V. Naipaul - Collected Short Fiction

Eddoes was crazy about cleanliness.

He used to brush his teeth for hours.

If fact, if you were telling a stranger about Eddoes you would say, ‘You know — the little fellow with a tooth-brush always in his mouth.’

This was one thing in Eddoes I really admired. Once I stuck a tooth-brush in my mouth and walked about our yard in the middle of the day.

My mother said, ‘You playing man? But why you don’t wait until your pee make froth?’

That made me miserable for days.

But it didn’t prevent me taking the tooth-brush to school and wearing it there. It caused quite a stir. But I quickly realized that only a man like Eddoes could have worn a tooth-brush and carried it off.

Eddoes was always well-dressed. His khaki trousers were always creased and his shoes always shone. He wore his shirts with three buttons undone so you could see his hairy chest. His shirt cuffs were turned up just above the wrist and you could see his gold wrist-watch.

Even when Eddoes wore a coat you saw the watch. From the way he wore the coat you thought that Eddoes hadn’t realized that the end of the coat sleeve had been caught in the watch strap.

It was only when I grew up I realized how small and how thin Eddoes really was.

I asked Hat, ‘You think is true all this talk Eddoes giving us about how woman running after him?’

Hat said, ‘Well, boy, woman these days funny like hell. They go run after a dwarf if he got money.’

I said, ‘I don’t believe you.’

I was very young at the time.

But I always thought, ‘If it have one man in this world woman bound to like, that man is Eddoes.’

He sat on his blue cart with so much grace. And how smart that tooth-brush was in his mouth!

But you couldn’t talk to him when he was on his cart. Then he was quite different from the Eddoes we knew on the ground; then he never laughed, but was always serious. And if we tried to ride on the back of his cart, as we used to on the back of the ice-cart, Eddoes would crack his whip at us in a nasty way and shout, ‘What sort of cart you think this is? Your father can’t buy cart like this, you hear?’

Every year Eddoes won the City Council’s award for the cleanest scavenging cart.

And to hear Eddoes talk about his job was to make yourself feel sad and inferior.

He said he knew everybody important in Port of Spain, from the Governor down.

He would say, ‘Collected two three tins of rubbish from the Director of Medical Services yesterday. I know him good, you know. Been collecting his rubbish for years, ever since he was a little doctor in Woodbrook, catching hell. So I see him yesterday and he say, “Eddoes (that is how he does always call me, you know) Eddoes,” he say, “Come and have a drink.” Well, when I working I don’t like drinking because it does keep you back. But he nearly drag me off the cart, man. In the end I had to drink with him. He tell me all his troubles.’

There were also stories of rich women waiting for him behind rubbish tins, women begging Eddoes to take away their rubbish.

But you should have seen Eddoes on those days when the scavengers struck. As I have told you already, these scavengers were proud people and stood for no nonsense from anybody.

They knew they had power. They could make Port of Spain stink in twenty-four hours if they struck.

On these important days Eddoes would walk slowly and thoughtfully up and down Miguel Street. He looked grim then, and fierce, and he wouldn’t speak to a soul.

He wore a red scarf and a tooth-brush with a red handle on these days.

Sometimes we went to Woodford Square to the strike meeting, to gaze at these exciting people.

It amazed me to see Eddoes singing. The songs were violent, but Eddoes looked so sad.

Hat told me, ‘It have detectives here, you know. They taking down every word Eddoes and them saying.’

It was easy to recognize the detectives. They were wearing a sort of plain-clothes uniform — brown hats, white shirts, and brown trousers. They were writing in big notebooks with red pencils.

And Eddoes didn’t look scared!

We all knew that Eddoes wasn’t a man to be played with.

You couldn’t blame Eddoes then for being proud.

One day Eddoes brought home a pair of shoes and showed it to us in a quiet way, as though he wasn’t really interested whether we looked at the shoes or not.

He said, brushing his teeth, and looking away from us, ‘Got these shoes today from the labasse , the dump, you know. They was just lying there and I pick them up.’

We whistled. The shoes were practically new.

‘The things people does throw away,’ Eddoes said.

And he added, ‘This is a helluva sort of job, you know. You could get anything if you really look. I know a man who get a whole bed the other day. And when I was picking up some rubbish from St Clair the other day this stupid woman rush out, begging me to come inside. She say she was going to give me a radio.’

Boyee said, ‘You mean these rich people does just throw away things like that?’

Eddoes laughed and looked away, pitying our simplicity.

The news about Eddoes and the shoes travelled round the street pretty quickly. My mother was annoyed. She said, ‘You see what sort of thing life is. Here I is, working my finger to the bone. Nobody flinging me a pair of shoes just like that, you know. And there you got that thin-arse little man, doing next to nothing, and look at all the things he does get.’

Eddoes presently began getting more things. He brought home a bedstead, he brought home dozens of cups and saucers only slightly cracked, lengths and lengths of wood, all sorts of bolts and screws, and sometimes even money.

Eddoes said, ‘I was talking to one of the old boys today. He tell me the thing is to never throw away shoes. Always look in shoes that people throw away, and you go find all sort of thing.’

The time came when we couldn’t say if Eddoes was prouder of his job or of his collection of junk.

He spent half an hour a day unloading the junk from his cart.

And if anybody wanted a few nails, or a little piece of corrugated iron, the first person they asked was Eddoes.

He made a tremendous fuss when people asked him, though I feel he was pleased.

He would say, ‘I working hard all day, getting all these materials and them, and people think they could just come running over and say, “Give me this, give me that.” ’

In time, the street referred to Eddoes’s collection of junk as Eddoes’s ‘materials’.

One day, after he opened his school, Titus Hoyt was telling us that he had to spend a lot of money to buy books.

He said, ‘It go cost me at least sixty dollars.’

Eddoes asked, ‘How much book you getting for that?’

Titus Hoyt said, ‘Oh, about seven or eight.’

Eddoes laughed in a scornful way.

Eddoes said, ‘I could get a whole handful for you for about twelve cents. Why you want to go and spend so much money on eight books for?’

Eddoes sold a lot of books.

Hat bought twenty cents’ worth of book.

It just shows how Titus Hoyt was making everybody educated.

And there was this business about pictures.

Eddoes said one day, ‘Today I pick up two nice pictures, two nice nice sceneries, done frame and everything.’

I went home and I said, ‘Ma, Eddoes say he go sell us some sceneries for twelve cents.’

My mother behaved in an unexpected way.

She wiped her hand on her dress and came outside.

Eddoes brought the sceneries over. He said, ‘The glass a little dirty, but you could always clean that. But they is nice sceneries.’

They were engravings of ships in stormy seas. I could see my mother almost ready to cry from joy. She repeated, ‘I always always want to have some nice sceneries.’ Then, pointing at me, she said to Eddoes, ‘This boy father was always painting sceneries, you know.’