by Jacob Ross
Birdie had made a wall of his body and placed it between the soldiers and the youth. He’d lifted all seven of them like useless bits of debris and knocked their heads against those old stone walls that locked him in. There was an eighth who’d stepped back to aim the muzzle of his gun at him. What Birdie did to that one – he would not say.
That was why Chilway would not come for him this time, Deeka said. It would be small men with bodies as slim and hard as whips, and eyes that hardly blinked. They would not be the ones he’d half-killed, o’ course, and they would not come to Old Hope night-time. Chilway would’ve warned them about Old Hope people and the night!
They would arrive quietly in the early hours of the morning, their rifles held across their chests, their fingers on the trigger. They would not argue or make sweet talk with Deeka, or splay their fingers before offering her a handshake. They would not make a joke of Patty’s loveliness. They would look up at the giant that her son was, see the size of his arms, the muscles that rippled like a river down them, the hull that was his shoulders, the hands that made an axe look like a matchstick. They would not think of the bread he made with those hands, the laughing ease with which he lifted his sisters to those shoulders. They would miss the softness in his eyes.
S’matter o’ fact, for her boy, they would need no reason other than the fact of what he was. A stronger man. A bigger man. A man who was more man than they was. And when little men find they can’t measure up to something bigger than they was – what they do? Eh?
She spat the question at the night, waited for the answer, and when it came she was the only one who heard it. But they saw the way it straightened her spine and pulled her shoulders back.
‘They do what all man do, from time. They try to own it or cut it down to size. And if they find they can’t do either, if they can’t make it the same like them or less, they pull it apart. They break it. They turn it into something useless.’
But no man of hers was ever going to go like that. Not so easy. Not so foolish. Not for nothing. Not again.
Not even for God.
It was as if, by giving voice to all these awful things, by making them happen before, with words, his grandmother was obviating what was to come tomorrow. But there was something more and Pynter knew they had to wait for it. He knew that all this was grand-move, a voose – a rain dance of words. It was the old woman’s way of stepping out ahead of them to some place they had never been to before; and she needed to be there first to see what it was like before she called them over. And whether they welcomed it or not, it would determine what was to become of all of them.
When it came, it was so quick and simple it caught them unawares.
Deeka brought her hands up to her headscarf and tightened it. She swung her shoulders round and said to Tan Cee, ‘Go call that man you call your husband.’
‘Take your child to Maisie house and leave it there,’ she told Elena.
She paused at Patty, looked her youngest daughter up and down with a dry, assessing gaze. ‘Go change your clothes. This is not no short-skirt time.’
Now she was leaning towards Pynter and all he could see was the high curve of her forehead and the patterns of the firelight on the right side of her face – and those eyes that had always revealed that she cursed his birth.
‘You know de night,’ she said. ‘I askin you to go to every door in Old Hope. Tell dem …’ She straightened up, gathering breath to say the words. ‘Tell dem that Victor soldiers coming to kill my son tomorrow.’
She turned to Coxy Levid, who’d arrived by then, pulling on a cigarette and smiling.
‘Go wiv him.’
‘I go alone,’ Pynter told her. ‘Else I don’t go.’
Pynter pushed a hand beneath the boards and pulled out his slingshot. He leaned further in, brought out a little sack of ball bearings and tipped it over. The steel marbles glittered in his palm like drops of water. He eased the handle of the weapon down the waist of his trousers, threw Coxy a last hard glance. ‘Don’ wan’ nobody falla me,’ he said softly, mockingly, and slipped into the night.
Coxy took the cigarette from his lips, spat on the flaming tip and dropped it on the stones.
20
IT WAS CLEAR from the time the blue Land Rover entered Old Hope the next day that Victor’s soldiers knew nothing about the place.
Foolish! So foolish! Enough to make a pusson shake their head and laugh.
