Eddie Signwriter by Adam Schwartzman

crocodile’s back in the tall grass in what was left of the garden, a dirt-brown zinc roof, and a driveway parked with taxis in various states of repair, the most dilapidated still on bricks.
    Inside it was a shell of wood and lime-washed walls, kept tidy by a woman employed twice a week. It was entirely bare, but for four rooms at the back inhabited by the boy’s uncle, away from people and the road, and those in the front, where the boy established his quarters.
    Given the whole house on Castle Road from which to select, the boy chose two rooms that opened up onto the front balcony, their entry on the upstairs landing. The original function of the rooms was indiscernible. They were relatively small and connected to each other by arches that had never known doors. In the room furthest from the landing he put a mattress. This became his bedroom. A chair and table turned the landing into his living room, from which he could look down between the railings into the empty entrance hall, where shafts of sunlight—that in the morning carpeted his bedroom—caught the dust as it crept through the holes in the roof.
    He and his uncle got along well. He admired his uncle, who had traveled the world and lived as he pleased. An easy affection developed between them, as between people who are alike. Although they were alone together in the house, their lives revolved only loosely around one another’s. They ate when they were hungry, together when they felt like company. His uncle said that his nephew did not need nurturing—something, in any event, that he could not haveprovided him. He said that his nephew needed to be left alone, to do as he pleased.
    His uncle wasted no time in fulfilling his side of the deal with his mother. Shortly after his nephew’s arrival at Castle Road, the promised apprenticeship was organized. The signwriter with whom his uncle arranged for his nephew to work had cut his teeth in the trade thirty years before, when competition was fierce and the formal economy ruled. Somewhere his real name must have been recorded, but everyone knew him by his moniker—Big Henry.
    To look at, he was five-foot square of a man, wide almost as he was short, black as a seal, his whole skin sparkling with humidity. He was full of life. His flesh buckled under it. His heart was full as a wardrobe.
    Though there was a suppleness about him too. He was
lithe
. In his manner, but also in his movements—the way he sprung up the stairs to his studio, agile as a goat, though the heavy stairs shook and the plates rattled in the kitchen below.
    There was a kind of magnetism in that sort of bulk. People weren’t laughing at him. They were sharing in something good about the world that his existence made possible. But also there was something more serious about him, something less about joy. A solidity to his presence, that was more than simply his physical bulk. This man exuded dignity. He was graceful, generous, had the balance of things.
    In his own boyhood Big Henry had painted with love. But many years had passed and now he painted not so much with love as with honesty. He took a casual interest in the beauty of the world, drew simple pleasure from the fact that a surface made of paint could represent known things, and saw as much value in the intention to suggest something beautiful with his art as to succeed in it.
    Though in his time Big Henry had been successful. He had made a name for himself—not only through commissions for the large European and later Ghanaian firms, but also for the piecework he’d continued to do around the neighbourhood for next to nothing. And it was this that became the mainstay of his business three decades later, when the formal sector had turned to photography, and manyyounger men, more hungry than himself, and more mobile, were plying his trade.
    Still, the signwriter painted with as much skill and enjoyment as ever. Only now, for the first time in his life, he’d begun to suffer problems