by Jacob Ross
We left them there leant into each other in a frenzy of mutterings and kisses.
We looked back just once when she among us who had a view on everything, said we must, from this time onward, greet the stranger by his name.
3: OCEANS
A WAY TO CATCH THE DUST
For Bineta Gaye
Something the sea says in my night of blood
For the past five days, Mantos has been feeling the eyes of the young man on his back. From the moment he begins the slow climb up the stony track, past the white graveyard of lambi shells to the clearing above the precipice, that boy’s been following him. Sometimes he does not spot the white shirt, the lean and angular shape against the black sand of the bay, but he knows the youth is somewhere down there among the decaying boats.
This morning, he climbs to taste the wind. It is not a normal wind. It does not have the grittiness of hurricanes, followed always by the stillness a day or two before it strikes. He knows the taste and texture of a hurricane, would warn the village a week before they hit. ‘Storm coming. Watch y’all arse, brace y’all self.’
The men would drag their boats further up the sand and chain them against anything they hoped would hold. They replaced old pillars and caulked the crevices of their homes. They’d long learnt that he was not called the wind taster for nothing.
It is this certainty the young man wants from him: how to taste the wind and know. To hell with that boy! This wind disquiets him. It has no taste. What it carries is an odour and a colour.
In his mind it is a wide, yellow wind. In the first few days it will nibble at the land with a steady, intent grazing; in its final days, it will begin to shed the dust – fine as air, the colour of ground corn. It will release it on the mangroves that darken the southern fringes of the bay. The dust will settle in the cracked bark of the aged sea grape trees, the grooves of their wooden houses. A barely visible corn-yellow shroud.
The dust stirs memories: a storm, a rising curling wave, a naked girl – dark as the sand on their beach. A voice so soft, so throaty, as if it came from somewhere else.
The bay has assumed the greyness of the water. Perhaps sensing something, the boats have come in early. The men and their scrawny families are ragged bits of windswept colour on the beach. Every now and then they shift their heads his way. In the past few days they have seen him climb this hill too often and stay up there too long.
The sky is a wound when Mantos leaves the hill.
‘Make me know de weather, ole fella. I want to be like you.’ From behind him, on the beach, the voice rasps against his ear. He did not hear the boy approaching.
‘Can’t be like nobody except yuhself.’ Mantos turns to face him. ‘And I suttinly don’t want to be like you.’
‘I kin be anything I want to be.’
Mantos looks into a hard, dark face. Might’ve been a fine young man if not for the too-tight forehead, the too-small, toodark eyes magnified behind those glasses, the thinness that he carries like an illness, the way he stands inside his body like he does not own it.
‘Teach me to read the wind.’
‘You don read de wind – you taste it.’
‘Den teach me how to taste it.’
‘You got a tongue, not so?’ Mantos spits at the sea, turns and walks away. He could feel the boy’s smile on his back.
‘I know what you trying to catch up there.’ That coarse sandpaper voice again. ‘You tryin to catch a cold.’
Mantos swings around to face him. ‘You got a heap o jumbie in yuh head, an you not goin get rid of dem on me. You is a fucken crazy youngfella.’
That wipes the smile off the young man’s face. He disappears inside the mangroves.
Ocean birds – those with the great unmoving wings as wide as sails – are coming in. Birds that hate the land are gathering on the branches of the mangroves and sea-grapes. Amongst the assembling flock, he spots a couple that he hoped would not be there: white everywhere except the tops of their night-black wings, edged with bright white feathers, like chalk-marks on a stone.
‘Brace y’all self,’ he mutters. This time he will keep his warning to himself. If, afterwards, they ask him why, he will remind them of a girl and what they did to her.
There are signs they ought to see and hear themselves. There, past the white hillocks of lambi shells, past the swamp, just beyond the Point of Shadows, is the rock they used to call The Sound – a jagged chunk of granite that rears out of the water and straddles the air like a horned beast. Its great twisted mouth is turned up at an angle to the sky in a scream that remains silent, even in the storms which sweep in from the north and west. It is the east-storms that give The Sound a voice. The night before, it began to hum.
