notes that made them round and warm as a voice, and they played a calypso from the tents that season and then a slow waltz that the boys must have been working on for weeks, the high pans carrying the tune and the booms rolling under it like the sea, and when they finished the yard cheered them, honestly, Torchlight's people too. Cyril, beside Lionel, was leaning forward with his mouth a little open, listening to the low notes the way a man listens to someone speaking his name in a crowd.

Then Torchlight played. The same calypso. Then a march, the kind the police band played, which they had learned as a joke and kept because it was hard. And at the end, because Cyril could not help himself, the old song, the climb and the hold and the long walk down round the bowl, almost right, missing only the one in the crack.

The yard cheered.

Then everybody looked at Clementine.

She sat a long time. She picked up her tea and drank some and put it down again. She looked at the Kings by the breadfruit tree, and at Torchlight by the standpipe, the boys on both sides very still. Then she pointed at Elvin.

"Your low pans," she said. "Who tune them?"

A thin young man in a vest put up his hand. "Me, Miss."

"They sweeter than ours. Much sweeter. You will show my grandson how you do that."

The thin young man looked at Elvin. Elvin nodded slowly.

Clementine turned to Cyril. "And you," she said. "Your high pan sweeter than theirs. You will show him."

"Tanty..."

"I am not finish." She looked at both bands. "The Kings play the calypso better. Torchlight play the march better. Nobody play the waltz but the Kings, so they win that. And nobody play my mother's song but us, so we win that." She folded her hands in her lap. "So nobody win. And next Saturday, you all come back, and play again, and I will judge again. And the Saturday after. And any Saturday a boy from the Kings and a boy from Torchlight fight in the road, then the next Saturday there is no playing. For anybody. And everybody will know whose fault."

---

Afterward, much later, with the lanterns burning low and the women of the yard bringing out pots of pelau and callaloo with crab and the last of a pot of bake for everybody, Kings and Torchlight together, Lionel sat on the low chair that had been his father's and watched his nephew and the thin young man from up the river squatting together over one of the Kings' low pans by the standpipe, with a lantern between them.

The thin young man was tapping. Cyril was listening with his head bent close. Then Cyril took the hammer and tapped, and the thin young man listened, and nodded, and shook his head, and pointed. They did not talk much. Now and then one of them laughed.

Elvin came and sat on an upturned bucket beside Lionel with a plate of pelau balanced on his knee.

"Next Saturday," Elvin said.

"Next Saturday."

"The police will hear about this," said Elvin, "and they will think we planning something."

"Let them think," said Lionel. "They can't carry away a Saturday in a handcart."

Down the yard, by the standpipe, the thin young man struck a low note on the Kings' pan, and then Cyril struck the same note on his, and they listened to the two notes hang together in the warm dark, and both of them, at the same moment, reached for the hammer.

Savannah Night

> STEEL BAND COMPETITION. On Carnival Saturday night at the Savannah, bands from all districts will compete for a silver cup before a panel of judges. Each band to play one calypso and one piece of its own choosing. February 1950.

Kamla Ramlogan had told her mother she was going to the competition to chaperone her little cousins, which was true, and that she would be home by ten, which was not, and that she had no particular interest in which band won, which was such a large lie that she was surprised the sky did not crack open over the Savannah to say so.

The cousins were twelve and nine, and she had lost them within a quarter of an hour, and did not much care, because they knew the way home better than she did and had been given strict instructions to tell nobody anything.

She stood at the rail by the grandstand in the dark with the grass wet under her sandals and the dew coming down, and looked at the stage.

---

The Savannah at night was a different country. In the day it was a great flat burnt plain of grass in the middle of the city, ringed by the big old houses with their towers and verandahs and the huge trees, the samaans spreading their branches over the road like umbrellas, and men playing cricket and boys flying kites and cows, sometimes, grazing at the far end. At night it went dark and enormous and smelled of cut grass and horse and the sweet damp breath of the hills behind it, the Northern Range black against the stars. Only the grandstand was lit. Bulbs strung on wires across the front of the stage, and floodlights on poles that drew every moth in the island, so that the light was full of soft white wings.

