Tell No-One About This

by Jacob Ross

  Her eyes were still on the girl, even though her mind seemed somewhere else. From time to time she glanced at the pot of boiling water.

  Mariana felt alone. She stared at her hands, then lifted her face. There was a smell in the air, perhaps from the smouldering fire or the herbs on the table. The odour brought a heavy choking sensation that pressed against her chest and with it, the memory of a bright Saturday morning when, carefully dressed, she’d walked into a government building on the Carenage. She’d passed through several rooms until she reached the office where she’d learned her father worked. The man she stood before did not get up from his desk to greet her. The office was exactly as she had imagined: large black desk, filing cabinets, two telephones. What hadn’t been part of it was a photograph of that man beside a grey-eyed, light-skinned woman and three children smiling out at the world.

  She’d stood before him and said, ‘I’m Mariana. Crissy – Christina Safara’s daughter, and you are my, erm…’ She’d stopped then, hearing her words as if they were issuing from another throat. She could not say the word. The man was not helping her. There was no welcoming smile from this tall, tight-lipped, staring stranger. Hostility or hate would have been better, for they were things she would have recognised, not this flat-eyed, battened down indifference.

  She’d run out of his office into a day that had gone dull and oppressive. She had wandered home and wept. The periwinkle she had uprooted from between one of the cracks of the old colonial stone building had been pulped and sappy in her hand.

  ‘That smell,’ she muttered tearfully, as if it were the source of all her hurt.

  ‘De canes,’ Dalene told her. She sounded almost sad. ‘De cold does make dem sweat.’ Almost as an afterthought she added, ‘Is de time o de fireflies. Martha say you never seen a firefly…’ Dalene got up, unwound a string from around a nail and flung open the window that faced the valley.

  Mariana dragged herself off the chair. The smell hit her in the face, and she clamped down her jaws on the sickness that welled up in her chest.

  And there it was just as Martha had told her – a glowing, shifting, twinkling mist of light stippling the void below them. For the first time in that day her face softened. She turned to her aunt, childish and amazed.

  ‘Fireflies? I, I would like to catch one.’

  ‘Ketch one?’ Dalene’s voice came back surprised. ‘Fo what?’

  ‘Fo me.’

  ‘Never worth de trouble.’ Dalene’s chuckle was a soft cough. ‘You ketch one an it die. An when it die, de light does die. Besides…’

  ‘Besides?’

  For the first time the girl detected a reluctance in her tone.

  ‘You sure you wan to hear?’

  Mariana nodded.

  Dalene’s hand fluttered above her head – another of Martha’s gestures. ‘People dis part o de world believe dat firefly is not jus little tings dat fly ‘bout here come night time. Is de spirit o all de unborn dat visit us, to ketch a glimpse of dis world dem never get to see.’

  The girl shifted her weight against the window.

  There was a new depth to Dalene’s voice. It seemed to match the awful smell that came up to oppress them. ‘You see, Mariana Safara, dat’s why they carry dat light, so as to see jus a little bit of dis worl. Just enough to mek dem decide whether to try to come again, or not. Used to be a time amongst dem cane down dere when a woman might decide she didn want no chile ov hers to inherit dat abomination. It had Safaras amongst dem too. What trouble me sometimes is if all o dem did decide to do de same, me an you wouldn be standin here. We’d ha been two firefly, too. Besides…’

  ‘I don’ want to hear no more.’

  ‘You ask me,’ Dalene said, and returned to the pot.

  Joseph would laugh that derisive laugh of his if he could see her now with an aunt she’d barely admitted to herself, far less to him. Joseph of the rough-gentle ways, who rarely listened long enough to really hear what people said, whom she sometimes irritated with the little things she showed him, like the colours on a hillside, the patterns on a seashell, the curve of a road. She wondered where he was now. Perhaps on a beach somewhere with his friends, not staring at the sea, not listening to its cough and thunder, but trying to shut it out with the music of Credence Clear Water Revival or Joe Cocker and his Mad Dogs.

