by Jacob Ross
They married in their own way. Just Coxy and her: he smiling all the time; she gripped stiff with the fear of her father, even if John Seegal would never have found them in that quiet lil bay in the shadow of a cliff that people called The Silent, with the seagulls as their witness and the waves their congregation.
She remembered the light. Remembered the way it came down from the sky and settled on the water: pink, like the inside of a conch shell. Like the colour of church windows. She’d taken his hand in marriage but she never took his name. And it was exactly a year before her secret slipped from her. She said it to her mother and her sisters two days after they stood on Glory Cedar Rise and watched John Seegal walk into the Kalivini swamplands.
Tan Cee said the same things to him every night, her agitation beating against his ear like the flutterings of a moth, and at the end of it, she would lean away from him, preparing herself for those last words she always left him with. She wanted his understanding in advance, for this thing her mind kept turning her towards. This growin, worryin thing that gone and creep inside her head and would not go away because it did not want to. And if, if he could not give her his understanding, at least, she wanted his forgiveness in advance.
A thin skein of drizzle was drifting down the Mardi Gras the morning they saw Pynter rise to his feet. The water had settled on the soft matting of his hair. His skin was glistening like the bark of a June-plum tree. Holy Rain they called it, this God-spray – this feathering of water from the mountain that fanned the sunlight out above their heads, softened the shapes of rocks and trees and left a glow on everything.
They followed his climb up to Glory Cedar Rise, all legs and arms and shifting torso, his slingshot slung around his neck like a rubber noose. They watched until he was no more than a shape against all that sky up there, lifting the Y of his catapult, his left arm flexing and unflexing, his whole body a living arrow with a single barb.
Tan Cee called them up there later. The shudder in her voice was all they needed to send them hurrying after her. Up there they could look down and see everything that lay beyond Old Hope. The wind was strong enough to snatch away a person’s voice and fling it down the hillside. Strewn across the carpet of decaying glory cedar leaves – like a scattering of feathered fruits – were birds: hill doves, brown and soft as innocence, johnny birds and pipirits and pikayoos. Ramiers – normally made grey by flight and distance – now glistened like polished slate around their feet. Cattle egrets, so white their wings threw back the light like mirrors, hummingbirds – little scraps of fallen rainbow – and cee-cee birds and johnny-heads and blackbirds. Each of them knocked out of the sky. Each of them lying on the earth with shattered eyes.
Deeka made a hammock of her skirt and sat amongst the carcasses, shaking her head. Did they know? Did they know that long-time people, her people, used to believe that birds were the eyes of God? Did they know that? Eh?
She turned her gaze up at the glory cedar trees, their dark wind-hardened branches arched by age and time. ‘He must’ve hear me say it,’ she muttered. ‘But I – I don’ remember sayin it. I don’ … ’
She came to her feet and brushed the dead leaves off her dress. She turned towards Elena, taking in her daughter’s swelling shape, her eyes gone dull with malice. ‘You won’t touch ’im again,’ she said. The words bubbled out of Deeka’s throat like oil. ‘He come through you; but he never was your child.’
She turned her face up to the trees again, placed a toe against a bird and turned it over with her foot. ‘He vex,’ she breathed. ‘He vex to kill.’ And then, softly, wonderingly, ‘S’like he know hi time comin soon. So he quarrellin wit’ God.’
BOOK TWO
Hands
18
THE CANE-CUTTING season, the long, hot months they called the Stretch, brought with it the kind of labour that deadened the eyes and numbed the tongue. All Tan Cee’s night-time whisperings in Pynter’s ear, after his mother’s hand had sent him blind again, were sopped away by tiredness.
It was two years since Birdie had left and these were the months they missed him most. They were the months of lowered voices and half-said things, when children tiptoed around the tempers of their parents. Evenings were reduced to grunts and gestures, and that smouldering far-eyed gaze that fixed itself on nothing in particular.
They came home each evening smelling of the heat and straw down there. They would try to wash the day away with bucketfuls of water tipped from high above their heads, scrubbing and scrubbing, but the day would remain with them. It stuck to their breaths and came out in their utterings over dinner. There was Lana’s man who was about to walk and, hard as he tried, that long-face dog could not hide it. All a pusson had to do was watch the way he didn laugh with nobody no more. And that new-and-fancy sweetman walk he practising, never mind the crossing and uncrossing of them bow legs of his. As if a pusson didn know that he watchin ’imself in some fancy, freeze-up place in England or America. As if!
And right now in the middle of the Stretch, Pinny found herself with child. And her trouble was the trouble of every woman who ever worked the canes – to lift the heavy bundles above her head and hand them to the loaders as if the baby was not there. There was no other way to do it, no easier way to carry cane. It would mean that in a coupla weeks, it really wouldn be there no more. Or she could make the choice that was hardly one at all: leave the canes, live on less or nuffing, and let the baby live. And did they notice that that McKinley foreman fella was makin eyes at Myna’s girl-chile, who body only just begin to say things that she herself don’ unnerstan? They must keep their eyes on her as often as the work allowed. But like all them years before, however close they kept to her, McKinley was sure to find some way. Knowing she didn have no father or brother or uncle there to make him feel the hard part of a machete. Knowing that as long as this valley shifted under the weight of cane and he counted their money every week, he would get away with murder.
