JACOB ROSS

Pynter Bender

For Esau and our father,

Janine, Jamal, Nichole and Akilah

For Grenada, and those who will come after….

Being lost is worth the journey home…

Contents

Title Page Dedication Book One: Eyes Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Book Two: Hands Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty One Chapter Twenty Two Chapter Twenty Three Chapter Twenty Four Chapter Twenty Five Chapter Twenty Six Chapter Twenty Seven Chapter Twenty Eight Chapter Twenty Nine Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty One Book Three: Heart Chapter Thirty Two Chapter Thirty Three Chapter Thirty Four Chapter Thirty Five Chapter Thirty Six Chapter Thirty Seven Chapter Thirty Eight Chapter Thirty Nine Chapter Forty Chapter Forty One Chapter Forty Two Chapter Forty Three Chapter Forty Four Chapter Forty Five Acknowledgements Copyright About the Publisher

BOOK ONE

Eyes

1

SATURDAY MORNINGS, THE women came down to the river. They were larger than their menfolk. They balanced basins as wide as ships on their heads and their voices carried across the foothills and washed the bright morning air.

As soon as their babble reached him, Pynter left home, let the slant of the hill carry him down towards the water to watch them wash and talk the day away. He chose a large boulder that overlooked the field of stones around which the water boiled and frothed before disappearing through the dark leaf tunnel of the bamboos overhead. He just sat there, feeding his eyes on the glitter and the green and on the throbbing reds and yellows of their washing spread out on the soap-bleached stones. The glare hurt his eyes. Aunt Tan Cee kept reminding him that he must rest those eyes of his, they were new and delicate, taking in the shapes of things, still making sense of the darkness and the light and all the mixing in between.

Each woman had her own little acre of stones on which she spread her washing. Up to their knees in water, they beat the clothing against the boulders and flashed their soapy corn husks over them. He’d grouped their names in his head according to the sound of them – Ursula, Petra, Barbara and Clara; Cynty, Lizzie, Tyzie, Shirley. And then there was Miss Elaine, her name all pretty and by itself, just like the way she was.

Pynter knew them by the stories they told each other and laughed over: the illnesses of their children, the appetites of their menfolk, the little things they wanted for themselves that their men would never give them. He heard them even when their voices dipped; they seemed to bring their heads together, especially when their talking turned to terrible things. Like why pretty Miss Madrone no longer came to the river with them. She carried an illness between her thighs, which her man had brought home to her from the tourist ship he worked on. He was due back in three months and only God knew what he would bring back to her this time. Pynter learned about the child that Sadi Marie’s eleven-year-old daughter was carrying for Sadi Marie’s man, while Sadi was accusing every young bull in Old Hope because she could not make herself believe the truth. And then their voices would go lower still and the women would speak of what a man called Gideon had done to his mother a coupla months before Peter and he were born. Gideon – he’d heard the name before, always said with lowered voices, always with a sideways glance as if he might be there among them listening. Once Deeka, his grandmother, had used that name in the yard and it had paused his mother’s hands over the dishes she was washing, brought a deadness to her face.

Suddenly the women seemed to notice he was there and they fell silent. Miss Lizzie would not take her eyes off him. Her eyes were dark and shiny like the berries that grew on vines beside the road, berries Aunt Tan Cee said were poison.

His presence bothered Miss Lizzie. She said so all the time, and loud enough for him to hear. She said so with steady staring eyes, and lips that barely moved. She repeated it so often, the others no longer seemed to hear her: that he, dat ‘Jumbie Boy’, didn have no right just sittin on dat stone an’ watchin people; that he, dat ugly likkle mako-boy, was like a shadow on her shoulder and she hated it.

He’d grown accustomed to her words the way he had the sandflies that bit into his skin and left little needle points of itching there. He’d put it down to what the women said about her. That her belly was poisoned. That something in there killed the babies she was carrying a coupla months before they born. That she blamed it on the weakness of the men who placed their seed in her, and she would have any woman’s man if she thought his child would survive her insides. Which was why, Miss Dalene said, a pusson was prepared to put up with the natral badness of that woman.

