by Jacob Ross
He turned his face up to the morning, the almond-shaped eyes catching the soft, indifferent light. A gold tooth glimmered between his parted lips and his large head dipped down. He picked up a cotton sack, which he swung onto his left shoulder. The sudden flurry of air raised the scent of bread. His eyes were still fixed on the scar against the hillside when he started marching down the hill, the smell of yeast and hard-dough bread following him.
He emerged into a bright, harsh day from the cocoa plantation near Cross Gap Junction a couple of miles away. And it was from there that he started greeting people.
Tan Cee heard him first about a quarter of a mile out on the road. Somebody must have set him off laughing. Her head cocked up like a chicken’s and suddenly she was squealing, ‘Birdie! Birdie!’, running down the hill towards the road with the tub of washing spilt all over the ground and Coxy’s trousers trailing in the dirt behind her.
‘That sister o’ mine crazy,’ Elena laughed, but she too was dancing on the steps.
Birdie brought Tan Cee back up the hill kicking and choking with laughter in between her pleas for him to put her down. He was holding her high above his head and tickling her at the same time.
They collapsed in the yard together and before he knew it they were all over him. Patty arrived running and simply dumped herself on them. Elena almost took a flying leap from the steps and trusted Birdie’s body to take care of the rest. Tan Cee was somewhere between them. They pinched him, they bit him, they kicked him, they dug and squirmed their fingers in his ribs, which brought out thunder-rolls of laughter from him and set the whole yard laughing too. For Birdie’s was the kind of laughter that was in itself a joke.
He rolled them off eventually and they sat in the dirt and stared at him, the giant they saw once in every few years. They reached out their hands and brushed the bits of grass and dust from his beard, wiped the sweat off his forehead with their hands. Tan Cee straightened the collar of the khaki shirt they’d just crushed while Patty and Elena rested their elbows on his shoulders. He got to his feet, bringing them all up together with him, like a tree might move with all its branches, and now that the children could see his full size they were open-mouthed.
If Birdie had been born after his father’s passing, they would have said he was John Seegal born again, and he had the same effect on Deeka. She was sweeping up the fallen flowers of the grapefruit tree when she heard his laughter. The sound of him had frozen her. She hadn’t moved from under the grapefruit tree, still held the broom in her hand in mid-swing.
She didn’t say a thing when he got up, eased the three women aside and turned around to face her with a grin as wide as a beach.
Birdie lifted his mother off the ground and held her, broom and all, as one would do a child. The smile gone now, he looked down at her face and rumbled softly, ‘Ma!’
Everything was in that single word, all the time and distance there had been between them. Deeka dropped the broom. She reached up and looped her arms around his neck.
‘Put me down,’ she ordered.
He held her for a while longer then carefully let her down among the stones, passing his hands through his hair, his beard, then his hair again.
‘When you goin back?’ she asked.
‘I goin straight this time, Ma. No more jail for me.’
‘Until you break in somebody house again and clean it out? I try to straighten you out from small, but this son o’ mine born crooked. Come lemme feed you some proper food, you thief!’
His laughter filled the house till evening. He ate everything they placed before him, and when he finished he kicked the heavy boots off his feet, reached for the canvas bag that hadn’t left his shoulder, even when his sisters were wrestling with him, and pulled out several loaves of bread.
It was what they had been waiting for: Birdie’s prison bread. Pynter and his brother knew more about his bread than they did about their uncle himself. It was the taste of Birdie’s bread they talked about when they were really missing him. It was a way of talking about his strength too, for the secret to his making the best bread on the island – and a pusson won’ be surprised if it was de best bread in de world, Elena told them – lay in the power of those hands. She’d said those last words the way a preacher in church would say them. Only she didn’t get an amen at the end but a loud ‘Uh-huh!’ from Tan Cee.
