Tefa had fluttered down from the nest, was giving herself a dust bath to stifle mites. She was kicking up an opaque cloud. Tan-Tan coughed and stepped back, fanning dust away from her face.
Tefa was another one who didn’t have to be leashed to her any longer. There were other daddy tree communities about. Abitefa had made a point of searching them out and warning them not to lay down obvious trails to tallpeople settlements. Humans were curious animals and now that they had really begun to wonder about how douens lived, some brave ones were venturing farther and farther into the bush. Janisette’s posse had made it the farthest so far, but they had become a laughing stock. Almost no-one believed their tale about a tree as big as a mountain that had shrunk to a sapling overnight. Tefa had refused to stay with any of the other douen communities because Tan-Tan refused to join her, or to try and live with tallpeople. Was only a matter of time before Janisette caught up with her. She didn’t want to bring her fate on anyone else. Abitefa should leave her too, in this shadow place between two peoples. And then where would Tan-Tan be? And what about when the devil baby got born?
Circles, her mind was forever going in circles lately and always came back to this. “Tefa,” she shouted, “I going into the settlement it have over there so.”
The dustcloud stopped its dance. Abitefa peeked out. *Why?*
“I need new blouses—the belly poking out again.” Which was only partly true. The last set of clothing she’d got would fit until she delivered. She was just restless, wanted to see people going about their lives round her. She hadn’t checked out this particular settlement yet. She puffed her way back up into the tree—soon she’d have to nest on the ground, and what would she do then? Later, think about it later. From higher up she marked the path of the sun, then jumped back down to the ground. “I go come back by nightfall, all right?”
*Seen. Walk good.*
Tan-Tan marked her way as she went; notching a tree here, building a small pyramid of boulderstones there. Aside from the discomfort of her baby belly, it felt good to exercise her body. Adult exiles to New Half-Way Tree often never came into the full satisfaction of feeling their muscles work to move the world around them.
It took her about two hours to start to see the middle bush that signalled a settlement. She hid her lantern in a shrub at the border of the bush. She thrust her face out of the bush. About a metre sunward was a wisdom weed field. It would hide her entrance and exit from the settlement. Staying in the bush, she worked her way round to it.
There were people who had been working the field this morning. She could see them in a hut nearby, taking shade from the noonday heat and eating their lunch. One of them was holding court with a Tan-Tan story, the one about Kabo Tano and the evergiving tree. Tan-Tan smiled wryly to herself. It was a simple thing to sneak past them through an uncut section of the field.
What a thing those Tan-Tan stories had become, oui! Canto and cariso, crick-crack Anansi back; they had grown out of her and had become more than her. Seemed like every time she heard the stories they had become more elaborate. Anansi the Trickster himself couldn’t have woven webs of lies so fine. She kept trying to discern truths about herself in the Tan-Tan tales, she couldn’t help it. People loved them so, there must be something to them, ain’t? Something hard, solid thing other people could see in her; something she could hear and know about herself and hold in her heart. Know you is a no-good waste of space.
She found the road and asked a passer-by if there was a tailor. There was. She followed the man’s directions through the streets. One or two people looked at her curiously. Some nodded a greeting. She had almost forgotten what the gesture meant. She’d been walking a few minutes when she realised what was odd about this settlement—it was clean. No smell of sewage in the streets. No open middens. Pickney-them only as frowsty as diligent parents would allow.
And this must be the tailor shop here, right where the man had said it would be. The door of the small hut was open. She walked inside. The tailor looked up from his ancient treadle sewing machine. “Good afternoon, Compère. How I could help you today?”
Tan-Tan goggled at him, tipped her sombrero down so its shadow hid her face. “Is okay,” she said in a voice she made deep, and rushed out of the shop.
“What . . . ?”
She didn’t answer, kept moving. What settlement was this? She must have asked it out loud. A young boy replied, “Sweet Pone, Compère.” She hurried by him without thanking him. Her heart was triphammering, the weight in her belly dragging her down. Hurry!
She turned down a side street, found herself in a market. Hurry! Her cape dragged a gutted foot snake down off someone’s counter. She heard its liver wetness smack against the ground. The vendor shouted.
“Pardon, beg pardon,” Tan-Tan apologised. “No time.”
She was half running now, as much as the monster baby would let her. She got her legs tangled in a goat’s leash, overturned a heaped pyramid of halwa fruit. The vendors were shouting at her to take care, the noise was calling attention to her. She ran smack into a little girl child, knocked her bawling onto her behind. “Lady, what the rass wrong with you?” the little girl’s mother demanded to know. She bent to her child.
The girl’s lip was cut, Tan-Tan could see the blood. She stopped. “Oh. I didn’t mean to hurt she . . .”
“Why you can’t watch where you going?” said the woman. And to the child, “Don’t mind, doux-doux. Is just a stupid lady.”
She was hunting for something to wipe the girl’s mouth with. Tan-Tan bent, used a corner of her cape. “Sorry, sorry.”
Running footsteps. A shadow fell over her. “Compère?”