  ‘I believe he spite me,’ she said suddenly, drawing from a well of resentment that rushed up and surprised her. And with that statement, it was as if something had been unplugged in her: the flood of little humiliations; the tiny, teasing resentments; the accepting without wanting. All the things he’d said and did not say, did and did not do, which she hadn’t really registered before. The fact that her presence here with Dalene was because of what Martha called her ‘foolishness’ took nothing away from the bitterness she felt now, the sense of having been betrayed.

  It was a bitterness that Dalene echoed softly, preoccupied now with laying out two plates of fried fish. ‘Man is a hoe,’ she said, gently placing the plate before the girl. ‘He always leave a mark. Eat and sleep. We’ll both be surer in de mornin.’

  FIVE LEAVES AND A STRANGER

  The stranger told us that he came from one of those green mysterious valleys inland, beneath the buckled ridge of mountains that rose above our heads. Up there, he said, they woke to soggy mornings and everything dripped with mist.

  It took some time to get that out of him, because his history left his lips in fragments. It was only the few among us with the memory and the mind for fitting things together that could make a story of his mutterings.

  They were the last of a breed of people, he said, who believed themselves to be pure and wanted to remain so; but there weren’t enough of them and their inbreeding had begun to show up in their offspring.

  Their children lacked the strength to run. They were born as frail as kite flexes and prone to the chills and illnesses that a normal baby’s body took for granted. Nowadays, many of their babies did not live for long.

  Blood, he said, was a river, and the river in them was dying. It needed another stream to make it strong again. Their women knew this. They would receive a man, but refuse to have his children. That was why their childbearing women ran away. Most left at night to escape the machetes of their men. The brave ones, preferring a quick death to a slow one, took their chances any time of day. It was life fighting to save itself.

  He had climbed out of that dripping valley one morning, not knowing where his feet were taking him, not sure of anything except the rejection of the women and a stirring in his guts. It was not his loins aching for relief. It was the same thing their women knew long before he did.

  His feet had taken him all the way down the eastern coast of the island with its straight-legged, snake-hipped women. They looked on at his passing as if he were a ghost. He’d travelled through villages full of silent men who stood erect like palisades along the roadside, their very silence a threat.

  Maybe they sensed what had put him on the road, and so they’d moved him on past the rocks and black sands of the coast, from where he’d once again turned inland, being more at ease in the shadow of the mountains.

  He knew mountains. This one at whose feet we lived was the darkest he’d ever seen. The trees that covered its slopes were different from the ones that clothed theirs. Its peak led him to our place of wilted vines and scorched rocks.

  We don’t like strangers. We don’t like drifting men who trace the shape of our women with their eyes. The few who pass through walk quickly and keep their gazes on the road.

  But this stranger came as secretive as water. We were not aware of it until we saw him with Minerva. He saved himself that way, because which one of us would ever want Minerva? Who remembered she existed? A hard, flat wedge of a woman who, after her day in the quarries, returned home a ghost, white with the dust of the stones she worked in. Minerva the Stonebreaker, thin as drought, who walked with the stiffness of the boulders that she fought with every day. We let him have h
er.

  Minerva must have told him the kind of people that we were. She must have suggested ways to keep us interested, so that we would not want to make him leave. He brought little marvels into our children’s lives, like that strange flower he said he found among the granite and the mosses of the foothills. In the fading evening, he sat them down, made them watch the petals spread until the flower was a living flame. We were there; we saw it too. It was like witnessing the passage of a lifetime in this blooming of a plant that did not pause for jubilation, that did not stop to boast its beauty, but started dying as soon as it had given the best of itself. We watched it sink into itself, become a papery mess of ashen petals.

  We can speak of many more such things: the morning he woke us up to watch a fat worm as it broke the prison of its skin and turned into a butterfly; the fish we never ate because of the poison in its bones. We saw how, in his hands, over a fire of herbs and sweating plantain leaves, it became the tastiest thing we’d ever eaten from the sea.

