Ode to my hammock

Lot 12, Adventure          photo by Kristen Hare

by Kristen Hare

Guyana, 2000-2002

     It’s a swinging pea pod, a giant cradle for the giant little girl who lives all alone. It’s a place to rock into daydreams and surrender into naps. In the easy breeze on my verandah, I rarely had to stretch my foot out for a good push. The wind off the Essequibo swayed me side to side, my sun-drying clothes picked up the rhythm, and the palms that stretched overhead rustled along. Some days, it felt like even the clouds were rocking me.

     In those first six months, my cream colored hammock offered escape -- from my own blundering and sweaty life in Guyana, the one I missed back in Missouri, and the ones unfolding underneath my feet.

     In my village of Adventure, the top floor of the little house off a white gravel road was mine. Downstairs lived a 20-year-old mother of one, step-mother of another and her husband. They had one room. One bedroom. She would give me anything I looked at, so I learned to look down when we spoke. During the months I lived at Lot 12, our lives mixed together like the dust that clumped up under my doors, unable to be swept away but hard to ignore.

     All together, there was too much of us filling that little house.

     At first, it was quiet. Nice. I could hear their lives, the hum of the TV or the flushing toilet. We woke up and fell asleep together. She’d gossip with our neighbor while cooking, the harsh scraping of grating a coconut rising to my flat. She could hear my phone calls, my soft steps, my soft and constant singing.

     And then it started.

     Slaps, so hard they’d pull my eyes open in the morning light. It was never a fight. And never when he was home. But her hand flew freely at the little boy who came to her husband five years before she did. Then, I heard stifled cries. I still don’t know which sound was worse. 

     Hit, slap, shut up, shut up. And this 5-year-old is whimpering, denied even the release of a good cry. He doesn’t get the biscuits fast enough. He doesn’t get out of bed before she wakes him. The baby threw up. Every morning. It became my alarm.

     At night, when her husband came home, it stopped. I’d carry something down, mangoes or a little food to share. Slowly, then, I’d climb the stairs back to my hammock.

     Below me, this family sat all evening in the rough brown hammock that was their only furniture. I heard laughter. Singing. He and his son worked on their ABCs. She rocked the baby. They sounded happy.

     The next morning, after he’d left in the dark for work, slap, slap, a sound that wasn’t even a slap, but something hollow, stinging, a small body absorbing force. Who could I tell? Where could I call? I asked myself again and again, what could I do here that wouldn't lead to more harm? What could I do to make it stop? 

     I never really knew.

     So I stuck to my hammock whenever I could and closed my eyes and covered my ears and rocked.