No running from it any longer. Tan-Tan looked up into Melonhead’s face.
• • •
“Take off that cape and hat, nuh? I could see you sweating under there.”
“No thanks, me all right.”
Melonhead shrugged doubtfully. Tan-Tan remembered that expression, the one he got when he didn’t believe her but wasn’t going to push the point. To be looking at his face, so dear to her! She kept imagining brushing it with her fingers. She reached for her glass of wet sugar tree water instead, concentrated on drinking one swallow at a time. She felt nervous, sitting still in a rum shop like this. Keeping on the move was survival. But her camouflage drab worked. People were ignoring her.
“I thought you did dead in the bush,” Melonhead said softly.
“No.” He had been with One-Eye and the dogs that were hunting her down. What was he up to?
Even softer he said, “I thought if maybe you didn’t dead, you would try and meet me up here in Sweet Pone, like you did promise.”
“No.” Covertly she scanned the place, plotting her escape route. The exit on her left led to the main street, busy enough to disappear in, if no-one was really looking for her. She shouldn’t have come here in broad daylight. Stupid girl. You go dead of stupid.
“Why you won’t talk to me, Tan-Tan?”
What he really think this is any at all? What he trying to trap her into? “Nothing to say. You not going back to work?”
“You have a next partner?” he asked.
Enough. “Is what it have with you, eh? All you could think about is partner this and partner that? You and me story never start, now it finish. It finish when you come with dogs to hunt me.”
The hurt and shock on his face wrenched at her. “Me? Hunt you? Tan-Tan, I follow One-Eye to try and make sure he ain’t do away with you right there!”
Horse dead and cow fat. She wasn’t going to believe no anansi story.
Melonhead must have seen the doubt on her face. “Is true! Me and Daddy come back later that night to try and find you. I come back next morning, and the morning after that. For a week I went back to that same place, hoping to find you. Then I think say you dead.”
An old grief saddened his face. No, not so old; it had only been seven months, eight? since she’d seen him last. To her it felt like years.
“You don’t believe?”
She sighed. She had no business with regret. “Seen, I believe you.”
“So what make you ain’t come to find me?”
“Janisette hunting me down.”
“What?”
“I can’t rest any one place, seem like she have people in every settlement who she pay to look out for me. She think I kill Daddy in cold blood.”
“Rahtid. Nobody in Junjuh think that. Everybody know say him been beating you like dog from since.”
They all had known? “Worse than that.”
“Worse how?”
Shit. That had slipped out. “Never mind. You not going back to work?”
But he wouldn’t leave her, wouldn’t be distracted. He pressed her for details of what had happened that night, how she’d survived in the bush this long. She wove half-truths, trying frantically to keep her own story straight. She’d thought Antonio was going to kill her with blows, had lashed out blindly with her new knife. She’d run away into the bush, had climbed a tree to throw the dogs off the scent. She’d made her way to other settlements somehow, had begged and borrowed and stolen and had been settling down when Janisette had found her.
Nothing about the rape. Certainly nothing about Chichibud and Benta, or about the daddy tree. She had drunk tree frog blood; drunk douen people’s secrets with it. She owed them her silence.
Melonhead bought her lunch. They laughed and talked over a meal like they hadn’t done in so long. Quamina had been well when Melonhead left Junjuh, though she would still cry with missing Tan-Tan. Aislin too. Glorianna had given birth to twin girls, fathered by Rick. “Two pickney pretty for so, you see? I help Daddy sew the nine night-gowns for them, from lace Quamina make.”
Shooting the breeze with Melonhead was sweet. Tan-Tan realised that she didn’t want to leave his company, didn’t want to go back to her cold nest in the bush with no humans for company. Guilt flared at that thought. Abitefa was her friend.
“Oh! Let me tell you this one, Tan-Tan! You go like it, for it have your name in it. Long time, Tan-Tan the Robber Queen used to live on the moon . . .”
The thing in Tan-Tan’s belly kicked and rolled like Jour Ouvert morning. “Nah man, pretend story that. Tell me, tell me . . . how people here does cook foot snake meat. After it so rank.” He obliged. She breathed again.
The shopkeeper brought them mug after mug of sugar tree water, bowls of salted dry-fried channa peas. Other patrons of the rum shop smiled indulgently at them as they sat with their heads together. She and Melonhead talked and talked, her spinning lies, him caught in their web.
The sun was beginning its descent down the bowl of the sky. If she wasn’t back at the nest by daylean, Abitefa would be frantic. So would the rolling calf pup. “Come Melonhead, make I walk you back to the shop. Must be time for you to lock up and go home.”
“Is right there so I live.”
But the shop she’d seen was one room with a narrow pallet bed rolled up in the corner. “What, you not keeping house with nobody?”
His face crumpled. “Tan-Tan, like you don’t understand. I been grieving.”
So had she, for so many things. “Come, I walk you back.” He looked at her, sighed, shook his head, lips pressed hard together as though he were keeping words in. He got to his feet.