  Of all the enchantments we witnessed, Minerva was the one true marvel. To this day we do not understand it: how the spirit of a woman could be so watered by the attentions of a man; the way the planes and angles of her body rounded and then softened with his presence; the bright new clarity of her eyes.

  She preferred this man’s language to our own – this stranger’s way of not saying; his glances and nods and finger-flutterings; the tilting of an eyebrow that would draw a smile; the quivering of lips that caused a small convulsion in her shoulders. We envied the richness of their silence.

  Then the baby came – a little girl born on the cusp of the Dry Season. We heard that the stranger delivered the child himself, and that he held the infant to his chest and wept. We were not there to confirm this, but from then on we noted the stranger’s gratefulness in everything he did.

  As the dryness of the year gave way to cooler air and soft rains, we watched the way he loved his child, and it is true to say that it was from him we learned the joy to be had in our own children.

  It lasted eight months. Then the baby fell ill.

  It was no ordinary sickness. Rumour said it had been brought to the island by the child of a foreign woman on a boat. The illness left the body of that child and came ashore. It took the children to bed and fed on them; it left their bodies and moved on after five days, almost always taking their lives with it.

  We did not know that it had reached our valley until Minerva’s baby began crying at the sight of food. Then came the fevers and the wasting. On the second day the doctor came, jittery from lack of sleep, or perhaps at the sight of us, and told us what it was.

  With the fading of his child the stranger began to fade too. Nights, we heard him pacing the stones of Minerva’s yard and when morning came we found him sitting on her step, his hardwood body rocking to the rhythm of his torment.

  With Minerva, we couldn’t tell which was worse – her pain at the grief of this man who had come to her from nowhere, or the slipping away of their child. Sometimes we saw her leaning out of her window, staring at him, her eyes so red it was as if she were crying without tears.

  Word reached us on the fourth day that there was a cure, but it was no more than a rumour that had been travelling across the island like a slow wind. We learned of the remedy from the mouth of a woman in one of the deep blue valleys further west. She’d seen this before, she said. They’d been visited by that same illness in ‘35. To send it back to where it came from, we must boil the leaves of three plants together and force the infusion down the child.

  We knew chado beni and colic weed. We scattered our children across the valley and up the foothills with instructions and a mouthful of threats. They rushed back in a swarm with half a forest between them. There was enough to cure the island if we only knew what the third plant was. But we were not given its name or told what it looked like; we’d only heard about what it did. And what it did sounded like a wish. We’d lived through every illness this plant was meant to cure. We’d suffered fevers and constipation; yaws and gonorrhoea; the stomach troubles of our children; the difficulties of childbirth. But no single plant we knew could fight them all on its own.

  We sat in Minerva’s yard that evening and ploughed our memories for clues, for some little thing that might have been said by our people who came before us. We talked until our mouths grew numb with tiredness. At the end of it, the stranger rose swaying to his feet, his eyes inflamed with the fever of his grief. He told us he would go out there and find the plant, even if the effort killed him. We looked at him and nodded. It has always been our way to let hope die a natural death; it is criminal to crush it.

  Night had already gathered its skirts around our valley when he left, heading west, up and over the spine of the Mardi Gras mountains. There are forests up there, high winds and entanglements of every kind. We could not imagine him emerging on the other side.

  And us? We sat on the stones, watched a July half-moon break the hills and make its way across the sky, until the first earlymorning wind came off the sea, crept up the valley and under our clothing. We were not sure what we were waiting for. We did not pray because we had no faith in Faith.

  The humming of the women in Minerva’s house had stopped. The one among us who heard everything said the child inside was still breathing. Someone began to hum. It sounded like a dirge. We shut them up.

  After a very long time of silence and many shiftings of our bodies, the one among us who heard everything, cleared his throat. He told us that beneath the sigh of trees and drip of water he thought he heard something. We asked him what that something was. He was not sure.

