by Jacob Ross
‘Y’awright?’ Tan Cee said. She cocked a thumb and smoothed the eyebrows of the girl. ‘You seen ’im?’
Elena hadn’t taken her eyes off Windy and she returned her stare. Deeka saw that look and it froze her fingers over the bowl of sorrel she was cleaning. Some mothers slapped their daughters down the very first time they saw that look. There were those who took it as the declaration of a war they’d hoped would never come, that look which said that their girl-chile was a woman, and the body she lived in was her own.
Tan Cee got up. She had things to do. She went up the hill to the garden of corn and sweet potatoes above Anita’s house, her mind full of Pynter. They’d been crying for him in terrible, silent ways, Deeka especially. The Old Woman had become irritable and silent, was prey to hot flushes and could barely abide the sight of Peter. She was wanting this bright-eye, smooth-face, long-face dog of a gran-chile who looked at her as if he could see inside her head, whose funny edicated talk had her stuffing back a mouthful of chuckles. In all these hatin-an’-lovin years, it was this same lil Pynto who, after John Seegal left her, made Deeka begin to feel again.
Since he was a child, he’d told them what he needed but they would not listen. He told them when he returned with Santay that time, his blindness cured. They were all aware that he was seeing them for the first time. He was looking at them and matching their voices to their faces. He did not want to leave the woman’s side. Santay had to put her hand behind his head and push him towards them. He came straight over to her, Tan Cee, folded his arms around her waist and looked up in her face. Even then, she saw the desperation in his eyes.
‘Santay say I’ll live if y’all believe it,’ he said. He’d glanced over his shoulder at Deeka and tightened his grip around her waist. Had held on to her as if she were the only thing that could anchor him to this world. And with that one look into her eyes he’d claimed her in a way his brother, Peter, could never do.
It explained everything: those months of scooter madness when word reached them that he was riding his machine between the wheel-span of the tractors; the illness he’d brought upon himself which almost killed him. And that night he returned from the river, soaked to the bone, caked in mud, his clothing hanging off him, and later told them what he did to save himself.
For what was there left for a boy-chile to do when all his life a pusson tellin him he not born to live for long? That he didn have nothing to look ahead for?
He ain’t got no choice but two, not so? He either run from the death a pusson keep holdin up in front of him, or he turn around and face it. He try to put his hands on it and bring it closer to his face. He try to understand it. That’s what a pusson do.
Which was why Tan Cee didn give a damn if they all believed she was going crazy when she told them that it wasn’t Arilon that Pynto was going after, it was the burden that each of them had left him with.
Tan Cee made her way through the garden on the slope above her house. From time to time, she stopped to run her fingers down the ears of corn, and if she was satisfied with what she felt, she pulled the corn loose and dropped it in the hammock of her dress.
It would be their first corn for the year.
Corn was in season the first time Chilway took Birdie off to jail. Corn was what Deeka fed them the night John Seegal walked.
Unsteady with the weight, she made her way down to the yard. There, she cleaned the fireplace, pulled some wood together and left the fire to rage for a while. When the wood had burnt itself down, she stripped the ears of young corn and laid them on the embers.
It was late. The half-quarter moon had started its downward arc towards the Kalivini hills. Old Hope would not sleep tonight. The air quivered with their fretful spurts of temper directed at the children. They were remembering Jordan and thinking about Arilon.
The children came first, drawn by the smell of the corn, and after them their mothers. When they were all there, Tan Cee looked up, red-eyed and blinking from the smoke. ‘I can’t figure no better way to pass de night,’ she said, ‘so we might as well eat corn. And somebody better find a story fast.’
Meena cleared her throat.
‘Not you,’ she said. ‘We don’ want to fall asleep. Patty, you goin start a song?’
Patty pretended not to hear her.
Tan Cee drew a large corn from the fire and held it up against the glow. ‘A song for a corn,’ she said, turning to the children. ‘Else y’all starve tonight.’
