by Jacob Ross
He tossed some of the sun-yellow guavas and water-lemons he’d gathered to some women labouring over multicoloured mounds of clothes. A mango or two, if he knew them well. He’d hidden the sapodillas and sugar-apples in his shirt. The gru-grus were for sale in school tomorrow. His mouth was white, his stomach tight from chewing sugar cane.
The sun was melting over the Kalivini hills when he arrived. From where he stood, he could not see Cold Hole, roofed as it was by the interlocked branches of kakoli trees and thick-hanging lianas. But already he felt the chill. He halted outside the wall of vegetation, took a breath, parted the weave of vines and entered the smell of fermenting leaves, heard the hollow hum of the river further down, the shift and groan of branches overhead.
The pool glinted like a giant reptilian eye. A wall of mosscovered rock buried its feet in the darkness of the basin.
He rested his things on the bank beside an overturned calabash. There was a toss of rice around it. Saraka-people came here, too, to offer saltless food to Oshun.
He stripped and wrapped his crayfishes with his clothes so that lizards could not get at them. He walked to the edge of the pool and stood above it until his eyes adjusted to the gloom.
Somewhere beneath these silent waters there was a hole in the rock where Ashton never failed to catch the king of all crayfishes – a guaje. A great lobster-sized creature, so ancient, a hardened crust of silt covered it from head to tail. Its saw-toothed pincers could cut through any line.
He packed his lungs and plunged. The cold closed around his nakedness and shocked his senses. He surfaced, snorting, and struck out for the dripping rock wall. There, gripped in the vice of the freezing water, he allowed his body to sink and began a sidewise groping along the rock. Moss and mud gave way between his fingers. Now, he felt the heavy drift of the water nudging him toward where the river flowed out and carried on.
Starved of air, he heaved himself to the surface. The water churned around him and something slippery slid across his chest. He threw himself backward and began thrashing for the bank. He scrambled onto it and remained there, stooped, teeth chattering. He realised it was a river-eel, a zangri. An image of the fish swam inside his head: flat and silver like the blade of a new machete, with the teeth of a barracuda.
It was a while before the shivering stopped.
At the dripping rock face, he raised his eyes. Flecks of sky winked at him through the canopy. He thought of the eel, then turned his mind to home. It would be easy to gather his fruits and crayfish and walk away. All that food would put his mother in a good mood. She would sit beside him on the step while they ate, sidle a glance at him, nudge him with an elbow, then offer him a smile. But this vision was muddied by the memory of Ashton and Mandy sneering down at him.
He rose, shuffled to the edge, tensed and plunged, this time angling his body the way he’d seen Ashton do, heading for an area of darkness at the base of the rock. Once there, he allowed himself to sink.
The hole was much further down than he’d expected. Its jaggedness surprised him. He felt around its edges for a while, relaxed his arm and eased it in, following the upward angle of the opening until his shoulder was flush with it. Something stirred against his fingers. He withdrew rapidly, surfaced, took in air and went down again.
He blanked his mind and sent in his arm. Something erupted against his palm. A jolt of pain flashed down his arm, stiffened his spine and convulsed his legs. It was as if he’d been driven through with nails. Bracing himself, he closed his fist around the armoured head and pulled. It was like ripping away a piece of rock, but inch by inch the creature came, and it came out fighting.
He heaved to the surface and struck for the bank, levering his body up the slippery incline with his elbows. There, he half-lay, half-knelt among the stones and grass and watched the enormous creature clinging to his hand. A lacework of blood trickled down his wrist and forearm. The guaje swivelled its crablike eyes at him – the tail splayed and thrashing the air with heavy strokes. He forced open its pincers and dropped it on the ground.
He lay there cradling his injured hand, the pain pulsing through his arm and pooling at his shoulder. He turned his eyes on the creature. It had raised its pincers, its tail curved inward under its belly.
‘So is fight you want,’ he hissed.
