by Jacob Ross
His words almost stopped her, and he must have seen this because he nudged the friend beside him and they high-fived.
*
Then it was Friday and she didn give a damn who lookin at her. They could watch until their eyes dropped out becuz she had the whole weekend ahead and, come Monday, her mother and Missa Byron goin give them what they asking for.
The new man was back, standing with his shoulders against the tree. Stinkweed’s stick hung at the corner of his mouth. The others sat with their hands propping up their chins. They were not looking at her. The change in them felt strange.
From the corner of her eye she saw the new man push himself away from the tree and step onto the road beside her.
Her mother had told her what to say to boys who brought their forwardness to her, but she’d never given her words for no longneck, dry-up ole man, with gru-gru hair and hammer-foot.
Her mother had also warned her about her temper. Every morning. With her breath on her neck as she fixed her hair and tied her ribbons, her mother warned her, over and over, to walk careful. ‘Don’ give nobody no back-chat. Don’ bring no more embarrassment on me again. Y’unnerstan? Watch yuh temper.’
She told her mother the same thing every time. Is not deliberate. I can’t help it. The temper does take me by surprise. When the vexness come, what a pusson s’pose to do?
‘Pray,’ her mother said, ‘pray for the sonuvabitch dat cross you. You didn get dat temper from me. Is from dat no-good jailbird…’ At which point her mother’s voice retreated down her throat.
Pray, her mother said! Well, right now she praying dat dis ole bull didn bring his freshness to her. Becuz…
‘Eh heh!’ Stinkweed boomed. The man brushed his ears as if he were shaking off a bumbo fly.
‘Jackass,’ he said, and threw a sideways glance at her. ‘Sorry about de fellas.’
She sucked her teeth and glared at him. ‘What de arse y’all want wiv me. Cuz I not havin no ole bull watchin me all de time and followin me down de road. I goin tell my mother about y’all, and if she bring Missa Byron with her, is ten planass you goin get in y’arse. Is like all ov all-you want to dead.’
A rustle of a chuckle escaped him. ‘Thought you couldn talk.’
He shoved his fingers down his shirt pocket and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. He turned a shoulder against the wind, struck a match and cupped his hands around the flame, then he slid another glance at her.
‘You dunno who I is. Not so?’
She kept her silence.
He rolled his eyes at the sky and chuckled. ‘And she not even curious. You not curious?’
The girl shifted the books and frowned. ‘Nuh.’
They were at the junction between Cross Gap and Top Road. He slowed, then stopped.
She lengthened her stride.
‘Tell yuh modder, Gideon say hello,’ he shouted. She heard the drag of his rubber sandals as he headed back up the road.
Her mother was at the stove when she got home. She was dressed the way Byron liked – a loose flowered dress, high at the hem with thin straps that left her legs and shoulders bare.
‘Who’s Gideon, Mammy?’
Her mother stiffened, dropped back the lid on the steaming pot and swung around to face her. ‘Where you get that name from? Who give it to you? Eh?’ Her mother made a step towards her. ‘Where you been to get it? Yuh bizness is school, not no shittalk. Go change your clothes. I don’ have the strength…’
The girl retreated to her room, sat on the bed and examined her feet.
I don have the strength… is what her mother says when the letters arrive from school or when Missa Byron smashes the plates, or like that last time when he kicked the new colour television and broke the screen. Her mother would sit on the steps, massaging her shoulders, staring at the day and saying it.
Now, her mother’s words had replaced her recitation whenever she saw the waiting man. She repeated them, not out loud as her mother did, but to herself – though yesterday the words came out of her mouth, jusso, when she sat in front of the headmistress. Didn’ even realise her own lips were moving until she heard herself. I don have the strength. And she wasn’t sure what she meant by the words, but what her mother had been feeling all this time became, somehow, a little clearer.
Every evening, just when they got to Cross Gap Junction, she would wait for the slap of his rubber sandals to slow down and then to falter, and as the distance grew between them, the man who called himself Gideon would throw words at her retreating back – sometimes meant for her, most times for her mother.