Those hands – they kneaded dough so tight a pusson could hang it on a branch and swing on it and it won’t stretch loose an’ make dem fall an’ bust their tail. That was bread – that was de fadder an’ modder of all bread. In fact, bread was Birdie salvation. God might forgive him his thiefin ways on account of his talent for baking. And not just bread. Dumplings too. Cornmeal dumplings, plain-flour dumplings, cassava dumplings: dumplings for oil-down and crab stew; for pea soup and fish broth. Or jus’ dumplings stan’-up by itself.
You bit into one of Birdie’s dumplings and it protested. It stewpsed. It sucked its teeth like an irritable woman. It went ‘chiiks!’ Like it was answering you back or something. Like it asking you what the arse you playin, biting it so hard.
In fact, a woman could get de measure of a man by the dumplin’ that he make. By de size of it, the toughness and de strength of it, an’ whether it could answer back when you sink your teeth in it. And if a pusson want proof dat Birdie was a real man, dem only had to eat his dumplin’. Just one. In fact, you didn even have to go to all that lovely trouble. All you have to do is ask his woman, Cynty. Cuz soon as Birdie reach from jail, he does go an’ cook she food!
Woman-talk. Sweet-talk. Bender-talk that sent them up in quakes of laughter and left the children smiling back suspiciously at them.
Birdie spoke of prison as if it were another country – one with walls too tall to escape over. And why a person goin want to do that anyway? They could break a leg, and if they got away, where they goin to hide on a little island that the sea fence in better than any barbed wire? And that was only if they got that far, because there were dogs – he knew the name of every one of them. Real dogs. Not no bag-a-bone pot-hound like people got in their yard at home, but Rockwylers and Allstations. Them is serious dog! Them could follow a man shadow in the night. No joke! All they need was a little sniff of the bench that fella sit down on a coupla years ago. And they good as got him.
He told them of troubles they knew nothing about, and of men who’d spent their entire lives behind those old stone walls, who, when let out, were so confused and terrified of all that light and air around them they ran straight back inside. Some spent all their days trying to figure out what they did to be up there.
There were the bright ones, he told them, put inside for something they might have said that somebody did not like. With their quiet words and educated ways, they changed the men without the wardens noticing. Taught them how to talk up for themselves, how to hold on to an argument. And those who could not take their minds off their women and their children were made to think of things that had never crossed their minds before. Like why cane was so cheap and they couldn’t afford to buy the sugar that was made from it; why the dry season always brought with it so much rage and hardship on an island where the soil they walked on was so rich. So rich, in fact, that if a pusson dropped a needle on the ground it grew into a crowbar.
The smile left his lips, and his hands grew quiet in his lap. Now the young ones were coming, he told them, children who had no place among big men. Sent there by men who thought they owned the country. Who could not abide the impatience of these young ones who asked more questions and wanted a life that took them further than these narrow acres of bananas and sugar cane. Which was why there were more guns and soldiers now; which was why something had to break. Soon. It didn’t take the edicated men to show him that. He could see it coming.
Pynter eased his head off Tan Cee’s shoulder.
‘An’ you, Missa Birdie, if it so bad in dere, how come you like jail so much?’ He didn’t understand the sudden silence and the look that Deeka s
hot him.
Birdie raised his head and laughed, but the furrows on his brows that had not been there before made his face look different.
‘You de funny one – not so? You de second-born?’ Birdie said.
Tan Cee rested an arm across Pynter’s shoulder and drew him in to her. ‘And you the one who name we give ’im.’ She smiled. ‘Hi first name is your middle name. We call ’im Pynter.’
Tan Cee’s words seemed to take Birdie somewhere else. His face relaxed. His eyes got soft and dreamy.
‘I ferget that,’ he said. ‘I ferget that name. S’what happm when you got something and you never use it. Dat remind me,’ he rose up like a small earthquake from the floor, ‘Cynty down dere waiting.’
That night, curled up on the floor beside Peter, Pynter realised that his uncle had not answered him. His head was a hive of questions he never got to ask – why, especially, was he always thiefin things that were never really useful?