He stood up and nudged it with a foot, passed a provocative toe along the coarseness of its carapace. It convulsed, then lay still. He prodded it again, tensed his legs and raised his heel above the creature’s head. For a moment he hung there in a dreamy paralysis, seeing himself walking up Old Hope Road with the guaje wrapped in cocoa leaves, strung from his shoulder with strips of vine. He pictured the unbelieving eyes gathered along the roadside, the amazed utterances of his name. But the vision stirred nothing in him, no anticipation of his mother’s pleasure, or what Ashton’s and Mandy’s words might be when they saw him with the giant crayfish. In that dreamy pause he felt the creature’s whiplike feelers stroke his toes then come to rest there, and its gentleness surprised him.
With a scooping movement of his foot he flipped it in the air. The pool received it with a gurgle and a sigh. Then came the churn of disturbed water followed by the quiet.
He pulled on his clothes, gathered his things, halted at the vine-door to look over his shoulder. And with a voice that pulsed from his throat and shocked him, he shouted down the long river-corridor.
He listened for his echo. Heard none. Spun on his heels and headed home.
ACQUAINTING
Thomas came back from school to find a man sitting in his mother’s yard. He had deep wide eyes, and the lashes of a woman. His hair fell about his face like the petals of some dark mysterious plant.
The boy dropped his books on the step and walked around the stranger slowly, never looking directly at the man’s face, never responding to his smile.
He shifted his eyes towards his mother in the doorway, then back to the man. He was thin as a whip, but not frail; the skin of his arms and legs were cocoa-dark. A quiet, watching man whose long dark fingers remained still in his lap. Thomas noticed that his toes – peeping from the busted front of his canvas shoes – were almost as long as his fingers.
Thomas felt his mother’s eyes on him. Her gaze was underhand and secretive, and however quickly he turned his head he was never fast enough to catch her eyes. She kept wiping her hands on her dress and twisting the little plaits of hair at the nape of her neck.
He didn’t like that look on her face when she handed him his dinner. She was smiling at him too much. Didn’t even tell him to change his school clothes before he ate. He raised a hand and pointed a finger at the doorway.
‘Mammy, what kind o man he is?’
He saw the irritation in his mother’s face as she turned to him. But he really wanted to know and Mammy must have seen this because she clasped both hands in front of her and made a small step back, as if she were holding a bat to protect herself from the googly he might bowl.
It wasn no googly he had in mind. Was a coupla bouncers. He goin remind her that, after all five of his uncles came to their yard last year and dragged Missa Ashton out of the house and sent him away for good, she promised she would never bring a fella to their house again, unless he, Thomas, tell her that he liked the man. And if she bring a fella, he had to be a gentleman. An’ even if he was a gentleman, she would test him for a couple weeks to see if he was any good; and even if he was any good she go give him a coupla months before she moved him in; and if she moved him in, she had her five brothers as backative to drag him out soon as he start behaving like bad-john.
‘You never see a Indian man before?’ she said.
He shook his head, ‘Nuh, I never see a man like he. Where he from?’
The smile left her face. ‘How you mean where he from? He from the same place everybody come from.’
‘And where that is?
‘Somewhere,’ she said – as if somewhere was a place that he should know. ‘Everybody come from somewher
e. Talk to him, he won’t bite you.’
‘He could talk?’
‘He not yooman? He ain got a tongue?’ Now she seemed aggrieved. ‘A gen’leman come to a pusson yard, a gen’leman come to stay with us and people not saying boo to him. Look how you was walkin round the Mister like if he’s a maypole. Is a miracle you didn get giddy an fall down. Is so people does make acquaintance? Eh?’
Thomas turned his head and looked out. The stranger hadn’t moved. He did not have the barrel chests of his uncles. His muscles snaked along the bones of his arms like rope. It crossed his mind that if this new fella had been a plant he would be bamboo.
Thomas pushed his plate aside. A little knot had tightened in his throat. He didn’t feel hungry anymore.
