by Jacob Ross
Peter swung himself around. Pynter felt his brother’s breath on his face. ‘It sound like if you wan’ to … ’
Peter didn’t get to say the rest. Deeka’s voice surprised them. For she hadn’t spoken during all these months. Not really; not properly. Every evening, without so much as a word or gesture, she’d reminded them of the reason: that her daughter, Elena, had filled a bucket of burning coals to throw at her. The very idea, the very thought of it, had killed the stories in her.
Tan Cee’s hand paused with the bit of yam she was about to place in her mouth. She inspected it and dropped it back into her bowl. Elena shifted the baby on her shoulder. The eyes she rested on Deeka were deep and almost fearful.
‘Is twenty years,’ Deeka said, her voice trailing away like smoke. ‘Next month make it twenty.’
She was leaning against the wall of rock at the top end of the yard. She’d crossed her arms and she was looking straight at them. ‘What – what make a mother love a child different from the other? Better than the other? Eh?’
It could be anyting, she told them. ‘Could be because dat baby got some weakness that the others don’t have. Or it replace a pusson who come before. O’ p’raps it ease some hurtin or achin or sorrow.’
She’d given John Seegal the children he’d asked for, she said. Tan Cee first, then Elena, then Birdie. Patty was the last. Patty came as a present. A surprise. He’d taken to them in a way most fathers in these parts didn’t have the smallest idea how to. He roped them in so tight with all that lovin. They hardly had their own pussnal air to breathe.
‘It didn have no space inside that rope for Anita. And she know she never goin to have none. She was a growin girl and my husband wasn’ blind to it. Ain’t got nothing more revealin than a man pretendin dat he blind to something hi two eye can’t avoid. I see de quiet that come over ’im when she pass in front of ’im. I see the struggle in ’im. I see de fever dat take hold of ’im. I see it and I didn know what to do with it. I don’ know what happm between them. I didn wan’ to know. I still don’ wan’ to know. She had to go.’
Deeka stood before them as if all her age had settled on her shoulders. But her head was up, her words deliberate and clear as if, now that she’d decided to tell, she needed them to hear it all.
‘I didn have to tell her, becuz dat lil ’ooman learn soon enough dat it have different kind o’ lovin and not all of it worth havin. Not all of it is good. I didn have to make her go. She went anyway. The first time police bring ’er back, they say they find ’er halfway up the island. Walkin. All day walkin. They ask ’er where she goin. She say she going to meet ’er father. Don’ know how she know. I never told her. My husband must ha’ told her. Next time she went, she didn even go lookin for no father. She just went lookin. Is twenty years now. I – I believe she lookin still.’
Pynter glanced at his mother and his aunts, their shoulders stilled, not so much by Deeka’s words (for he was sure that they already knew these things) as by the fact that she’d finally said the one thing she had been holding back in all their years of listening to her. And it was good that his grandmother had finally said it. For wasn’t it Deeka herself who had told them once that even things that rotted needed air? To dry up properly, and then disappear – and even if they didn’t disappear, they became at least more bearable.
His grandmother’s words had delivered something else to him. The thought had settled on his mind that during all this time it was not John Seegal they were missing, it was this girl whose name they never said unless they had to.
Peter was right about those stories. All he wanted was to drive the grandfather he’d never seen back to the swamps he’d decided to walk into, and have him stay there. To be able to live their lives without carrying a dead man’s weight with them for what remained of their time above this valley of heat and hurt. To kill him off, properly. For good. Only then, perhaps, would it be possible for Anita to come back.
Now his grandmother was looking at him directly. She was talking as if he were the only person there with her. ‘Shame,’ she said, ‘shame could be so strong it … it make a man get up, leave everyting he own behind – an, an … ’
She didn’t finish. She climbed the steps and went inside.
Pynter felt his brother’s elbow grind against his ribcage.
‘Dat’s why Deeka say you born for trouble!’ Peter said.
‘Dat’s not all she say,’ said Pynter. ‘She say I born to dead too. And what you say?’
‘I say – I say you’z a flippin dog.’