The last time the police had come for him was after he arrived in the yard with a fridge on his head and a television under his arm, even though the whole world knew that Lower Old Hope didn’t have electricity. And it was a waste, because the chickens made their nest in the fridge and one of the policemen who came to take him went off with the television.
‘Peter, you like Birdie?’
‘Uncle Birdie,’ Peter hissed.
‘Uncle Birdie – you like ’im?’
‘Uh-huh. And you?’
‘He not well an’ he don’ know it.’
He felt Peter shifting in the dark. ‘S’not true – Tan Cee tell you so?’
‘No, I tell Tan Cee so.’
‘Which part of ’im not well?’ Peter said.
‘You say s’not true, so I not tellin you.’ He felt his brother moving towards him, felt his breath against his ear.
‘Jumbie Boy – you’z a flippin liar.’
Elena Bender was smiling when she asked Pynter to come and sit with her beneath the plum tree. That was not good. His mother never smiled so early in the day. She picked up a piece of stick and began making patterns in the dust with it. A thin film of sweat had settled among the very fine hairs on her upper lip. She glanced sideways at him, briefly, tried to smile again, but he could see that she was forcing it.
‘You goin to your father house from Sunday.’
‘My father – Manuel Forsyth?’
‘You don’ call ’im Manuel Forsyth; he’s your father.’
‘He got another name?’
‘Is the same rudeness you bring to your Uncle Birdie yesterday. You see how upset you make him? Peter know what y’all father look like. You don’t think you ought to know him too?’
He didn’t answer straight away, preferring to follow the flight of a pair of chicken hawks high on the wind above them. Their cries reminded him of bright sharp things – knives and nails and needles.
‘He a old man,’ he said. ‘Ten times older’n you. Dat’s what Miss Lizzie say. I not goin nowhere.’
‘What else Miss Lizzie say?’ She was looking at him sideways.
‘Lots o’ things.’
‘Like what?’ She was speaking but her lips were hardly moving.
A small current of uneasiness ran through him. He turned his head away from her, remembering the evening he returned from the river after Tan Cee had taken him there. During dinner, Patty the Pretty had come to sit with him. She’d asked him what had happened down there by the river. He told her, finding that he’d lowered his voice like hers. When he finished she was shaking her head and she wasn’t smiling as she did most times.
‘You must never tell your mother about these things, y’unnerstan? You talk to me or Tan Cee, but never your mother, y’hear me?’
He’d asked her why. She seemed to be making up her mind about something, then she touched his arm, ‘Know Miss Maisie?’
He nodded.
‘See that long white mark that run across she face?’
He nodded.
‘Well, one time, when y’all was little baby, Maisie say something to your mother about y’all and Manuel Forsyth. Elena put you an’ Peter down by the roadside and went fo’ her. It take four people to pull her off. She only had time to do that to her face. Imagine if she had another coupla minutes.’
He looked across at his mother, his voice a plea this time. ‘Let Peter go – I don’ like ’im, Na.’
‘You don’ like somebody you don’ know? Is you he ask for.’
‘Why?’
She looked away.
‘I wan’ to stay with Tan.’
‘What you say?’
He felt the change in her. It was as quiet as it was frightening. He jumped to his feet to run. Her hand shot out and closed around his shirt.
‘Siddown!’ The voice came from her throat. ‘Lemme teach you something. I’ll never have to do this with Peter – but you, you different. I don’ know what kind o’ child you is. You want to know who’s your modder? Well, let me,’ she shook him, ‘show you,’ she shook him again, ‘who your modder is!’
She was loosening the buttons of her bodice with the other hand. He watched as she lifted the ends of the garment. Still staring into his eyes, she took his hand and placed it on the small bulge on the left side of her stomach. He tried to pull away. She dragged him back.
‘Peter was here fo’ eight months an’ thirteen days. You,’ she pulled his hand over to the other side, ‘you was here a extra two days. This,’ she forced his finger along the lines that ran like a faint network of vines around the bulges, ‘is y’all signature. Is de writing dat y’all leave on me. Dis is Peter; dis is you. Me, Elena Bender, I’z your modder. So!’ She shook him hard. ‘Don’ get renk with me, y’hear me! I not askin you, I tellin you – next week you goin live with your father.’