There is also the beach. For days the ocean has been emptying its stomach in the bay. The black beach is strewn with piles of wood, algae and canvas bags that are weighted around the sides with chunks of lead. In days past they would gather the bags and burn them when the weather eased, or one of the young men would go past a few horizons and return them to the sea where the waves would reclaim what had once been clothing for white men’s corpses. Once, they would have seen all this, known what it meant, and begun to brace themselves.
A hard wind comes off the water and slaps him in the face. It leaves an aftertaste of salt and bitterness. Mantos pulls his shirt closer and readies himself to climb down the hill.
He is about to turn when he feels something like the limbs of a crab against his neck. Then the voice – the soft chuckle at the back of it. ‘I catch you, ole fella.’
Mantos becomes aware of the fall below, the waiting rocks, the writhing mouth of the sea. He shudders, feels as if the cliff has shifted beneath his feet. He tries to step back, but the hand of the boy is strong.
Mantos closes his eyes. He hears the birds across the bay, their sudden agitation. Then, like a quick release of wings, the fear lifts that’s been haunting him all these months. And he’s glad for it because this boy, like a mangue-fly that feeds on blood and poison, would have grown strong on it.
‘Well,’ he breathes. ‘You catch me for true.’
The weight of the hand has grown on his neck. All he hears now is the boy’s breathing. If only he could turn around, see the youngfella’s eyes, face him, he… but the thought of falling backwards is much worse.
They are alone in the remnants of a day that has begun to trickle down the sky and stain the water red. The birds have settled again in a huddle amongst the trees. Brace yuhself, he thinks, cringing at the new meaning they have suddenly assumed for him.
‘What you want to know, Sonny?’
‘Everything!’
‘Like… uh… Like how to catch de dust?’
‘De?’
‘Yes – is all around you – de dust. You let me go. I show you.’
He quickly licks a thumb and holds it to the wind. He counts from one to nine. Just as quickly and without turning, he pushes his hand behind him. ‘Pass your hand across mi thumb.’
There is an increased pressure on his neck.
‘Pass it!’ he mutters thickly.
The pressure eases and he feels a hard, dry finger brush his thumb.
Mantos waits, hoping that the boy has the kind of fingers that could feel the film of dust. Not everyone can. The boy withdraws his hand abruptly and the old man flinches. He bows his head and waits. Then he sees the boy’s arm thrust forth in front of him, the thumb glistening with spittle.
‘No, too much,’ he mumbles. ‘Not too much! You turn the finger round like dat.’ Cautiously, he takes the boy’s wrist and turns it. The hand does not resist him. He glances round at the face, dark against an even darker sky. He realises the youth’s eyes are closed, the narrow nostrils flared as though prised wider by the wind. This is his moment. There will never be a better time. He feels strong enough to spin the boy around and throw him down.
The thought must have communicated itself. The youth opens his eyes, as if startled out of sleep.
Mantos sees the curiosity in his face, the dare that is also a desire and he realises that if he has lost his moment, the boy’s threat to kill him has also passed.
‘Come!’ He lifts his eyes to the first flush of lightning down the edges of the sky. ‘Lemme show you how to do it.’
It has taken him more than four times the years this boy has lived to learn to catch the dust, first to know that it was there at all, and then to find a way to retrieve it. Now, here he is, on a precipice above the sea, trying to teach an insane boy – in minutes.
Just the right amount of moisture on the thumb.
No – not too long, the finger will dry and the wind will take it back.
Don’t make the thumb too flat, the dust will never settle.
He demonstrates with a quiet, focused urgency. He can feel the coming storm like the breath of a beast against his ear. Now, there is the distant smell of rot. Soon the rain will come and there will be no difference between earth and air.
The boy can feel the dust at last. It shows on his face – the satisfaction of finding what, before, had not been there and grasping it. But it is not enough.
Mantos senses his dissatisfaction. How can he begin to make him understand that these little grains in the air are doorways to a time and a woman with a soft and throaty voice? That it proves to him that she once existed?