‘That make you one too. We got same mother, not so?’
‘But I born first.’
‘Then you born a dog befo’ me.’
‘You sonuvabitch.’
‘You call ’Lena a bitch? Cuz she my mother too.’
‘I didn say dat.’
‘If you call her a bitch again, I tell her, you … ’
‘I didn say dat!’
‘Yes, you say so! By flippin implication.’
‘By wha? You flippin long-word, word-a-mouth show-off. I different. I’z not like you, I … ’
‘What you like then, eh?’ said Pynter. ‘You small-word, no-word, dry-mouth, long-mouth sonuvabitch!’
19
OLD HOPE WAS a place of roads – a spider’s web of tracks that could take a person anywhere.
There were the everyday roads that children learned the way they learned to read. They were made to travel them so often they became as familiar as the markings in their hands.
There were other kinds of roads. Some took a person to the edge of a cliff and seemed to leave them there. The rest of that road lay far below, joined to the spot on which they stood by the snaking root of a dandacayo tree, or wist vines stripped naked of their thorns.
There were the desperate roads, the hardly-talked-about roads, the roads of last resort. They were there only to carry messages in an emergency. These were the little paths that followed the rise of rocks, of fallen trees and roots, with little cuttings made in them, just large enough to fit the feet and hands of a young one. The children would outgrow them the way they outgrew clothing.
There were the never-talked-about roads – secret tracks that took a running Old Hope man to a hill above some trees. He would have headed there because he knew which of those trees below would take the weight of a leaping adult, and which would deliver him to the bed of rocks beneath them.
There were places where the trees tied their branches in tunnels that lasted miles. A person could slip into that green night in the early hours of a morning and surface at the far end of some place further north to find the sun going down.
And then there were the ghost roads – the hidden travel-ways left there by the Old Ones, water paths and rock trails designed to cover flight, where the sunlight filtered in so faintly a person navigated by the shape of things. The whisper was that people still followed them: the soft-walkers, the self-talkers, the strange-borns. The loners with an appetite for puzzles who sought meaning in the shapes of roots, in the unusual curve of branches. They passed each other in the half-light, treading softly, ghosts on roads so old and faint they were hardly there at all.
Which was why when trouble came to Old Hope, Deeka Bender turned to Pynter.
He was telling Peter about planets and stars, and numbers and distances so far-an’-futile the yooman mind could never hold them in; and did he know that there was a time when that moon up there used to be a lantern, before some bad-minded, too-curious Eye-talian fella name Galileo Galilei looked up at the moon through a piece of glass one night and from then on it got reduced to a lil piece o’ rock? Pynter was about to tell him what a foolish-fool Christopher Columbus was and why, when he paused, made a little circle with his head and muttered softly, disbelievingly, ‘Birdie?’
Peter stirred and looked at him.
‘Bread,’ Pynter said. ‘Bread jus’ cross my mind – that’s all.’
But that was not all. There was also the tincture of
man sweat that was only Birdie’s. Mebbe it wasn’t a smell at all; mebbe ’twas just a thought.
Peter was staring up at the moon through a bit of broken glass. ‘Another year to go an’ you dead, Jumbie Boy,’ he said.
Pynter pulled his shirt around him and eased his back down on the stones. Jumbie Boy. He shaped his lips around the name. It had been said so many times he hardly heard it any more, unless it came from Peter. He’d tried everything to kill that name in Peter’s mouth but still his brother said it: the first morning he left the yard for his new school in San Andrews; the evening he’d returned. And when his head was down and his mind was so far inside a book that he did not hear Peter’s feet approaching, his brother would place his lips against his ear and breathe those words.
He’d tried to make Peter understand it – this way of being sure sometimes. Of knowing without thinking. He’d asked him to imagine one of the women by the river gathering up her basin full of clothing before heading home. Each piece of washing had its own colour, not so? And it didn’t matter how much that woman washed it; it still carried the odour of the man or child who wore it. P’raps if Miss Maisie closed her eyes and brought it to her nose, she would know its owner straight away. He – he didn’t have to do that. He could stand on a stone a lil way up the river, call out to her and tell her.
