by Jacob Ross
That word had also brought to mind one of Uncle Michael’s poems, its five lines stacked one on top of the other like the fingers of a hand.
where will this loving lead us?
on my left soft breasts of sand
at my feet the dark rocks stand
splitting the teeth
of breakers
It made him think of his grandmother, Deeka Bender, standing with her three daughters on the top of Glory Cedar Rise, calling out his grandfather’s name as he walked towards the dark waters of the swamps. It tugged at the edges of the sadness he felt on Wednesday nights when his auntie’s husband, Coxy Levid, got to his feet, slipped his fingers across his crotch and left her sitting in the yard, staring at her knees.
‘Love?’ He angled his head away from Patty, his eyes sliding over to the place where John Seegal’s stone used to be. ‘Then – then, who, who love more, Tan Patty? Somebody prepare to kill fo’ you or somebody prepare to dead fo’ you?’
She looked at him strangely, her face gone still, her eyes glowing in the evening sun like strips of glass. ‘Which is de better love? That what you mean?’
‘Don’ know what I mean,’ he said.
Her hand shot out and pulled a leaf. She held it in the flat of her palm in front of him. Her fingers were trembling slightly. ‘This,’ she said, slipping her thumb along the surface, ‘is your Aunt Tan Cee, and this …’ She flipped the leaf over. Now he could see the darkly veined underside, a deeper green. ‘This is your modder. Same leaf, come from de same tree. Love to kill for, love to dead for – same love.’
She placed a finger against the hollow of his throat, looked into his eyes. ‘That not what you really askin, though. Not so?’
He did not answer her because the word was not enough. It did not explain his mother leaving secretly on mornings to go to the stranger in that place down by the river. It could not explain the rage that slept beneath her skin, which had always been there, like a hole in the middle of the yard that they’d grown so accustomed to they’d learned to step around it without thinking. That sleeping anger made him think of the serpents he used to look up at in Eden, their slow uncoiling, the blind flickering at the air with tongues as bright as flames as they eased their dark lengths towards the lizard or the bird they were about to consume. When they struck, it was always fast and hard and frightening. His grandmother had forgotten this, and look … Look what nearly happm … Forgettin’ almos’ kill ’er. Which was why he could never tell his mother that he knew the place she went to early mornings. That even if he hadn’t met the stranger she went to, he was certain that he wasn’t from these parts. That he was slimmer than the men of Old Hope. Could make things with his hands that were just as strange and beautiful as what Patty made from straw and bits of coloured cloth. That when he, Pynter, looked at her sometimes and felt the stirrings of the stranger’s child in her, it reminded him of the sea.
It puzzled him that the other women in the yard could not see these things: how slowly his mother walked these days, how carefully she sat down on her stone now; how she combed her growing hair more often. The way she sang to herself throughout the day, and whistled like a bird. Her skin had changed the way the leaves of a candlebush did over time: smoother, shinier, almost as pretty as Patty’s. And from time to time, without thinking, she lifted her hand to touch the little throbbing vein at the base of her throat, which hadn’t been there before.
A couple of mornings ago, he’d raised his head to look at her and found her large, quiet eyes settled on his face with the softness of a moth. He also saw the trembling sadness in his mother’s face, because now she was dead in Deeka’s mind.
Mornings, she made a cup of cocoa, covered it with a saucer and placed it beside his grandmother. It sat on the step till afternoon, curdling at the top as the heat got sucked out of it. At the end of the day, Elena would go to the step, lift the cup and stare at the contents as if she were hoping it would speak to her. Then she would go to the back of the house and tip it into the soil. She hung there a while, looking down at the moisture at her feet before sighing heavily and walking back into the house.
Dinnertimes, she served her mother first, her hand bringing the end of her cotton dress to the enamel of the bowl and polishing it till it threw the flames back at them.
Deeka would not take the outstretched bowl of food. She watched them eat, her body a soft shape against the steps. Then, if she felt like it, she would strip a square of banana leaf from the tree beside the house, bend over the pot and serve herself.
It did not change his mother’s gestures. It did not modify the stillness in her eyes, now down-turned all the time, her face fuller than they’d ever seen it, her shoulders lower than she’d ever held them.
She did these same things every day: the cup of steaming cocoa, the brightly polished bowl of food, the tireless, wordless gestures. And when she spoke, she addressed her mother softly, as if she were trying to ease her out of an awful dream.
Sundays were worse. His mother’s hands were restless from the time she woke. For she’d been washing and braiding Deeka’s hair since she was a girl. The task had fallen to her, they said, for reasons no one cared to remember. And anyway, it wasn’t that which mattered now. What mattered was that after all these years, grooming her mother’s hair had become more than habit. It had become a knowledge that had settled in her body. For Elena understood her mother’s head of hair far better than she did her own. Her fingers had pulled at the very first strands of grey there. Deeka had blamed her in part for it, pointing to the time she’d brought her ‘belly’ home and would not name the father. And with the passing of the years, the rest of Deeka’s hair had whitened beneath Elena’s fingers.