She stood. Felt like the blasted duppy pickney had grown in the few hours she’d been sitting there. She stretched out her legs, did her best to affect the walk of someone who wasn’t pregnant. She would be an easy target if people thought her ability to move was hampered. They walked along the main street. She saw new deportees, identifiable by the softness of people unaccustomed to physical work and by the distant, frantic look of the newly headblind. But for the most part people looked content; thin and wiry from manual labour, but healthy. The basics were there: running water nearby, a market, and the tradespeople—healer, carpenter, blacksmith, Melonhead the tailor. Runner people skills flourished in Sweet Pone. People greeted Melonhead happily, called him Compère Charlie. So is that was his name. He kept stopping to introduce her to people, till she had to take him aside and explain how she couldn’t afford to have people start to recognise her. His face fell, but he said nothing. They kept walking. “You like living here?” Tan-Tan asked him.
“Yes, man. These people working hard to build a new life, you know? We nearly finish putting up a Palaver House where we Mocambo could meet people and talk. We even have a little library! Nearly a hundred books! Them solar-powered texts could run forever if we care them right.”
Books, manuals. So many they had! No wonder people could develop skills here, they had books to teach them. Tan-Tan noted how Melonhead said “we.”
They were at his home. A neat pile of folded clothing lay on his pallet. He shook the pieces open. They were tiny, a child’s clothing made from unbleached fabric. “Rehan must be bring these while I wasn’t here. Is his little boy pants these, I recognise the tear I mend from when he fall down and bust he little knee open on a rockstone. Look, the bloodstain never come out. Is my stitches these.”
Proudly, he showed her the small pair of pants, the neat, well-made stitches that darned the torn edges of fabric back together. “Nothing ain’t wrong with them, so the pickney must be just outgrow them again. I have to let out the hems for he.” Tan-Tan had a brief flash of a girl with her face, dancing and laughing in the sunlight. She used to be a pickney too, who would tear out the knees of her pants while playing. She shut the vision out, moved to look round the rest of the hut. There was nothing much to see beyond Melonhead’s orderly tools: needles, awls, thimbles, scissors, a small spinning wheel.
Melonhead inspected the rest of the clothing, noting a rip here, a missing button there. He folded the clothing, unfolded it again, draped it over a chair. He looked uncomfortable. “Um, you want to stay little bit?”
“No thanks, I have to go.” Did he look relieved?
“Where you staying?”
She sighed. “Don’t ask me, Melonhead, I done tell you I have to live in secret, I don’t settle anywhere for long. I will come and visit you again, seen?” She turned to leave.
“I could come with you?” he asked quietly. At her look he blustered, “Not to stay or nothing, not to give you grief, just to walk you back to your home, talk to you little more. Then I leave you alone, promise. So long I ain’t see you, girl.”
Home. He thought she had a home. This was breaking her heart, this longing. “You could hike in the bush?” she said, before she could have time to think about what she was offering.
“Nanny save we, is bush you living?”
She couldn’t stand the pity on his face. “Bush today yes, a different place next week, maybe bush again the week after that. Is so I does live, take it or leave it.”
“Nah, I ain’t mean nothing by it.” He was searching through his room. “Let me just find my good boots.”
“We taking the side routes, so you know. Can’t make anybody see where I go.”
He straightened up from tying his laces. She’d forgotten his short, sweet, bandy legs. “All this secrecy really necessary, girl?”
Panic fluttered in her throat. “Yes! And if you can’t honour that, tell me now and let me go my ways.”
“I never break word with you yet, Tan-Tan.”
But she’d broken hers to him. “Make we go.” She tipped her sombrero low on her head.
He followed her uncomplainingly, dipping into side streets, taking the least observed routes. He followed her through the cover of the eveningtime cornfields, through the middle bush to where she’d stashed her lantern. He just raised an eyebrow at how quickly she found it. It would be dark before she got back, Abitefa would be worried. She shouldn’t have stayed this long. How would she let Tefa know she was bringing company? How would Melonhead react to the hinte? To the rolling calf pup? She didn’t know what she was doing, or why. “We have to go quick.”
“Seen.”
He hiked along quietly with
her for almost an hour, a soothing presence by her side. He held the lantern for her while she lit it, handed it back to her, said, “You making baby, ain’t it?”
“You could tell!” she stuttered, too shocked to dissemble.
“Not at first, no. That cape does hide plenty. But it start to show in your walk once you get out of Sweet Pone.”
“Huh.” She strode off, leaving him to keep up.
Another half hour of silence, not calming this time. Tan-Tan’s brain was seething over, too fast for sense. She was aware of every step Melonhead took, every inclination of his head. She nearly jumped out of her skin when he took a preparatory breath in. He was going to speak. He said, “Tan-Tan, don’t vex at the question: is Antonio baby?”
“Why you would ask me something like that!” She stomped on ahead of him, horrified herself with the fleeting thought that she could abandon him here in bush, like in the douen stories. She had let him get too close.
He caught up to her, gazed at her, waiting. Fucking man, always waiting, waiting for her to say what was on her mind. She said, “I can’t talk about it, don’t ask me.”
Midnight Robber Page 30