  We were preparing to call out words of sorrow to Minerva and leave her yard, when the one among us who heard everything detected the drag of footsteps on the asphalt. Not long after, we saw an unsteady shape in the grey light.

  We were never much given to strong feelings, but something moved in us. We hurried down the hill and lifted the stranger off the road. We brought him to Minerva’s yard and set him down. Minerva rushed out, lowered herself beside him and brought her face down to his neck. He sighed something in her ear. She slid a hand into his half-opened shirt, drew out a twig with five glossy leaves the size of coins.

  The mutterings among us were deafening. We knew the plant. Even in the dimness of the morning we could see it down there, in the lap of our valley, tall as god, its great water-seeking roots straddling the stream.

  Hog Plum, we shouted. In our relief and outrage we forgot to be grateful. We cursed the fools who did not say it was a tree. We berated them until we remembered the ailing child and what little time we had.

  Fire. Water. Leaves. A little butter tin. The hands of our women brought them all together. We watched the rising smoke dissolve in air and refused to see it as an omen. Then it was done: a cooling cup of sap, plain as the water it was boiled in.

  Minerva came out with the infant wrapped in an old white sheet. Many of us saw the baby close-up for the first time: a mahogany child, its skin gone lustreless with the creeping ash of death. The baby had her father’s hair, straight like the fronds of a royal palm, and glossy black. We saw Minerva’s lovely mouth and nose; it was a mystery that we’d never noticed the beauty in this woman of ours before.

  The stranger lifted the child with shaking hands. He held it against his chest as a nursing mother would, took the cup and began tilting it against the baby’s lips.

  Minerva hovered around them, her arms thrust out as if to gather them both into herself. And because the stranger would not look at her, she pressed her face against his neck and muttered something in his hair. He shook his head, then turned to her. We do not have words for that look. We did not know that so much could be said with eyes. Whatever it was that passed between them softened Minerva’s face, it loosened her arms and shoulders and made her step away from him.

  She scanned our faces. We saw how thin she had become, how the bones pressed against her skin. In her shifting gaze we thought we saw
defeat. A woman knows things about her child a father can’t. It is her flesh. The child itself would tell her it’s too late. We had learned this over time. It has happened to us many times before. So when Minerva begged, in a voice tight with trepidation, that we call her only when it was done, we thought her flesh had spoken. She left the yard and headed for the road, and the weight of the early morning pressed down heavier on our heads.

  We tried to help: two fingers placed on the bud of the baby’s lips; the careful prising; the slow drip, dripping of the fluid; the liquid disappearing. But no shifting of the baby’s throat; no sudden catch of breath.

  For a moment the man looked lost. We felt lost too. He rested the cup on the stones and plunged a hand inside his pocket. When he withdrew it, we saw a guava in his palm. The skin of the fruit was pale. It glistened like a small moon in the early light. He burst it open, scooped out the soft pink flesh with his thumb and pressed it against his daughter’s lips. And she among us who saw everything was the first to claim the child’s lips twitched; swore there was the quick flick of a tiny tongue, the smallest tremor of its throat.

  And while the stranger drip-fed his child he spoke. Words we’d never heard before. They rolled off his breath like a song; and yes, they seemed at last, to reach beneath the stillness of his little girl, because she stirred, ruffled the sheet, twisted her face and cried.

  Our utterances of relief must have frightened her because she kept on crying for a while and then fell silent. And we told ourselves that it was a good thing – a very good thing indeed to make Minerva’s baby cry some more.

  The stranger left the yard with us hurrying after him.

  Minerva was a crouched shape in the middle of the road. She must have heard our footsteps, or perhaps the wordless calling of her man had roused her, because she rose to face us, a terrible question in her eyes. The man held out the bundle smiling. She stumbled forward, flung out her arms to steady herself. But in that swift and effortless way of his, he was already beside her, making a prop of his body.