They walked up the road together to the old man’s shack and went in through its open door.
The old man leaned the mast with its wrapped sail against the wall and the boy put the box and the
other gear beside it. The mast was nearly as long as the one room of the shack. The shack was made
of the tough budshields of the royal palm which are called guano and in it there was a bed, a table,
one chair, and a place on the dirt floor to cook with charcoal. On the brown walls of the flattened,
overlapping leaves of the sturdy fibered guano there was a picture in color of the Sacred Heart
of Jesus and another of the Virgin of Cobre. These were relics of his wife. Once there had been a
tinted photograph of his wife on the wall but he had taken it down because it made him too lonely
to see it and it was on the shelf in the corner under his clean shirt.