by Jacob Ross
And amidst all that wetness the first wonder arrived. It came like a present, like something the night had created and left in the yard for them, so that first thing in the morning it drew their eyes to it. A gloria lily. A flower-flame. Large as the head of a child and impossibly round, it stood among the stones, the raindrops hanging off its petals like jewellery; the flesh of its stem the colour and sheen of ivory. It had been sleeping in the darkness all year long and now the late November rains had called it out.
The women leaned out of their windows, their eyes on their children. They would observe the ones that backed away from all that beauty and those that moved towards it with quiet, wide-eyed wonder. One or two would stoop and run a finger up the stem, hesitating only when they reached the bright cold flame. Another might even become tearful. And always, always there would be one among the little crowd whose hand reached out and broke it from the earth. There would be no irritation when that happened, no anger at the killing of a thing so beautiful and strange, since something just as precious would have come out of it – a glimpse into the deeper natures of their children.
And anyway, if the gloria lily did survive the children, it would live only for a day; would begin to die before their eyes by early evening.
This, Deeka Bender reminded them, was the time of little miracles, the time they called the halfway season. It was when Elena ‘took up’ Manuel Forsyth’s twins (and she wasn’ saying dat ’twas a proper thing to do). Fact was, strange things happened to a young pusson’s feelings, so parents with part-grown girls and mannish lil boys had to be specially watchful because babies appeared from nowhere.
And true enough, in these flat grey days when it was easy to believe that they would never see a purple sky again, little miracles happened. A tiny slit in the clouds opened up one morning like the parting of a pair of lips. The light came down thin and sharp like a blade, tapering out just wide enough to hit a single flowering tree at the foot of the Mardi Gras. A shout from someone somewhere brought them out into their yards to stand there staring at the burning immortelle that made the hillside look as if it had just sprouted a wound.
It happened again later in the evening with night already hemming the foothills: another parting of the heavy dam of clouds. A different light this time. Syrupy and glowing, it settled on the high and slender branches of a dandacayo tree, turning it all metal – a living, shimmering thing against the darkness of the hillside.
‘It have hope in that,’ Tan Cee said, lowering her chin on Pynter’s head. ‘It have a lotta hope in that.’
It turned Deeka Bender’s mind to John Seegal’s only brother, the one her children never got to meet – Columbus of the misshapen head and big soft eyes.
He was larger than Birdie, she told them, and still growing when she came to Old Hope. Had the shoulders of a giant but couldn’t shift a stone because his hands would not allow it. He was not meant to be born that way, but made so by the hands of a young English doctor who didn’t know what he was doing.
She could see him now: that heavy walk of his. A forest tree on two legs. Columbus never stop growing. Never got accustomed to the body he born in. A lil boy, that’s what he was, a lil boy struggling to free himself of all that flesh that held him down.
Talked as he walked too! Heavy and slow and not-so-certain. A pusson listen to him speak and ’twas easy to believe that all he did was mumble to himself.
But same way that light come through and hit that tree, God left a lot of light in him. A lotta light becuz nobody could pick a petal off a flower as gentle as Columbus. Nobody ’ceptin he would think of holding a living insect up against the light to make everybody see the colours they never thought it had. He could thread a needle without looking, pick a mosquito off a pusson eyelash. Big as he was, he had hands and eyes for things almost too small to see and touch.
God take away hi talking voice and gave him something better. God fill hi mouth with song. Used to sing like a girl, a voice so pretty it raised the hairs on a pusson arms. Was the only part of himself he’d passed down through the family, and proof of that fact was that there wasn’t a Bender, except one p’raps, who couldn sweeten a pusson ear with song.
Used to have a man in Old Hope name Josiah. Short fella. Hardly talk to nobody. He hate chilren. Hate man too. Hate woman more. Hate turn flesh was what he was. Never laugh in all hi life. Once a week he come. Don’t say hello to nobody. Don’t look at nobody. He come an’ sit in John Seegal yard and ask Columbus to sing for ’im. He sit with hi head point up in the air an’ lissen to Columbus sing. And when Columbus finish he get up, put a dollar in Columbus shirt pocket and walk off. No hello; no ba-bye; no thank-yuh. The dog!
