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Updated: June 6, 2025
Help came readily while her misfortune was fresh in the minds of the villagers. A subscription was taken up among the fisherfolk, and on the proceeds, with other gifts that came in, she was able to get along for three or four months. Then people forgot. Tona was no longer the widow of a man lost at sea. She was a pauper ever on hand with the wail for alms.
What a pity, though, for that poor girl Rosario, so modest and unassuming and never saying a word, who took her sewing down to the beach with Roseta, and was always timidly asking whether siñá Tona had had any word from Tonet.
Amongst the Zapotecs of Central America, when a woman was about to be confined, her relations assembled in the hut, and began to draw on the floor figures of different animals, rubbing each one out as soon as it was completed. This went on till the moment of birth, and the figure that then remained sketched upon the ground was called the child's tona or second self.
Pascualet became a real mother to his younger brother. While siñá Tona was busy with the tavern, during the earliest days which had been the hard ones, the good-natured boy had carried the baby around with the tenderness of a nurse and had played with the young torments of the water front with that snarling squirming brat in his arms, who would bite and scratch when anything did not suit him.
Siñá Tona boo-hooed louder than ever at the joking question. A present! A little present, that was all! She thought it would ease her mind. So she had taken what money she had saved a few pennies it was and had bought something for him. A life-preserver! A neighbor of hers had gotten it from an engineer on an English steamer!
A memorandum of a lock to be turned by figures. Medicine for tona boils with which Samoan children are often afflicted.
If the older men soon fell asleep with their pipes dead between their teeth, not so the sturdier boys, aflame from the privations and abstinence of life at sea. They would look at siñá Tona in ways that would bring gestures of annoyance from her and make her wonder how she could fight off the brutal caresses of those Tritons in striped shirts.
The tavern was living on its old habitués, and bringing in just enough to keep the wolf from the door. More than once Tona would walk down to the water as she used to and sadly look back at the two stoves now cold, the fences now rickety and tumbling down, the pig-pen where a lean hog scarcely ever grunted at all, and the half dozen hens hungrily pecking about the sands.
That might do for Tonet, who didn't like real work overwell. As for himself, he was a man of muscle, and he loved the sea. No, he must be a fisherman like his father! When siñá Tona heard such remarks the terrifying thought of the catastrophe of that Lenten Tuesday would come back to her mind. But the boy held his ground. Things like that didn't happen every day.
That would make her the joke of all the Cabañal. No, siñá Tona had the right idea "Fleet-Foot," the name of old Pascualo's boat, the one he had died in, and that, later on, had been the home of all the family. But now it was the men's turn to shout something down. No, that would bring bad luck, as the fate of Fleet-Foot herself had shown. Dolores had a good one.
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