A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [120]
And when Mr Maclean set to work, he worked alone. Mr Biswas never saw Edgar again and never asked about him.
Mr Maclean went to a ‘bandon’, brought back tree-branches and trimmed them into rafters. He cut notches in the rafters wherever they were to rest on the main frame, and nailed them on. They looked solid. He used thinner branches, limber, irregular and recalcitrant, for cross-rafters. They looked shaky and reminded Mr Biswas of the rafters of a dirt-and-grass hut.
Then the corrugated iron was nailed on. The sheets were dangerous to handle and the rafters shook under Mr Maclean’s weight and the blows of his hammer. The weeds below and the frame became covered with rust. When Mr Maclean had packed his tools into his wooden suitcase and gone home for the day, it was a pleasure to Mr Biswas to stand below the roof and be in shade where only the day before, only that morning, there had been openness.
As the sheets went up, and they were enough to cover all the rooms except the gallery, the house no longer looked so drab and un-begun. Mr Maclean was right: the sheets did hide the branch-rafters. But every hole in the roof glittered like a star.
Mr Maclean said, ‘I did mention a thing called mastic cement. But that was before I did see the galvanize. You would spend as much on mastic cement as on five-six sheets of new galvanize.’
‘So what? I just got to sit down in my new house and get wet?’
‘Where there’s a will there’s a way, as the people does say. Pitch. You did think about that? A lot of people does use pitch.’
They got the pitch free, from a neglected part of the road where asphalt was laid on, without gravel, in lavish lumps. Mr Maclean put small stones over the holes in the roof and sealed them down with pitch. He ran sealings of pitch along the edges of the sheets and down the cracks. It was a slow, long job, and when he was finished the roof was curiously patterned in black with many rough lines, straight down, angularly jagged across, and freaked and blobbed and gouted all over with pitch, above the confused red, rust, brown, saffron, grey and silver of the old sheets.
But it worked. When it rained, as it was beginning to do now every afternoon, the ground below the roof remained dry. Poultry from the barrackyard and other places came to shelter and stayed to dig the earth into dust.
The cedar floorboards came, rough and bristly, and impregnated the site with their smell. When Mr Maclean planed them they seemed to acquire a richer colour. He fitted them together as neatly as he had said, nailing them down with headless nails and filling in the holes at the top with wax mixed with sawdust which dried hard and could scarcely be distinguished from the wood. The back bedroom was floored, and part of the drawingroom, so that, with care, it was possible to walk straight up to the bedroom.
Then Mr Maclean said, ‘When you get more materials you must let me know.’
He had worked for a fortnight for eight dollars.
Perhaps he didn’t pay seven dollars for the cedar, Mr Biswas thought. Only five or six.
The house now became a playground for the children of the barracks. They climbed and they jumped; many took serious falls but, being barrack children, came to little harm. They nailed nails into the crapaud pillars and the cedar floor; they bent nails for no purpose; they flattened them to make knives. They left small muddy footprints on the floor and on the crossbars of the frame; the mud dried and the floor became dusty. The children drove out the poultry and Mr Biswas tried to drive out the children.
‘You blasted little bitches! Let me catch one of you and see if I don’t cut his foot off.’
As the sugarcane grew taller the dispossessed labourers grew surlier, and Mr Biswas began to receive threats, delivered as friendly warnings.
Seth, who had often