by Jacob Ross
They walked until suddenly there was the ocean rearing up ahead of them. The concrete road glistened like a silver bracelet. It was all sky and water and wind, and the gusts that came off the sea seemed to want to push them back along the road they’d just travelled.
Even if Miss Maddie hadn’t told him that Gideon’s house had a big yellow door and light-blue blinds, he would have found it anyway. Gideon was sitting on the wall of his veranda. Two women were on chairs. They held glasses in their hands and were nodding while he spoke.
He was bringing a glass to his lips when he saw them standing against his gate. His hand came down and he got slowly to his feet.
Pynter knew that sideways look of Gideon’s, but Peter didn’t. His brother began shuffling backwards. Pynter didn’t move. Gideon came down the steps, his eyes no longer on the two of them but on the three Alsatians chained to the concrete pillar. They had been quiet when they arrived, but now that Gideon was approaching them they began peeling back their lips and barking. Pynter saw Peter against the gate of the house behind them and smelled his brother’s fear. He had been counting on his slingshot. Would have blinded Gideon from the moment he came down those steps. Would have done that first to him and then the dogs. He’d been practising for months. But then he heard Peter’s cry behind him, shrill and high like a gull’s. Then the sound of pounding feet. Saw Gideon straighten up. Felt himself dragged backwards. Saw the fear twist Gideon’s face into something dark and tight and ugly as Birdie stepped inside the gate.
Pynter felt a sudden tightening in his throat, didn’t know what sound came out of him, but whatever it was, it halted his uncle and brought Gideon’s hands down from his face.
Birdie swung his eyes back round to Gideon.
‘Jus’ touch dem…’ he said, slowly, with a terrible gentleness. Gideon stumbled away from the lunging dogs, his eyes on Birdie.
Birdie lowered himself to the grass and laid the axe across his legs.
‘Gwone, fellas,’ he said. ‘I relaxin out here.’
Pynter did not know what he expected, but not the sight of the old man spread out on a clean white sheet with all that light and wind coming through the window above his head.
The young woman was there with him. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, holding his hand. She looked up anxiously at them, smiled and said that Grandad had been expecting them. He realised that his father knew nothing of the trouble outside, which was strange because he should have heard the dogs. The young woman smiled again and got up to leave.
Pynter did not return her smile. Peter was looking at the way her skirt swished about her feet as she walked out of the room. ‘She nice,’ he whispered.
‘Patty nicer,’ Pynter grunted.
Manuel Forsyth seemed to have been expecting them. Not on that day exactly, but any day soon. And it was clear that, lying there with the light from the window on his face and neck, it was all that he had been doing.
‘What take y’all so long?’ he muttered.
His father lifted his hand and Pynter nudged his brother forward. Those hands had spent a long time knowing Pynter, but in all these years their father had hardly ever laid his hands on Peter.
‘Peter?’ the old man said softly, his eyes switching from side to side. Pynter noticed how thin and drawn he looked. His father traced Peter’s arms with the tips of his fingers, passed his palms across his back and waist, his face still turned up towards the window, almost as if he were listening with his hand.
‘Pynter will grow taller. You goin make a broader man. Solid.’ The old man chuckled. ‘You, Peto – you carry me inside you.’
In the silence that followed, all Pynter could hear was the sea. He wondered where Gideon had gone, whether Birdie was still on the grass out there. Their father’s voice came to him as if it were floating down from the ceiling.
‘I wasn’t always good to y’all mother. Y’all know that?’
‘Yes,’ Pynter answered softly.
The old man didn’t seem to hear him. He smacked his lips and stirred. ‘Have children. Remember me. Remember me to dem. Y’all hear me?’
Peter mumbled something. Pynter glanced at him.
‘A lawyer will come to y’all one day when time right. He’ll hand y’all papers and ask both o’ you to sign them. Sign them. Y’hear me? Pynter, you goin read fo’ me?’
‘Which part?’
‘Any part. Just wan’ to hear your voice.’ That seemed to turn the old man’s mind to something else. ‘Paso come to see me last time, Pynter.’ Pynter nodded and slid his hands beneath the covers of the book. The leather sighed against the skin of his palms. Its weight was familiar; its smell was like much-used money, and now something else hung over the pale yellow pages: the smell of the woman who had just left the room.
His mind shifted back to those evenings in that empty house, so crowded with the memories and ghosts of other people – other lives that the old man said was family. And with Peter beside him, the shuffle of feet outside the door, the waves coughing against the rocks outside, he started reading.
‘“And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again…”’
He lifted his head. Peter’s eyes were on the gulls wheeling in the air outside and his father was snoring softly. When they came outside, Birdie was where they had left him. Gideon had disappeared and his dogs were lying on the grass with their jaws resting on their forelegs. The woman was leaning out from the veranda as if she wanted to place her lips against their ears.
‘Y’all not – y’all not goin meet him again like…like…’
‘I know.’ Peter looked back at him with a little surprised smile. They’d both said it at the same time.
