by Jacob Ross
And it was not true what Tan Cee said about Deeka not knowing a way to talk to him. She had found a different language, that was all.
She’d been placing little presents beside the stone he sat on every evening. Hard-to-find things: shells which Peter told him she’d walked to the bay and collected herself. A few days ago she’d returned from the foothills with a plant whose leaves were also flowers – cream and soft like a tongue, with bright purple edges. Last night she laid a beetle on the floor where he did his homework – so iridescent in the lamplight its carapace seemed to spark. And it made his body twitch with irritation, because there were never any words from her, just these offerings of shapes and colours and patterns, which Peter took up and examined as if they were meant for him.
Tan Cee looked away. ‘You still believe she want you dead? That what you feel?’
A child’s voice, bright as a blade, came up from the river. The chattering of others further up joined in. The babble faded just as suddenly.
Tan Cee was quieter when she turned back to him. ‘Hate an’ love, Pynto – sometimes dey hardly different. Either way, is feel-ins. Either way a pusson carry you inside dem. S’why hate-an’love does exchange place so easy.’
Perhaps it was not the words but the little wave of sadness that crossed her face which made him think of Coxy. He raised the tail of his shirt, reached out and brushed the sweat from her forehead. Now she was looking at him strangely.
‘Wimmen funny,’ she breathed, a small smile tugging at her mouth. ‘We always love de bad ones more. S’a gift from yuh granmodder, Pynto. S’a proper gift.’
‘S’not enough,’ he said again.
He took up his bag of books; paused over Deeka’s small machete. It lay flat and dull like a petrified snake in the grass. He took it up and handed it to Tan Cee.
‘Time, yunno – a lil more of it. Thaa’z all.’ He was not sure why he said that. Didn’t know exactly what he meant by it. He straightened up and stared down at the river.
‘Let’s go home,’ he said. ‘I hungry.’
23
THESE MORNINGS the women’s eyes searched his face, striving to read the things he was not telling them. Walk more carefully, they said. He would be fifteen soon – a dangerous time for young people. In the evenings, on the way back from his school above the ocean, he should remember to turn to face each vehicle he heard coming up behind him. If it were full of soldiers, never look them in the eye. Force a smile – at least it would soften the sourness of that face of his, if nothing else.
A fast way home was anywhere that was not the road; it was the slopes that rose above San Andrews, the high hill gardens that overlooked the mansions just beyond them. The brutal heave of trees and mud tracks that stood between him and Old Hope.
His mother would reach up and pat his collar for the hundredth time, her eyes fixed on his face. And if, she said, her advice didn make no sense to him, just remember lil Jordan.
Lunchtimes, he reached into his bag and felt his slingshot lodged against his books, folded with the same care with which she wrapped his sandwiches. The rubber straps felt fragile between his fingers. His grandmother never forgot to place it there before he left for school, her way, perhaps, of reminding him too of Jordan. And it was true that every time his fingers brushed those straps, it stirred in him the memory of that boy, with his dangling arms, and eyes so glazed and distant it reminded Pynter of his father’s. The steady, staring eyes of Jordan which could no longer recognise the place he was born in. Jordan, standing at the side of Old Hope Road where Sylus and his men had dropped him, gazing into his mother’s face and not knowing who she was.
Jordan’s mother blamed it on Birdie. It was the scooter Birdie had left them all those years ago. It was the madness that this bit of wood and metal had sneaked into their children’s blood. The memory of their uncle standing on the top of Man Arthur’s Fall, tall as God, with his flying machine, had never left them. It had taken Birdie an evening to build it; a moment to show them what it did; no time at all to tell them how it would make them fly.
In the quiet of that evening, as soon as his uncle had left for Cynty’s house, he and the other boys had sat in a tight group by the roadside and talked about the machine Birdie had built Peter. It was not Birdie’s fault that it did not fly. It was the haste with which he’d built it. Becuz serious tings need serious time. And a jailbird like Birdie never have nuff time. Which meant, of course, they had to build themselves the machine he intended.