Chilway would have known – he would have known that men would never gather by the standpipe at the roadside to hold no low-voice conversations with plastic buckets at their feet, becuz that was children’s business. Cane men didn stoop in groups to fill up potholes in the road with stones the size of children’s heads, becuz that was government business. And at the height of the cutting season every house in Old Hope should be empty … and those children wouldn be down there in the cane fields doing their parents’ work.
Chilway would have known – and what Chilway didn’t know for sure he would have scratched his head about. Like why Muriel chose to climb to the top of Glory Cedar Rise at that time in the morning to sing ‘Rock of Ages’ with a voice that carried to the far end of Old Hope. And when she stopped so sudden in the middle of the song – well, that would have had him thinking.
Word of the soldiers’ coming had passed along those houses high above the twisting road. And in places where the distance between them would have made shouting necessary, the words were handed over to a child who took them running to a household further on. So that when the vehicle turned the corner, Deeka and her daughters were waiting at the roadside. They already knew that there were ten men in the jeep – eight at the back, the driver and another who sat beside him. They also knew that each carried a rifle, except the man who sat beside the driver. That the cap he wore was a darker blue than the rest of them and the silver watch on his left hand had a greenish face on it.
The driver got out first, followed by the others. They were as Deeka had imagined them, unsmiling, underfed young men balancing. 404 rifles in their hands. They looked up the hill towards Deeka’s yard because they heard men’s voices up there. And by the laughter that reached the road, these Old Hope men were having a whale of a time. They saw that those who had been at the standpipe were now sitting on the grass verge a little way behind them. They too were talking amongst themselves.
They looked further up beyond John Seegal’s house and saw small gatherings of youths spread out along the top, their bodies still as stonework against the bright skyline.
The man who stepped out from amongst the soldiers looked older than the others. His face was smooth as a child’s. His eyes were red, as if they needed sleep.
‘Birdie Bender,’ he said. ‘He belong to y’all?’ He was looking into Patty’s face, and something in his gaze made her back away from him, her large eyes shifting in a kind of panic towards her mother.
Tan Cee moved to answer but Deeka stayed her with a movement of her head.
She was staring at the men. As soon as they arrived she’d begun squinting at their faces, pausing briefly on each one with rapid movements of her eyes. When she spoke, her voice was not what Pynter expected. There was no anger there. No irritation. No trembling or fear. The words bubbled out of her like oil.
‘Send Chilway,’ she said.
‘Is I come for him, not Chilway.’ The soldier’s voice crackled above their heads like parched leaves.
‘Chilway,’ Deeka repeated. It was as if she hadn’t heard him. ‘Let Chilway come.’
‘You didn hear me firs’ time. Is I dat here to take him.’
‘And how you goin to do dat?’ Deeka asked. She sounded as though she really wanted to know.
‘Yuh trying to play de arse wiv me?’ They watched the irritation tighten the man’s face and change it into something stiff and ugly. He moved then: a twist of the head, a fast glance at the men behind him. Pynter saw the stiffening in the Old Hope men, the quick adjustment of their hands. The change that came ove
r his grandmother was much quieter. She seemed to be drifting towards the men.
‘Look up there,’ Deeka said, pointing at the shapes against the skyline. ‘Listen.’ She raised a hand above her head. ‘You kin take all of us with you? You fink you kin manage dat?’
Now she was pointing a finger at one of the young men. He wore his cap differently from the rest, the peak pulled sideways. The way he held the gun was odd too – his fingers wrapped around the metal of the muzzle, not the stock.
‘You – you a Skinner, not so? You from up dere?’ She raised a hand at one of the hills on the other side of the valley. ‘You got de Skinner head an’ mouth. Your modder got de same-shape face as you. Is you who show dem where we live; not so?’
The young man did not answer her. He threw a quick glance at the Old Hope men behind him; not at their faces, but at the machetes in their hands.
‘But you didn tell dem why you look so ’fraid? Eh?’
