by Jacob Ross
Pynter wondered what Peter was doing now. What would he say when he told him about Marlo and Harris? He sat on the earth, not bothering to settle himself down in his hideaway in the elephant grass. He wanted a stick to make markings like his mother on the ground. He wanted words to make all of it make sense.
He saw the man the instant his hand reached out to pull a twig – a shadow at the corner of his eye almost as if one of the trees had moved. He was on his feet before he’d even thought of it. Felt the wet grass give way beneath him and his shoulder hit the trunk of the guava tree in front of him. He heard a grunt, felt the tree heave. A shower of guavas hit the grass. A hand closed around his ankle. He kept moving. He kept moving because Tan Cee had told him to. He couldn’t remember how long ago, or how many times she’d said it to him and Peter. He’d forgotten where he was or exactly when she’d said so, but now her voice was like a whisper at the back of his ear. ‘If a pusson get hold of you, and you know dat they don’t mean you no good, you don’t jus’ stand up there. You move, you kick, you bite, you make a whole heap o’ noise. You don’ tell yourself you weak, you don’ tell yourself you finish, you never tell yourself you lose. You keep movin, even if they lock you down, you never stop movin, y’hear me? Jus’ move … ’
The hand slipped off his ankle. He swung himself away and in that single eye-blink of a turn he caught a glimpse of Marlo’s fleshy face, the leather scabbard at his side and his bulk against the guava trees. And then there came a shout from another man nearby.
‘Ayyy! What de hell goin on ’cross dere?’
Pynter found his back pressed against Missa Geoffrey’s stomach, the man’s hand holding him firmly there. Missa Geoffrey’s chin was lifted high, his body rigid. He held a large stone firmly in his free hand.
There was a crash of trees, branches breaking, and suddenly Marlo was no longer there.
Missa Geoffrey stepped away from him – with his light brown eyes and a tiny brown moustache. ‘Who de hell is you, and what bring you here?’
‘Pynter – I’z Pynter.’
‘You know who dat was?’ Missa Geoffrey lifted his chin at the bushes beyond them.
Pynter nodded.
‘You know what could’ve happen if it didn cross my mind to come here now?’ His face was hard and unsmiling.
Pynter nodded again. He realised his knees were shaking slightly. Missa Geoffrey was there beside him, yet he sounded as if he were speaking from a far way off.
Missa Geoffrey dropped the stone. He looked about him. His face and shoulders were twitching. ‘Why dat murderer had to come here, eh? Dat sonuvabitch could ha’ gone everywhere else, but is here he had to come. I have to report this now, not so?’ He gestured at the bushes. ‘An’ what happm when I get out o’ here and call police? Next thing you know, this place full up of all kind o’ people.’ He looked about him again as if the gully were his house. Pynter thought the man was going to cry.
‘And you,’ he turned brown accusing eyes on Pynter, ‘what de hell bring you down here? This look like place for chilren?’
‘I come here when I hungry,’ Pynter told him.
‘Come here when you – you playin de arse wit’ me, not so?’ The man was staring at him closely. His eyes narrowing down to slits.
‘I don’ look, Missa Geoffrey. Not all de time.’
‘Don’ look – look at what? Look, you say?’ Geoffrey moved his lips to say something else but coughed and rubbed his chest instead. He swung his head around as if expecting all of Old Hope to be there. He brought his hand up to the side of his face and coughed again.
Missa Geoffrey looked around him. ‘Look? What de hell it got down here to look at? Dem guava? Dem serpent over yuh head?’
Pynter found himself replying in his father’s flat irritated tone. ‘A pusson not blind, yunno.’
His words stopped Missa Geoffrey short. Left him open-mouthed and confused. He kept smoothing the hair back from his forehead and then he coughed a very distressed cough.
‘Lissen, lil fella,’ his voice rumbled out of him deep and low exactly as it did with Miss Petalina, ‘I just save your life. You know what dat mean?’
‘Nuh.’
‘It mean,’ he dropped his voice to a half-whisper, ‘it mean you owe me a life.’
‘I don’ have no life to give back.’
‘I don’ want no life back, man. You tell anybody ’bout …?’