News of the carcasses of cars and trucks sent them walking the island with lengths of iron and crowbars across their shoulders. They invented new tools, the better to reach inside the engines and prise the bearings out. It took them months – which proved their point about Birdie’s hastiness – of building and rebuilding, of breaking and remaking, of adjusting wheels and wood and axles. Of launching themselves from Man Arthur’s Fall, their minds still fizzing with the memory of that first time Birdie Bender tied a stone on a flesh-coloured plank of wood and told them it could fly.
Pynter remembered the first time that he tried himself, lying flat on his stomach, watching the road slip by in a swift grey river, half an inch below his face. The sense of being lifted out of his own skin, the weightlessness as they raced down Man Arthur’s hill, filling up the world with thunder. For there was no sound on earth like the wail of sixty metal wheels on asphalt, no sensation like the dizzying delirium of jittering bone and blood. No certainty as chilling as the one that emptied their heads of everything and held them to the slipping road. All there was between the safe side of the shaky iron bridge and the rocks below on which Man Arthur threw himself was a simple twist of the wrist.
Right here at this desk in his school above the ocean, he’d wondered what it would be like to hold a steady line between the wheel-span of a tractor, to go clean under it and come out the other end unbruised. He’d worked it out and done it, with the others watching from the top of Man Arthur’s Fall, with Peter screaming his name so loud that, despite the tractor up ahead and the grinding of his own machine, he could hear the terror in his brother’s voice. By then they had trimmed their machines down to nothing, so that all that lay between them and the road were three ball bearings and a strip of wood half the width of their bodies. They had so terrified the drivers that, in the closing months of the cutting season, they’d reduced the flow of sugar cane to the factory to a nervous trickle.
It was two years since Chilway had come to Deeka’s yard and warned them about the trouble to come, so they’d forgotten the warden’s warning. These April days when Old Hope Valley felt hollowed out and calm and the air that drifted in from the sea brought ground doves down to earth to feed beside the road, they’d forgotten the threat of a soldier named Sylus.
No one missed Jordan until his mother began calling out to him that evening, patiently at first, then more urgently as night began to fill the valley. Her keening, high-pitched calls finally urging them out of their yards.
They found Jordan’s machine lying in the middle of the road, its wheels turned up towards the sky. They had no way of finding out what had happened until Tobias said to Cynty that the soldiers had him. The men wanted to hear it from Tobias themselves. He stood before them, grinning, his large eyes rolling in his head, and told them he knew nothing more. The men stepped away from him to observe what his hands and eyes were doing while he talked. They adjusted their machetes, nodded at each other and agreed that there was nothing to do but wait.
And in that time of waiting, the boys hid their machines in gullies and ravines, between the branches of high trees, wherever the adults could not lay their hands on them.
On the third day after Jordan disappeared, a long blue van arrived quietly, so quietly Old Hope did not hear the engine and if it wasn’t for Lizzie collecting water from the standpipe they would not have known that Jordan had been returned.
The van was speeding up the road by the time Lizzie started shouting.
Jordan, he
used to be the mildest-mannered boy they knew: a long, smooth face and eyes so dark it was as if there was no limit to their depth. Thick-haired, tall and healthy, with the prettiest smile Old Hope had ever seen. Almost too pretty to be a boy, and so gentle with it a person hardly heard him when he spoke.
The sounding out of Jordan’s name tumbled them onto the road, a shuffling, hustling thunder of feet stretching from the small hill-rise of Hinter to the crotch of Old Hope Valley.
Jooordan come back! Dey bring back Joooordan!
He was just standing there in the middle of Old Hope Road, staring at all that grinning, laughing, jostling confusion.
Jooordaan! Jordan?
But he looked lost. ‘Jordan not dere at all,’ Deeka said. He looked frightened, and when he tried to speak, the words got all squashed up in his mouth. That was what Pynter remembered now: a quick boy gone slow. It broke the heart to watch him force his lips to shape words.