Come Sundays, without Deeka’s bony shoulders against her stomach, without the small pressure of her mother’s head against her chest, it left Elena Bender with a hollowness and empty gestures. Her hands still did the things they’d always done on Sundays: the same slow downward strokes, the straightening and the parting; the plaiting and the oiling; the raising of the shine with coconut oil mixed with cinnamon grass and mint. Come Sundays, his mother’s hands had nothing solid to hold on to.
Pynter had seen this before: the way his father in his blindness would reach for his Bible, or turn his eyes towards something he expected to see. He remembered in his own self the way he sometimes turned his ear towards a voice, or leaned his head away from it, the better to know its owner – forgetting that he possessed eyes.
The body remembered things the head had long forgotten. He knew that now. The body felt things it did not even know it did. Like his mother’s inside-crying; like her fingers combing the empty air before her. Like what not grooming his grandmother’s hair reminded them of now: that they carried another blood. First People blood. The blood of strangers who’d once resided on the small blue hills above the Kalivini Sea; who used to live on fish and leaves and fruits; and whose voices, Deeka told them once, still carried across the sleepy waters of lagoons. They’d left nothing of themselves behind apart from the pieces of patterned clay he sometimes found lying at the edges of the sea. That and the length and glow of his grandmother’s plaited hair.
Evenings, they looked down at their plates or found their eyes wandering across the silence towards the soft dark question mark that was Deeka’s shape against the steps. Not expectant, not even sorrowful or upset, just wondering what a pusson was s’posed to do after dinner done. Deeka Bender’s voice had filled in all their after-dinner silences from as far back as their minds could take them; and further still if they ’lowed themselves to think about it.
Make it worse, in the silence that she’d left them with, something secretive and wordless had crept in and taken over. Or maybe it had always been there; but now there was nothing else to turn a pusson mind away from it: that tense, uneasy thing between his aunt, Tan Cee, and her husband, Coxy Levid, which lived at the back of every word they said to each other, especially on Wednesday nights.
‘People buildin houses in de night?’
The first time she spoke that way, her words had stopped the cigarette halfway to her husband’s mouth.
He didn’t turn to look at her, but even from his end of the yard, Pynter felt the rush of anger in the man. It never reached his face though. It never got that far. He was looking down at her and smiling. And the words he spoke slipped through the small gap that his smile made.
‘P’raps in the place where dis man going, people do,’ he said.
He’d closed his lips down on the cigarette and turned to leave. But her voice came at him again, steady and soft and stroking. ‘Ain’t got no night-time where you going, then?’
Patty’s hands left her knees and began tugging at her ear lobes. His mother reached for a stick and poked it into the fire. She pulled it back and turned the burning tip towards her face. Held it there a while, meditating on the living amber at the tip. Then she tossed the whole thing back into the fire.
‘How far you goin dis time, den?’ Tan Cee coaxed.
‘S’far as man foot take him.’
‘And how far’z dat?’
The frown lines on his face got deeper. There was a glitter in his eyes. It sent Pynter’s mind back to that night when those eyes had looked into his face. When the long brown fingers now stroking the red box of Phoenix cigarettes had closed around his throat; had pinned his back against a tree and made him know how easy killing was.
Now, though, his auntie’s voice seemed to match her husband’s face exactly. It raised the hairs on his arms because it was so soft, so steady, came so easily out of her.
She’d turned her chin up towards him, the firelight like yellow water dancing on her throat. It hollowed out her eyes and filled in the rest of her face so that she was a different person altogether. And there was a small smile on her lips.
‘So you ain’t got no time, then? That what you sayin?’
Coxy didn’t answer her.
She lowered her face then, turned her gaze down to the stones. ‘Watch how you walkin, fella. Just watch yuh step.’ But Coxy Levid didn’t hear her, he was halfway down the hill.
The gradual hardening in his aunt, Tan Cee; the sleepy desperation Patty the Pretty carried; the smell that crept into his nostrils, reminding him of the odours of the swamplands his grandfather had walked into; the dream he had been having every night for weeks in which he watched the darkening of the Mardi Gras mountain by the shadow of a bird. If he ever said these things, it would prove he was a Jumbie Boy, prove that he was like Santay, the woman who had given him back his eyes and was here now to see him.
The sight of her had raised the hairs on Pynter’s arms. Santay walked over to him, reached a hand towards his face.
‘S’awright, Osan,’ she had said, ‘you been on my mind.’
His mother went inside the house, came out with a bowl of unshelled peas and began to pick at them. Santay talked of weather, corn and cane, and the new illnesses that Old Hope women had been bringing her. The New Year had something to do with it, she said. Didn they see how it begin? Nice an’ bright, like a basin full of promise – her eyes rested briefly on his mother – but when that basin finally tipped over, what did it give them? Politics. But she didn come to talk about no politics, she said. Wasn’t that which bring her here. She been sent here by a dream. In her dreams, she said, one of Deeka Bender’s daughters was sitting on John Seegal’s stone. And on that stone there were birds and watermelons and the daughter’s feet were in a puddle of rainwater. Trouble was, the daughter’s back was towards her and she couldn’t figure out which one of them it was, even if that dream came back to her four nights in a row.
