by Jacob Ross
Dat light, is de light I still remember. All dat light around dem and I was in dat light now, like if I did belong dere too.
I know she must have hear me thinking because she take my hand and rest it on she belly like i was touching the whole world with my hand or the reason for the world, or something.
I ask her how I could come like her. what I did mean was how I could be so happy and contented. She look at the boy and she understand and her body laugh. Her face and her hand tell him something dat he tell me afterwards. he say dat she say I have to be a woman first. A woman. Like that word was something that she just hand over to me.
i get impatient with de years. I get sort of fed up waitin to turn woman, sometimes. And a couple of times I try to hurry things up. I start talkin to meself too, bicause all them thoughts was running round inside my head like ants and when I couldn hold dem in, I sort of let dem roll out of me and i write dem down on anything my hand fall on. Is how they begin to think that I gone crazy. Dat my father spirit get tired of that dirty swamp down dere and seein as I was his favrite before Patty come he come back to possess me.
I know you long before you know me. I know you from de time you look down straight at me one morning, when I get up early to go to the pipe for water.
I had my bucket on my head when you reach me and I lift my eye to say Mornin Missa Manuel Forsyth. I tell myself afterwards that I shouldnt do that. I should a keep my head straight but I was remembering what Miss Sharon tell me by the river. Everything I been waitin fo ever since she tell me come back to me.
You didnt look like no old man to me. Wasnt no old fella I see when I look and wasnt what I see afterwards.
I dont know why it had to take three months of getting up early in the morning and saying Good Morning Missa Manuel befo I work meself up enough to tell you what I want. And it wasnt no old fella lookin at me when I ask you first time even if you look at me as if I mad.
I keep asking till I wear you down. After a little time I see you couldnt hide behind your age no more because all thats left was a man looking at a woman.
That was how I come to feel alright again since my father leave, because after that I was going to have something dat bilong to me.
What I never understand …
He could not find the leaf that would have told him what she never understood. Not a whole one, but fragments that, whichever way he placed them, did not fit together …
…dam fool to believe ——
—— crazy l——
——y —— mother and all th——
—— love and ——
—— chilren who is ——.
—— dam fool ——
—— hatin all ——
——nofabitch tha—
How did it end? Was it with love and —— or was it with — — hatin all ——?
Uncle Michael’s words were stranger than his mother’s, colliding in odd and unexpected ways.
moon over your shoulder shadow in my eyes.
Today you looked much older.
Today I made you cry.
Aruba, May 1945
And it was strange that even when he’d forgotten them, it still felt as if they’d left some part of themselves inside his head. Short words, not half as long as his mother’s; sometimes a line running across a page – like a tiny ant-trail against a vast white desert.
Day yawns, cracks the egg of dawn. A coq-soleil’s sopranoing rises and circles a clean sun.
Panama, August 1947
Those words did not help him understand why his uncle never wanted children. They were like the doorway that had invited him into this abandoned room. Everything was laid out before his eyes but their messages remained hidden. A darkened room that was as full of stories as the women in the river. Only these were littered in untidy heaps across the dusty floor, and stranger to him than anything he’d ever heard before.
It going to be quiet up there, his father had told him, but it was not quiet in his head. He missed the voices of the women in the yard. The foolish and the awful things they talked about and laughed over. He missed his fights with Peter and above all he missed his auntie’s hands.
Now that the dry season had come, his aunt, Tan Cee, would be down there among those tiny black dots crawling along the green edges of the never-ending fields of sugar cane. Patty the Pretty would be home because Leroy had taken her out of cane. They would no doubt be doing what his grandmother said his youngest aunt always did when Leroy was around: trying for a child.
He never wondered what that meant. It was some kind of magic between adults that involved hiding themselves away and, if he were to judge by what he saw from Patty, looking very sleepy and smiling all the time.
Tan Cee would be down there with the men, swinging her machete at the roots of the cane, his mother just behind her, gathering them in bundles, tying them and lifting them over her head onto the tractors that looked like big yellow beetles from where he stood. Home was just a walk away, but from here it seemed as if it would take an entire lifetime to reach them.
He wondered if Birdie was with them, then he remembered Tan Cee saying that Birdie only ever sweated over bread.
It was quiet up here. The quietness stretched beyond the house. At the back of it, the land ran wild for miles, all the way past the hellish quarry-land of Gaul through to Morne Bijoux on the other side of the ridge of hills that separated them from the rest of the world. Afternoons, when the heat of the day pushed the old man into a deep sleep, he left the room and retreated into the bushes, making his own little pathways among the borbook and black sage.
There was a long, narrow ravine that went down to a tall wall of plants with bright blossoms. His first few visits there, he couldn’t figure out why everything seemed to be either in fruit or flowering when everything else around was dry. He had gone closer, to examine those heavy deep-scented flowers, when he felt himself falling. He landed in a tangle of wist vines, was shaken but not hurt. Sat there while his eyes adjusted to the thick green light.
He was in a gully that he would never have known existed had he not fallen through the bush that covered it like a roof. The earth was dark with dampness, though it hadn’t rained for weeks. It was cool here too, like the riverbank. There were the same darkish odours of growth and fermentation.