‘You an’ Miss Tilina? Nuh.’
‘Me an’ Miss – Jeezas, man. Jeezas! Then you keep it so – okay? You keep it so, cuz … ’
Pynter nodded. ‘A life fo’ a life.’
‘Eh?’
‘Pastor Greenway goin kill ’er if he get to know.’
Missa Geoffrey sat back on the wet grass. ‘You prepare to swear on de Bible?’
Pynter nodded.
Missa Geoffrey slapped his pockets with both hands. He pulled out something bright and red and shiny and held it out to Pynter. ‘Look – look, I want to give you this.’ It was a small penknife. ‘Dis mean me an’ you’z friend. Dis mean you can’t tell nobody nothing. Dis mean me an’ you agree man to man, y’unnerstan?’
Pynter took the knife.
‘Okay fella, we settle then.’ Missa Geoffrey looked up as if suddenly alerted to something. ‘Come, let’s get outta here. And don’t come back again, y’hear me. Is my land.’
‘Is not.’
‘You hear what I say?’
‘Yessir.’
When Pynter reached the yard, it was raining again. Warm dry-season rain, the kind that fell with all the violence of a flash-storm and lasted just a short while. Pynter wondered if Gideon had left yet. He was trembling, but he wasn’t cold and he didn’t want to go inside if Gideon were still there.
He stooped between the pillars of the house and watched the rain come down.
10
‘GIDEON TAKE MY father,’ Pynter said.
Elena shook her head. She didn’t understand him.
‘I come from Eden. I shelter under de house and when I went in he wasn’ there.’
His mother shook her head again. She still didn’t understand him. ‘You look in dem other room?’
‘Gideon take my father,’ he repeated.
‘Where he gone to?’
He heaved his shoulders and turned his face away.
‘Where…’ She stopped herself short. The cloth that she was drying her hands with dropped softly on the floor. She brought her face down close to his. She touched his cheek and looked into his eyes. ‘Gideon take your father where?’
He heaved his shoulders again. ‘Gideon come and take ’im when I wasn’ there.’
‘You get wet,’ she said. ‘Your head soakin wet. You couldn shelter from the rain?’ She began unbuttoning his shirt.
He was staring at the wall behind her head.
‘Pynter,’ she said.
He did not answer. She peeled the shirt from his shoulders. ‘You must learn to cry. Y’unnerstan?’
She touched his cheeks again. Her face was working. ‘When you feel like this, when you feel like you feeling now, you must try to cry. Y’hear me? You have to learn to cry.’
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and pulled him close to her.
He did not tell her everything – how he’d gone to Miss Maddie’s house to ask her where his father was. How she had looked away from him as if she didn’t want to answer, her eyes red. And all she had said was that she wished Paso had been there when Gideon came. She had stood him in the kitchen and wiped the rain off him. She’d done it the way Tan Cee or his mother would have done, pausing every now and then to examine him. She’d stretched his arms out and slid her fingers along the bones all the way down to his wrists. Had turned his palms up towards her and examined them under the gaslight in the kitchen. She’d passed her fingers along the small drain at the back of his neck, followed the fissure all the way down to his spine. She had come closer to his ear as if she were about to whisper something, traced the sh
ape of his lobes with her fingers, and spent a long time over his feet. She’d gone to the fridge and offered him some food. He didn’t want anything to eat. She’d left him for a while and come back with a towel. She had tried to smile. He had seen that she had three gold teeth. She had told him the towel was hers, spent a long time wiping his hair dry.
‘You got feet like Paso,’ she had said. ‘An’ them fine little hairs on your back same like all my father children.’
‘Miss Maddie,’ he had turned his head to look up at her, ‘you could tell me where Gideon live?’
He could not make out the expression on her face because the evening had thickened into night. He had only her voice to go by.
‘You shouldn think of goin there.’
‘Tell me where he live.’
‘He’s not a good man. He my brother, but I have to say it.’
‘If you don’ tell me, I’ll still find him.’
She had nodded. ‘Take one o’ your people with you. He got dogs.’
‘Where he live?’
‘Westerpoint. Take your family with you.’
‘G’night, Miss Maddie.’
‘Y’hear me!’