‘Word reach me that she christen you, Agatha. She name you after my modder. Tell she I feel good ‘bout dat.’
The next day: ‘I not makin no claim, but yuh have to know, two river run inside yuh. Half is from yuh modder; the other half belong to me.’
Sometimes he hung behind as if held back by the goading of his men-friends, but always, when they arrived at the junction, his gravel voice addressed her.
‘People say you doin well in school? I hear de other ones I got doin alright too. But you the one who got my brain. You should study for doctor. How old you say you is right now?’
This time she turned around to face him. She was calm – and glad for it. There was no rush of heat in her head, no tightening in her chest that shortened her breath and made her want to break things, like this morning when the new teacher bent over the back of her chair for the third time, pressed his chest against her shoulder and leaned into her. She’d caught his arm with her pencil rather than the eye that she was aiming for.
This was different: the mix of reluctance and curiosity she felt – the repulsion and the pull of him as he rose from the group and placed himself beside her, or behind her. Nothing in her mother’s coaching was useful now. But at least she could be honest – follow her feelings like her English teacher said.
‘You don’ even know my age?’ She paused to right the little thing inside her head that his words had just misplaced. ‘And – and – and you say that you my…’ She couldn’t say the word; it had never been said between her and her mother. And despite all his talk, he had never said it once.
She was almost as tall as him. When she looked at him, she had an impression of bones – the print of his collarbones against his shirt, the knobs of his knuckles always working because his hands were never still, the trousers that fell straight down from his waist, held up by a thin belt too narrow for the large loops. She’d only seen eyelashes like his on coolie men, and on women.
‘Wait,’ he said, ‘if I think back a lil bit, I could figure it out easy. By the look ov you, I would say you thirteen?’ He lifted his head and rubbed his chin. ‘Nuh – you fourteen, or thereabouts!’
‘Yeh!’ she said, ‘I fourteen, and in all this time – where you been? Where you been all this time?’
‘Nowhere far. Was, yunno…’
‘Nowhere far is still too damn far. I askin you again.’ She adjusted her books and openly appraised him. ‘Where you been all dis time?’
‘Sometimes, yunno, life take over. Sometimes…’
‘I didn ask you that. You a jailbird like my – erm – like people say?’
He threw a quick glance at her face. ‘Things happen… Is like anodder country up there, yunno. A fella…’
‘What you do?’
He licked his lips, seemed about to say something, then changed his mind.
‘What you do?’
‘Ask yuh modder.’
‘I askin you.’
For all the staring he’d been doing during the past few weeks, he would not look at her now. He lifted his shoulders and dropped them. ‘Someting I shouldn ha done.’
‘Uh-huh?’
‘Uh-huh!’
‘And what’s the somefing?’
‘Tell yuh modder I say I sorry.’
‘Fuh what? Is someting yuh do my modder?’
He moistened his lips again. ‘In a way,’ he said. ‘Tell er I say…’ His words trailed o
ff in a mumble. ‘Anodder time.’ He waved a hand at her and turned back.
She watched him go, in a fever to chase after him, but just as suddenly something cool and shadowy draped itself around her.
‘That’s why she hate y’arse.’ The words erupted from her throat louder than she expected – almost a scream that halted him mid-stride and turned the heads of a group of strolling women a little way ahead of him.
He wasn’t there the next day, and she was smiling because it was the August break – three whole months of not walking this road, of being away from the chafing of her teachers, and the growing attrition with Patricia who used to be her best friend.
The space beneath the tree was empty. Abandoned beer bottles and a broken dice board lay in a heap at the far edge of the clearing. A dizzy of feeding flies blackened the rolled-back lids of scoopedout corned beef tins.
Someone had nailed a rusting square of corrugated iron against the tree, with freshly painted words in red.
The devil does fine wuk for idel hans to do All mancrab mus fine they hole from now on. By order of the propitor.