He wanted to tell Mammy that he didn want no father, ‘specially since he never meet the one they said was his. He thought about the fella she brought home the year before and asked him to make ‘acquaintance’. She said he was a gentleman – not so? And mebbe he was – until he lost his job and started beating up the boss through her.
His mother was standing in front of him, her eyes large and moist. Thomas saw the tension in her body. All of a sudden he wanted to take her hand and press his head against her side. He stared out the window at the stranger, lifted his face to hers and mumbled, ‘He awright, Ma? Not so? I hopin and supposin he different.’
His mother smiled. She blinked at him and turned her gaze towards the window.
‘Go way,’ she told him softly. ‘You come here to upset me?’
THE CANEBREAKERS
Evenings, I used to watch the women coming home from work, wading through the orange light, their frocks fluttering like wings. I would stand on the only boulder in our yard and peer down, searching amongst that line for my sister.
I struggled to pick her out, not by her face but by that long stride of hers and the curious way she angled her body forward, as though she was pushing against winds felt only by herself. But these women were no more than shapes against the white feeder road that stretched behind them till the distance narrowed it to a needlepoint.
‘Sis,’ I asked her once. ‘Why I could never make you out from mongst all dem wimmen comin home from work?’
‘Coz we’z de same, Ah s’pose.’ Then she looked me straight in the eyes: ‘Yep, we de same. Besides, y’all men never choose de right light to look at us in.’
I didn’t know what she meant by that, what my sister meant by most of the answers she gave to my questions. She hardly ever talked straight. Most people thought she never talked at all.
I used to think it was the canes that made her like that. Any person would feel small and confused and lost in those lil spiderlegged houses of ours, standing at the very edges of a tossing ocean of sugar cane.
Dry Season, she became even more firm-lipped. It was not a sudden change of mood, but a sort of deepening inside that grew with the shooting canes, their blossoming and their ripening.
I sometimes looked at her and found myself wondering about my mother. I couldn’t recall what she looked like, though people said my sister was her spitting image. I dreamt of this woman of indistinguishable features who had left for Trinidad.
I never met my stepfather, a brother and a little sister whom I only heard about.
Rumour had it that my mother gave Sis the chance to live with her. That was the year after she abandoned us. I was four, my sister, eighteen.
The boat ticket arrived and my sister’s departure date was fixed. She left me with my aunt with the promise that I would come soon after. The evening before she left, Old Hope threw a lot of farewell kisses and speeches at my sister.
She took them all in; left the following morning dressed for Trinidad, carrying a brown cardboard suitcase.
Imagine the confusion when the workers on the estate saw her return in the taxi she left in, borrow a machete and set to work – still in her best dress – as if leaving for Trinidad and returning a short while later was the most natural thing in the world. She said one of those puzzling things that I had grown accustomed to.
‘You have to break cane, not escape cane. Besides, it have cane in Trinidad too.’
She took me back from my aunt to live with her in the house my mother fled.
Sis got up every foreday morning, waking me with her. It was so quiet out there, you could hear the cane leaves rubbing against each other, and get the smell of molasses and rum from the sugar factory miles away. She told me where to tie the goats for the day, and while I was out she prepared our lunch – mainly steamed vegetables, salt-fish and a drink of black sage or lemongrass tea, which we also had for breakfast.
She tied her head, wrapped a band of cloth around her waist and strode out into the morning, the little machete in one hand, the old fire-blackened tin marked DANO MILK, which contained her lunch, balanced in the other.
She never said goodbye. But I didn’t mind.
Later I left for school balancing my books with the same care that my sister held her machete. I carried my lunch in an identical can in the other hand.
I never discussed school with Sis. She never asked. I told her what I wanted and she got it. I would hand her the slip of paper folded exactly as the teacher gave it, with the name of the book he’d scribbled there. Sis would take it between her fingers, as though she was afraid of hurting it and without a glance, she would place the note where she kept her money – in the cleft of her bosom.