And the crowd. Thousands. Sitting in the stand, standing at the rails, spread out on the grass in the dark beyond, so many that Kamla could feel them more than see them, a warm living mass of people pressed together, talking, laughing, shouting at friends, eating. The vendors walked through them with trays on their heads and lamps on their trays. Roasted corn, black in the husk, with salt. Peanuts in paper cones, still hot. Sugar cake, which made her think of Miss Clementine. A man with a donkey cart full of green coconuts was chopping the tops off with three strokes of a cutlass and handing them over, and the cool sweet water ran down her chin when she drank, and she did not care that it spotted her good blouse.

Twelve bands. One after another on the stage, from every part of the city. The Riverbed Kings had played already, third, and played well, and their low pans had made the whole crowd sigh. Torchlight was ninth.

She had seen Cyril once, at the side of the stage, in the crowd of players waiting to go up. He had not seen her. He was in a white shirt with a red band round the sleeve, like all of Torchlight tonight, and he was standing perfectly still with his pan against his chest, his eyes shut, his lips moving.

---

She was twenty. She was in her second year at the training college for teachers, which her mother had wanted, and which, to her own surprise, she had come to love. She taught a class of eight-year-olds at a school in Belmont three mornings a week as practice and came home with chalk on her fingers and stories about boys who ate their pencils, and her mother listened to the stories with her face shining.

Her mother did not know about Cyril.

That was not quite right. Her mother knew everything. Her mother knew that Kamla had been sitting on the back wall of the panyard since she was seven. Her mother knew that Cyril Dorival had been tuning pans in the yard for fifteen years and that Kamla had been watching him for most of them. Her mother knew that since Christmas, Kamla had come home from the panyard later and later, and had stopped saying where she had been.

What her mother did not know, officially, was that four weeks ago, on the back wall over the Dry River, in the rain, Cyril had asked Kamla to marry him, and Kamla had said yes before he had finished the question, and he had laughed in surprise and nearly fallen off the wall.

They had told nobody. They had been waiting for Carnival to be over.

---

When she was small, a band competing on a stage would have seemed a strange idea.

When she was little, the bands had gone out in the road, and the road was the contest. Who had the most people jumping behind them. Who was the loudest. Whose name was on people's lips on Ash Wednesday morning. And then for years after the war the contest had been in the street, at the corners, with fists, and the police with their handcarts.

Then Miss Clementine had sat in her chair between the Kings and Torchlight with her cup of tea, two years ago, and judged them. And had done it the next Saturday, and the next. And word had gone round the hill, and other bands had come down to Jubilee Yard to be judged too, until Miss Clementine said she was a seventy-five-year-old woman and not a magistrate, and somebody had better organize this properly before she lost her temper. And somebody had. Committees. Rules. A stage. A silver cup.

And now here it was. Twelve bands, playing on a stage under lights to thousands of people sitting on the grass, and not one fist anywhere.

Miss Clementine had not come. She said it was too far and too late and too cold and she would hear about it by breakfast. But she had made Kamla promise to listen to the Kings' low pans and tell her if they were still sweeter than Torchlight's.

---

The eighth band finished, a band from the west of the city, to a long roar. And then the announcer, a man in a white suit with a voice like a ship's horn, read from a paper, and said the name.

Torchlight.

Kamla's hands closed on the rail.

They came up onto the stage carrying their pans, twenty-two of them, and set up in the light. She could see them all. Mr. Lionel at the back with the big boom, fifty-seven years old and gray as an old fence, his face calm. Her uncle Bas with the tune boom. The boys from the yard, and the boys from Duncan Street, and two of the boys from the Kings who had come over the year before, after the Saturdays. And Cyril in front with the tenor pan, his own, the best pan he had ever made, twenty-four notes in a bowl sunk so deep and so smooth that you could see the floodlights in it. She had chalked the rings for him. She had walked the path with her finger round the bowl until he had it right.

