by Jacob Ross
‘When he talk to Defoe he watch ’im straight in hi eye.
‘He was there when I come out with de washing. He look at me like if he surprise. He look at me like if he jus’ make up hi mind ’bout something. It cross me mind dat for me to get to the clothes line I had to pass under dem eyes of his. Not only that, but I was wearing one o’ dem cotton dress without no sleeve, and for me to hang up dem clothes I had to stretch to reach de line. I didn like dat. I didn like no man making me feel so confuse without my permission. I was vex like hell. I look at ’im an’ tell ’im, “What de hell you looking at?” He look back at me like he more vex than me and say, “Tell me what you don’t want me to be looking at and mebbe I won’t look.” An’ den he laugh.’
Deeka laughed out loud at the memory.
‘I never hear man laugh so sweet. He start comin more regular for dynamite, till I got to thinkin that he mus’ be plannin to blow up de whole islan’ o’ someting. Missa Defoe get wise to ’im and start refusin to sell ’im any more dynamite. An’ den one day that Béké fella tell ’im straight, “Oi’m never going to sell you no more dynamite.”
‘“I’ll come anyway,” John Seegal tell ’im.
‘“Then Oi’ll have you arrested for trespassing, or shoot you moiy-self,” Defoe say.
‘“Make sure you succeed first time you try,” my husband tell ’im back.
‘Lord ha’ mercy, them words frighten me. Them frighten me to know dat I become a woman dat a man prepare to kill for. He keep comin like he promise. Used to stand up on the lil hill across the road an’ watch me. I never talk to ’im. But if I look up an’ he not ’cross dere, I start to sorta miss ’im. It last a coupla months till he couldn take it no more. One day he stay ’cross the road an’ call me. Was de kinda call dat make you know dat if you go, you was sayin yes to a question he didn ask you in the first place. Was like sayin, “I give in, I’z yours.” I never go. I should ha’ gone. I didn go. He call my name again an’ tell me if I didn come to ’im right now, he never comin back.
‘“I tired holdin on,” he say. “You wearin me down,” he say. “Dat lil Béké man ’cross dere make it clear he want you for himself. I could break his arse as easy as I look at ’im but you have to give me reason. I won’t bother you no more. When you ready, you come to me.” He stay right across the road and shout it. Then he leave. Was de last time he come.’
Deeka had been standing all the while. Now she sat on the steps, her elbows resting on her knees. She seemed to have forgotten they were there.
‘Still, it don’t take a half a man to have a woman come to him from jail carryin a child that not his, far less a child for a man who was threatening to shoot ’im. He cuss me, he even bring hi hand to me face. But was de beginnin of a kind of forgiveness, although he never accept the child. A woman know these things. Is what a man don’t say. Is how he look at that baby when he think you not watchin. Is how he dress an’ undress dat chile if he have to. Is how he look at it when it not well, that sorta thing. Must ha’ strike ’im, every time he look at her, dat it ain’t got no way dat lil red-skin girl could pass as hi own child. And in Ole Hope here, a man who take in a woman dat carryin another man seed, he either born stupid or born wrong-side. Is all of dat must ha’ got to ’im in the end. And of course my lil girl, Anita.’
This was the place they were waiting for her to arrive at. Perhaps this time she would go past it and tell them the bit that seemed to stop her right there every time. Over the years she’d been inching closer to it. A word here, a sentence there, softly mumbled sometimes, like slipping on pebbles at the edge of some precipice. She always recovered at the last minute. She became herself again, the weight of all her years settling back on her shoulders and bowing them very slightly. The light in her eyes receding.
3
THE TALK OF WOMEN taught Pynter Bender one thing: men walked.
The women spoke of it as if it were an illness – a fever that men were born with, for which there was no accounting and no cure. It could come upon them anytime, but more likely halfway through the harvesting of the canes in April – those months of work and hunger that Old Hope called the Stretch, when the children were thinnest.