Up here, with a storm over their shoulders, the boy is just a frail face, propped up by an even frailer frame – a human who has every limb in place but, somehow, still appears malformed.
‘I used to think you ugly,’ Mantos begins, cautiously.
If the boy is hearing him, he shows no sign.
‘Right now, I don’t tink so. If people think you no use to nobody, especially yourself, is because you believe you is no use. What make you come like dat? You think I like dem? You think… I’ll tell you why this storm will come and dey wouldn believe what hit dem. Why I prepare dem for every wind dat blow, every livin drop o rain. Why I been preparin dem all dis time, so dat dey will never be ready for dis one. I been waitin for dis storm, Sonny – all my life.’ His arms take in the sky, the wind, the sea. ‘Dis storm is de one dat bring de girl, last time.’ A chuckle escapes him.
‘De?’
‘Y’hear me right – de girl. A hurricane is a sneeze. A lil’ fit o temper compare to what is about to come. Dis – dis one is a stinkin, kickin rage.’
He gestures at the houses down below. ‘I have more reason to hate dem dan you could ever have.’
The boy’s shirt rustles like the wings of a disturbed bird.
‘I tell you a story,’ Mantos mutters. ‘I don expect you to believe it. Sometimes it feel like a dream – like some creature dat settle down inside my mind and make a little nest in dere, and now it gone to sleep. It don’t feel like it real no more. De only proof I got is de dust.
‘I’z eighty now – yunno dat? De last of what y’all call “de ole ones” – me an Maisie Green. But I used to be young like you, and empty-handed, but my head was full o dreams. It have a time in a pusson life when dey don’t believe dey’ll ever die – all dat hope, all dat life! I never had de chance to be like dat – young an strong an feedin on de bread of hope. You – you should unnerstan dat. Cos you was never young. Dem never give you o me a chance to be.
‘Yuh see, my mother got me from a man nobody never meet. Or if dem ever meet him, she never tell dem it was he. Somewhere in dem hills above dere, ‘mongst de mapou and de mist, she lay down with a forest man – a man not from the sea.
‘I dunno what it was dat make her keep her silence – shame, o pride, o love, o perhaps all of dem mix up. I dunno. Anyway, he fill her up, not just with me, but with dat selfsame silence dese forest people carry all de time with dem. I born dat way – with all dat silence in mih blood and something else – a sort of knowledge of de world. De little things – de way a leaf does curl, the colour of de veins on dem, de shape of a bird wing, how a sea gull spread it toes. I could hear de crabs under de sand; the turning of de worms. Dat forest man carry all his learning in his seed, and he pass dat on to me.
‘Once she tell me I was jus like him. Was de only time she mention him. It was a warning. She was tellin me dat in dis place if you different, den you good as dead.
‘Now take a child dat could point a finger at de sea an say what kind o fish it have out dere. Or throw an eye at what de wave bring in de night and say what kind o weather dat goin mean tomorrow. Now dere ain’t no reasonin for dat. An de ting dat nobody can explain is de work o de devil. So I become to dem a devil chile. Something dat possess my mother in de bush. Something dey had to get rid of. An worse, my mother had no place amongst dem. From de time she got me, she wasn human no more. A thing was what she was, de bait for any nasty man who decide to lay a claim to her. One man after another.
‘I was fourteen when she went out for de last time. Dis time it wasn a man dat call her out. She just went an didn come back. I get up dat mornin, didn see her dere, and know she wasn’t comin back.
‘I s’pose dat what protect me was deir shame when, a coupla days after, dey lift her body off de tide. Dat an de fact dat she did prepare me for it. She tell me what I must and musn’t do. Why I should abide my time. Why, to protect meself from dem, I must teach meself a kind o blindness: kill de smells dat nobody else could smell, shut down my hearing like you bolt a door. And wait.
‘But ignorance is a beast with a stomach like de sea – it always hungry, and it feed on anyting. No matter how much my mother prepare me, no matter dat I grow up mongst dem, no matter how much like dem I did become, she didn prepare me for one thing: nobody would accept me to marry deir daughter.’