Deeka brought her hand up to her headwrap and untied it. The hair fell loose. Now they could barely see her face.
He didn only use to sing, he used to cry too, a big belly-cry. A man swimmin in a whole heap o’ misery. Nothing worse than a man trap inside a body he don’ know what to do with. You could hear him struggling with himself, raging against all that flesh that wasn’ serving him. John Seegal used to leave the yard an’ come back next morning cuz he couldn take it.
Santay must ha’ heard him from all that way up there. One mornin she come here vex as hell an’ tell John Seegal, ‘He want a woman. Dat’s what he want.’
‘What make you think he want a woman?’ my husban’ say.
‘A time does come when every man want something to lose ’imself inside,’ she say.
‘Don’t have no woman goin to want my brother,’ John Seegal tell her. And he damn vex too becuz he don’ like the way that woman talk to him.
‘Then show him how,’ she say. ‘You a man an’ he a man – show ’im how to ease ’imself.’ And she walk off.
Lord ha’ mercy! I never see a man so upset like my husband. He upset for days. But then time pass an’ Columbus didn make dat noise no more. In fact he got so quiet, a pusson used to forget that he was there. The only pusson that didn like de change was Josiah, cuz Columbus didn sing for him no more.
Now, I come to the part I want to tell y’all about. Yuh see, the same happiness that make ’im stop singin used to send ’im up in the bushes above my house whole day,’ mongst the nettles, comfortable as you please gathering insect and mumblin to himself. Yunno, holding out hi hand to spider, crickets and whatever else.
One evening he was up there and the sun, after it hide itself away all day, just come out in a big yellow blaze the way it do a lil while ago.
I don’ know what make me look up. Mebbe it was something John Seegal was saying to me and he stop sorta sudden. Anyway, I look up and see Columbus up there in the middle of all that sun with a heap o’ butterflies flying an’ dancing around ’im like a million little candle. An’ it bring to mind what long-time people used to say: dat it have a little piece of every yooman soul inside every living thing that crawl or creep or fly. My granny used to say that. She used to say that every one of us got a lil piece of weself inside some creature. A part of we that is not we – like water, like food, like fam’ly. And y’all better don’t ask me to explain dat, cuz I jus’ tellin y’all what she say.
Is the only part of us that really free, she say. So I figure that if that lil part of Columbus was in a hundred million butterfly ’twas because hi soul did need more light an’ air than most of us.
Elena reminded them of the time that she’d taken Peter to the river and he was surrounded by a host of dragonflies. Hers, she said, were ants. She could stand in a nest all day and never get stung by one.
Patty recalled the rain-birds that sang like a Sunday choir on the days Birdie came home, even though he’d gone to jail so often they got fed up with praising his return and went off somewhere to rest for good. That raised a convulsion of laughter from them. Tan Cee’s were iguanas – the ones that stood their ground and nodded at her toes like a crowd of wizened old men.
Pynter stirred and turned expectant eyes on them, ‘And mine? What’z mine?’
Dee
ka reached out and stirred the fire. As if prompted by the gesture, Patty did the same. Coxy, who hardly ever spoke, commented on the moon: how round it was, and white like a plate of rice, which made Tan Cee turn and look at him with deep, expressionless eyes.
His grandmother inspected the smoking end of the stick. It seemed to be an extension of her finger. ‘Well, I don’ see none o’ yours tonight. Yuh see … ’
‘Watch your mouth, woman!’ Tan Cee’s back was turned towards the fire.
‘Nobody don’ know what I was goin to say.’
‘Nobody don’ want to know. Cuz whatever it was, it wasn’ goin to be good.’
Pynter narrowed his eyes and looked up at the sky. He came to his feet. Tan Cee’s voice reached over their heads to him, ‘S’awright, Sugar. Yours will come to you.’