The crowd went quiet. It was a big, deep quiet, like water.

They played the calypso first. It was the road march of the year, the one about the woman who went to the market and came back with the wrong husband, and the whole Savannah knew it and the whole Savannah wanted to sing it, and Kamla could hear them, thousands of people humming under their breath on the grass in the dark, as Torchlight played. It was fast and bright and clean. Cyril's tenor danced on top of it. The booms rolled. In the middle, Bas's tune boom took the melody alone for eight bars, walking down, and the crowd roared, and Kamla saw her uncle grin in the light like a boy.

Then the second piece. The piece of their own choosing.

She knew what it was. They had argued about it for two months in the panyard. Mr. Lionel had wanted a march, because marches impressed judges. Bas had wanted an American song. The boys had wanted a waltz. And Cyril had wanted to play the old song, and everyone had said no, because it was too short, and too strange, and nobody outside Jubilee Yard knew it, and anyway he still could not play the whole of it.

They had played a waltz. A slow waltz from a picture show. It was beautiful.

But at the very end, as the last chord of the waltz was dying away under the floodlights and the moths, Cyril did something that had not been planned. She saw Mr. Lionel's head come up. Cyril lifted his sticks alone and played, very softly, the climb. Three notes, up. The long one held, ringing out over the dark of the Savannah. And then the walk down round the bowl, step by step, to the place where the note was missing.

He stopped there. He did not jump it this time. He stopped right at the edge, on the last note he had, and held it, and let it ring, and let it fade, and lowered the sticks.

There was a silence on the Savannah that went on so long that Kamla heard a moth hit a bulb.

Then the crowd broke.

---

They did not win. A band from across town won, a big band from Woodbrook with forty players and a famous tuner, and they deserved to win, and everybody said so. The Riverbed Kings were second. Torchlight was third. The announcer in the white suit read it out once, at midnight, the three names, and the crowd cheered all three, and the band from Woodbrook lifted the silver cup over their heads in the lights, and that was all.

Kamla found Cyril behind the grandstand, in the dark, among the pans being packed onto the handcart.

"Third," he said. He did not seem to mind. He seemed dazed.

"You stopped," she said. "At the end. You didn't jump it."

"I couldn't jump it again." He looked at the pan in his hands. "Not in front of all those people. If it isn't the note, it isn't the note."

"They didn't know it was missing."

"I knew."

She stood beside him. The crowd was going home across the grass in the dark, thousands of people, the vendors' lamps bobbing among them like fireflies, and somewhere a band that had lost was playing anyway, as it walked, a calypso, fast and happy.

"I am going to tell my mother tomorrow," she said.

He turned and looked at her.

"After Carnival, we said."

"I don't want to wait," she said. "I want to tell her. I am tired of lying about the cousins."

---

She told her mother on Ash Wednesday, in the kitchen behind the shop, while her mother was grinding spices on the stone.

Savitri did not stop grinding. Kamla stood at the door and said all of it at once, the whole thing, and her mother rolled the stone back and forth over the cumin and the coriander seeds with both hands, and the smell rose up warm and dark and sharp, and she did not look up.

When Kamla had finished, her mother went on grinding for a while.

"The pan man," she said at last.

"Yes, Ma."

"Ivy Dorival's son. Miss Clementine's grandson. The one who burn tires in the yard and make my whole house smell like the devil kitchen."

"Yes, Ma."

Her mother put down the stone. She wiped her hands on a cloth. She looked at Kamla for a long time. Then she went past her, out of the kitchen, into the yard, across the beaten earth past the standpipe in the hot morning sun, to the kitchen shed, and stopped at the corner post.

Kamla followed her.