A man stripped and cut the canes for ninety-four cents a day. A woman tied and packed and lifted bundles onto trucks for seventy-eight. And with the coming of the first rains, the tractors with the ploughs arrived. They walked behind them for a month, clearing the valley floor of stones and the diseased roots of last year’s crop.
That was when their men started looking southwards at the triangles of blue between the hills. Over dinner, the man would not really hear his woman when she told him something trivial about their child: that it would have his lips or eyes and be as good-looking as him. He might nod or stare through her, wondering aloud if she’d heard that another stoker in the sugar factory south of Old Hope, or in one of the little mills further east, had lost an arm to the machinery. That some quick-thinking friend had the presence of mind to cut the arm off at the shoulder before the cogs could pull him in. Or that an overladen truck, carrying a couple of tons of cane, had rolled over and crushed the loaders – boys really, boys barely old enough to earn a wage.
It was not always the rumour of an accident that started the man off daydreaming. One ordinary day he would look up from pulling ratoons from the earth and suddenly see nothing but the canes, stretching all the way to the end of his days, beyond life itself. And he would imagine himself walking on streets with lights, or standing at the foot of some tall glass building with cigarettes and money in his pocket, a coat around his shoulders and a newspaper tucked under his armpit. His woman would sense the change in him because he was irritable with her all the time, raised his hands at her more often, couldn’t stand to hear the baby crying.
Over the months, the savings, the borrowed money, would go towards the beige felt hat with the widish rim, a couple of thick Sea Island cotton shirts, two pairs of heavy flannel trousers, that started narrow at the heels and got looser all the way up to the waist. And of course a coat. Nothing was more confirming of his intentions than that coat. It would be the last thing that his friend – the only person he’d trusted with his plans – would hand over to him as they stand on the Carenage in San Andrews with their backs towards the island. And he would promise that friend, over a quick and secretive handshake, that he would make a way for him as soon as he got ‘there’.
‘There’ was anywhere, anywhere but home. ‘There’ was wherever in the world someone wanted a pair of hands to do something they didn’t want to do themselves. ‘There’ was anywhere a man could turn his back on cane. And it all started with that walk which, one quiet night, took him past the small dry-goods store with the single Red Spot sign, past the crumbling mansions that sat back from the road, their facades half-hidden by ancient hibiscus fences.
At Cross Gap, the last and only junction that marked Old Hope from the rest of the world, the man would begin to walk faster, the beige felt hat pulled down over his eyes, his last journey up Old Hope Road, his arms swinging loose, the walk of no return.
There were other Old Hope walks too, shorter walks, the night-time disappearances that lasted until morning. After dinner he would get up, wash his hands, hitch his trousers higher up his hips, and with barely a turn of the head he would say, ‘I takin a walk.’
‘Where you off to?’ a woman’s quiet query would come.
And just as softly his answer would reach her: ‘Don’ know, jus’ followin my foot.’ And the soft pad of his shoes would melt into the night.
Tan Cee’s husband would never explain himself. Wednesday nights, Pynter would watch his auntie watching her husband sitting cross-legged on the stool a couple of feet away from her. He imagined her counting the cigarettes he pulled out of the packet, the gestures his left hand made to light the match, how close to the butt he smoked each one and the slowness with which he crushed it into the dirt between his feet. That long, still face of his was always lifted
slightly, like a man whose head was buried in a dream. And as the night drew in, he took longer drags and made the match burn closer to his fingers.
Tan Cee’s head was angled just like his, but slightly away from him, her eyes switched sideways so that only the whites showed in the firelight. He could hear the whisper of Coxy’s clothing as he came to his feet, smell the Alcolado Glacial he’d rubbed along his neck and shoulders. It was only when his sandals hit the asphalt on the road below that his aunt got up and headed home.