Deeka started backing away, her finger still levelled at the young man’s face. Her voice rose high and bright and sudden. It startled the man; it made Pynter’s heart trip faster. It silenced the laughter in their yard and brought the men on the grass verge to their feet.
‘Well, Missa Skinner, tell dat fella here dat if he make any of you just lif’ dem ting, none of you goin live long enough to hear one o’ dem go off! Tell dat sonuvabitch for me. Tell ’im! Make ’im know dat is why I ask ’im nice-an’-polite to send Chilway for Birdie. Tell ’im!’
Deeka turned round with a rush of air and began striding up the hill, the bottom of her dress flapping around her heels like wings.
The Old Hope men that the soldiers hadn’t seen began appearing on the road. They came from everywhere. They slipped down the banks from the bushes that overlooked the road. They emerged from the backs of houses. Deep-chested men with sugar-sack shoulders and dark-water eyes. A couple nodded at the strangers standing in a tight bunch with their guns. Some even grunted a greeting.
Sloco, tall, rum-eyed, always smelling of molasses, and as unsteady as a cane stalk, cocked an eye at them. ‘North-woman,’ he explained, lifting his chin up the track where Deeka and her daughters had just disappeared. ‘Do what de lady say, fellas. When north-woman want a man, you send de one she ask for, y’unnerstan?’
He adjusted the machete on his shoulders. ‘An’ if y’all tink she bad-an’-ugly, y’all should ha’ meet de husband.’
He cackled at his own joke. Thought about what he’d just said and laughed again.
The arrival of the soldiers and the intention in the eyes of their leader had so shaken Patty she’d placed her back against the house to steady herself. A stillness had settled over the yard which even the chickens seemed to sense. For as soon as Deeka returned from her confrontation with the soldiers in the road, they’d retired with panicked chuckling noises to the knotted clumps of pine grass at the back of the house.
His mother cooked in darkness – not on firewood this time but over a nest of smokeless charcoal whose steady glow reddened the stones of the yard. Deeka went into the house and brought out a bowl of flour. She said Birdie’s name. He came out on the steps and she handed him the bowl. She gave him a cup of salted water and placed the little brown bag of corn flour beside his feet. He raised his head at them, the tendons switching at the sides of his neck like ropes – his eyes pausing, it seemed, on each of them in turn. It was not the gaze of a frightened man. The shaky desperation with which he had arrived had left his body now. It was a look Pynter remembered – the one he’d given Peter all those years ago on their way to Gideon’s house, when he’d sent both of them ahead of him and promised he would be just behind.
Pynter studied Birdie’s kneading hands and rolling shoulders – solid as the boulders on the bank above the house – and he could not imagine his uncle the way Deeka had talked of him the night before, crushed at the hands of these men who’d come with guns to take him. And for the first time since his uncle arrived, Pynter felt the tightness in his chest relax.
Last night he’d done as Deeka asked. He’d gone out there and tossed a pebble at every door, passing on his grandmother’s words to the hand that pulled a blind, the eyes that studied him from a crack in the wall of the wooden houses or the head that popped out from a window.
Tonight, Old Hope would not sleep. Nobody had to tell him that. They would be attentive to the barking of their dogs. Every footfall on the road would be listened to and made to match its owner. And in all this watching silence there hung a statement, as certain as the whispering canes beneath them, as solid as the hills that overlooked this valley: that Deeka and her family needed to use this time to find a way out for Birdie.
But as Deeka told them earlier, there was no straight road to anywhere. In fact, there was no road at all when a pusson didn know exactly where they off to, or where they s’posed to go.
One thing was certain, though: north was the only way to go. She’d spoken as if ‘north’ was a destination. She’d argued her way to the upper end of the island and it was only on her way back down that she’d settled on Kanvi – a village full of straight-back wimmen and tight-lip men, who’d stared at the ocean so long, she said, they carried a portion of it in their eyes.