The post was gray and old and hard as iron, and it was covered in names. Kamla had looked at it all her life. Every child born in the yard since before her great-grandmother's time. Some in letters. Some in signs. A fish. A star. A ring.

Her mother put her finger on one of them, halfway down, worn almost smooth: a small curved mark with a line across the top, like a little house.

"Your grandfather," she said. "Harry. Old Dularie make that, the year they come, when he was nine. In her own writing. Old Mathilda Dorival tell her put him on the post, though he was not born here."

Kamla had known it was there. She had not known how it got there.

Her mother's finger moved up. CYRIL, in plain capitals, cut by his grandmother. And just below it, in a hand Kamla knew because it was her father's: KAMLA.

Savitri stood looking at the two names, a hand's width apart on the old dark wood.

"So," she said, "the post already decide."

She went back to her kitchen. At the door she turned round.

"Tell him come and eat on Sunday," she said. "And tell him wash first. I will not have iron dust in my curry."

A Gray River

> STEEL BAND FOR BRITAIN. A picked orchestra of players drawn from many bands will sail this month to perform at the festival in London. The players have been chosen for their skill and their good conduct. July 1951.

The pan would not stay in tune on the ship, and Cyril Dorival spent the first four days of the voyage to England lying on his back on the deck with a small hammer, tapping, while the sea did its best to roll him into the scuppers.

It was the salt, partly, and the damp, and the cold that came on as they went north. Mostly it was the steel. A pan was a living thing. It moved. It had been made in the heat of a yard in Port of Spain, under galvanize, by a fire of old tires, and it did not understand where it was now, on an iron deck in the middle of the gray Atlantic with spray coming over the rail. The notes drifted a little every night. Every morning he tuned them back.

The other players thought he was mad. Some of them were seasick and could not lift their heads, let alone a hammer. The boy from San Fernando who played the second tenor had been lying in his bunk since the first afternoon, green, saying he wanted to die and be buried at sea so that he would never have to get on another ship. The big man from the hill who played bass was sick over the rail every hour and came back to his chair each time saying, cheerfully, that he was nearly empty now.

Cyril was not sick. Something about the sea agreed with him. He lay on the deck in his jacket with the pan on his chest and the hammer in his hand and the whole sky moving over him, enormous and white, and listened.

---

There were eleven of them. Picked from bands all over the island, from every part of the city and two from the south. Some of them had fought each other in the road a few years before. One of them was the thin young man from the Riverbed Kings who had shown Cyril his low notes by the standpipe, and who had shown him a great deal more since. The rest Cyril had met only in the past three months, at rehearsals in a hall in the town where the leader, a quiet exacting musician who never raised his voice and never needed to, had made them play the same scales for hours until they could not see straight.

He had also made them build new pans. That was the first thing he had done. The pans of the yards would not do, he said. They were good for the road, for calypso, for the tunes of the yard. But they were going to play for people who had heard orchestras all their lives, and they would have to play the music those people knew. Waltzes. Marches. Pieces from the old composers. And that music needed every note.

"Every note?" Cyril had said.

"Every note there is," said the leader. "Every one between. Every half step. If a piece ask for it, you must have it."

So Cyril had built himself a new pan for the voyage, in the yard, with Bas and the thin young man helping. A new drum from the base, sunk deeper than any he had sunk before, so deep his arms shook for a week. And on it, following the leader's chart, he had chalked every note. All of them. Every one between. Twenty-six notes in a steel bowl, the little ones crowded at the center like seeds in a pod.

He had not thought about the song once while he made it. That was the strange thing, afterward. He had been thinking about waltzes.

---

England, when they came to it, was gray.