‘Is what I is,’ he’d said. ‘Is so I come.’
His mother’s voice pushed its way into his thoughts. It came so sharp and urgent it made his heart flip over. She was looking at Peter. His brother was staring past the grapefruit tree into the dark.
‘What happm?’ Elena said. She spun round suddenly, prepared to fight off whatever it was that held Peter there so rigid and wild-eyed.
Nothing happened; not for a while. Not until a large dark shape detached itself from the stool of bananas at the back end of the house. Tan Cee stood up with that strange smoothness of movement which always made it look as if she was helped up by some force outside of her.
Pynter felt a new heat in his brother. Smelt the fear too. He turned to tell him not to worry cuz it was only Birdie, but his brother was no longer there. He glimpsed the pale shirt disappearing up the hill into the night, listened to the stiff thumping of Peter’s heels on the earth, before silence returned and settled on the yard.
Birdie did not speak.
With a movement that was almost as abrupt as Peter’s, Elena shifted the baby on her shoulder and a sound came out of her.
Tan Cee ran out of the yard. She returned almost as soon as she’d left with the shirt and the pair of trousers that she always kept for Birdie.
Birdie remained where he was, his back against the darkness. He seemed to be waiting for something from them – some sound or gesture that would fill out the solid block of shadow that he was and make him flesh and blood. And when it came it was almost tearful. ‘Come, son,’ Deeka said. ‘Come, tell me.’
Tan Cee held up a chunk of burning wood before her as if it were an offering. They noticed the dark mixture of mud and blood that ran all the way down Birdie’s shoulders to his fingers; the ripped trousers and khaki shirt hanging off him like torn banana leaves; the mud-caked pair of canvas shoes; the gold tooth glimmering through half-opened lips; his eyes just as large and luminous as Patty’s.
Deeka reached out and took Elena’s child from her. ‘Hot some water,’ she said. ‘Get a cloth. Bathe him.’
Now, the words that passed between the women were soft and taut and urgent. Pynter did not need to know what lay behind the small grunts from his aunt, the little cries of anger and surprise from Patty, the heavy silence of his mother. He listened to the water crashing down his uncle’s body, turned his head up at the moon and wondered where Peter had gone to.
Tan Cee called his name. Pynter rose to his feet and went to her. He did not look at his uncle’s nakedness. He did not look at his mother either. From this aunt of his – who sat over him at nights and listened to him dreaming; who placed marbles in his hands and whispered unspeakable secrets in his ears; whose smell of eucalyptus oil and cinnamon was as much a part of her as the knife she carried somewhere on her person – he would learn what the trouble was. Not the details yet, but something of its magnitude and weight. And it would not be from what she said, but from the adjustments in her breathing, and all the things her hands and eyes were doing.
‘Stay out here.’ Tan Cee’s gesture embraced Old Hope. He understood that whatever the trouble his uncle had brought home to them, he, Pynter, must not sleep tonight. He listened to the shuffle of the women’s footsteps on the floorboards. Felt the slight change of pressure as the house adjusted to his uncle’s weight. Stay out here. From as far back as he could remember, it had been this way. The awful things that had no name or words to them – the women always kept them to themselves.
The Mardi Gras was a hulking shape against the sky above them. There was no mist up there tonight. He could see the shape of the summit, curved like the head of a chicken hawk and, lower down, that puzzling scooped-out hollow that was so much like the mouth of a man opened wide in what could just as easily be a roll of endless laughter or a scream that had no end to it.
Birdie knew something about his mother that the others didn’t. Maybe he used to listen to her stories differently and so had discovered a part of Deeka Bender that she had never shown her daughters. Else why didn’t he do what so many of the men who’d broken out of prison did: run to the hills, or climb to the top of the Mardi Gras and bury themselves amongst the mists and ferns up there? Until, of course, the dogs were sent to drag them down.
Instead, Birdie came running to his mother.
