Wood, Rats, and Bedding

After sleeping on the floor each morning, we wake up with achy toes. Bits and pieces of your toes were missing.

Carrying wood taught us to avoid the nails that protruded.

We learned that people poked by rusty nails could have locked jaws. A locked jaw could cause your mouth to lock up like a dead man! What child wants that? We certainly didn’t want that. We became experts at lifting wood to our heads and settling it there safely as we balanced them like ladies going to market mangoes.

We labored with our hands, feet, and heads to make a place where they would sleep well. At first, we slept on the floor. Our bedding comprised various threadbare dresses and sheets spread in layers on the living room floor of my grandmother’s house—all of us 5 and our mother. The youngest boy and girl slept closest to her. She had to protect them. The two others were gone now.

Each morning, after sleeping on the floor, we wake up with achy toes. Bits and pieces of your toes were missing. After showering, we compared our toes, counting the number of nicks and gouges there. Some nicks were deep enough to show redness that went past the outer skin.

“It’s rats,” my Great-aunt Ivy said.

She would know because she used to sleep on the floor before we went to stay there. The rats had feasted on her toes as they were doing ours; and that had to stop. “We have to get a tabby before Dese Pickney dies from rat jaundice. God knows I cyaan’t deal dih mo’ dead (death)” she declared.

That same day, they brought a cat, and she ended our nightly encounters with the rodents.

But we needed space during the daytime, so we would build a house.

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