That was what everyone said, stepping off the ship at the port and getting on the train with their pans in canvas bags, and Cyril heard it so many times on that first day that it became a kind of joke among them. The sky was gray. The sea was gray. The stone of the buildings was gray. The faces of the people at the station were gray, or pink, or a color between that he had no word for. The trees were green, but a dark tired green, not the green of the hills at home. It was July, high summer they said, and he was cold to his bones in his good jacket, and the boy from San Fernando, who had recovered on the train, put on every shirt he had brought, one on top of the other, and walked about looking like a pillow.

London was bigger than anything. Bigger than the sea. They came into it on the train in the afternoon through miles of brick houses all joined together in rows, every one with a chimney, every chimney with a little smoke, and then the river, and the bridges, and the great buildings along the water, and the whole city under a low gray lid of cloud that never quite became rain and never quite stopped being about to.

The river was the thing he remembered after. It was enormous and brown-gray and full of boats, and it moved slowly in a way the Dry River never did, a heavy, patient, oily river in no hurry at all with gulls over it, smelling of mud and coal smoke and the sea. He stood on a bridge the first evening and looked down at it and thought of the riverbed behind the yard, white stones and a green thread of water and the frogs singing. He thought about it so hard he did not hear the leader calling him.

---

They lived in a hostel, in a long room with iron beds, and rehearsed every morning in a hall nearby, and in the afternoons they played on the festival grounds by the river, on a stage under a white roof among the new buildings and the crowds and the flags.

The first time they played, the English people did not know what to do.

Cyril watched them. They came strolling along the riverside in their coats and hats, families, old men, young women pushing baby carriages, soldiers, and they heard the sound and stopped. You could see it in their faces. They had been told about a band of oil drums. They had expected a noise. And then the pans came in, the tenors and the seconds and the bass, and played a waltz, the slow one from the old composer that the leader had made them practice until they dreamed it, and the English people stood still on the path with their mouths a little open, and one old woman sat down on a bench very suddenly, as if her legs had gone.

They applauded politely at the end. They were English. But they did not leave. More came. By the end of the afternoon there were hundreds, all along the river, standing in the gray light, and when the band played a calypso at the end, the leader allowing it as a reward, some of them began, stiffly and then not so stiffly, to move.

And among them, Cyril saw, there were faces from home. Not from Port of Spain. But from the islands. Men in good suits who had come over on the ships after the war, to work, and women with them, and they had heard about the band, and they had come across the city to stand by the river. He saw them at the back of the crowd. One of them, a heavy gray-haired man in a brown suit with a hat in his hands, was crying openly, and not wiping his face, and not caring who saw.

---

He found the note on a Tuesday, in the morning, alone.

He had gone to the rehearsal hall early, before the others. He could not sleep in the hostel; the beds were hard and the sky was light too early and too late, and the city made a sound at night that he could not get used to, a low steady roar like the sea, without the sea. The hall was empty and cold, smelling of floor polish and damp coats. Rain was running down the long windows. He sat down on a chair with the pan on its stand in front of him and the sticks in his hands, and for no reason at all, because he was cold and far from home and it was raining, he played the song.

The climb. Three notes up, like a torch lifted. The long one held, ringing out in the cold empty hall.

Then the walk down, round the bowl, along the line that Kamla had chalked. Step by step. To the edge. To the crack, the place where the one in between should be.

And it was there.

He had played past it a hundred times in the past three months, in scales, in waltzes, in the pieces from the old composers. It had been on the pan since he chalked it in the yard. A little note near the center, small as a coin, between two others. He had made it for European music, because the leader's chart said so. He had never once thought to look for it in his grandmother's song.

His stick found it now without his asking. The hand walked down, and there was a step where there had never been a step. He struck it. It sang, small and sweet and a little sad, exactly the note of the catch in the old woman's voice, the dip, the place where the spark falls and is caught for an instant in the air before it drops again.

And then the rest of it came down after, easy, the whole slide, like water finding its way down a gutter after rain.

He stopped. He sat in the cold hall with the rain on the windows and his heart going like a boom.