He began picking his way through the tangle. This place puzzled him. The earth was covered with guavas. They hung thickly from the branches above his head. A slight brush of his fingers and they fell into his hands. Wherever there were guavas there were serpents. Santay had told him about the reddish ones that grew long and fat and wrapped themselves in tight knots around the branches. And sure enough he saw them, untying themselves, their heads stretched out towards him, their tongues flickering like small flames in their mouths. He made a hammock of his shirt, selected the fruits he wanted and left there quickly. Later, in the dimming light of the late evening, he sat on the steps and broke open the fruit, tasted each one tentatively before stuffing himself full.
He came back to that place often, because he could find food there. He found crayfish canes and water lemons further down the gully, and a little walk beyond that, sapodillas and star apples. Everything was growing there in that long green tunnel of light and leaves, a secret place that only he, the birds, the millipedes and serpents knew about. He called it Eden.
It was during one of his visits there that Gideon came. When Pynter returned to his father’s house, he heard a new voice pitched high and fast. It sounded like an argument. His father’s rumblings were soft and subdued against the other. Miss Maddie was bending over a pepper plant on the side of the house, a can of water in her hand. His father was lying back on the canvas chair. A man in a pressed blue shirt sat on a chair he had taken from the living room. His legs were close together and he was leaning forward slightly. There were papers on the bed.
The stranger turned and saw him, looked at him as if he knew him. His eyes paused on his face, then dropped to his
naked feet. They stayed there a while before travelling back up to his face again. Pynter was suddenly aware that he hadn’t washed his hands. Hadn’t poured water on his feet and cleaned them in the grass outside. He felt an urge to go outside and do it.
‘So you the one they call Half Pint?’ The man was showing him his teeth. His face was strange. It was long like his father’s but thinner, with all the bones showing through. His eyes were round and bright like polished marbles and when he spoke, his lips hardly moved.
‘Pynter,’ his father said, ‘dis is Gideon, your brother.’
Gideon closed his mouth as suddenly as he’d opened it to show his teeth. He turned back to face the old man. ‘So, how you gettin on, Ole Fella?’
‘Don’t “Ole Fella” me, I your father. Pynter?’
‘Pa?’
‘Say hello to your brother, Gideon.’
Gideon threw a quick sideways glance at him. ‘I met the boy already.’
‘Gideon hardly come to look for me,’ his father said. ‘The more money he make, the longer he stay away.’
Gideon protested, his stammery voice rising and falling quickly. His father chuckled. Soon Pynter was not hearing them. He stood at the doorway, his shoulder pressed against the side of it, watching the face they said his mother feared more than any other in the world, following with his eyes the hands that had almost taken Peter and him away from her. Gideon was still wearing his grey felt hat. It looked new. Everything about him looked new, even his pale blue shirt and shiny brown leather shoes.
Gideon turned his head and saw him staring. He glanced at their father, who was busy with figuring out the exact value of the farmland he’d stopped working in the far end of Old Hope. When Gideon turned back to Pynter it was with a look that reminded him of Deeka, like that time she pushed him off the top of her steps and Tan Cee came so close to striking her.
He retreated into the living room and sat on the chair closest to the bedroom door. He didn’t know what was making Gideon talk so low and rapidly, but occasionally he heard the old man chuckle, and just once Manuel Forsyth’s voice rose sharp and clear: ‘You can’t make a fool of me, Gideon. I still got my senses. I not signing anything, specially now that I can’t see too clear what I going be signing.’
Miss Maddie was still out there shuffling around the house. She was nearer the back now, uprooting grass or something. With Gideon here and Miss Maddie at the back, things made a little more sense to him. This dusty wooden house suffused with its deep and sweetish odours of wood-rot and neglect was theirs. Gideon, Miss Maddie, Sister Pearly and Eileen-in-America wouldn’t have minded the shadows in the corners, the very faint odour of Canadian Healing Oil, the smell of bay leaves and black sage that grew on the windward side of the house. It was their feet that had smoothed the wooden floor. The walls had thrown their voices back at them. His father’s house would never be his and Peter’s the way it had been for them.
His mind must have taken him a far way off. Miss Maddie was no longer moving around the house. He got up and went to the bedroom door. ‘Pa tired,’ he said. ‘Dat’s why he not answerin you no more.’
That sudden sideways glance again. The expression was still there when Gideon laughed. ‘’Kay, Pops. I see you again soon.’
Gideon stood up, took out a roll of money and peeled off two brown notes and three green ones. He shoved them in his father’s hand.
‘Thirty-five dollars. All I have. Come, walk me to the door, Quarter Bottle.’
‘My name is Pynter.’
‘What’s the other one call?’
‘Peter. He your brother too.’
Gideon’s hands were stuffed inside his pockets. Keys jangled.
He pulled them out. ‘How you know dat, uh?’
‘Everybody know dat,’ Pynter told him flatly.
Gideon brought his face down close to Pynter’s. ‘Look here, Half Eights.’
‘Pynter!’