Pynter imagined his uncle sprinting through the little back roads that stood between the prison and Old Hope. His desperation was there in the cuts and bruises on his skin, the stripped down shirt and knee-cut trousers. The wildness in his eyes was no doubt placed there by his fear of the Rottweilers and Alsatians Birdie thought were just behind him.
Pynter had no idea how much time Peter had passed out there on his own or how long the women and Birdie had been inside talking. When his brother returned, Pynter found himself hurrying over the stones towards him. But Peter did not see him. Whatever it was his brother had returned with from the dark had stiffened his head and shoulders, and thinned his lips down to a thread-line.
Peter climbed the steps and threw his weight against the door. The chair the women had placed behind it crashed against the floor. Pynter followed him inside.
Birdie was sitting on the only chair that would hold him up, one he’d built and fortified himself. His elbows were on his knees, his hands propping up his chin. The women were sitting at his feet. He’d curved the bulk of his body forward over them like the outcrop of a cliff. Four pairs of eyes, bright and yellowed by the lamplight, settled on their faces. Birdie did not look up at them.
A thin film of sweat glazed Peter’s face. His lips were working and his eyes were on the window behind their uncle. The women’s still-eyed condemnation changed to puzzlement and then concern. For they too had not seen this agitation in Peter before. Peter – the first-born, the one who laughed so easily, who preferred to stay at home and drift around them, who hummed hymns and love songs all the time, danced in the yard to the radio and made them chuckle at his foolishness.
Their mother pushed her weight up off the floor. Her movement prompted a gesture from Peter – one so abrupt and violent she sat back down. Now he was lifting his finger at Deeka, ‘If – if yuh send ’im back … ’
He dropped his hand, his lips still working, his sweat-glazed face glistening in the lamplight. ‘If – if he go back …’
‘They’ll kill ’im,’ Pynter cut in softly.
He followed his brother out of the door.
Elena came out after them. She stood amongst the stones with her hands dangling down her sides. There was a small smile on her face. ‘You sure?’ She flicked her wrist at Pynter.
‘Is Peter words,’ he said.
‘But
you …’
‘Is Peter words; you don’ unnerstan dat?’ His ferocity surprised him.
Their mother was looking at them both, her hands still hanging at her sides – that smile that wasn’t a smile at all still tugging at her mouth. They stood side by side, staring at her.
A little cough escaped Elena. Her right hand drifted up and rested on her stomach. Her lips moved around some words. She turned and went inside.
Peter began humming to himself. He swung his head from side to side, curling his tongue around each rhyme so that the words came out the funny way that Jim Reeves’s did.
Pynter felt a sudden pulse of sympathy for him. A desire too, to play the game they’d invented a couple of years before, where they stood back to back and tried to guess exactly what the other was seeing. They never cheated; they never lied; they never argued over what the other said he saw.
He took his eyes off Peter and lifted his face to the hills. It was up there, some way below the tall fall of vines, just beneath the ridge of white cedar and bamboo, that Miss Maddie and Miss Pearly – another sister whom he’d met just once – had laid their father. He’d gone to Miss Maddie’s house and told her that this was what their father Manuel Forsyth said he wanted: a place that overlooked his garden, his children and Old Hope. He did not tell her that he’d dreamt this a couple of weeks before their father passed.
Pynter sniffed at the air and caught the faint smell of early-morning rain. He placed his lips against Peter’s ear and breathed softly, happily, ‘Jumbie Boy!’
He laughed so loud it made Patty push her head out of the door and stare at them with depthless eyes.
What Peter said made the movements of the women sharper. It shortened their words. It made their footsteps heavier. It was as if their grandmother was unravelling a ball of thread that Peter had thrown at her.
They knew now that Birdie had blocked the butt of a soldier’s gun from breaking the face of one of those discontented youths he’d talked about the last time he came home. The soldiers lifted them off the roadside every day now for talking too much and too loudly; for cursing the name of the man who believed he owned the island; for asking questions they were not s’posed to ask about the unnecessary price of necessary things; about the labouring that crippled or killed their parents early. About the thieving and the waste.