by Jacob Ross
The two seemed to be waiting for her to speak. The stranger’s stare made her shift on the bed with rising annoyance.
‘I want to put on my clothes.’
Neither seemed to hear her.
If their silence was meant to unnerve her, they were mistaken. She didn’t know what Martha might have told her sister, but she could guess at the list of ‘sins’ she had spread out for her gaze. For them, ‘family’ meant everything. It gave them the right to poke and stare at everybody else’s business – even this aunt here, badly dressed and awkward as a stone.
‘Get out!’ she snapped. ‘You two, you –’
‘Shut up! Get up! Go an bathe!’ The woman’s voice sliced across her words like the swing of a machete. It was as if somebody had struck her on the ear.
The woman stepped out of the darkness of the corner, and now that the window-light was on her, Mariana saw the shape of her face, how impossibly like Martha’s it was, how dark the lips – and just how much rage a face could contain.
‘Who-who de hell is you to tell me?’
Again the voice lashed out and lopped off her words. ‘Y’hear me!’
‘I not…’ But something in the woman’s demeanour dried her up.
‘You!’ she snarled, balling her fist against her waist. ‘You call yuhself a Safara?’
The outrage with which she said the name was surprising. This aunt did not invoke her ‘sins’ against her mother’s memory the way Martha did. Her anger seemed to feed on one thing: that Mariana carried a name that she also had a claim to.
‘She goin be takin you with her,’ Martha cut in.
‘I’m not going anywhere with that!’
She would never figure out how anyone could move across a room so fast, or how the flat of a palm could hold the power of a thunder clap. Joseph had slapped her once in front of his friends to prove that he could do it. That was like one of those pecks on the cheek that Sandra practised on her friends compared to the explosive, dizzying darkness that now flushed her head.
‘Go and bathe,’ the face above her said.
She had barely recovered – the woman still hanging above her – when something soft was thrust against her cheek.
‘Three months pass an you don’t use none o dese tings once. How come!’ Martha said.
Finding her fire again, the girl raised her head, but was checked by Dalene’s sudden movement, pushing her face close to hers. The girl could smell her hair, the musk of coconut and nutmeg oil. The woman’s thumb shot out and brushed against her throat. It was a feather of a gesture, but it seemed to bring a new grimness to Dalene’s face. ‘Done happen,’ Dalene said, and straightened up.
Martha’s eyes had gone dull and deep and sorrowful. Her hand reached up and brushed the head wrap, adjusted it and remained up there.
‘What you tink you hidin, chile? How long you tink you kin hide a ting like dat?’ Dalene said.
Unable to hold the woman’s gaze, the girl fixed her eyes on the dried-out periwinkle on the wall.
‘Go an bathe; I takin you with me.’ This time the woman’s voice was softer.
Mariana began to cry.
That was how she found herself heading for some place named Morne Riposte, her suitcase packed with books, a couple of jeans, two large, ill-fitting dresses – becos it ain’ got no partyin up dere – and the little things she could not bear to leave behind: a ring fashioned from the shell of a gru-gru palm nut, three pebbles, a bit of pink glass she’d picked up from the beach, and the only thing that Joseph had ever given her – a small bottle of gold-flecked paint for her fingernails – which she’d later learnt had been his sister’s.
On their way through the hills and quarries, past the tiredlooking houses that leaned away from the road, through the smells of fermenting fruit and leeching soil and the dark, cloying rankness of vegetation, she discovered she’d forgotten her comb – and this felt like the most damning confirmation of her helplessness.
The journey was more potholes than road. It imposed a silence on the bus, packed with women laden with dry goods. After the raucousness of the early part of the journey, they’d come to rest their eyes on thoughts she could not guess at. This was a side to them she had not seen before: people who handled silence with the same ease with which they made conversation.
She noticed, too, the way they responded to her aunt. They rarely looked Dalene in the eyes and it galled Mariana to realise that she, too, had come to fear that gaze.
The driver was a thin young man with skin the colour of nutmeg. Throughout the journey he threw glances at her from the rear-view mirror and seemed indifferent to her hostility when she caught him staring. When he stopped the bus to let them off, he pretended she was not there.
