The PagodaAn Excerpt Patricia Powell (bio) The sun had appeared by the time he turned east again, and it battered down on them and on the hilly and dry and hard red earth. Water in his canteen had grown warm and the mule switched its tail though there were no flies. He passed women burdened with baskets on their way to market, over worked donkeys straining under impossible weights. The trees, foliage and brush blanketed the roads in abundance, no sight of the shimmering glassy sea, just the blue green mountains bristling with lush vegetation and fluttering butterflies, the meandering dirt paths broken up by ruts, the pure heat, the thatch roof road side stalls full of arguing women and girls and squealing babies, squatting and laughing and selling and buying and standing round and eating and philosophizing. Scrawny dogs and peel-headed chickens rushed from the stalls to the road to yell at the mule and then back again to the stalls where they rooted through the mound of rubbish in silence. He rode on, passing the gothic stone buildings that separated into banks, infant schools, drug stores, hair dressing parlors, barber saloons, tailor shops, fish market, butcher shops, post office, church, rum bars and grocers. He approached the center, where Queen, King and Princess streets intersected and where hundreds of hand cart men sold ice cream and snow cones and cool drinks and the brown and green heads of coconuts. He heard the bells and chants of blind beggars and seeing ones without legs, their trousers folded and hooked at the knees with shiny safety pins. Among them too were the children busy at noisy and convoluted games until they saw him, then they paused to stare at him and to point and shout out and grab at pebbles, before turning back to their games. There were the musicians who sang in deep baritones against the din of jangling banjo strings and stormy tom-toms. The claws of hunger finally dug at him and he slowed near a row of shop fronts and lifted the hat from his parched head and staggered past the disorderly mob of confusion, his legs wobbling from ill use. He unsaddled the mule and looped the noose around the waist of a Sycamore and tucked his shirt neatly into the waist of his trousers, and checked if the bristle black brush of hair pasted above his thin and trembling lips had escaped and entered the square. He carried his hat in his hand, and his shadow lumbered ahead of him, mammoth-like and imposing. There were people everywhere, some white, but mostly men of a million assortments of brown, dressed in Sunday clothes and white shoes, some with string ties and felt hats and bow ties and bowler hats and brightly colored short sleeved shirts. There were men who had faces twisted with laughter and men with chattering mouths full of solid gold bars of teeth and men with smirking smiles and men with eyes that [End Page 319] crouched with anger. They stood in the entrances of banks and schools and post office and clinics and police station; in the entrances of the towering government buildings. They stood in the narrow entrances of bars holding glasses full of rum and bottles of beer and sticks of cigarette and rolls of tobacco. They talked and guffawed with crooked and corroded faces and slammed dominoes on upturned crates. They stood in the shade of Ortanique orchards with their legs wide apart, hugged their balls and thought of their frustrated longings. They stood with their legs wide apart, a row of them, backs to the street, pissing and waving their blue cocks. They sat on wooden benches with their legs crossed at the knees and with their legs spread out in front of them and folded at the ankles and with their legs collapsed underneath them in a squat. They leaned against broken down stone walls, against the wrought iron gates that protected the colonial monuments; they wrapped themselves with frail, sinewy arms, they talked in loud voices, with wet eyes, about politics and the infertile land and the approaching drought and about their...