Miguel Street by V. S. Naipaul Page A

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.’
    Eddoes looked properly impressed.
    He asked, ‘Sceneries nice as this?’
    My mother didn’t reply.
    After a little talk my mother paid