A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [117]
‘Boss, I got some cedar planks. A man in Swampland offer me a whole pile of cedar for seven dollars. Seven dollars for a hundred and fifty foot of cedar is a real bargain.’
Mr Biswas hesitated. Of all wood cedar appealed to him least. The colour was pleasing but the smell was acrid and clinging. It was such a soft wood that a fingernail could mark it and splinters could be bitten off with teeth. To be strong it had to be thick; then its thickness made it look ungainly.
‘Now, boss, I know they is only rough planks. But you know me. When I finish planing them they would be level level, and when I join them together you wouldn’t be able to slip a sheet of bible-paper between them.’
‘Seven dollars. That leave eight for you.’ Mr Biswas meant it was little to pay for laying a floor and putting on a roof.
But Mr Maclean was offended. ‘My labour,’ he said.
The corrugated iron came that week-end on a lorry that also brought Anand and Savi and Shama.
Anand said, ‘Aunt Sushila bawl off the men when they was loading the galvanize on the lorry.’
‘She tell them to throw them down hard, eh?’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Is that what she tell them? She did want them to dent them up more, eh? Don’t frighten to tell me.’
‘No, no. She say they wasn’t working fast enough.’
Mr Biswas examined the sheets as they were unloaded, looking for bumps and dents he could attribute to Sushila’s maliciousness. Whenever he saw a crack in the rust he stopped the loaders.
‘Look at this. Which one of you was responsible for this? You know, I mad enough to get Mr Seth to dock your money.’ That word ‘dock’, so official and ominous, he had got from Jagdat.
Stacked on the grass, the sheets made the site look like an abandoned lot. No corrugation of one sheet fitted into the corrugation of any other; the pile rose high and shaky and awkward.
Mr Maclean said, ‘I could straighten them out with the hammer. Now, about the rafters, boss.’
Mr Biswas had forgotten about those.
‘Now, boss, you must look at it this way. The rafters don’t show from the outside. Only from the inside. And even then, when you get a ceiling you could hide the rafters. So I think it would be better and it would cost you nothing if you get tree-branches. When you trim them they does make first-class rafters.’
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