Dalene pulled a small sac from somewhere down her bosom and handed it to him. ‘For your mother,’ she said. The young man took it like someone receiving a secret. He laid it carefully against the dashboard and thanked her.
‘Your fourth cousin,’ Dalene said to him. He nodded, his eyes glancing at Mariana, then quickly sliding off her face.
In a fit of nervousness her hand crept up to her throat and stayed there. What was it there that had exposed her and drawn the woman’s wrath? Dalene’s fingers had paused there briefly and had confirmed the one thing that for more than seven weeks her mind had shut itself against. It done happen. Those words had made her a frightened child again. How could a finger passed against the skin reveal so much?
‘Is only Dalene could prevent de shame,’ Martha told her.
This knowledge had suddenly made school important again, confirmed for her that she wanted all the things education had promised her.
With a mixture of belligerence and contrition, Martha had tried to prepare her for the journey. She had talked in the language of parables.
‘She will take you up de ole stone road. De one dat climb over Old Hope Valley. Glory cedar trees – you can’t miss dem cos dem rise up wid de road – and long before you come to dem you kin smell dem like a greetin. You kin smell de wind too, an de saltan-freshness from de sea. An cane…’ Her eyes had darkened and that darkness seemed to seep into her voice. ‘It ain got no smell like cane, Marie. Ain’t got no feelin like de feelin dat cane cause you. Is a man smell. A sad smell. De kind o smell dat is sadder dan de saddest times you ever live. Ain’t got no other smell kin full you up an frighten you without you hardly knowin why. Just keep you eye on Dalene when you follow she up dat road.’
At their parting, especially in Martha’s kiss, she had felt something that went beyond forgiveness. Love, her aunt had confessed, had weakened her, and when Martha rested her lips on her forehead, Mariana had a sense of what she meant.
As they made their way through the woods, there was a humming that clung to the ears like damp cloth. If Martha had prepared her for the climb, she had not told her what came before it – the stepping into greenness, into trees that seemed to have laid eternal claim to the earth; the immersion in a world of wetness, stones and mud; wading in air that flowed around her body like cold water.
The demon aunt was no more than a shape ahead of her, a shifting darkness that moved amongst the trees. Just once Dalene stopped to dip beneath a bush and emerge with a machete in her hand. Then she stepped back onto what could barely be called a path, hardly pausing to pick a leaf here, to chip at a bit of bark there, to rummage at the foot of some tiny growing plant before uprooting it. These she stuffed in a small plastic bag that had suddenly appeared around her wrist. They crossed a ravine and while she struggled behind – a rising anger gathering in her chest – the girl slipped and the bag of clothes spilt its guts out in the mud. Her aunt stopped but did not look back, seemed in some uncanny way to know exactly when to take off again. Just when she was about to shout her defiance, to say that she was tired, couldn’t people see that she was doing her best to keep up, they stepped out into day, and the brightness struck her face like a sharp, unwelcoming slap.
‘You dirty yuhself,’ Dalene
said, glancing at the mud-soaked canvas shoes and the scar of mud that ran down the front of her dress. Mariana clamped her lips and glared hatefully at the back that was abruptly turned on her.
The climb was an eternity. Dalene had begun to gather bits of dried wood which, after close inspection, she trimmed with a brisk flick of her machete and added to the ever-growing bundle on her head. The girl wondered if there was a limit to the size of the load this woman could carry.
She waded through the scents of flowering glory cedar like a drunk, her footsteps fuelled by a hate that killed the tiredness and kept her climbing with a focused, tight-lipped determination. She was only dimly aware of the rising chill, the land receding below, the total absence of anything human but themselves. In this landscape, all the things Martha said about this woman who never tired, who walked as if no one else was there, seemed all too believable. It occurred to her that in this landscape she could be made to disappear without raising a whisper. She did not put it past this woman.