One night, I woke up and caught her staring at the note I had brought from school. She did not know I was awake. I’ll never forget that picture of her, sitting on the edge of the little bed, squinting at the paper, her lips forming letters, words – or perhaps a wish? I dunno.
That very Saturday she got up early, put on what folks had come to call her ‘Trinidad dress’ and left for St. George’s on foot.
She returned in the afternoon with the new book and, like all the times before, asked me to open it while she sat in the corner near the window, staring at me with such a strange expression I felt nervous and proud and foolish at the same time.
I used to take these things for granted – I mean, getting up on mornings, tying out the goats, watching the people leave their homes and head like a long column of worker ants for the stretches of estate cane that fed the factory in the south.
Cane was always there and we expected to live and burn out our lives in the fields – less abruptly, perhaps, than my father who had passed away after being hit by a tractor carrying cane. My mother? Well, she gave up.
I was always home before Sis. Having brought the goats in, I did my homework sitting on the doorstep, hastening to finish it before the rest of the daylight faded. Then I climbed the boulder and watched the old cane road for her.
Arriving, she would lower herself on the steps and I’d hand her the big, white enamel cup. She drank with a satisfaction I envied, because she seemed to get such pleasure from a cup of water.
If working for the estate made water taste so good, then that, for me, was reason enough to want to spend my life there too.
*
‘Your sister don’ want you to work on no estate,’ Tin Tin told me once.
Tin Tin was my best friend – somebody I talked to and daydreamed with. We were the same age and shared so much of our spare time together, I often forgot she was a girl who was not supposed to throw stones, climb trees, pick fights and steal sugarcane. To be honest, she could do all of that better than I. Worse yet, I couldn’t beat her in a fight and was often obliged to retreat into silence whenever our quarrels became too heated.
‘My sis didn say she don’ want me to work on no estate.’
‘She don’ have ter, chupidy. She send you to school. Give you eddication, not so?’
‘Your modder sen’ you to school too.’
‘Yes, but she don expect me to – well, she not workin she soul-case out for me. My modder different, see! Is you an your sister alone; my modder have eight o’ we. Besides, my fadder pass away.’
‘My fadder pass away too.’
‘Yes, but not in no sugar factory. Is a lil ole tractor dat bounce off yours. Mine is a whole factory.’
‘Factory don’ bounce off people,’ I said.
‘I didn say dat.’ Tin Tin was getting annoyed.
‘Nuh, but you implied that. If you assert…’
‘Ass-hurt,’ she echoed scornfully. ‘Big wud! You start showin off!’
‘The word jus slip,’ I apologised.
‘Slip what. You showin off coz your sister buy you big book an’ you done scholarship exams. You know damwelly if…’
I knew what she was going to say. She was brighter than I. We used to be in the same class until The Accident; she would have been doing the exams, too, had not her mother said it made no sense. The two eldest boys would have to work in the fields alongside her and she – Tin Tin – was not going back to school ‘coz she couldn’ afford no school-expense and there wuz two lil children to take care of durin de day.
*
‘Sis, how come Tin Tin can’t go back to school?’
‘Ask ‘er.’
‘She tell me arready.’
‘So why you askin me?’
‘Tin-Tin bright,’ I said.
‘I know dat.’
‘Nearly as bright as me.’
Sis raised her brows at me. This was one of the times when I felt she didn’t like me at all.
She ignored me for the rest of the evening.
The season deepened. What had once been growing cane became a brown expanse of parched straw as they were chopped down and the trucks took them away.
The overseers walked up and down in their wide straw hats – potbellied men with thick books from which they looked up and thundered orders to the men who chopped and to the women who heaped the cane together and loaded them onto the waiting trucks.
Sis was one of the few women who chopped cane. She did it because choppers were paid fifty cents more than loaders. It was hard work but she had grown accustomed to it.