He played it again. The whole thing. Climb, hold, fall. Every note. All of it, from the bottom to the top and down again, on steel, the way his great-grandmother had made it, sitting on the back wall over the Dry River in the year she married.

He played it a third time. Then he put the sticks down on the pan and put his hands flat on his knees and sat very still in the cold hall.

---

When the others came in, shaking the rain off their jackets and complaining, he did not tell them. He did not know how to. It was not a thing that could be told to men who had not lived in Jubilee Yard. It was not a waltz.

He told the thin young man from the Kings, later, on the walk back to the hostel along the river in the evening. He told it badly, in pieces. The thin young man listened all the way across the bridge with his hands in his pockets.

"So the note was always there," he said at the end. "On the new pan."

"Since the yard."

"And you never see it."

"I was looking on the old pans. I was looking for it in our notes. It wasn't in our notes." Cyril stopped on the bridge and looked down at the river, gray and slow and brown under the gray sky, the gulls going over. "It was in theirs."

The thin young man thought about that.

"So you come all the way to England," he said, "to find a note from Duncan Street."

"Seem so."

"Your grandmother will kill you," said the thin young man, "for taking so long," and Cyril laughed for the first time in days, out loud, on a bridge in London, so that a man walking past with an umbrella turned and stared.

---

That night in the hostel, with the others asleep in the long room and the city roaring softly outside, he sat on the edge of his iron bed under the one lamp and wrote to Kamla.

He was not good at letters. He wrote that it was cold. He wrote that the English were polite and the food tasted of nothing and the boy from San Fernando had worn six shirts at once. He wrote that the band had played every day by the river and that thousands of people had come. He wrote that he had seen men from the islands crying in the crowd. He wrote that he missed her, which was harder, and he crossed it out and wrote it again.

Then he wrote that he had found the note.

He wrote that he would not tell his grandmother. That Kamla must not tell her either. That nobody must tell her, not Ma Ivy, not Mr. Lionel, not Bas. That he would play it for her himself, at Carnival, in the road, on the pan, and she would hear it there for the first time, and he wanted her to hear it in the road, out of the gate of Jubilee Yard, with the band, and not from a letter.

He folded the sheet into the envelope and wrote the address. Kamla Ramlogan, the shop, Duncan Street, Port of Spain, Trinidad. He sat turning it over in his fingers. It seemed a very small address for a very large place.

Then he took the pan off its stand at the end of the room, carefully, so as not to wake anyone, and laid it on the bed beside him, and tapped the new note once with his finger, so softly that only he could hear it, to make sure it had not drifted in the damp.

The Note in Between

> HOME FROM ENGLAND. Players of the steel orchestra that performed in London last summer will be out with their own bands this Carnival. February 1952.

Clementine Dorival was seventy-nine years old, and she had decided in the night that she would go as far as the gate and not one step further, and she told everybody so at three in the morning in a voice that left no room for discussion.

"The gate," she said. "Then I sit down."

"Yes, Tanty," said Lionel.

"Yes, Grandma," said Cyril.

"Yes, Miss Clementine," said Kamla Ramlogan, who would be Kamla Dorival in five weeks and had already been given the bottle.

It was dark and cool, and the yard smelled of dew on the dust and the coffee boiling in the kitchen shed. The stars were thick over the breadfruit tree. Torchlight was gathering by the standpipe in the light of four lanterns, twenty-six players now, and the yard was full, every tenant, every child, people from Duncan Street, people from up the river. The Riverbed Kings were somewhere on the hill, getting ready to come down. From every direction came the sound of steel being warmed up, scales running up and down in the dark like water.

Clementine sat on her chair, which Ivy had carried to the gate for her, and looked at the band. She had on her white dress and her red headtie. Ivy, beside her, was fifty-four and had gray at the temples and was holding her mother's shawl and pretending she was not watching her.