In the light of the decaying evening, the large concrete houses were no more than shapes against the sky. He didn’t realise that they had been that long inside Gideon’s house. He looked inland in the direction from which they had come. He could see no houses, not even the canes, just the ash-blue hills that squatted like children at the foot of the towering Mardi Gras. The concrete road was now a wide grey snake cut out against the side of the sea cliffs, threatening, it seemed, to slip into the ocean at any time.
Birdie placed his big hands on their shoulders. He was looking straight ahead at the road, his head pulled back, listening it seemed to something that was somewhere beyond their hearing.
‘Life’s a lil bit like dat, fellas,’ he said finally, his voice a rumble above their heads. ‘A pusson have to walk it. Ain’t got no choice. And a time mus’ come when dem have to stop cuz dem can’t go on no more.’
He was silent for a while and when he spoke again his voice was different. The thunder was no longer in it.
‘Do me a favour, fellas. Tell y’all mother I really beat that man up. Tell ’er I beat ’im bad. Tell ’er that for me. Go ’head o’ me. I meet y’all at home.’
12
HIS FATHER’S WORDS – Remember me – were like the drumming of fingers in Pynter’s head. He patterned his walking to the rhythm of their syllables, searching those two words for the meaning he knew was hidden there. And with the passing of the months, they fleshed themselves out with all the things that people said around him.
It amazed him that even when he’d listened, he’d never heard what Deeka was really saying when she loosened her hair and talked; that beneath her words there lived another story – one that sat at the back of almost everything the adults said, especially when they spoke of those who had come before them and those who would come after.
This new thing that his father’s last words taught him: that in the villages above the canes people did not die. As long as memory lived they did not. They passed. Leaving always something of themselves behind. John Seegal, their grandfather, had passed most of himself over to Birdie, except for the thieving ways, o’ course, which came from a great-grand-uncle whose name Deeka refused to say. And the long-gone aunts, the grandmothers, the uncles were there with them right now. They were scattered among the chi
ldren the way the leaves of a forest tree became the flesh of other plants around it. They were there in the curve of a young man’s spine, the turn of a girl-child’s head, the way their lips shifted from their teeth in a grimace or a smile. There too in the shape of a baby’s feet or the quickness of its temper. There even in the flavours they preferred, and the things their bodies asked for.
For wasn’t it true that Columbus, John Seegal’s only brother, had passed on his singing voice to all the Benders that came after? And where did that shine-eye beauty of Patty come from, if not from the very best parts of all those cane-tall Bender women who knew how to unravel dreams and turn their hands to medicines; and who, sometimes just for the sake of it, created new and marvellous things from rope and thread and fabric? And what about those children born with a wisdom older than their age? Did that come from nowhere, eh?
It explained, at least, the querying hands of those adults who, like his father, mapped the bones of children and sought to read their futures and their past there. And it explained why the idea that his body was a house to a man who had lived long before his time made perfect sense to Deeka Bender, his grandmother.
Her problem was the way he had come. Not a little while after Peter. Not even later in the evening. But two days after his brother. She who had brought him out still talked of the way he’d fought her. For all of two bright dry-season days when, with the whole world living life outside, night hadn’t left that birth room. And that cry, when he’d finally released his death hold on her daughter – that cry wasn’t the cry of a child at all, but the raging of a young man. And then, of course, they saw the eyes, or what hid the world from them.
It was not so, Tan Cee told him. Not as Deeka said it. She did not remember it that way. In their first few years, Deeka didn’t remember it that way either. But remembering was like that. Remembering was like life, like people: it got better or worse with time. There were women like Deeka, she said, who tied their lives to a man’s so tight they forget they ever owned one. And when that man got up and walked, it was not just his life he took, he went with theirs as well.
‘So what left for them to do after?’ She smiled dreamily at him. ‘They look for something they kin blame. And you – you the one your granny pick.’
He’d asked her what John Seegal looked like, because even if they’d said he looked like Birdie, he could not make an image in his mind. Just a shape – a scattered force that inhabited his grandmother and the children he had left with her. He used to imagine him within the stones he’d used to build the yard, especially the large flat rock beside the steps which they said he used to sit on.
He wasn’t sure that Tan Cee heard his question. Her eyes were on her husband, off again, he’d told her, to start work on a house somewhere in the south. He would be away a coupla days.
She took her eyes off Coxy, adjusted her skirt and sighed. ‘Some things have to …’ She stopped short, considered what she was about to say and smiled quietly at him.
‘Your granny always talk ’bout how she meet John Seegal. She never talk ’bout how he left. She never say much ’bout Anita either. Y’ever wonder why?’
She told him of a morning her mother was sweeping the yard when a child arrived and called her by her real name. He stood at the edge of the yard, his stomach exposed, his thin legs crossing and uncrossing, his hands small and thin like a bird’s, moving around his face as if he were washing it with air.