She pushed his hand away, got to her feet and went inside.
A couple of mornings every week, when it was still so dark even the chickens beneath the house had not begun to stir, there came the clip-clop-clipping of his father’s donkey, the thud of a bag of provisions hitting the ground, then the voice, ‘Elen-ooy!’
Pynter would listen to his mother in the bedroom as she got up, quickly dressed and hurried down the hill to the road.
Pynter would hear the rhythm of the donkey’s hooves fading into the distance, following them in his imagination through the sea of plantation canes in the lower valleys of Old Hope, over the Déli Morne River, past the stony wastelands of Salt Fields, where they said the bamboo rose so high their branches swept the sky.
For a long time Pynter had tried to put a face to that voice.
The hands that lifted him onto the back of the donkey were big like Birdie’s. A face turned back at him – brown and smooth and hairless, the eyes resting on him almost as a hand would. And then a voice, ‘Is quiet where we going; you sure you want to come?’
He nodded. He liked the smell of the man.
His father’s house stood on a ridge that looked down on Old Hope. From there he could see the deep green scoop of the valley winding towards the Kalivini swamps where his grandfather disappeared, and the purple-dark hills that seemed to hold back the sea from spilling over onto the canes and the people who worked in them. His father’s house was smaller than his mother’s and had no yard to speak of, just the lawn he was not allowed to walk on, which belonged to Miss Maddie – a greying woman whom he’d only caught a glimpse of, and who his father called his daughter.
A window with six glass panes let light into the bedroom. It was the only room with a door that was open to the day.
His father pointed at the back room first – a lightless doorway that stood gaping like a toothless mouth, and from which came a warm and unexpected breath – the odour of musty, nameless things. ‘Don’t go in there,’ he said, without offering a reason. ‘And leave this place alone,’ he added, turning to the living room.
He’d said ‘this place’ as if the living room did not belong to the house. It had been abandoned to spiders
and dust mites. A mahogany table, on whose surface he drew finger faces and curlicues, stood in the middle of it. The matching chairs were arranged around it strangely, as if the people who had been sitting there had suddenly got up and, without looking back, had left the room for good. Two brownish photographs hung in the gloomiest corner of the room. The smaller one was just the head of a young man, his hair cropped short, staring directly out at them. In the other, a man sat on a beautiful chair with a gaze that was direct and grave. A still-faced woman rested a gloved hand on his arm. Four children, a boy and three girls, were arranged around them like flowers in a vase.
His father gave him their names the moment he stepped through the doorway: Maddie, a sour-faced child, knock-kneed and resentful even then. To the left of her, Eileen – beautiful and dreamy. His father’s voice had gone dreamy too. Eileen left the island soon’z she was old enough to travel. Never look back. Pearly was the youngest – too young then to know that she had to sit still to get a proper picture, which was why her face was no more than a smudge.
He left Gideon for last. Gideon was the only boy. ‘Apart from y’all, of course. Gideon build bridges for the government.
‘Gideon fifty next year. Pearly forty-seven. Eileen,’ he smiled, ‘she thirty-five next month.’
For a while Pynter felt that the man had forgotten he was there. The bag he’d taken off the donkey was still hanging from his shoulder. His eyes were on the photograph. A stillness had come over his face.
‘Time pass. Time pass too fast, son. Time does pass too fast.’ His voice had grown thick and slow. There was a sadness there that made Pynter turn his eyes up at the heavy shape against the backlight of the doorway.
Once, this shape had been no more than a sound. A voice. It used to stop his hands from whatever they were doing. His father’s voice – different from the voices of all the men he’d ever heard. And now that he could see him, it was the only voice that fitted the face to which it belonged. A large face, brown like burnt ginger, not smiling, not strict, not young, not old. A face that shifted easily, like shadow over water.