Pynter had his eye on Coxy too. There was something about the soft-voiced smoking man that made his aunt a different person. However quietly Coxy called her name, she always seemed to hear him. She would lift her head, drop whatever she was doing and go straight away to him. It was as if she had an extra ear that was always listening out for him.
Sometimes Pynter would catch Coxy’s eyes on him. It was a different look from Deeka’s. It didn’t seem to wish he wasn’t there. It didn’t switch from him and then to Peter and back to him again. It was quiet and direct; and if he looked back at him, Coxy would nod his head and smile.
He was going to get an answer to the question that Coxy always left behind every Wednesday night. It felt a natural thing to do because lately he had been following his eyes. He left the yard on mornings and made his way to places he’d spotted in the distance. The week before it had been the high green rise of a silk-cotton tree on the slopes of Déli Morne. The day after that a patch of purple down the furthest reaches of the river, or a bit of rock that stood bare and brown like a scar against the green face of that precipice they called Man Arthur’s Fall. His eyes had even taken him down to that stinking place of tangled roots and mangroves into which they said his grandfather had disappeared. He’d stood there staring at the boiling mud, wondering what could ever make a person want to do a thing like that.
Now, he’d only just got back home from the sea. He’d sat on the pebbles that faced the ocean and looked out at the grey shape of the land that rested like a giant finger on the water, beyond which were darkness and the boom of water breaking over reef. He’d repeated in his head the last words Santay said to him the day she returned him to his yard: that to truly rid himself of Zed Bender’s curse, he would have to cross that ocean.
Deeka was talking about John Seegal again when he arrived. He wondered if she’d ever been to see the swamp that her husband had left her for. He wondered if anyone in the yard had ever done so.
His mother came and placed his dinner in his lap. He wasn’t hungry, but he fed himself all the same, keeping his eyes on Tan Cee and her husband. He glanced across at Deeka’s face. She was talking too much to notice him, and for that he felt relieved.
Following Coxy in the dark was easier than Pynter expected. He had been behind him for so long his heels were aching and a film of sweat had broken out on his face. He was not afraid of the night. It was never the kind of deep black that Deeka spoke of in her stories, where you couldn’t see your hands even if you held them up before your face.
The night was full of shapes, some laid back against the skyline, some leaning hard against each other. The track curled itself around the roots of trees that rose as high as houses. It dipped into small ravines, turned back on itself so suddenly he sometimes lost his sense of where he was.
He thought there would be no end to Coxy Levid’s walking.
Past Cross Gap Junction, Coxy turned left and suddenly they were in the middle of a cocoa plantation that spread out before them like a warren of dark tunnels. Pynter had a sense of how far ahead of him Coxy was because of the glow of his cigarette and because he sometimes whistled a tune. Sometimes he stopped and pulled his shirt close because it was cold beneath these trees.
Tan Cee had told him of the snakes that lived beneath the carpet of leaves which every cocoa tree spread around its trunk. Crebeaux, she told him, were creatures so black they glistened. They moved like tar but were quick enough to knot themselves around the foot of a careless child, a rabbit or a bird and make a soup of their bones before swallowing them whole.
He’d lost sight of Coxy, had emerged on the edge of a small hill and hung there, leaning against the bark of a mango tree, looking down at the houses scattered along the hillside facing him. Lamplight seeped through their wooden walls. Their galvanised roofs glowed dully in the dark.
He was about to turn and make his way down when he caught the smell of cigarettes. He brought his hands up to his face. A hand reached around his shoulders and he felt himself thrown backwards. He’d lost his balance but he wasn’t falling. He felt his breath leave his body as the hand lifted him and slammed his back against the tree. Pynter opened his mouth and drew his breath; and there was Coxy Levid’s face, level with his own.
‘Why you falla me?’ Coxy shook him hard. ‘Yuh aunt send you after me?’
Pynter shook his head, made to speak, but his tongue had seized up like a stone inside his mouth.
‘You lie fo’ me, you never leave dis place.’ Coxy made a circle with his head that took in the bushes and the darkness around. ‘Y’unnerstan?’
