Inroads

By any standard, ours was the poorest. We lived in a small hut built in the middle of a coconut grove. We also had a small outhouse and a woodshed where we kept our sow, chickens, and the big gecko with red eyes. I never got the chance to see the last but I knew it really lived there. There were times when I would sneak away from siestas just to see it but most often mother would catch me halfway down the squeaky bamboo stairs. When she did, she would bring me back to my sleeping spot and lie down next to me, and so began her stories.

My mother was a seamstress. She said she learned the craft by herself. Nobody had formally taught her, she discovered it when she was barely sixteen while working as a maid in the household of a mayor's relative. But I said I guessed her knowledge in sewing was only an extension to, or professionalization of, her childhood pastime which was handbag weaving. But no, she said, she inherited it from her mother.

Saturday afternoons were always spent this way. First, mother would roll out our buri-palm mat on the bamboo floor. Then I would skewer for a way out. Among the strings of excuses I felt I had masterfully contrived was making a pass in the outhouse. Unguarded, mother would find herself acquiescing to it.

I did not have to go straight to the outhouse, of course. If I was lucky, I could catch the gecko sleeping in its lair, or just lazing somewhere in the woodshed, I thought excitedly as I took one last sweeping look for any signs of mother behind. A yellow-breasted songbird fluttered by. It darted swiftly into the woodshed.

The sow grunted. The hens cackled. The goat bleated. The woodshed was astir.

Birds could be such squeals. They could be sources of untold troubles. And I blamed them, particularly the yellow-breasteds. I saw no gecko, and in a moment mother was behind me with a deleafed twig for a whip.

Then I figured out the reason why I hated birds. My slingshot and mouth-missile could attest to this. And the yellow-breasteds were my favorite targets.