Not remembering was best sometimes, Tan Cee said. It was something that the heart knew. It pull a pusson in, far back into demself. And nobody could bring them out again until they cured an’ ready to face de worl’.
But it seemed to Pynter that Sylus had done something worse to Jordan. He’d reached inside of Jordan and crushed him up in there.
Deeka was in the yard when they returned, leaning against the mud bank with her lips pulled together in a knot. She lifted her head at them, wanting to know who the hell Muriel thought she was to wrap her sour mouth around her son like that? What the hell Muriel take Birdie for?
That was the trouble with Old Hope. That was the problem with this whole island. People forget. They make themself forget. They clear their heads of rememberin, like how some fussy wimmen clear their yard of leaves.
And she was certain that a time goin come when they won’t remember Jordan. Not as they saw him standing by the road this evening. They would make themselves remember what he used to be before Victor soldiers lay their hands on ’im. The same way, during all these years, they choose to remember the man who believe he own the island, that was until this evening, when he reach his hand inside this lil cane valley, lift a young-fella off the road and bring ’im back so confuse he didn know hi own mother.
It wasn’ Birdie who did that.’ Twasn’t even the soldiers. It was the man that all of them decide to make a Christ of. And Muriel will never think to point at him.
What did they remember of the man who believed he own the island, eh?
Elena placed her back against a house post. She sat cross-legged, with the sleeping child across her lap, and made small, caressing circles with her fingers in its hair. Tan Cee leaned, quiet and far-eyed, against the grapefruit tree. Peter came and stretched himself out on the stones beside Pynter.
Down there, Deeka said, pointing at the strips of cane land beyond which the stones began. There used to be a time when the soil between those stones was payment for their labouring in the canes; not the soil itself but the food they made come out of it. But food rot, she said. You can’t take part of it, wrap it in a bit of cloth and leave it somewhere safe. You can’t decide not to use it. You can’t hold on to food and make it add up to something more. You can’t break it into smaller pieces of itself, use some of it and leave the rest for as long as you make yuhself believe that you don’t need it.
Money was not the name for what Victor gave them. That word didn say nothing about the choices it allowed them: to save little parts of what they earned, to starve themselves so that the chilren who come after could break away from cane.
That night, she told them of a man who walked. What made him different was that he came back. A young-fella, beautiful to look at, with the dark-skinned loveliness of Patty and a tongue that wrapped the ugliest words in syrup.
Victor used to stand by the roadside too and talk, and it was there beside the road that he made them understand why food was less important than a wage and all of the things that tied them and their children to this land.
Men had lifted him off the road too. Did they know that? Did they? They came in tall skyscrapin ships with guns that looked like cocoa-rods, with sharp knives at the end of them. They had eyes like Pynter, the colour of the sea between those hills. Eyes that looked upon them with the coldness of the place that they arrived from. She remembered their eyes. Remembered the wall of bodies she was part of, standing between Victor and these strangers, on that curve of concrete in San Andrews that overlooked the sea.
For they would have done anything to preserve the life of this man who pointed out for them a better way to be; who gave them a picture of their children long after their time. Who made them unnerstan that the future was not something a pusson hope for, it was something they made.
It was like waking an emotion in a lover that made them yours for life. Truth was, Victor break the thing that tie them to the strips of land down there. And in a way he make it possible for every man-an’-woman in Ole Hope to walk. And Victor gave them something else, she said, something the whole island had forgotten. He’d stumbled on their taste for it, on a memory they’d put to sleep. Fire.
Fire was the one thing their people used to turn to when nothing else would do. He reminded them that fire was the hottest whore and she cost nothing. Fire was a red-hair woman with the walk of giants. Her skirt was de wind. She fan herself wiv it. She grow tall in it an’ stronger. And like the harlot that she was, she wrap her scorchin legs round anyfing an’ take it in completely.
Deeka laughed at the memory. She laughed louder at the discomfort of her daughters. And her madness made her beautiful and frightening in Pynter’s eyes.
It was their fault, she said. Victor was their fault.