She almost missed the house, a tiny wooden thing with a narrow tin gutter running the length of the eaves and draining into a large yellow oil drum perched on a nest of stones. It squatted on very short thick concrete pillars a foot or so high. From a distance, the house had appeared legless because the lower part was hidden by a flourishing fence of dasheen plants.
The bundle of wood rolled off Dalene’s head and crashed onto the earth. She turned to the large drum, lifted a calabash which must have been floating on the water. She filled it and began to wash her arms from the shoulders down. Finished, she turned to her feet, rubbing them vigorously on one of the nearby stones. Straightening up, she took the bag of clothes from the girl, handed her the calabash and muttered softly, ‘Bathe.’
She was too tired to retort that she would have done that anyway, that she was not like people who only washed their arms and feet after a sweaty half-day journey. Instead, her hand on her throat, she sat on a stone and stared at this new world.
Night was already hemming the tops of the hills. Below, the canes were a darkening green. The smell of glory cedars reached her even here. A mile or so further down the valley, a huddle of hillside buildings sat amongst the green, like an untidy pile of dried leaves.
She would spend the night outside. It would be her declaration of war with this demon woman. Her life was hers; nobody could own her, and that was that.
*
Dalene came out, her headwrap gone. She’d thrown a loose shapeless dress over her shoulders. She picked up the calabash at the feet of the girl and walked over to the drum.
Mariana watched from under hooded lids as Dalene undressed. It was the darkest body she had ever seen, impossibly young, muscled and curved; too strong, too straight, too assured of itself to be a girl’s, and clearly a thing that light loved. What remained of it from the dying day settled on the woman’s skin like dust.
She was throwing water on herself with careless, fluid movements of the arm, dipping over and over again with the same rapid, flowing gesture that seemed more like dance. The girl wanted to reach for the paper and pencil that were not there. The realisation of their absence left her feeling deeply deprived.
Mariana bathed with an odd sense of privacy out there in the yard. Night had fallen when she finished. That and the sudden chill that gripped the air had killed her desire to stay outside. She realised that in the town she had never really seen night, not without the amber haze that always gave some shape to things. Here, the valley below had been swallowed by a dark and depthless void.
She entered a room suffused with candlelight. Dalene was a moving darkness at the corner of her vision, rummaging inside the plastic bag she had carried on her wrist earlier on. Mariana halted, her eyes darting beyond her aunt to the darkness outside for some steadying thing to brace against, because for a terrifying moment, she’d lost a sense of where she was.
Dalene’s small room was another world. An odd world of trees and rocks and skies and, above all, in the middle of everything and directly before her, a road. It took a while before her heart quietened, before she realised it was a picture. A collage. The kind she used to do before she turned her hand to drawing.
She stared at the road, the light and shadows there, the lines converging to a needlepoint in the distance. It had, for a brief, terrifying moment, seemed so real. Then she turned her eyes on the woman.
‘You, you did that?’
Dalene paused to look her briefly in the face. She was less than three feet away and still she seemed to be peering from a distance. She did not answer.
Mariana retreated inwardly, troubled that her first attempt to say something to Dalene without being asked meant nothing to the woman. She might have gone on and told her it was good – though ‘good’ was not the word for it. ‘Good’ could not account for the piles of magazines and newspapers that Dalene must have gone through to create this beautifully haphazard yet coherent world, with photographs stripped of their skies and made to meld with the skies of other worlds. Trees that shot out of stones, and strips of empty air and grass sprouting flowers as heavy as hibiscus.
Her eyes returned to the road and lingered there – wide and dark and inviting where it began at the join between the floorboards and the wall, heading, beneath a jagged sky, to God-knows-where.
In smaller ways the rest of the room was like that – lots of colour, shine and patterns: a white hand-knitted cloth covering the centre-table that was frilled with pink paper roses that looked almost real; two chairs made of bamboo; nine gold-rimmed teacups that sat on a large matching tray on the top of a small mahogany table. Underneath the table was a nest of speckled snails’ shells gathered in a pretty heap, and beside it what appeared to be the tail of an animal – a donkey’s perhaps – patterned with tiny white shells that sheened quietly in the soft light.