A match exploded in his face again. Coxy’s lips were peeled back, his teeth white and curved like seashells. The light-brown eyes glowed in the matchlight like a cat’s.
‘Why you falla me, boy!’
‘I don’ know, jus’ … You squeezin me.’
‘That woman send you after me?’
‘No. I come – I come by meself. You, you squeezin me.’
‘So if I break your fuckin neck right here fuh mindin big man bizness, nobody goin to know.’ The fingers pressed harder against his forehead.
Pynter looked into Coxy’s eyes. He searched his head for words. Found nothing.
‘So what you fallain me for?’
‘I – I not goin to tell nobody.’
‘Tell nobody what? What you got in your mind to tell nobody, eh? A man cyahn’ take a walk? You think anybody could walk behind me for me not to know? You feel say you is spirit? You feel say all dem shit dem talk ’bout you is true? You feel say you can’t dead. You wan’ me to prove it?’
Coxy shifted his hand sharply down beneath Pynter’s chin. Now there was a terrible pressure at the back of his neck. His jaws were so tightly locked he could barely whimper.
‘You so much as breathe my name to anybody, you so much as tink a lil thought about where you falla me tonight, you so much as dream ’bout tryin it again, I make you wish you never born.’
The hand released him suddenly and he fell backwards.
Pynter stayed leaning against the tree, his breathing coming fast and hard. He listened to Coxy’s footsteps going down the path until he could hear the man no more. A little way off a dog barked. A few others across the hill replied, followed by a man’s voice – low and deep like far-off thunder. A woman’s laughter climbed the night air, so bright and musical it made him think of ribbons in the wind.
4
FROM THE SETTLEMENT of twenty dwellings or so east of Glory Cedar Rise a man sat hidden under one of the houses, dreamily looking down on Old Hope Valley.
The occupants did not know that he was there. He could have chosen any of the houses scattered about the hill, since they all offered the same view of the valley. After resting a couple of hours there, he’d picked up enough from the conversation that filtered through the floorboards to know that the woman’s name was Eunice and the man’s was Ezra, and that he worked in one of the quarries in the south.
He had dozed a little and then woken up. His feet still ached from the walk from Edmund Hill. The eight miles had taken him longer than he’d anticipated, but that was because for many years he had lost the habit of walking distances.
Having also lost the habit of sleeping a whole night through, he would sleep again for another couple of hours and then wake up to watch the morning come. By then, those above him would begin to stir. He would take the mud track down towards the river, or perhaps wait a couple of hours longer. The quarryman might find him
there. He might move to say something, as any man would do to a stranger sitting beneath his house, but then the quarryman would stop and examine him more closely – the coarse old cotton shirt with faded numbers stencilled below the breast pocket, the heavy pair of leather boots, resoled and passed on to him as a present. And of course his face. The quarry man’s eyes would pause there and he would think better of whatever he was about to say and maybe go inside to tell his woman.
It was what always happened when, every few years, a man found him beneath his house waiting for the morning.
In the valley below, he’d counted the fires in the yards as they went out one by one with the deepening night, each bit of dancing yellow like a tiny signal of hope against all that darkness. He had watched the moon rise and smelled the morning, and had begun to wonder how they would receive him this time and what, if anything, had changed since he last saw them. And then the sky lit up a couple of hills ahead of him. It was in the general direction of where he wanted to go. He eased himself forward, thinking how strange it was that anyone would want to light a boucan this time of night, in fact so close to morning. He watched it burn till the flames died down, becoming no more than a glowing scar against the dark.
It was daylight and the valley filled with birdsong. He got to his feet. He moved with the litheness of a man accustomed to hard work. It would take him a couple of hours to get there, perhaps longer, because on his way up the other side of the valley he would pause to gather guavas, water lemons, perhaps carve a spinning top or two for the children. He always brought home something for the children.