They talked as if it were their fault; as if it were for them to find the answer to this botheration they’d been carrying all their lives. And this year there was more trouble. They hadn’t realised it then, but it had started with the man who came to them a couple of years before, dressed in brightly polished leather shoes and a nicely ironed shirt. He’d arrived in a jeep and given them a different way to plant the canes. He wanted them to place the rows much closer than it made sense to do. He’d lost his temper when they told him what this meant: more borer worms, more of the skin-eating cow-itch plants making beds of themselves in there. And certainly more of the useless love vines that looked like flames and fed on the sap of canes. He didn’t even allow them time to mention the trouble they would have cutting through the tangle.
They’d planted more sugar cane on less soil. And with the land they were left with, they were told to cut more roads. Later in the year, when the plants were shoulder-high, the truck with chemicals came to kill the borer worms and the flaming yellow vines. But it was when the green machines with wheels that turned like mills arrived at the start of the cutting season that they understood the reason for those roads. They replaced the men. They spat out the canes in mutilated heaps behind them. Now everyone was struggling to keep up with the thundering machines, while the men stood by and watched them kill off in half an hour the job it took them all of a day to do. The machines cut, a few men trimmed, the women packed and lifted. McKinley argued it was less work. At the end of each week, he looked at the heaps, turned his eyes up at the sky, guessed the exact amount of sugar that must be lost given the heat of the sun that day, the amount of rain that didn’t fall and whatever else his mood or mind came up with. Then he cut their pay accordingly.
Pynter looked up from his dinner one evening, uncrossed his legs and glanced over at Peter. His brother was humming to himself while eating. ‘Tomorrow,’ Pynter said, ‘you come to Top Hill wiv me?’
Peter threw a sideways glance at him. ‘Fuh what?’
‘When you come, I show you.’
‘S’awright, no; or s’awright, yes – which one?’
‘It depend.’ His brother licked his fingers and resumed his humming.
Peter was as their father had said he would be: broader hands and a fuller body, with muscles that had already begun to fill his shoulders.
‘Depend on what?’ Pynter felt the irritation rising in his throat. He swallowed hard on it.
During all these evenings of the women returning home, preparing dinner and handing them their plates, he’d been wanting something different from his brother. He wanted to offer him a feeling – an emotion that nobody in the world apart from their nephew, Paso, had been able to put the proper words to. He wanted to let him have that portion of the ache and desperation that was due him. To have Peter also put his hand around this thing his teacher told him in his school above the ocean.
Pynter slipped his hand behind him, unstuck the handle of his slingshot from his waist and dropped it at his brother’s feet. ‘You come wiv me, I give you this.’
Night was already settling like a fine coating of dust on the furthest slopes, but here where they stood on the summit of Top Hill, the last of the evening sun still left daubs of honey on leaves and bark and branches. They could see the foothills, and the villages encircling the hillside, and, below them, the greying emptiness that had replaced the canes.
He pointed out to Peter all the places his brother already knew. Told him also what it was like beneath the gatherings of trees that hugged the hollows in the hillsides like the bunched hairs of an armpit; the overhangs of rocks and the far, fragmented patches of grey where the coconuts rose like tall upstanding brooms and swept the sky. He kept talking because he wanted to keep his brother distracted until the foreman’s whistle came.
The sound reached across the valley like a stricken bird-cry and released their people. It turned his brother’s gaze down towards the valley. Pynter fell silent, his eyes on Peter’s face.
His brother brought his finger to his mouth. The catapult hung loosely in his other hand. Pynter pointed at the long meandering line that began spilling onto the white dust road – a wavering thread of stick shapes, thin as drought, with the dying sun glancing off the angles of their limbs like blades.
‘Show me our modder,’ he said to Peter. Pynter paused a while, then pitched his voice more urgently at Peter. ‘Show me Tan Cee.’
His brother was leaning further forward and away from him. His eyes narrowed down to slits.
‘Show me Deeka,’ Pynter said.
Peter looked up. He shook his head. ‘I can’t make them out, Pynto,’ he said, his voice stuck somewhere between bewilderment and panic. ‘I can’t.’ He passed his arm across his face.
Pynter told his brother what he remembered of Paso’s words – ‘In the evenin dark, my people walk to the time of clocks, whose hands have spanned so many years … ’ – and how those words had changed the way he looked at cane. Spoilt it in a way.
Their nephew must have seen this, he said. He must have stood on one of these hills and looked down on the fermenting valley and watched that long grey line of men and women dragging their shadows behind them like an extra weight, with the dust of the old cane road frothing around their feet.
Paso had to have watched the way night gathered around them, seen the darker mounds of canes piled high behind them, stretching all the way down to the darkness that was the sea.
And he too must have let this enter him and settle there; must have lived this quiet desperation, this helplessness that was so much like the way he, Pynter, used to feel when he watched their father fumbling about him for all the familiar things that he could no longer see.
