How I Wish I Could Smile Again

The last time I smiled without being afraid, I was nine years old and holding a piece of paper.

It was a letter from school. Miss May gave one to every child in Primary Four at the end of the day. First she read it out loud, standing in front of the class with her glasses sliding down her nose.

“Next month,” she said, “Primary Four will travel to Lake City. We will visit the museum, and we will see the big lake.”

The whole class went wild. Boys climbed onto their desks. Girls held hands and screamed. Miss May did not tell anybody to sit down. She was smiling too.

Lake City. I had never been there. Nobody in my family had been there except Papa, who went once for a meeting at the factory head office and came back with a key holder shaped like a fish. He hung it on the nail beside our front door, and it never moved again.

I folded the letter carefully, slid it inside my reading book so it would not crease, and ran all the way home.

Green Hill was not a big town. If your legs were strong, you could walk from one end to the other in an afternoon. I ran past the market, where women were packing tomatoes into baskets. I ran past Mike’s Bar, where old men sat outside on plastic chairs arguing about football. I ran past the motor park and the big almond tree where the bus drivers rested in the shade. Then I turned up the red dirt road to our house.

Our house had four rooms and blue windows. Papa built it before I was born, with two friends and his own money, and he liked to remind us. “Every block in this house,” he would say, knocking on the wall with his knuckles, “came from my sweat at the bottle factory.”

Papa was the storekeeper at the Green Hill Bottle Factory. He wore a blue shirt with the factory’s name stitched above the pocket, and he was proud of it. Every Sunday evening Mama washed and ironed that shirt, and nobody else was allowed to touch it.

When I reached home, the compound was full, the way it always was in the evening.

Ben, my oldest brother, sat on the front step reading an old newspaper. He was seventeen and in his final year of secondary school, and he read anything that had words on it. Sam and Joe were playing football with a ball made of rags tied with string. Sam was thirteen and as strong as a goat. Joe was eleven, two years older than me, and he cheated at everything, even football.

Mary, who was six, and Lily, who was three, sat in the sand sorting bottle tops into colours. Ruth, our big sister, was at the tap washing plates. She was fifteen, and she did most of the things Mama had no time to do.

The plates Ruth was washing were white with blue flowers around the edge. They were Mama’s wedding plates. We used them only in the evening, and only for Papa and for visitors. The rest of us ate from plastic bowls.

“Mama!” I shouted. “Mama, look!”

Mama was in the kitchen at the back, stirring the soup pot. Paul, our new baby, was tied to her back with a cloth. He was three months old and could sleep through a thunderstorm.

She wiped her hand and took the letter. She read it while she stirred, and I watched her face. Something small passed over it, like a cloud crossing the sun. Then it was gone.

“This is good,” she said. “Wait for your father.”

“Can I go, Mama? Everybody is going.”

“I said wait for your father.” She handed the letter back. Then, more softly: “Go and bathe. You’re full of dust.”

Papa came home at seven, when the sky was turning orange.

You always heard Papa before you saw him, because he whistled. Every evening he whistled the same old tune up the road, a tune none of us knew the name of. When the little ones heard it, they ran to the gate.

That evening I got there first.

“Where is my Mr. Smile?” Papa said, and he lifted me off the ground, even though I was too big for it.

Papa had called me Mr. Smile since I was a baby. Mama said I used to smile at everybody: at visitors, at goats, at the man who came to read the light meter. Papa said I was the only one of his children who was born happy.

I gave him the letter. He set me down and read it right there at the gate, under the yellow light from the window.

He was still smiling when he finished. But only his mouth was smiling. His eyes had stopped.

“We’ll see,” he said.

He folded the letter twice and slipped it into his shirt pocket, behind the factory name. Then he patted my head and went inside.

That night, Papa ate from a blue-flower plate at the small table, and the rest of us sat on the mat with our bowls.