She began stepping to the rhythm of her ring-game rhyme, making a medley of it.
Shoo fly doh bodder me
Me an you not no company
Sly Mongoose
Dog know yuh way
Yuh come inside ah me modder kitchen
Yuh tief she shoe and you eat she chicken.
Sly mongoose…
Then she saw him. He was sitting on the wall above the culvert facing Missa Elton’s shop, a cigarette drooping from his mouth.
It stopped the bounce in her walk and drained away her words. He came quickly to his feet, dropped the cigarette butt and crushed it with his foot.
‘Y’awright?’
He was swaying slightly, looking at her with a chupid halfsmile on his face. She smelled rum on his breath.
‘Where you think you goin?’ she grated. She’d read his intention in his manner and it made her mouth go dry.
‘I walk wiv you a lil’ way. No trouble. I promise.’
‘You not following me,’ she said. The walls of their house was a shimmer of red and blue between the shifting leaves of the yellow poui trees that hung over the road.
‘Why not?’ he said. He hadn’t raised his voice, but something in his tone reminded her of the time he shut up Stinkweed. It brought her back to the men sitting on the root chipping away at her every time she passed.
She took in his hair – roughed-up and uncombable – his parched lips, the rubber sandals with their broken straps and the faded yellow shirt with its signs of clumsy ironing.
Missa Byron would want to know who he was. He would force it out of her mother. And when she told him he would never let them forget it.
Suddenly she was hating him for the embarrassment he was about to cause them, the trouble and the shame to come. The urgency to drive him away broke out in sweat on her face.
She held his eyes and spoke in a semi-whisper, words she’d been rehearsing these past few weeks, except that now they felt not spiteful as she had planned, but sorrowful and hurting.
‘My modder don’t want to see you,’ she said. ‘In my mother head, you dead. A long time now. She never even tol’ me yuh name. And I never ask. An – me – I wish I never see you becuz it too late. I fourteen now an it too damn late for everyting. Y’unnerstan? I don want to know you. S’far as I concern, I don’ have no father.’
He stood before her, quiet and unblinking, as if he were absorbing her words with his eyes. He grunted something, reached into his back pocket and pulled out a handkerchief – white and pristine – folded as if it had just come from the store.
He held it out to her.
‘Wipe yuh eye,’ he said. ‘You cryin.’
She did not take it.
He rested the square of cloth in the gap between her school shirt and her books, turned around and headed back up the road.
She pressed herself against the bank of the road so that if he turned he would not see her watching him – the way he leaned his body forwards, the slight outward swing of his right foot as he walked. She stayed there until the shadow of the yellow poui trees that arched over the road swallowed him.
Her mother was on the steps observing her come up the path. The girl greeted her, then pointed at her head. ‘Headache,’ she said and hurried up the steps.
In her bedroom, she unlaced her shoes, dragged her chair against the old wardrobe and stood on it. She was up there for a while rifling through old school books and notepads.
She dropped the notepads on the bed, climbed down and began sorting them, pausing over every drawing – from the little stick-men of her infancy to the delicate pencil etchings of her primary school years that her friends and teachers used to marvel at. All of them efforts to conjure up the body of a man her mother would not put a face or name to whenever she’d asked.
The latest ones, in the sketchpad that she walked to school with every day, were less detailed, the charcoal strokes much fainter. None of them looked anything like him, except the eyes, heavy-lashed and very dark, like hers, with wide wing-strokes for brows, and the long, long scoop of his neck and throat. She’d never bothered to colour them in.
Hearing her mother’s footsteps on the floorboards, she tossed the sketchpad at her feet and lay back on the pillow. Her mother tapped the door frame and walked in. She cleared a space on the bed and sat beside her, resting a hand in the curve of the girl’s neck and fingering the tiny earring on her lobe.
‘Y’awright?’ her mother said.
She smelled of the soap she’d been washing Byron’s shirts with.
‘Uh-huh,’ she said, pressing her chin against the hand. ‘I awright, Mam. I feel a little better now.’