The boy lifts his chin to speak. Mantos stops him with a gesture.
‘Yuh see, boy, I was de child o de woman dat lay down wit a demon in de mountains. Dat mean I carry his seed, and dey believe dat seed must die in me. Ain’t got no loneliness worse dan dat! Ain’t got no knowledge more bitter dan dat – dat yuh life stop with you, an you ain got nothing to show for it, dat de world end with you.
‘But you can’t strangle water; water always find a way. An life is like dat. Life always find a way, an it make a little room for me.
‘It come in de form of a girl. And to dis day, I believe it was a storm like dis dat bring her. I see three in my whole life and I count meself cursed, or p’raps lucky, because some people live and never see one. De first one come when I was a child, and I don’t remember much of it, except a smell, and a old woman name Androvy passing her tongue across my finger and holdin it up to de wind.
‘De second time I recognise de coming by de smell – a smell dat was so small and far, you hardly know it there, de smell o sweat an dirt an breathin, like people livin in a tight, small place. It wake up all de tings I bury in mihself, de tings my mother encourage me to stifle. I feel it weeks before it reach, like a blind man feel somebody presence in a room. I warn dem. I dunno why. Perhaps was to show dem dat de gift I born with could serve some good. Dat if I was different, that difference have its use.
‘Dem didn lissen at first – thought it was my madness. But about a week after, dey start seein de message dat de sea left on de sand. In my young days, people really know de sea. Dem know dat de ocean have three parts and every part is a world complete to itself. All we see is de part with all dat light, all dat blue. Dat’s all we know. Past that, further out, you got another kind o deep. Is de place o shark and whale and big squid, and de fast fish: mackerel, tuna, marlin. And den past all dat, you have de bowels o de ocean.
‘Is like a bad dream down dere. Ain’t got no light. Hardly got no bottom. And what life it got is like nothing dat you ever see. Fish dat ain’t got no eye. Creatures who whole body is a mouth. Creatures dat carry deir own light under deir skin, or hold it like a torch on top deir head. A kind o worm dat got root like grass, brown on top an white below. You smell it and it smell o sulphur. You burn it an it don’t want to burn. How I know?
‘Is what y’all ignorance been
walkin over since last week on dat beach down dere. Is what I didn show nobody dis time. An lemme tell you someting else, boy, anyting dat kin reach dat deep to upset de stomach o de sea, can’t be good for us.
‘Besides,’ he says softly, ‘besides, Fatimi tell me. Dat was how I know was out o all dat darkness dat she come.’
He looks at the boy and blinks. ‘No! Wasn’t no mermaid. Unless de sea have black ones too with foot and hair like me. Was a real girl – flesh and blood and warm like you – an dat sea deliver her to me. Maisie Green will tell you. God blind her for de part she play in what happen afterwards.
‘De night de storm reach, I walk out to de bay an meet it. Only it didn have no bay out dere no more. I went out to face it, cos my life didn have no worth. So what difference if a east-storm tek it?
‘I dunno how long I was out dere. What protect me was de way de wind was comin cross dis cliff – sort of bouncing off and missin us down below. I was thinkin dat p’raps dis was de end o de world, dat maybe was not fire dat would take us, but water!
‘I was talkin to meself, cussin de wind, de rain, de whole damn world, an laughing. Yes was madness, but I welcome it, cos madness mek me happy for de first time.
‘She come on de curl of a wave. Like you was sitting on de edge of a movin, rollin cliff that lift you up and rest you down right dere on de ground in front o me. I didn see her come. I figure dat out by de way she just appear. It had to be de only way.
‘A girl – naked as de night, and just as dark. Standin dere in front o me, tremblin from de cold. She must ha’ say someting, ask for help, tell me something. I dunno. I notice de voice straight away, soft like if it come from inside mih head. She didn speak like we speak and I couldn see her clear. Except dat she was slim an tall and she was in a bad way.