Her aunt had pasted pictures all around the walls. Hundreds of them: unfamiliar reaches of rock and mountains; storms and deserts; wild and wrathful seas – not so much objects as sensations, like the sudden flush of light through leaves, or drops of water making chains around a cobweb. Her eyes paused on a tree rooted amongst black rock, so tortured by the wind it crouched low to the earth.
She could not help stealing glances at the woman, bent now over the coal-pot on a dresser built into the window.
‘You, erm, you don’t like people?’ In Dalene’s landscapes there was nothing that moved or lived.
Dalene reached for a pot, placed it on the fire and poured in several cups of water.
‘Yer have to decide tonight, cos what we eat from now depend on what you want.’
Dalene retrieved the plastic bag of herbs and roots. The girl stared at her, as the woman’s meaning slowly settled in her head.
‘De-decide?’ What decision could there be other than what had already been decided? From the moment she had left Martha, from the time Dalene had confirmed the thing she did not want to know, the decision had been made. That, surely, was what Martha meant by ridding themselves of the shame? You did not choose an illness. An illness happened and you simply did whatever was required to get better.
Dalene’s statement, so flat, so void of feeling, had raised a possibility that had not existed for her before and she felt as if a block of ice had settled in her stomach.
Dalene placed bits of plants on the table in two formations: one nearer the girl, the other to her right. Long-fingered, dark and sure, her aunt’s hands teased them into neat heaps.
Then, with the same casualness with which she’d reached out and brushed her throat, Dalene slipped her hand into the bag and brought out what looked like several onions, only they were smaller and a glistening bluish cream in the lamplight. She laid all eight of them on the table.
‘These,’ she gestured at the heap before the girl, ‘kin make you strong an prepare you. Those,’ she nodded at the small pile on her right, ‘will kill it by tomorrow.’
‘Will?’ The girl stared at the arrangement.
Dalene s
ighed, drew up one of the bamboo chairs to the table.
Mariana licked her lips and tried to hold the woman’s gaze. ‘Kill… I… I don’t like de way you put it,’ she said.
‘How else I mus put it?’ Her aunt spoke as if she was really prepared to learn something.
‘Is not a life. Not – not yet.’
Dalene reached beneath the table, her eyes still on Mariana. Her hand emerged with a bit of broken mirror. The girl realised that she must have placed it there just for this purpose. Dalene shifted the candle and held the mirror up to the Mariana’s face. Then, with the other hand, she took one of the girl’s fingers and placed it gently against the hollow of her throat.
‘Dat not what it tellin us,’ she said. ‘Look dere. De pulse, dat’s de baby tellin you it dere.’ Dalene shifted her weight on the chair, and although it was a gentle movement, it seemed as if the whole house quaked.
‘I dunno nothin ‘bout dese tings. Besides, my school… I’m, I’m still a, still a…’ She turned away, biting back the tears.
‘I not tellin you to keep it,’ Dalene said. ‘I tellin you what I told your mother when she come to me with you. You was a pulse on her neck dat time, too. I tell er a pusson never get rid of tings like dat. Either way, it stay wit you. An your mother was a big woman at de time, a Safara.’
‘I’m a Safara too,’ the girl snapped. ‘I didn’t ask for the name.’
The wine-dark lips sketched a smile. It suddenly struck the girl that Dalene had tricked her into owning something she’d taught herself to be ashamed of.
‘I don’t want it,’ she said.
‘P’raps it don’t want you either. A child does born knowin that you didn want it, and it carry dat knowledge in de blood. Vex till it want to burst. All de time. Without hardly knowin why. Ain got nobody in de whole wide world more full of vexation dan a child who come like dat.’
Dalene fixed considering eyes on her. ‘I tell you what is true though. Ain’t nobody kin love you more dan Martha gone and done, an certainly not no little red-mouth, long-arse, pissin-tail boy who mek imself believe he is man by ridin poor-people girlchile. Ain’t got no amount of ungratefulness goin change dat. Martha love you like a curse. An a pusson got to be more full o spite than dog to turn and spit on dat.’