Usually Papa talked during dinner. He told us about the trucks that came to the factory, about the funny things the manager said, about the time a goat walked into the store and ate a whole box of labels.

That night he said nothing. He pushed his food around the plate and drank water.

Mama watched him from beside the pot. Ben looked at Papa, then at Mama, then down at his food. Even Joe forgot to steal meat from my side of the bowl.

I thought Papa was tired. I did not know yet that a person can be tired in a way that sleep cannot fix.

I woke up in the dark to voices.

At first they were low, like a radio playing in somebody else’s house. Then they grew louder.

“Two months, Frank?” It was Mama. “Two whole months, and you said nothing to me?”

“Lower your voice. The children are sleeping.”

“Oh, now you remember the children!”

I sat up on my mat. The boys’ room was small. Ben slept on the only bed, and Sam, Joe and I slept on mats on the floor. Joe was awake. Sam had his face to the wall, pretending. Ben was sitting on the edge of his bed with his feet on the floor, very still.

I did not know what “two months” meant. I only knew that Mama never shouted.

Then Papa’s voice went high and cracked, like a boy’s.

“And what do I tell Tom? Tell me, Grace! What do I tell Tom about his trip?”

My name. In the middle of all that shouting, my name.

Then the first plate hit the wall.

I had heard plates fall before. When a plate falls, it makes a small sound, almost like it is saying sorry. This was different. This plate screamed.

Then another. Then another.

Joe pulled me down and dragged the cloth over our heads. “Close your ears,” he whispered. “Close your ears, Tom.”

But he did not close his own. I could feel him shaking against my shoulder.

Ben got up and stood at the door with his hand on the handle. He did not open it. In the darkness I watched his back rise and fall.

From the girls’ room came Ruth’s voice, singing softly. It was the song Mama sang to us when it rained. Baby Paul was crying. Ruth sang louder.

Another plate. Then something heavier, maybe a chair. Then Mama’s voice, not shouting this time, just one sharp sound.

“Frank!”

Then silence.

The front door banged. Feet crunched fast across the gravel. The gate creaked open and slammed shut.

Then nothing at all.

Ben opened our door and went out. Joe held on to me. I did not sleep again that night. Under the cloth, in the dark, I did what Miss May had taught us to do with hard sums. I put everything in order.

The letter came home. Papa went quiet. Then the shouting. Then my name. Then the plates.

By morning, I knew exactly what I had done.

When I came out of our room, Mama was sweeping the parlour.

There was a small mountain of white and blue in her dustpan. Blue flowers, broken into a hundred pieces. Her left hand was wrapped in a strip of cloth with a red dot in the middle. Ruth was on her knees picking up tiny pieces with her fingers. Ben was outside at the tap, splashing water on his face again and again.

Near the door, among the broken pieces, I saw it. My letter. It was torn in two, and one corner was wet with soup.

Papa must have pulled it out of his pocket.

When nobody was looking, I picked up both halves, folded them small, and pushed them into my pocket.

“Mama,” I said. “I don’t want to go on the trip.”

Mama stopped sweeping. She looked at me strangely, as if I had spoken in another language.

“Who said anything about the trip?”

I did not answer. I could not explain it. I just knew.

“Go and get ready for school,” she said, and she went back to sweeping.

Papa’s chair was empty. His whistle did not come back up the road.

At school, Miss May collected names for the trip. Hands shot up all around me. Mine stayed in my lap.

“Tom?” she said. “Don’t you want to go?”

“No, Miss.”

She looked at me for a long time over her glasses. Then she wrote down the next name.

That night, I hid the two halves of the letter under my mat. I kept them. I still have them.

That was the day I learned to stop asking for things. If you don’t ask, nobody has to shout.

Papa came home very late. There was no whistle. He walked past the boys’ room without stopping and shut his door.

He did not call me Mr. Smile that night.

He would not call me Mr. Smile again for seventeen years.

And it would take me those same seventeen years to find out what really happened that night. By then, the truth almost came too late.