Deeka asked him what he wanted. He told her that he wanted nothing. She asked him why he came then. He said his father sent him with some news. She told him that men never sent their children anywhere with news. And a woman wouldn’t have sent him because she would bring the news herself. And so she turned her back on him.
But he was still there at the corner of her eye. Still washing his face with his hands. And then, when she was least expecting it, his voice came across the yard as clear as if he was standing right next to her.
He told her that her husband Big John Seegal had wagered her, his house and his three girl-children that he was going to cross the Kalivini swamps in the early hours of the morning and emerge from it alive.
Deeka smiled at the joke at first, found herself remembering it throughout the rest of the day and laughing. But by late evening, when she heard her husband’s footsteps coming up the path, the words of that boy seemed somehow less ridiculous.
He came home full of his own thunder. Sat on the steps stinking of the rum he’d despised all his life. Sat there working up a murderous argument with himself. He raised his hand at Deeka and told her for the first time what he really thought of her and the four children she had given him. And at the end of it he stretched himself out in the yard and would not look at them.
Deeka gathered the children around her and told them what their father was about to do. Down there, she told them, way past cane, there is a place where the Old Hope River meets the sea. The river does not die there; it becomes something else: a stinking, bubbling tangle of mangrove where the sharks swim in on the early-morning tides to feed on all the things the land rejected. She told them that their father, overtaken by some demon for which there was no accounting, had decided to cross that place in the small hours of the morning.
Deeka fought all night to keep him: I ever give you cause to feel you not a man? That you less than another woman man? What about the children? Eh? What about them? They not healthy? They not yours? You want somebody to tell you sorry for something they didn do to you? Okay then, I sorry. If me, the children or anybody do anything to push you to where you is, to make you come like you come home tonight, I want to tell you sorry.
She turned to the girls with a deadly, soft-voiced rage. I want every one of you to tell y’all father sorry. Tan Cee, the eldest, was more temper than tears. Elena fixed him with an unblinking, tight-lipped gaze. And Patty the Pretty, his last, his youngest, the dark-skinned miracle he’d named himself, Patty who could stop her father in mid-stride, who could melt his anger with a touch, the muttering of his name, even Patty could not turn him. And Birdie, the son who looked like him and had the strength to hold him down or tie him against a post or tree or something solid till he came back to his senses – Birdie was in jail.
By the morning, they had grown quiet, the girls starved of sleep, and Deeka just too tired to be tearful any more. Defeated also by a realisation that had come to her during all those hours of pleading. That there was something in John Seegal’s decision that went beyond his drunkenness. That it had not been made over a glass of rum, but over time. So that in the still grey hours of that morning, even while she stood on the top of Glory Cedar Rise and called out his name as they watched him walking down Old Hope Road, watched and called until the canes and distance swallowed him, she knew that all the pleading in the world would not make him turn around.
She went back to her house, pulled the trouser leg from under the mattress they’d conceived their children on, emptied the contents on the floor, counted the money she had placed there over the years and began preparing for his wake. And while she prepared she cursed the canes. She blamed this shallow valley she had come to from the north, this long, blue gorge of sighing, coughing, whistling grass which consumed their men so casually.
‘But you can’t beat cane,’ Tan Cee muttered. ‘You can’t do much to hurt it back.’ Which was why, she said, Deeka retreated into a dark-eyed, watchful bitterness and kept reminding them of the miracle their father used to be.
‘And soon after,’ Tan Cee sighed and got to her feet, ‘Elena body start changin with y’all.’
‘And de baby girl – Anita?’
‘She wasn’ no baby girl de time de trouble start. I got a coupla things to look after.’ She dusted her skirt and walked away.
13
THE FOOD THAT Birdie brought back now was meant to last them longer. Peter confided that he’d even tried to bring along a cow but it wasn’t to be persuaded. Besides, the cow had horns that were long enough and sharp enough to win t
he argument.
Peter talked with a look of puzzlement that brought the laughter out of them, all the more because he couldn’t understand what they were laughing at. Couldn’t see the joke either when Birdie sneaked off during the day and returned home with ridiculous things: a couple of giant plants sitting in heavy, white stone pots; an iron gate; three beach chairs; an aluminium oar; the two back wheels of a car; a child’s plastic bicycle.
The women seemed to recognise this change in Birdie. They responded strangely: they touched him more, kept back the best of everything for him; made difficult dishes like cornki and farine which took them two days to prepare, and sat and watched him while he ate.
He held their gifts of food between his fingers and brought them to his mouth as though the pleasure was not just his to have but also theirs.
And during these nights of bright moon and still air, when voices and laughter travelled down the foothills to their yard, riding it seemed on the achingly sweet fragrance of the lady-of-the-night, he repeated the stories of his time in prison.
It was only Peter who did not understand this ritual. Not even when his uncle tried to make him know by almost saying so. By leaving him at home without an explanation, by the quick flushes of irritation that left Peter tearful and ill-tempered, by not having time for him these days. Perhaps the women had spoken to Birdie. Perhaps he’d read their worry all along and was doing something about it now. Pynter wasn’t sure.