John Lazoo

John Lazoo
By John Reyer Afamasaga
eBook
©2001-2007 John Reyer Afamasaga
Copyright Certification ID = DSA 102 - Certified on 13/11/2006
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 01: Page 3
CHAPTER 02: Page 27
CHAPTER 03: Page 42
CHAPTER 04: Page 53
CHAPTER 05: Page 88
CHAPTER 06: Page 100
CHAPTER 07: Page 122
CHAPTER 08: Page 131
CHAPTER 09: Page 132
CHAPTER 10: Page 151
CHAPTER 11: Page 171
CHAPTER 12: Page 215
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CHAPTER 01
PART 1
When they take you away,
they take you away
When I have nothing left
I have nothing to give
You will not need to read
When I read you
When I tell these things
You will not need to be told
"James, James." Janine Elton checked to see if her seven-year-old man was still
awake. James was comfortable in the warmth of the June night and moved his right leg to

assume the recovery position correctly, his mother's poetry a fine replacement for the hot
chocolate that she could not afford. Janine looked straight ahead into the rafters of her
cottage with her hand-bound book across her left breast. James's movement in their
double bed simulated a hand on her bosom. Janine's fears were few, but they were not
new, nor were they far.
Janine had been adopted by a wealthy Wisconsin family, the Eltons, after the
baronial couple had found her as a three-year-old girl in a New York orphanage. She’d
grown up as their housemaid. She’d fallen in love with her stepbrother of the same age.
The Eltons put her on a bus for New York at the age of 14 when she became
pregnant. She gave birth to James Elton in a New York shelter for the homeless, and
when James was 24 hours old Janine left New York for the heartland, hoping to change
the course of occurrences and to give her son an earthy grounding away from the rot,
dampness, and sleaze of the city.
Her teats, sore and tender from the hungry baby, immediately relaxed as she
stepped down from the steel steps of the stuffy, crass, and crammed bus onto the dirt
sidewalk of Pleasant Prairie. As far as Janine was concerned her new bundle of life,
wrapped in white wool, had been delivered to her from God in the fresh country air, and
not in a freezing New York City squatter hall, carpeted with wet mattresses, the windows
without their glass panes.
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Janine had not bothered to pack her meager belongings into the shabby quilt
knapsack hanging from her back; the sack contained wet rags made from her blanket. The
new mother used the rags to clean the effects of James’s birth from herself, and used two
single-bed fleece sheets torn in four as James's first diapers. Janine stood on the side of
the road looking straight across it at the vastness of farmland inside newly erected wire
fencing, daydreaming a scene in which she and her baby shared a cottage on a quarter
acre which a kindhearted widower had offered her in return for housekeeping duties and
bookkeeping work. Janine stood and stared. Baby James's weight on her right arm,
supported by her left, was no burden. A smile could be seen in her eyes, telling of her
contentment. Even without an abode, she knew she would be all right; she had already

made the choice to give James Elton the best chance possible.
Janine started work for the first time in James’s life when James turned six.
Before then she’d made ends meet, but James at last attended school, so she could get a
steady job. Each morning he rode on the back of Mr Ghettis's tractor to school while his
mother went to the Juke Bike Factory, where she assembled brand-new, shiny bicycles.
On his seventh birthday, in the fall, his mother presented him with his first set of wheels.
Her pay deduction of $2 per week and her staff discount bought him his new bike, and
even then it did not come with its training wheels, as did those sold in the shops.
The cardboard box the bike had once hidden inside lay open on the ground. James
was soon upright on the bike most of the time, swaying a bit, his little legs touching the
ground on this side and then that side.
“Mom, I can do it! I don't need you to hold the seat, mother! I can do it! I can
drive Mr Ghettis's tractor, and I can ride a bike! Mom, I can do it!”
The tractor’s steering wheel was well supported by its chassis and four wheels,
but holding the handlebars of his shiny new bike felt like holding onto the bathroom
railings in the middle of one of his famous fevers, when he would see the people in his
mother's poetry and souls he had not met, but whom he knew intimately and who knew
him.
James lifted his left leg, the only leg that was supporting him and his mother's
only new belonging, off the ground. The whole contraption and the boy toppled to the
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right. Janine, with her arms folded, naturally levered her right hand to her mouth to cover
her smiling lips. James, after picking himself up and having checked to see if any of the
shine on his new present had been scratched, looked back at his mother on the porch
beneath the small arch that his right arm formed with the handle bar.
He pleaded earnestly, without crying, but with a screwed forehead, “Mom,
remember you told me never to laugh at anyone in trouble. Mom, remember?”
The bike leaned against the house inside the porch where they ate. He ate his
dinner with his eyes on the shine and the chrome of his birthday gift. Janine never for one
second asked him to watch what he was doing; even when the gravy missed his hanging

napkin she smiled as he smiled and they knew they were happy.
Mr Ghettis, the kind-hearted widower Janine had daydreamed of meeting when
she’d stepped down from the bus, was there to pick up James for a day in the fields. The
tractor engine chugged outside their window as she waited for his word that he would
keep his shirt on to cover his skin from the sun. His head down, looking to his left, he
clenched his jaw so that both of his lips got lost inside his mouth, which needed only to
say the two words, “Yes, mother.” Janine waited. The engine missed a revolution,
causing the chugging to end in a splutter. James still had nothing to say. Then his mother
hugged him tight.
“Yes, Mother.” His eyes cried for no reason as she let him go. He repeated his
reply on his way out the door, “Yes, Mother.”
His hands on the tractor's steering wheel made James feel like a man. The tall
sheets of the gold, dry grass parted uniformly for him; he turned his head to smile at Mr
Ghettis on the trailer. The sun sparkled in his hazel eyes to pronounce a magic moment in
his life that he would hold onto till the end of it, and the next, and of all the sagas that
would unfold neatly in his wake. He had been steering Mr Ghettis's tractor while sitting
on the old man's lap since he’d been five years old. Now Mr Ghettis, the owner of the
land that his mother's cottage stood on, sat in the trailer while the little seven-year-old
man drove, plowed, and controlled the big red toiler of the land, like a farm hand of
twenty harvests.
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