‘Okay, Pinky! Either I lookin at a miracle or you and whatever-his-name-is is the fastest one anybody ever pull on my old man and get away with it. Jeez! And believe me dat is a miracle, cuz he never was nobody fool. I don’ see no part of us in you.’
‘Me neither!’ Pynter said, and he turned to run back in, but Gideon’s hand had closed around his collar. He could have cried out, let his father know, but he didn’t want to. He spun round, stared into the man’s face, putting the weight of all the memories of all the things the women by the river had said behind his words. ‘I don’ like you, Gideon. I never like you since before I born. An’ long as I live, I never goin to like you.’
Gideon stiffened. Pynter thought he was about to hit him. But something in Pynter had changed from the night when Coxy had pinned his back against a tree and looked into his eyes. He would never let a man lay his hands on him again. He closed his fingers around Gideon’s wrist and had twisted his shoulders to sink his teeth into his arm when a voice came suddenly between them, ‘Let the little fella go, Gidiot.’
Gideon stepped back. Pynter turned his head to see a young man leaning against the house. He had both hands in his pockets and his legs were crossed. His eyes were like Miss Elaine’s – large and wide and bright. There was no collar on his white shirt. A small book with a blue cover peeked out of one of his pockets.
‘What the hell you want?’ Gideon squeezed the words out through his teeth.
‘Pick on somebody your size – you flippin thug.’
‘Lissen, Mister Pretty Pants – watch your … ’
The young man’s movement cut Gideon’s words short. He’d pushed himself off the wall so quickly, so unexpectedly, that Pynter felt his heart flip over.
Gideon stepped closer. ‘You try anything, I give what you got coming to you.’
‘Not from you. For sure. And don’t forget, you beating up a child and threatening me in my mother yard.’
The man mumbled something under his breath and turned to leave.
Paso smiled. ‘Say what you thinking, Big Fella.’
‘You and your mother won’ like it.’
Paso curled a beckoning finger at Pynter. ‘Come this side,’ he said. He was looking at Gideon sideways. ‘That’s bad blood there. Sour blood.’
‘At least I’m a man.’
‘You say that again, I make you sorry.’
Their voices had drawn Miss Maddie out onto the porch. Gideon saw her, straightened up and strolled out of the yard.
The youth stared down at Pynter, smiling. ‘First time you meet that dog?’
Pynter nodded.
‘Don’t go near ’im. He’ll bite anything that move. When he come, jus’ give ’im space.’ He stepped back, playfully almost, as if he were dancing. ‘So you my mother brother? I hear a lot ’bout y’all. People round here talk!’ He thumbed his mother’s house. ‘Call me Paso, and you – you Paul – no, Peter. Not so?’
‘I Pynter. Peter home.’
Paso reached for his hand and shook it. ‘So how I must call you – Uncle?’
‘Pynter.’
‘Pynter, okay – nuh, I think I’ll stick with Uncle. It got a certain, uhm, ring, nuh resonance to it. See you around, Big Fella.’
He winked and strolled away. Pynter watched him walk towards the porch, watched him until he stepped behind his mother and seemed miraculously to be swallowed up by her bulk.
Later in the evening, when dusk had just begun to sprinkle the foothills with that creeping ash that would thicken into night, Paso appeared again, this time with Manuel Forsyth’s food. He had changed his trousers but not his shirt.
‘Still there, Uncle?’
Pynter nodded. He’d spent most of the afternoon waiting to catch a glimpse of Paso again.
Paso placed the plate on the step beside his foot. ‘I tell the Madre to put a little extra in for you – not just this time, but every time. You been inside that lil room yet?’
The question caught him unawares. Paso dropped questions the way a person threw a punch when the other was least ex
pecting it.
‘Which room?’ Pynter asked.
‘The dark one.’ He winked.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Find what I find in there?’
Pynter turned his head and shrugged. Paso laughed.
‘Take me a coupla days and a bottle of the Madre cooking oil to grease them hinges. The Old Fella used to keep it locked. He shouldn ha’ tell me not to go in there. S’like an open invitation, s’far as I concern. I leave it open so he could know I was in there. He never close it back.’
‘Where you go to every night-time?’
The smile left his nephew’s face, but only briefly. In less than a heartbeat it returned. ‘Wherever night-time want me. Ever hear this one?
The road is long, the night is deep,
I got promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.
‘Uncle Michael?’
‘Nuh, Merican fella name Robbie Frost – with all the warmth from me, of course.’
He was fingering the little blue book in his shirt pocket. ‘Know any poetry?’
‘Wozzat?’
‘You serious?’
Pynter nodded.
‘You been reading Mikey’s stuff – and …’ He laughed, looked at Pynter closely and laughed again.
‘Jeezas, man! Moon over your shoulder.’
‘Shadow in me eye,’ Pynter cut in. The words had come almost despite himself.
‘You been reading Mikey stuff and you don’ know what it call? Listen to this …’ His fingers slid the little notebook from his shirt. He held it up before him. The way Missa Geoffrey sometimes held Miss Tilina’s face.
In the morning dark
my people walk to the time of clocks