Junglepixiebelize - Recollections of a Gringa Pioneer ​

​Nancy R Koerner - Copyright@2023 - All Rights Reserved
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
"Nut Meg in a Box"
 ​Our neighbour, Don Ponciano Perez was the kind of man whose shirt buttons fought a constant battle to stay looped to their respective button-holes across a bulging belly. He was light-Spanish, with kind brown eyes, and a face like a wrinkled roadmap. His large yellow teeth, which were always smiling, had never seen the inside of a dentist’s office. The old man still had a full head of white hair under the sweat-stained straw hat, and when he lifted it to mop his brow, there was a permanent hatband imprint around the circumference of his head.
Unlike our high-and-dry Alta Vista property, Don Ponce’s thatched house was perched only a hundred feet above the Macal, in a green shady glen with an idyllic view. About fifty feet away was a lovely ravine with a fresh spring running down to the river, and beside it, a well-worn footpath, born of generations of bare feet.
​There were two older boys in their late teens, and a twelve-year-old girl, who lived with Don Ponce along with his common-law wife, Meg—and, of course, the hungry, watermelon-thieving potlika dog we’d scared off with a shotgun. It was hard to pinpoint the generational-genetic relationship between the family members. Adopted waifs and outside-pikni* were often included in the family dynamic. Some virile patriarchs in Belize boasted sons and daughters that were spread over forty years of enthusiastic procreation, resulting in nieces and nephews who were older than their corresponding aunts and uncles, and brothers and sisters from different mothers, from different towns, villages, or districts, who didn’t know they were siblings, or cousins.
Doña Meg was of Creole descent, with curly textured hair, now more white than black. Small-boned like a bird, she weighed little more than a hundred pounds. Meg took particular pleasure in my young son, whose corn-silk platinum hair delighted all Belizean women. Bustling about the kitchen, she would fuss over me. Within minutes of my arrival, she would bring me a plastic glass of lime juice refrescante, then insist on feeding me. To Meg, I was always di lee maaga wait gyal** she needed to fatten up—even though I weighed 15 pounds more than she did.
Meg loved to laugh; the whole family did. By the time I had lived in Cayo for about two years, I was pretty-much kitchen-tri-lingual like everybody else. Once I started making jokes and puns in conglomerate English, Kriol, and Spanish, I knew I had reached a benchmark of enculturation. I made them laugh a lot, and they loved me for it. 
On one such visit, I happened to look up into the cross beams of the thatching, and was surprised to see a…COFFIN. What? Yes, it was a COFFIN. Well, what can I say? I had never sat in somebody’s house, and looked up to see a coffin before. When I asked Don Ponce why they had it, or who it was for, he explained he had taken it in trade for produce a few years earlier. He’d just figured, that way, there would be one available when needed. OK, it was actually very practical in a macabre sort of way. But having it up there, right above you? All the time? There was nowhere else to put it where it could stay level and dry, Ponciano explained. Tru dat.+ Thatched houses didn’t have closets, cupboards, or attics. So there I was, eating Meg’s rice and beans, with wild bird-pepper pica-de-gallo, and some fried plantain, laughing with the Perez family--with somebody’s  freaking COFFIN over my head.
Then, there was a period of time when I hadn’t been able to go over to Don Ponce’s. And, sure enough, when I did, the coffin was gone, and so was Doña Meg. Now, the twelve-year-old girl bustled about the kitchen, and brought lime juice refrescante—one for me, and one for Ponciano. We made a toast, clinked our plastic glasses, and took a sip.
“Ah oanli mis how di gyal di laff,” said Don Ponce. “Yu gringos uda kaal ahn wahn ‘nut! Sohntaim, Ah di kaal ahn, ‘Nut-Meg’.”++
​He grinned a little, with his big yellow teeth, and took another sip.
“Laif mi haad, bot sweet,”+++ he said, wisely. 
We sat there in contemplative silence for a while, looking down at the river through the shady ravine. Then he got up, took something from the shelf, and showed it to me. It was a photo of Meg.
​Photographs were hard to come by in Belize. Nobody owned a camera. In this high humidity, a camera would start growing mold inside its lens within two weeks. So, this was a special gift. Somebody with a camera had taken it, gotten it developed in Belize City, and given it to him.
​It was a photograph of Meg as she lay dead in her coffin. She didn’t look “good,” as Americans would say, lamely—when they stood beside a white silk-lined walnut casket in the States. She didn’t look “bad” either. She simply looked dead. Ponciano explained that, in their entire lives together, he had never gotten around to taking a photograph of Meg.
So, now, this was the only one he had. The only one he would ever have. 
​  
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* children born outside of the marriage
 
** little skinny white girl
 
+ True, that 
 
++ ”I really miss how that girl would laugh. You gringos. You would have called her a ‘nut.’  Sometimes, I did call her ‘Nut-Meg.’” 
 
+++ “Life is hard, but sweet.”