Her hand disappeared for a moment and emerged with a small knife. She began cutting through the husk.
‘Not with dat knife!’ Elena said.
‘What wrong wiv it?’
‘You not givin me no corn you cut with dat knife.’
‘A knife is a knife; I sure it cleaner dan yuh hand. Start singing, else no corn for y’all tonight.’ She was rubbing her eyes and smiling. ‘A song for a corn, y’all hear me? Sing Arilon song. It ain’ got nobody in Ole Hope don’ know Arilon song. Right now I askin’ y’all to sing it.’
It triggered off the bickering and then the arguments, and finally the rush of jokes that helped to keep their thoughts off the one thing that pressed down on their minds.
Patty sang at last. Miss Maisie’s voice, gruff and ugly on its own, eased in and seemed tempered with hers; then Peter’s added itself to theirs, striving for a bass he did not have yet. The rest tumbled in quickly, each voice jostling for a comfortable space within the tune, and on finding it, making room for the ones that came in after: Lizzie’s baby cry as unblemished as the day she was born; Elena’s and Deeka’s so similar a pusson could barely untangle them; Glenray and Nisa and Rachel frilling it with sighs and warbles and bird cries.
But the discovery was Windy. Her song voice came from the back of her throat, high yet hoarse and heavy-laden. She sang as if they were not there, with her head pulled back, her neck exposed and pulsing. They’d heard her hum prettily before, but never this open-mouthed, skin-tingling trilling. From the houses down below and on either side of them, and across the face of the hill above the canes, there came a surge of shouts and choruses.
Be a bird on a wind an’ fly
Be de heart of a child dat smile
Be a bee, be a bird, be a butterfly
Be all of a mornin sky …
They listened with their mouths full of corn. Tan Cee raised her head. She dropped the husk of the corn she was holding into the fire and looked straight at the women. She was glad they came, she said. If they didn turn up she would’ve come out tonight and meet them. It didn have a pusson ’mongst them who didn know about Arilon and Pynto. But she didn’t want them there to talk about those boys, or the soldier-hell everybody been livin these past five months. She wanted to take them back to the year after she brought her husband, Coxy Levid, to Old Hope. She was going to remind them of the night a young-fella name Solomon, from Déli Morne, danced and laughed and burned. They remember the months that followed – not so? They remembered those times when the men of Déli Morne and Old Hope were swinging machetes at each other the way a pusson did at cane? And if they remembered it the way she did, what was happening these days with Victor was nothing compared to those times. Cuz wimmen couldn’t rest easy, since no right-thinkin pusson would have their man or boy-chile go out after dark. It got so desperate a woman would’ve offered a daughter or herself as some kinduva peace offering if that was going to stop it.
The women were shifting under her words. They were fidgeting their headties and heaving their shoulders in the firelight. It was clear to Tan Cee that they wanted to know where the hell she was taking them, why she was dragging them back to a terrible place of rawness.
But she would not be hurried or worried by their stiff-necked glowering. She would not. They could cut their eyes, suck their teeth and stewps their mouths as much as they wanted, she was going to hand them, one by one, the names of the cousins, the uncles and the cousins of the uncles whose blood, one unsuspecting night, had soaked somebody’s soil somewhere becuz
of a youth named Solomon.
And, like Solomon, these cousins and uncles were always beautiful, not so? Not because they been that way in life. But because their youth and the suddenness of their passing made them so.
Like they know, it got some illnesses in life that only time could cure. Time cool the anger, it clear up the bloodlust. It soften the edge of hard things. So, if once a year on Guy Fawkes Night, Déli Morne people come to Cross Gap Junction and hold up Solomon name in front of Old Hope, if they still want her husband, Coxy, or one of their men to feel what it like to dance and burn, at least, in these times, they give them a chance to save themselves.
Tan Cee paused and looked them over.
She didn’t have to tell them that their men were up to something, she said. She was sure they knew. And Cynty wasn’t there tonight to tell them, which was a shame, cuz Cynty know better’n anybody else in Old Hope what their men were up to. Cuz last night nine of them went to Cynty house.