He stepped out into the night.
He didn’t know why he returned straight after, except that he’d looked up at the Mardi Gras often enough to know that bad weather always broke. Deeka was bad weather. Tan Cee knew it. His Aunt Patty did too, and her words to him were strange these days. She too had offered to come to sleep beside him because she didn’t like what she was feeling.
He saw the way they moved around him like a pair of shadows, always between himself and the larger, darker shadow of his grandmother. If his mother was concerned, she didn’t show it. She was sitting by the fire now, her head in the air, working her mouth around a chicken bone. Her eyes were never on him and Deeka. They were on the stranger that she went to every morning.
Patty lifted her chin at him. His eyes paused on her. Light loved her skin. Like now, it gave a glow to her legs and arms and face. Tan Cee didn’t notice him; she was staring at her husband.
Pynter crossed the yard and sat on John Seegal’s stone.
Deeka hadn’t looked at him till then. The words died in her mouth and something in her nature changed. There was a piece of iron near the steps on which they tethered cockerels when they were harassing the hens too much. He’d often combined his efforts with Peter to try to pull it out, but they could never manage to. Deeka did so with a single movement of the hand.
Tan Cee was on her feet from the moment Deeka moved. It was as if she had felt the tremors in her mother and her body had responded. It was more glide than run that brought her in front of him, her arms spread away from her body as if she were preparing to fly.
He’d risen to his feet much as he would after finishing his dinner. He followed Deeka’s movement towards him with a kind of interest and when she halted, the iron uplifted in the air, he had somehow placed himself in front of Tan Cee, his gaze on his grandmother’s face as if he’d seen something there that he wanted to get closer to.
It was his mother who stopped the hard, dark shape bearing down on him. It was the movement that Deeka saw at the edge of her vision that made her drop the piece of metal piping on the stones and turn round to face her daughter. For Elena had moved her arm just once – in what looked like a casual, absentminded gesture – for the old metal bucket they used for scooping out the ashes of the fireside on mornings. Had just as casually reached into the heart of the fire with the empty bucket and scooped it full of burning coals.
The bucket swung on its handle from her right hand, the smoke swirling up and around her arms and spreading itself about her face so that all they saw from the shoulders up was a smoking, shimmering woman shape.
Something – a sound, a choke, a gurgle – issued from Deeka’s throat. Her body seemed to drag her away towards one side of the house. Elena, her eyes still on her mother, convulsed her arm and the coals poured out of the bucket in a hissing amber gush back into the fire. She sat down again and crossed her legs – her mouth working around the chicken bone she hadn’t paused from chewing.
‘Something happm to you in yuh father place. What happm t’you up dere?’ Tan Cee was standing over him and breathing hard.
‘Nothing happm, Tan.’
‘Don’t lie fo’ me, y’hear me? What happm in your fadder place?’ She closed her hand around the flesh of his waist and spun him round. He thought she was going to strike him. He did not understand her rage. Couldn’t make sense of her questions.
‘You left this yard a different child. What happm to you in Manuel Forsyth place?’
Pynter shook his head, dodging the words she was throwing at him. Elena had come out briefly to take her washing off the stones and gone straight back in. Peter sat on the step, staring at them with a finger in his mouth.
‘That woman – yuh granmodder,’ Tan Cee’s teeth clamped down on the last word as if it were something she was biting into, ‘she was coming at you last night. And you – you start walkin towards ’er! Dat make sense? Eh? You think your brodder there would do a thing like that? You know anybody apart from foolish you who do chupidness like that? How come you lose your ’fraid? Why? What happm to you up there?’
She was close to shouting now. ‘This,’ she said, tightening her hand around his waist, ‘is flesh. Flesh is nothing without feeling. Y’hear me? The less you feel, the less flesh you is. The less flesh you is, the more you ’come the spirit yuh granny say you is. Look at me!’
He lifted his eyes and held hers. They were moist and that surprised him. ‘You have to learn to feel, y’unnerstan? You have to …’ Her hand released him.