Santay fixed the women with dark, interrogating eyes. A pusson didn’t mean to look inside nobody business, but was any of them with child?
His mother’s fingers were busy with the bowl of peas that she was picking clean of chaff. Patty the Pretty’s hands drifted down towards her stomach. Her eyes grew soft and large and something like a smile spread across her body. ‘Oh God,’ Patty muttered softly and sat down on the steps.
Tan Cee muttered something, or perhaps it was her lips that trembled slightly, and Deeka Bender, who’d greeted the woman with a silent, flat-eyed gaze, turned her back on them and walked into the house. They could hear the brushing of her feet against the floorboards.
Yes, the woman said, resting her eyes on Patty. Santay’s fingers reached for the knot of her headtie and loosened it. Tan Cee’s hand reached out and fingered the flattened plaits and she began to unplait her hair.
Water was woman, Santay said. The child was going to be a girl. And that child ought to bring a lot of light into their days. The birds around the woman’s feet told her that.
And one more thing. She shifted her head away from Tan Cee’s hand. Call the baby anything but … Her voice trailed off, and there was something new and different in her eyes. Would it be askin too much to add Adiola to the baby’s name? It was her name, she said, an old name, one that her mother had passed on to her. Every girl-chile in her family had carried it from time, and though she never used it, she did not want that name to die. Was that askin too much?
Patty shook her head and smiled. The lines around the woman’s mouth relaxed. Tan Cee touched Patty’s arm. ‘Lordy,’ Patty said, and again more softly, ‘Lord ha’ mercy, girl – I … ’
Patty’s chuckle cut across her words like the tinkling of bracelets.
16
THERE WERE THOSE February evenings when night settled like a sheet over the valley; when the darkness was so thick it felt like something a person could wade into. The air was quiet and chilly, brittle like glass. They could hear the river in the valley below slipping over every pebble. If bad weather was about to break, the suck and surge of waves forcing themselves through the caves along the seashore would reach them as if they were just there, butting against their doorsteps.
Hemmed by the after-dinner fires, with the darkness rising up towards them, it was easy to believe that they were sitting on a raft and what lay below them was a tossing, living ocean licking at their feet.
It was the only time that Deeka Bender talked to them of things that were not about John Seegal. She spoke of the glittering black sand beaches of the north where she came from, of Atlantic breakers as tall as ships, collapsing at the feet of cliffs so high their foam looked like white lacing on a deep-blue dress. It was from the lip of one of those precipices that the pure-blood of her people – the first humans on these islands – had launched themselves and left the earth for good.
She would wonder at the puzzling and unnameable things that traversed the world: roads that ran beneath the earth and carried cars and people; machines that sat on air the way a man would sit on solid earth; buildings so tall a pusson could stand on one, reach up and stir a cloud. And as the evening folded its skirts around them, her talk returned to Old Hope.
She would tell them of the year the snakes arrived – snakes that didn have no right or reason to spoil a proper New-Years-After-Christmas season. It didn’t make no sense. In the season of parched corn and smoked ham, of sorrel and hard-dough bread, and black cakes so packed with fruit and rum a pusson got drunk just from smelling them, it was the last thing that a pusson expected.
And ’twas not as if a pusson didn do what they was s’posed to do. They’d greeted the New Year with fresh curtains. They’d laid the floors with sheets of linoleum as bright as flower gardens. They’d stained and polished the mahogany chairs they rarely ever sat on. Had indulged the children with sips of the dark sweet wine smuggled in from Kara Isle, and laughed their heads off as the spirits took hold of the lil ones a
nd threw them about the yard, grinning foolishly at everyone while they fought to reclaim their limbs.
But still them snakes came! The first sign of them in Old Hope was the part of themselves they left behind: shimmering silvery stockings as delicate as a child’s communion veil. A pusson found these stockings everywhere: in tight tangles between the grasses, fluttering high on branches where the wind hung them up for all to see. At the door-mouths to their houses.
And ’twas all right to watch those flimsy white stockings blowing everywhere, until a pusson find out which snake they belong to. Crebeaux – those night-dark creatures that most yoomans live a lifetime without seeing, that didn live on trees like any decent-minded snake ought to, but in the twisted arteries of the earth, in the lightless hollows under stones and forest-root, in the dampness of ravines that never felt a direct ray of sun. Snakes that didn crawl but flowed away from them like oil.
And, of course, they started killing them.
But then the girl arrived, if a girl is what she was. She was short and muscled like a man, with a yellow ring around the iris of each eye, exactly like a bird’s. They remembered how she placed herself before the machete-swinging arms of men and would not let them kill these creatures, how she slipped an arm beneath the snakes and guided their heads towards the holes and crevices they came from, the way they flowed along the skin of her arms as if she were pouring them out of herself. And word of her presence in Old Hope had stopped the men from raising their machetes, for she’d spread something far deeper than fear or panic in their hearts.
She’d made them ask themselves: what if ’twas someone somewhere in Old Hope who’d done or dreamed up something awful that had given shape to her? What if she might be some woman living right here ’mongst them and some wicked deed had reshaped her?