A GAME OF MARBLES
Last night he dreamt of new marbles, each staring up at him with foliated irises of purple, red and blue. He also dreamed of birds with shiny eyes of steel circling the ring of marbles.
In the road below, a jeep snarls past. All through the night they have been bolting up and down the road. He wonders if the soldiers ever slept.
His granny won’t have slept. The old woman will talk all day about the gunshots she’d heard during the night, the jeeps tearing through the dark, and all those terrifying things she says she is too old to understand. Later, she will ask him when the strike will end and people can walk the road again to find food.
He’ll shake his head and say nothing because he is not sure he understands either. Marbles he understands. Playing makes him forget food and his grandmother’s upsetting questions.
There are no more wild yams in the bushes where he used to search them out. He is not the only one who hunts the hills for food.
He’s sick of the green bananas his granny boils, steams, stews, fries or roasts for him every day. Green bananas and wild yams are not enough. His granny needs meat.
His body begs for it too. Even saltfish will do, but the shops are closed, their doors padlocked. The whole island has stopped.
The day before, he went into the bushes to cut himself a Yshaped branch. He stripped it, pared it down to size and shaped the handle of the slingshot to his liking. He covered it with strips of rubber that he’d razored from a car’s old inner tube. At each tip of the forked stick, he tied two straps of red rubber cut from the thicker tube of a truck. He joined the rubber straps by a single leather-tongue taken from an old shoe. The straps became a loop; the tongue, the place where he would fit the stones to shoot.
Then he goes into the bushes. His craving pushes him to the upper reaches of Mount Airy. There, he sends a pikayo careering earthward in a cloud of grey and white feathers. Finds that it is not the same bird which, a moment before, was perched on the branches of the tall silk-cotton tree. On the carpet of rotting leaves, it is just a heap of feathers still warm with the life of its unfinished song.
He buries it beneath the same tree with an apology and a prayer. His granny has told him to leave the
birds alone. Birds were lucky, she said. They could fly away from problems.
The road is dangerous. Every twenty minutes or so, a jeep comes roaring round the bend. He plunges, with the other boys, headfirst into the roadside bushes. They lie still till the soldiers pass in a cloud of scattered pebbles.
The boys emerge, wary of the sounds that come on the wind. But the game must go on. The ring in which they’ve placed their marbles is more important than the fear of soldiers on the road. Only winning matters. They want to start the game before the jeeps return and scatter them again. But Sip is taking his time.
The boy stands loose-mouthed, counting his marbles. He shows them off like some men would their money.
‘I have four new ironies.’ The steel marbles shine in his palm like droplets of solid light.
‘How much veinies you got, Sip?’ he wants to know.
Sip says five. A veiny equals two marbles.
Sip holds up an extra large marble to the light. ‘I have one big tor. One jack’s eye. Plus six ordnary ones, not counting the ironies.’
He wants Sip’s marbles badly. He is worried that the soldiers might return too soon.
‘We playin’ till one of us go bust,’ he says. ‘No raafing – nobody grabbin’ up dem marble like crazy when them soljer pass. We play till somebody bust.’
Sip looks worried, so he adds quickly, ‘If I win, I give back some.’
He sends his marble crashing into the ring, collects the four that he’s knocked out, kneels and pitches. He misses the one remaining in the ring. Sip knocks it out and is encouraged to play on.
He is thinking while he plays. In the evening, when the road becomes too hot to walk on with his naked feet, he will take the dirt-track through the bushes and the sugar cane of Old Hope to visit Mrs. Ducan.
Mrs. Ducan has a big concrete house, a pretty lawn, two cars and a tall barbed-wire fence that goes all the way round their lot. She also has a generator – a Delco – in a shed behind the house which gives light at night when all the other houses are in darkness. Mebbe if his granny had a fridge to store things in and a Delco to keep it going, he wouldn’t have wanted Sip’s iron marbles so badly. And he wouldn’t be going to the Ducan’s house this evening.