‘G’night.’
She had placed two mangoes in his hands and told him she was sorry.
He didn’t tell his mother either that he knew now why they’d chosen him instead of Peter to go to live with Manuel Forsyth.
11
PREPARING FOR GIDEON meant standing in the sun on Glory Cedar Rise and staring into the distance. It meant lifting his vision above the canes, beyond the far green weave of bamboos that made a tunnel over the river.
There, past the festering swamps that his grandfather had walked into, at the foot of five pale low-lying hills, sat the big white houses of Westerpoint, scattered at the end of the long concrete road like bleached seashells against the blue heave of the ocean.
Gideon had come along that road one day to enter Lower Old Hope for the first time. The rumour of a cane girl carrying his father’s seed had brought him to their place one morning. He found the cane girl waiting her turn at the standpipe by the road. He’d called her name, and when she turned he began striking her with the sawed-off piece of piping he’d brought along with him. And all she could do was curl her body down away from him, offer him her shoulders and save the children she was carrying for his father. Elena saved herself by playing dead.
Two years later, Birdie’s woman told him of these things the very first night he returned from prison. He left Cynty’s bed, forgetting the loving he had come for, and walked back to the yard. He sat on the stone that John Seegal had placed there for himself and which Deeka would not have anyone else sit on apart from God and Birdie. He’d looked into his sister’s face and asked her if the things that Cynty had just told him were true. He was close to tears, they said, not because she did not answer him, not even because she knocked his hand off when he reached out and touched her shoulder, but because he understood then why she’d given his middle name to Pynter: the difficult one, the strange one, the one born blind, the child not born to live. Not as a way to please him, but as an accusation.
Preparing himself for Gideon meant reminding himself of all these things – recalling the words of the women in the river and learning, while he did so, the way the days unfolded in that place at the edge of the sea.
He sat there until night settled over the long, flat piece of land that stretched itself out like a tongue into the sea, and then with a tightening of the brows he slowly made his way back home.
‘Y’awright?’ Tan Cee’s eyes were steady on his face.
He smiled at her and nodded.
Birdie was stoking wood into the fireplace. Peter stood beside him. He’d missed watching Birdie chopping wood. His uncle did not cook with sticks and bramble; Birdie preferred trees. He brought large portions of their trunks down from the foothills and dumped them against the grapefruit tree. Mid-mornings he took out the axe, shed his shirt and laid into them. The sound of his chopping reached the foothills and bounced right back in their faces. It drew boys to their yard, small crowds that stood and watched in flinching circles. It paused the women on the road below and turned their eyes up towards him, standing there, rigid as a tree and half as tall as God, his legs straddling the wood, the axe coming down and rising, down again and rising, with the sweat and sunlight glistening on his back like grease.
Tonight they would have man food, large portions of everything: wild yams the size of logs that Birdie had also brought down from the foothills, dasheen he’d dug up from the banks of Old Hope River, dumplings, of course, and every kind of meat his uncle could lay his hands on. During the day people passed and dropped lengths of pigtail, a bag of sweet potatoes, or something surprising like pink-fleshed pum-pum yams, or a bowl of dried peas that they’d been hoarding for the hard, dry times like these. Half of Old Hope would turn up later, drawn by the giddying smell of Birdie’s cooking. Elena and Patty got out the plates, the calabashes and bowls. They served the smaller children first, then the bigger ones and finally the adults, whose silence lasted longer than their words these days, whose gazes, while they ate, were always turned away and downwards towards the darkness where the canes were.
These nights Birdie left with Peter. And as the dryness and the heat dug in, they would return later and later, with Birdie sometimes carrying the sleeping boy on one shoulder, a bag of provisions slung over the other. Birdie would lay Peter down so tenderly his brother barely stirred.
There grew a creeping uneasiness about these night-time journeys that saw his uncle and his brother returning to the yard closer to morning every time. Pynter saw it in his mother’s face, in Tan Cee’s glances at Patty, in their wordless avoidance of Birdie’s greeting when they got back. His uncle began to bring home a different kind of food, fat chickens and beautifully tended vegetables and fruit. Their avoidance of Birdie turned to whisperings in the dark, the mutterings of Patty and Tan Cee in his mother’s ear. Pynter knew that whatever it was that was nibbling away at their ease required them to say something to Birdie, and those muttered words were a way of talking themselves into a kind of urgency. A way of making whatever they had to say to Birdie come out of them more easily.