Cyril had been home since September. He had come up Duncan Street from the wharf with his pan in its canvas bag, thinner and quieter, and kissed his grandmother on the forehead and said England was cold and the food was terrible and he had brought her a tin of English tea, which she had tried, and found weak. He had not said anything else about England. She had not asked. For five months he had been in the panyard every night with the new pan and the boys, practicing, and she had listened through the wall, and there had been something in the playing she could not hear clearly. A tune he only played when he thought she was asleep, so softly it was hardly there.

She was not a fool. She knew he had found something. She had decided to let him tell her when he was ready.

---

Lionel struck the boom. The band lifted their pans.

But Cyril did not start the tune. He stepped forward out of the band, to the gate, with the new pan at his chest on its strap, and stood in front of her chair, and the whole band went quiet behind him.

"Grandma," he said.

"What?"

"I want you to hear something. Before we go."

She looked at him. In the lantern light his face was very serious, the way it had been at fifteen in the kitchen shed with the four-note tin on his knees.

"Play it, then," she said. "Don't stand there like a post."

He lifted the sticks.

The climb. Three notes going up, like a torch lifted from the ground to shoulder height. She heard it. She had heard it a thousand times on his pans by now, and on the bamboo before that, and in her mother's voice before that. The long note held, ringing straight up into the dark like a flame in still air, so long and steady she felt it in her chest.

Then the walk down. The sparks falling. Step by step, round the bowl.

She waited for the place where it stopped. She had waited for it all her life. On the drum in 1881, under her father's hands, the slide had been there, rough and close; and then the drum went into the roof and for sixty-eight years every band her family had made could not follow her mother down. Bamboo had no notes. Tins had no notes. Pans had notes, but not that one. Not the one in the crack.

The pan came to the place.

And went through it.

A small sweet note, a little sad. The catch in her mother's voice. Exactly. The spark held for an instant in the air before it drops. Then the rest, down, the whole slide, every step of it, to the bottom, and the last note ringing out over Duncan Street in the dark.

Clementine sat in her chair.

She was aware of Ivy's hand on her shoulder. She was aware of the yard, all of it, behind the band, not making a sound. She was aware of the lanterns, and the stars, and the smell of coffee and dew, and the frogs in the Dry River behind the back wall, and her own heart going, and her hands in her lap, which were shaking, and which she held still.

She was eight years old in a white frock with a torch in her hand, standing in the riverbed in the dark, and her mother was singing.

"One more time," said someone in the yard. Not her. One of the children.

Cyril played it again. And this time, when the climb began, Clementine sang.

She did not decide to. It came up out of her the way it always had. Her voice was old and thin and cracked at the top, and she did not care. She sang the climb with the pan, and the long note held, and the fall, and this time, for the first time in her life since her father's drum had gone into the roof, something went down with her. The steel went down beside her voice, step for step, and caught at the place where she caught, and went on.

And the band, all of Torchlight, without anybody telling them, gave the answer. The short shout of a phrase that hit on the boom. The answer her father's drum had given in the market road with fire all round it. The yard roared it with them.

---

She did not go past the gate. She had said so, and she was a woman of her word.

But when the band went out into Duncan Street with the lanterns swinging and the steel crashing and the whole street falling in behind, she held out her hand to Kamla.

Kamla gave her the bottle and the spoon.

Clementine looked at them in the lantern light. The bottle was clouded under the neck where she had struck it for sixty-eight years, a patch of scratches fine as hair. The spoon was bent from her grip.

She lifted the bottle and struck it once. A bright plain clink. In all that steel nobody could have heard it.

Up the street, at the front of the band, Lionel turned his head.

She gave the bottle back to Kamla. "Go," she said. "Keep the time. They will run off if you don't watch them."

Kamla went, running, to catch up with the boom, and Clementine sat in her chair by the gate with her daughter's hand on her shoulder and listened to her mother's song go away down Duncan Street toward the town, all of it now, every note, and the people in the dark singing the answer.