What happm to a man who receive so much lovin from so much people all de time? Eh? What happm when he look in the eyes o’ people and realise they value hi life above their own? That they’ll give him anything he fancy just to keep remindin dem that they worth something too? It change the way he listen, not so? He grow bigger in his own eyes. He mistake their thanks for prayers. He become the man they make him out to be. He start believing that he God.
And like Missa-Moses-in-de-Bible say, God don’ give up the thing he feel belong to ’im. He prefer to destroy it.
Pynter’s mind had gone into a drift. He was thinking about a white shirt and a classroom full of empty chairs when something in his grandmother’s speaking brought him back. She hadn’t raised her voice, but it seemed to come from further down her throat; so that now he could hear the breath around each word. He looked up quickly, not sure at all that it was her.
She was cursing them. She’d separated herself from all of them – her daughters, the yard, even John Seegal – and was curling up her lips at Old Hope. She was laughing at their foolishness. For not makin sense of the thing that was right there in their faces all the time.
‘Them fields down dere, dey angry,’ she said, pointing at the canes. ‘Dey vex. And de chilren know it. Dey feel it. S’what all dis scooter nonsense is about. Cuz chilren don’ just inherit the blood an’ bones o’ parents. Dey inherit somefing from dis land too.’
Deeka rested the back of one hand in the palm of the other. They knew that cupping gesture and the kind of words that always followed it. His mother came to her feet, made a staying motion with her hand. ‘Not my children, not dem,’ she said.
Deeka’s retort was hollow and mocking. ‘You can’t stop storm, Elena. You can’t raise yuh hand at rain an’ tell it not to come.’ She jerked a thumb in his and Peter’s direction. ‘Trouble come here to trouble y’all and y’all got no place to run to. So do what y’all have to do. Throw the trouble back in trouble face. Put fire in Victor arse. Show de sonuvabitch what hell look like. P’raps … ’ She’d cocked her head in Pynter’s direction. ‘P’raps dat’s really what yuh come back here for. P’raps … ’
Deeka took up a handful of bramble, broke them in the middle, doubled them up and broke them again.
She tossed them in the fire.
Wha
t Pynter did not tell them at home was that here, in his school above the ocean, their headmaster, John Coker, was saying the same things as Deeka. He hid his urgings behind words, disguised his raging with a voice that fell on Pynter’s ears like the tinkling of copper bells. Every morning, they said, their headmaster received a phone call from a man with a beautiful voice somewhere in San Andrews. It ordered him to hold his boys in. To lock the gates and keep them there. To guarantee their best behaviour to and from his school. Because his pupils had been standing on oil drums and boxes beside the road, hot with hate. They had no fear of guns. The man in San Andrews wanted to know the source of this new recklessness, which had them shouting curses even as they were lifted into long blue vans.
John Coker used to be cruel. He would take a piss-soaked strip of leather to a boy’s naked behind for nothing. The wickedness had been there on his face for all to see: the quick pink tongue which slipped across his lips like a flame, tasting their nervousness, savouring their fear of him.
It was Marlis Tillock, who Coker had once hated, who had taught him love. It was the only way Pynter could put it, though he would never have said this to Marlis. Coker never mentioned Marlis knocking out his son all those years ago. But from that time on, the headmaster seemed to know him. He punished him for everything: the loudness of his voice; the shabbiness of his shoes; a missing button on his shirt; the dirt beneath his fingernails. For strolling when the bell rang; for running when he was supposed to walk. For talking with his mouth stuffed.
Perhaps Marlis had softened the headmaster with his shamelessness. Perhaps John Coker got so tired of chastising him he’d lost the joy in it. They became accustomed to the sight of Tillock sitting on the rails of the veranda, his legs swinging with the regularity of twin pendulums, while Coker leaned against the door frame of his office and read to him or talked. Their conversations after school lasted hours, more often than not with Coker’s finger somewhere on the pages of a large book and Tillock leaning over it, looking up at him from time to time and nodding. It was a conversation that seemed to have no end to it.