Everybody in Old Hope knew that that lil man-friend who Birdie’s woman was comforting came from Déli Morne. Old Hope knew that Tobias was the only person that Victor’s soldiers got food and talk and water from. That lil fella laughed too loud and long with them. They took him in their jeeps on mornings, and dropped him off at night. Old Hope knew that too.
These nine men had all that in their minds when they went to Cynty’s house, knocked on her door and called Tobias out. They’d walked with their machetes. They wanted to know where Arilon was. The sight of the machetes started Tobias talking. He would’ve talked till kingdom come if they didn’t stop him.
There was a place above San Andrews that people called the Barracks, he said. There was a place outside that used to be a kitchen. A pusson knew when Sylus got somebody in that kitchen if there was a bar across the door frame, the way shopkeepers locked their shops. He told them that Sylus had been chasing after trouble in the north. News about Arilon would have already reached him. He would have left his men to travel back to San Andrews.
Tan Cee straightened up and swept the circle of faces with her eyes. ‘Cynty tell me they make Tobias say the same things thirty-seven times, till the lil fella almos’ fall down wiv tired. And they still not satisfy.’
Not satisfied because they’d already worked out how they were going to end it. It was what Gordon Kramer did that made her know this. He’d placed the point of his machete against the earth, leaned on it and let it slip between the stones of Cynty’s flower garden, until just the handle was above the ground.
‘Don’t make me come back here for this,’ he’d said.
Tan Cee let those words rest with the women for a while.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘They goin return. An’ if dey can’t find a reason, they goin make up one. Sure as hell they goin go back.’
For the trouble wasn’t Arilon. It wasn’t even Tobias’s grinning ways with Victor’s soldiers. The trouble these men had was with themselves. And there wasn’t a face in front of her, right now, that did not know it.
The men had gone to Cynty’s place itching with the humiliation of seeing themselves grow smaller in their children’s eyes, becuz in all these passing months, they couldn lift a finger at the soldiers. They saw their manhood shrivel up an’ die before their women’s eyes. They looked on helpless when the soldiers stopped their jeeps and curled a finger at their daughters, when they traced the shape of their women with their eyes as if they weren’t there. And shame bring blame, it make a pusson look for something to hit out at, and the only thing that they could turn on was Cynty’s lil man from Déli Morne.
Tan Cee stood up. She dusted herself down and stared hard and long into the women’s faces.
‘Hold yuh men,’ she said. ‘Do what wimmen know to do to keep dem quiet. As for me, for what I know I have to do, I tellin y’all sorry in advance.’
Tan Cee rested a hand on Patty’s stomach. She raised an eyebrow at Elena. ‘Pynto goin be awright,’ she said.
Anita’s laughter drifted down on them. Tan Cee nodded as if she heard something in her sister’s laughter and agreed with it. She pointed at the moon, slipping like a broken teardrop down the Kalivini hills. ‘Pynter goin be awright. Y’all know how I know dat?’
They did not answer her.
She told them anyway. ‘I jus’ done make myself believe it.’
BOOK THREE
Heart
32
PYNTER SAT ON the high ridge-road above San Andrews. By night the town was a random spread of lights hemmed in on one side by the depthless void that was the ocean. The lights from streets and houses gave the air a yellow glaze. He could make out the three church towers on Cathedral Street; the dead lighthouse, standing like an up-stuck thumb on the protrusion of granite and limestone where the harbour ended and the ocean began; and above all that, stencilled against the night sky, the high dark place that was Fort Grey, from the top of which a spotlight cut a wide, raw path down towards the harbour.
He knew it simply as the Fort. It was so old that the hunks of granite that had been cut and placed there by the people of Zed Bender’s time had re-fused under their own great weight and become once more smooth and seamless rock. Not just a part of the hill but the hill itself. He could never look up at Fort Grey without a flaring sense of danger. He’d dreamt once of children, all dressed in crisp school uniform, leaping from the mouths of its cannons.