---

*Port of Spain, 2026*

The Dry River runs in a concrete channel now, and in the dry season the children still play cricket in it, and in the rainy season it still comes down brown and roaring from the hills. Jubilee Yard is gone. The barrack came down in 1974 and there are flats where the standpipe stood. But two streets over there is a panyard under a high galvanize roof, and the band that practices there is called Torchlight, and on the wall by the tuner's bench, under glass, is a square of gray wood a hand wide, cut from the corner post of a kitchen shed, with marks on it: a fish, a ring, a little curved house.

Jerome Dorival, thirty-five, great-grandson of Lionel, sinks drums there for half the bands in the city. On the last Sunday in August he was firing a tenor head in the yard behind the panyard, the smoke rolling over the wall, the old oil smell cooking out of the seams, when his cousin sent the new recording to the family's private shared space, the one only the family could open, where the tree had grown to four hundred names in three countries because every cousin who wanted to could add one.

He listened to it that night on the tuner's bench with a beer, while the pan ticked as it cooled. Rain had come in from the hills after dark, the first of the evening downpours, and it hammered the galvanize over his head so hard he had to hold the speaker against his ear. Out in the yard the fire hissed and went to steam. The boys who had been practicing their run for the weekend had given up and were sitting along the wall under the eave, eating doubles out of wax paper, arguing about a bass line, and one by one, as the recording went on, they stopped arguing and came over to listen.

It was his great-aunt Leela, in Brooklyn, seventy-three, telling the Canboulay the way her great-grandmother had told it into Ivy's copybook, every word, and then singing the song. She had said yes to the recording, and the page carried her name. Under it the cousins had put the scans: the copybook in Ivy's small fast pencil, with CLEMENTINE ALEXANDER at the bottom and SHE SANG IT IN THE RIVER; the band photograph from Frederick Street, 1919, every man in paper flames, named on the back in their own hands; Cyril's chalk list from the panyard door, copied out by Kamla before the door was burned.

And a map, which somebody's daughter in Toronto had started, of where Jubilee Yard had gone. Flatbush. Scarborough. Brixton. Arima. Port of Spain, two streets over.

Jerome listened to the fall three times. Then he got up, took the chalk, and began to mark the rings on the new head, and when he came to the small note near the center he drew it with particular care.

---

*Brooklyn, Labor Day*

Marisa Dorival walked the Parkway on Monday with her mother's arm in hers and a rum bottle in her other hand.

The asphalt breathed heat back up at the sky. The noise was everything at once: trucks of speakers, flags, whistles, the smell of jerk smoke and doubles and roti and sweat and sunscreen, a million people from every island, and somewhere ahead, in the gap between the trucks, a steelband from Flatbush, forty pans on racks with wheels, pushed by teenagers in matching shirts.

Her mother, Leela, walked very straight. She had on a white dress and a red headtie that she had made herself out of a length of cloth bought on Frederick Street the year before, the same red, or near enough, and her sneakers were the only part of her that admitted she was seventy-three. People they did not know kept stepping aside for her on the crowded asphalt without quite knowing why.

"I am a dougla woman from Duncan Street," she had said into the microphone in July, with Marisa holding it, "and both halves of me were in that yard before there was a pan, and I will thank you to spell Ramlogan right." She had been very pleased with that.

The bottle was a hundred and forty years old, clouded under the neck in a patch of scratches as fine as hair. Kamla had kept it on a shelf in Flatbush for fifty years and given it to Leela, and Leela had given it to Marisa this morning in the kitchen without a word, the way you hand somebody a coat when it looks like rain.

The band ahead turned a tune. Marisa knew it before the second note. Three going up. One held, long, in the heat over the Parkway.

Then the fall, step by step, through the note in between.

She lifted the bottle and struck it, steady, steady, a bright small clink that nobody in Brooklyn could possibly have heard, and her mother, beside her, seventy-three, threw back her head and sang the answer.