If his uncle sensed this, he did not show it. Hard times had changed him. He laughed less, frowned more, would pass his fingers thoughtfully through his beard. There was a temper there too – tight and uneasy behind the passing smiles he would throw at them.
As if to ease her mind of all these things, Tan Cee played a game with Pynter. Nights, she came and placed presents in his hands while he slept: seashells, seeds, sweets; marbles, strange beans and buttons; dark blue pebbles veined with streaks of glowing white; flakes of crystals that winked at him like tiny eyes. Pynter would unfold his fingers in the morning and find them there.
The morning he left for Gideon’s place, Pynter was smiling inwardly. A little way down the road, he saw Tan Cee’s blue headscarf and his heart flipped over. She was sitting on a culvert on the side of the road, chewing on a stick of cinnamon and trying to smile at the same time. He pretended not to see her.
‘Taking a walk, Featherplum?’ She stepped out in front of him and placed an arm across his shoulders. ‘Whapm, fowl pick yuh tongue? Not talking to me this morning?’
She placed more of her weight on him. It slowed him down. ‘Take Peter with you,’ she said. The smile had left her voice.
He glanced quickly up at her. ‘Take Peter where with me?’
‘Wherever you goin.’
‘I not goin nowhere.’
‘Then take him nowhere too. In fact,’ her face twitched as if she were about to sneeze, ‘he and Birdie waiting fo’ you ’cross the river. That the way you goin, not so?’
She glanced at his face and burst out laughing. She was shaking with it, like a joke she had been holding in for years. Her eyes fell on his face again and a louder burst came out of her. People must have heard her at the top end of Old Hope.
Pynter rolled his shoulders violently in an effort to shake off her arm. Her laughter was nettling his temper.
‘Gimme the gun,’ she said, pointing at his pocket.
‘What gun? Somebody gotta gun? It got gun round here? Which gun?’
Her hand darted into his pocket and pulled out his catapult. She tied the rubber straps around her wrist, leaned back from him, shaking her head.
‘I watch you knock a coupla bird outta the sky with this last week, an’ I tell myself, God help the fool who cross you. All that hatin. You full of it. You been full of it from the time you come home from your father. You been feedin yourself on it. Look how it make you magga-bone and dry! See what hatin done to your grandmother? You want to ’come like her?’
He lifted blazing eyes at her. ‘You better don’t come round me no more. You better don’t – specially when I sleepin, cuz…’
‘Cuz what, pretty boy? You goin beat me up? You have to be awake to do dat.’
He searched his head for words to throw back at her but he couldn’t find them, so he stomped off, complaining long and loudly to himself. Her laughter followed him all the way down to the river.
Birdie grunted when he arrived. He’d taken to having his woman plait his hair but today he’d loosened it. It stood up like small clumps of cus-cus grass from his head and made his eyes seem larger. He carried two bags on his shoulders, the big bottomless one he made his night-time forays with and the long canvas sack he’d brought with him from prison.
He was looking down at Pynter. The gold tooth at the front of his mouth glittered like a little flame. There was an expression on his uncle’s face which he did not understand, the look of someone trying to see into the distance while the sun was in their eyes. He shifted the bags on his shoulder, rested a hand on Peter’s head and pushed him gently forward. ‘Go ’head o’ me. I meet y’all down there.’
Down there was a walk through the cane plantation, past the collapsed windmill around which giant cogged wheels were scattered like the teeth of a decaying monster. Wheels which Tan Cee told Pynter used to be turned by mules when there was no wind. When they looked back, they could not see Birdie. The mud had forced Peter to take off his shoes. They’d greased his brother’s feet and fitted him with a new pair of rubber sandals. Pynter could see that Peter was tense and distressed, almost tearful. As the gleaming houses with their tall cast-iron gates came up, Peter’s eyes turned more and more urgently behind, looking for Birdie, who now could not be seen.