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The trousers he wore were made of cotton that had been grown in fields not far from the village where he lived and that had then been sent bale on top of bale to England, where in a factory it had been made into yard on top of yard of cloth and sent back to a store that was in a village not far from the one in which he lived and it was there that he bought yards of this cloth and had it made into the garment covering that part of his body. The shirt he wore had the same origin and destination as his
trousers, and shirt and trousers clung to his lean frame as if they were another kind of skin, clung to his lean body as if he had been born wearing only them, and in that way even his body was mixed up with the world and he could not extricate himself from it, not at all could he separate himself from the world. Each intake of breath was a deep cry of pain, each sigh was an expression of unbearable sorrow.
    And: a curse fell on Nathaniel Potter and this curse took the form of small boils appearing on his arms and then on his legs and then on the rest of his body and then at last covering his face. And the small boils festered and leaked a pus that had a smell like nothing that had ever lived before and all his bodily fluids were turned into the pus that leaked out of him and he no longer cursed at whatever it was that he thought had made him and the world in which he had lived, and he even banished from his mind any thoughts of whatever it was, or whosoever it was, that had made him and the world in which he had lived. And when he died, his body had blackened, as if he had been trapped in the harshest of fires, a fire that from time to time would subside to a dull glow only to burn again fiercely, and each time the fierce burning lasted for an eternity. And he died and his death seemed sudden even though he had been marching toward its inevitability for forty-seven years, he was forty-seven years of age when he died, and his death
was a surprise just the way each death is, and his death made all who heard of it and all who knew him pause, stop, and wonder if such a thing could happen to them also, for the living always doubt the reality of death and the dead do not know of doubt, the dead do not know of anything. And Nathaniel Potter died and left many children—he knew of eleven—and when he died he could not read and he could not write, and he had not made any children who could do so. Among the names of his children were Walter and Roderick and Francis and Joseph and David and Truehart and John and Benjamin and Baldwin and Mineu and Nigel, their names taken from the history that has been captured in the written word and also from the history of the spoken word. And Roderick was my father but he could not read or write either, Nathaniel Potter only made Roderick Potter and he was my father but he could not read or write, he only made me and I can read and I am also writing all of this at this very moment; at this very moment I am thinking of Nathaniel Potter and I can place my thoughts about him and all that he was and all that he could have been into words. These are all words, all of them, these words are my own.

A nd many years after Nathaniel’s death and burying, I was standing in the graveyard in St. John’s, Antigua, looking for the grave of Mr. Potter, Roderick—the son of Nathaniel Potter. He was my own father, and I could not find it. I consulted the grave master, who was just an ordinary man in charge of such an important department, keeping a record of all who had lived and then died, the inevitability of this, dying, making his work constant and predictable, and when I was speaking to him as he was looking into his large black book, a ledger, he did not loom large and grow in importance, not to me and not to himself; he remained just so, ordinary. He could no longer find the exact spot where Mr. Potter had been buried, but it was registered in his book, it was a day, seventy years after he had