‘Tan,’ he said, a quiet desperation tugging at his heart. She’d placed herself so far away from him it filled him with a kind of panic. He leaned into her. Stared into her face, his eyes following the curve of her forehead, the way the light settled on her cheekbones and her chin, the star-apple darkness of her lips. She did not pull away. She did not move to touch him either. ‘I feel,’ he told her quietly. ‘I feel all de time.’
15
FROM THE TIME Elena destroyed John Seegal’s stone, it changed something in Deeka Bender. It was as if her daughter had reached a hand inside of her and crushed a wick. And Pynter honestly could not decide which was worse – the breaking of the slab of granite his grandfather used to sit on, or the memory that Deeka carried now, of her own daughter preparing to kill her.
It was the way she was going to do it, Patty said, the certainty of it too: with a bucket of fire in her hand and a gaze so quiet and so terrible it had crept into Patty’s dreams and stayed with her, even in her waking. It was the only thing she remembered afterwards, she said – that, and the fact that Elena did not only stop Deeka Bender hard, she almost stopped her dead.
But what a pusson expect? When you kill a pusson for good reason or no reason, you add their weight to yours. Did he know that? For what remained of your life, you carry that pusson weight with you. To kill a child was worse. You add that child’s weight ten times over. Why so?
His auntie reached out a hand as if she were rummaging the air for words. Well, for the woman or man that child would ha’ become. For each of the children they would ha’ given to the world. For the fact that a yooman been could even think of it, far less lift a hand to do it. So that his mother, Elena, reaching for the fire with which to set alight their mother in order to save him, was not a pretty thing to think about o’ talk about, but in a way ’twas saving his grandmother from a worse and different kind o’ death.
His mother’s hammering had dragged them out of sleep next morning. She’d brought a pillow out into the yard, had tied a strap of cloth under her stomach and sat on the earth with the slab of granite between her legs. And with her body curved over it as if she were in prayer, she’d taken the hammer and the chisel that John Seegal left behind, and slowly begun to break it.
The sound of her hammering had followed them throughout the day and far into the night, and then close to morning, with only the fluttering yellow of a masantorch to see by. A slow sound, hollow as a heartbeat, that left Deeka Bender curled up on her bed with her hands wrapped around her stomach as if her daughter were chipping away at her insides.
Pynter had lain with his head pressed against the floorboards, staring beyond the ceiling, hi
s mind drifting past the sound to the memory of the old woman bearing down on him, a metal rod held high, her hand beginning to make a hard dark arc towards his head.
He could still see his aunt, Tan Cee, gliding over the stones with her arms spread wide – like the picture of Christ that Patty the Pretty kept above her bedhead – to place herself before him. He remembered the fizzing in his blood, the tightness in his throat that had pushed his body past her. And the calmness that had come over him, just after. And then Deeka halting suddenly, as if she’d collided with a wall of air, her eyes on the smoking bucket in her daughter’s hand; her body dragged towards one side of the house by something more terrible than fear. And suddenly that movement of his mother’s hand.
The awful thing he saw in Deeka’s eyes had placed a question in his mind. It lived in his head every day until Patty the Pretty offered him an answer. She told him it was love.
‘Love?’ he said quietly.
There wasn’t another word for it, she said. Or if there was, it was too big a word to fit inside a single person’s head, which was why it was so simple. The smile was there, as always, on her face.
‘Love.’ He’d worked his lips around the word as if to get beneath the sound and taste its meaning.
It was one of his mother’s last words in her leaf letters to Pa. She’d written it just once, carefully, properly – scratched along the spine of a desiccated leaf. A fragment. A little island on its own without other words to lean against and give it sense.
Love. He’d heard that same word differently in Eden. That time it came leaping from Miss Petalina’s throat, stronger than the thunderings of Missa Geoffrey: a scream that was a sob, that was a sigh, that was a laugh, that was also none of these. It had come out of her so high and bright it made him think of dragonflies taking to the air.