The faint hum of engines pulled him out of his thoughts. He allowed the slope of the road to take him down, covering the distance in that lazy, loose-limbed, hop-an’-drop lope that was neither run nor walk. He counted crossroads as he travelled: Morne Bijoux, Prison Cross, Richmond Turn, Croix-Fusil. At the bottom of the hill there was the rising thunder of traffic converging on San Andrews from the north. He stopped at the junction that went six ways and took the road Paso had described for him – a narrow, teetering path over which the walls of mansions rose. The path ended near the sea.
He wasn’t sure what he expected but it was certainly not the large, flat-roofed house over the harbour. The rusted hinges of what used to be a gate were still buried in a low concrete wall which ran right around the house. A little way from the entrance on his right was the top of a giant flight of stone stairs carved into the hillside. It was hemmed in on either side by rows of little houses so tightly packed he wondered how people managed to move amongst them.
He marvelled at how close everything was. If he spat far out and hard enough he could hit the roof of the cinema below. A wide curving beach of asphalt was all there was between the shopfronts and the sea. From here he reckoned he could dive over the rooftops straight into the ocean.
He climbed the short steps at the back of the house and tapped on the slit door, kept tapping till a small brown face appeared in the single square pane of glass cut into the wall above his head. Massive eyes looked out at him.
‘I’z Pynter,’ he said. ‘I here to …’
The door eased open and strong hands pulled him in. He was halfway across the room when the young woman stopped abruptly. ‘The other fella?’
‘Tonight,’ he said. He gestured at the brightening day behind him. ‘Where’s Missa Hugo?’
‘I’m Tinelle.’
‘I’z Pynter. He there?’
She stopped again, sniffed and turned around to face him, ‘You stepped on something?’
‘Well … sort of.’
‘Leave your shoes here. I’ll boil a pot of water. I’ll get you some clothes too.’ She pointed at one of two blue doors to the right of her. ‘Hugo’s behind that door.’ She flashed a quick backward glance that took in all of him. ‘My parents won’t like you here,’ she said. And with that she disappeared.
He’d only seen women like her from a distance. They looked past him from the windows of their father’s cars; or from perches on wide encircling verandas. He’d glimpsed them stretched out half-naked on bright-coloured towels on the lawns of Morne Bijoux, lawns trimmed so neatly they didn’t look real. Women with up-tilted chins and
rigid backbones who handed out their smiles like favours.
He expected the parents to emerge at any minute and order him out of their house. The young woman returned and seemed to read his worry.
‘Canada,’ she said. ‘Somebody’ll have to write and tell them that you here. Jeezus! You definitely need a douche! I’ll get the water ready. I’ll do some breakfast after.’
She disappeared again.
His awkwardness would not leave him. He leaned against the door frame, feeling useless in this large room with its heavy brown curtains, low, cushioned chairs and darkly varnished woodwork. The air was dry and sweet with the faintest suggestion of perfume. The odour seemed as much a part of the house as the colour of the walls. It was the young woman’s smell. The house was full of her.
He thought of Patty’s man-friend, Richard. Imagined his house to be like this, so far removed from the yard that his young aunt came from, like a different country.
Heaps of records lay scattered across the far corner of the room. Their covers were similar – a man suited in black, a stick in hand poised a little way above his nose, like a cock in mid-crow. There were three fat cushions clumped together in the midst of the records, scooped out in the middle by the weight of the body they were accustomed to. He imagined the woman sitting there, her legs pulled in under her, the thick plait of hair running down her back and brushing the fabric of the cushions like the tail end of a broom.
A row of bottles ran along a shelf above the cushions, their shapes and sizes as varied as the colours of the fluids they contained, from clear-water to a deep, mysterious purple-amber.
When he turned, she was standing by the blue door.
‘How’s Paso?’ she said. She’d asked for his nephew the way a person would enquire about a brother or a lover.