‘Dat’s why I goin to burn it, Peter,’ he told his brother softly. ‘Everything. S’why I goin to kill cane. For good. Don’ know when. But before I dead I do it.’
Peter must have told Patty about his decision to set fire to Old Hope, because she had her eyes on him.
Evenings, he returned from school, spread his books out on the floor and began murmuring over the pages. He would lift his head from time to time and glimpse his youngest aunt hovering at the edges of his vision. She never looked straight at him, always seemed to be studying a cloud or something when he raised his eyes at her. It bothered him, this sly-eyed shyness, this not-watching-while-you-saw-everything expression on her face, and he felt a lift of relief when she walked into the house one Friday and lowered herself beside him.
She looked down at his book, slipped a sideways glance at him and smiled. She didn’t touch his face or tug at his ear lobes or call him Sugarboy this time. Just sat there shifting her large eyes from the pages to his face and back again. He eased himself up from his elbows. She rested a hand on him, a gentle staying touch.
‘What you reading?’ she said.
He tried to figure out a fast way to tell her, realised he couldn’t, shrugged and said, ‘Don’ fink you’ll unnerstan.’
She rose to her feet, paused briefly at the doorway and walked away. And all he could think of afterwards was that quick last glance of hers. That dark-eyed flash of hurt.
She missed dinner that evening. She had never done that before. Leroy came, nodded at no one in particular and took away some food. She didn’t come the next day either.
Patty’s absence left a scooped-out hole in the yard – a hollowness that entered him and settled in his stomach. He found he couldn’t clear his mind of the little smile that had briefly creased her face.
He noticed something different about the women’s conversations. They no longer spoke about their time down in the valley. Words came from them in fragments, like half-formed thoughts; got picked up by the others; were left aside and returned to later. Short sentences, partly said, never finished by the one who started talking. As if they were helping each other remember things they thought they’d long forgotten.
But with the passing evenings and Patty’s space still vacant, he eventually worked out the pattern of their talk, and marvelled. It was a kind of weaving. It was what Patty did with bits of thread and cloth: words and thoughts, and little bits of meaning they looped around each other, the way they plaited hair.
They were remembering a child whose name they did not mention. Her mother had carried her not nine but ten months and a half. Her mother was not worried, it had happened in the family before. And when that baby came, they saw that her limbs were longer than any other in the family. Her ear lobes were darker than the children who had come before her and she did not cry. She did not talk either, not for eighteen months. And the first word they ever heard from her was ‘nice’. As if she was noticing the world for the first time and found favour with it.
It took her just as long to walk. When she rose to her feet, people looked on her and thought of things that flowed: bamboo, vines and rivers. Her father regretted the name he’d given her, always said that he should have called her Grace, because of the way she walked and the way that girl-chile changed him.
He carried her everywhere. A man rough as the stones he’d worked in all his life would stop to notice flowers, to fondle the smoothness of a pebble, the patterns on a leaf or tree trunk. Like she was teaching him another way – a better way to be.
He carved little things for her – animals and human shapes that looked like people they knew. He taught himself to braid her hair. He would’ve killed the man, or dog, or insect that dared to upset her. She brought a sweetness on this rough-hewn man, a softness he did not know he possessed. A gentleness that surprised him.
All this meant she did not go to the lil infant school on Senna Hill, to recite all dem multiplyin tables-an’-chairs, an’ alphabeticals like his children who came before her. He did not want the world to touch her, didn’t want her stained. Sometimes too much love don’t feel like love. Sometimes too much love is prison. And if – if … a pusson didn …
Pynter left his unfinished bowl of food beside his stone. He could still hear their murmurings when his feet
hit the asphalt road. He would walk tonight. He wanted to walk. He would take the old cane road along the river and go towards the sea. He would sit on one of the hills above the bay and think about their secrets: all the things they never said, which stared out at him from the back of their eyes. All the things they held back about John Seegal. And why, why when he thought he was so close to understanding it; when he thought he saw the answer right there in front of him, he could never close his hands around it. Why it was so difficult to grab hold of the thing that really made his grandfather walk.
Patty was still on his mind when he started hiding the dollar his mother gave him every morning, in the little nest he’d made for his slingshot beneath the house. He left home early and walked the eight miles to and from his school above the ocean. Walking gave him time to think about Patty, and the woman teacher who had stepped into their class the year before, dropped her black leather bag on the floor beside her desk and begun talking about mirrors. She’d heard about their mother’s little mirrors that they brought to school and rested on the floor, she said, so that women teachers could walk over without knowing, which was why she’d decided to wear trousers. It made better sense than causing irrecoverable injury to the little fool stupid enough to try it. She’d paused and offered the class a twisted little smile. And by the way, she was not there to educate anybody. She was getting paid to teach. If they didn’t understand the difference, they had no reason to be sitting there in front of her.
The San Andrews boys, whose parents dropped them off at school in bright new cars, did not like her words. They didn’t like the way she looked: her hair cut low like a boy’s; a loose unironed shirt hanging carelessly over a pair of olive green dungarees that didn’t match the shirt. And a gaze so direct and sure of itself they found themselves shifting in their seats and throwing glances at each other.