There was a woman there named Ada Bowen. She was family. Birdie must go to her and tell her Deeka’s name. She would take him past the scattering of islands that stood between their place and the world. She would leave him on the last one, Kara Isle, which – little and useless as it looked – was the doorway to everywhere. Englan’ was on the right of it, a long-long way away; Cuba was on the left; Trinidad sat a little way behind him. America was straight ahead.
America was easy. A pusson just travel the curve of islands, play hopscotch with them. That route been always there, old as time, old as her people who’d discovered it, who’d learned that the surest way to get there was to follow the flight of birds, the ones that arrived and rested here at the tail end of the year: the yellowthroats, the blue-head’ buntins, the blood-throat doctor-bird, the tanagers and warblers. The swallows an’ swifts an’ nighthawks; the raptors and the thrushes; parulas and sandpipers. Plovers, terns and catbirds. Each one of them could take him to that place that looked so much like a whiteman nose hangin above a shoutin mouth. They called it Florida these days. It had lost the name her people gave it.
That was the easy part, Deeka said. The hardest part was getting him out of Old Hope. The Old Hope men who, that very day, had been prepared to face the soldiers’ guns for Birdie would not take him out to sea. These were cane men. Give them a machete to clear the foothills with, give them a hoe to make a garden all the way up to the top of the Mardi Gras, bring all of Victor’s soldiers to Old Hope and line them up before them, they’ll stand their ground and face them with only a coupla stones between them. But they knew nothing about sea.
The sea turn them into lil boys. It frighten them.
And it had always been a puzzle to her why so many of these island men, who could stand on any hill and see the ocean almos’ touchin their eyelashes, were so terrified of it. Perhaps it was the way they had arrived, she said. Perhaps they still carried the memory in their bones.
For her people – for the Old Ones – the sea used to be a road to everywhere.
Deeka cleared her throat. She tightened the knot of her headtie. She reached for the kerosene lamp and turned up the wick. Birdie would have to take his chances on the road – all fifteen miles of it. He would have to travel like the thief he was and always keep in mind that soon as night-time reach, the road belong to Victor soldiers.
Pynter followed not so much the details of their worrying as the broad outlines of it. It felt more like standing on a hill and watching the curve of a meandering road below him. He’d been thinking about trees, about Birdie’s strength and something he would have liked to do, though he might never have his uncle’s stamina or the desperation it required.
Deeka’s worrying finally brought her to a dead end. The women’s
exhaustion surrounded him now like a rancid towel; the air was stale with it – that and the smell of Birdie’s fear.
His mother’s gaze shifted to and from the moths that stumbled down the hot glass funnel of the lamp and became charred bits of nothing in the flames. Patty’s eyes were still and wide and staring, while Tan Cee leaned against the open window. Made restless by the fretting of the women, Peter had stepped out into the yard.
Footfalls, faint like padded heartbeats, slipped into the silence.
‘Somebody,’ Pynter said, rising from the floor and reaching for his slingshot.
‘Cynty,’ Tan Cee answered, her head still out of the window.
The name made Birdie shift his weight on the chair. His hand came up and crept towards his forehead.
Cynty brought something new into the room. Her presence made Pynter feel as if all the worrying they had been doing before she arrived had been for nothing. And that puzzled and amazed Pynter since nothing had really changed. Perhaps it was her size, the dark solidity and steadiness of this woman in the doorway whom all of Old Hope puzzled over. Cynty smiled more than she talked; in fact, she hardly ever talked, and large as she was, whenever she said something, her voice was barely above a whisper.
She walked across the floor and lowered herself beside Birdie so that her left shoulder rested against his right leg. She offered the room a brief smile then she turned her face towards Birdie.
Peter came back in after her. He stood in the middle of the room with a finger pressed against his lips as if he did not trust what might come out of them. Pynter followed his brother’s gaze and he too did not want to take his eyes off Cynty. She was half as tall as Birdie and almost as wide, with the miraculous darkness of skin that even now made her bare arms shimmer in the lamplight.