This morning Miss Lizzie came to the river with an ugly mouthful of words for him. She saw him there and laid her basin down. She moved her lips as if she was about to speak and then, without a word, she turned her head down to her washing. He could sense the heat in her; it came out of her skin like smoke. And soon enough she began tossing words over her shoulders at him.

‘What he doing here! What it want ’mongst big people, eh? Why dem don’ go an’ play with devil-chilren like theyself? Eh?’

It was a river morning, brimming with sunlight, the kind that made everything glitter and vibrate, and above the babble of the water he could hear the leaves of the bamboo shu-shuing like so many people making polite conversation. A shower of dragonflies, little strips of foil, drew his gaze away from her, and when he looked round to her again she’d left her patch of stones and was moving towards him. His heart began to race because she’d never looked so mad before. Miss Elaine called out her name and Miss Lizzie swung her head around, her arm flashing out behind her as if to squash a fly.

She was breathing hard when she reached him, and all he could feel was her hate, like the sting of the sun on his naked skin. He turned his eyes down to where her feet were in the water, studying the busy weave of light around her ankles. The other women were saying nothing.

‘Whapm, you born without a tongue too? Say something. Talk! You can’t talk?’ She turned towards the others. ‘What kind o’ people make funny chilren so? I hear he come from beast not yooman been. Dat so? Dat’s what your modder get from sleepin wid de Devil, y’hear me?’

He unfolded his legs from under him, shifted his gaze towards her face, worked his mouth because something hard and choking had caught itself inside his throat and he could not get it out.

‘Leave ’im, Lizzie. Is trouble you askin for,’ Miss Elaine said.

Miss Elaine reminded him of his Aunt Patty – tall and brown and wavering like the bamboos. She had moonshine eyes too, large and shiny white. Miss Elaine had coiled the red dress she was wringing around her arms. It ran like a snake from her shoulder, the water was spilling onto her chest.

Miss Lizzie laughed. ‘My arse! Trouble from who? Dat Bender tribe don’ frighten me. Your ever see yooman been with eye like dat? Look at ’im, black like sin with whiteman eye!’

Before he realised it, he was running through the canes, the saw-edged leaves cutting at his face and arms and legs. And then he was running home across the field of stones that took him all the way down to that thick green copse of almond trees, Miss Lizzie’s laughter trailing behind him like an accusation.

Aunt Tan Cee’s hands woke him that night. Most times he chose to sleep on the long wooden bench in the place they called the kitchen which no one ever cooked in. He slept on his back with his eyes wide open, they said. His twin brother, Peter, told him they shone like polished marbles in the lamplight.

Tan Cee had unbuttoned his shirt without his knowing. She’d brought the lamp down close to his skin. With the other hand, she was passing a warm, damp cloth over his chest and arms and stomach. Pynter looked back at her through slitted eyes. She stroked her thumb across his brow and he felt a warmth seeping into his head.

‘Tell me what happm,’ she whispered.

All he could see were her arms and face framed by the blue headwrap she always wore. The rest of her had melted into the darkness beyond her shoulders.

‘Don’ wan’ my eyes no more,’ he said. ‘Wish I never have dem.’

She eased herself backwards. The lamplight dipped and fluttered and the whole room seemed to teeter with the flames.

‘Which you prefer, Sugarboy? If Santay come to take back your eyes, yuh’ll agree to give dem back?’ She lifted the cloth from his stomach and brought her face down close to his. She smelt of plant things – nutmeg oil, and the bay leaves she picked to make him tea. ‘You still got your baby eyes, that’s all. Ever see how baby eyes look? Just like yours – light like a whiteman eye. Time goin come when all dat daytime sun goin darken dem, like how fire darken wood. If whiteman used to born an’ live here, you think he eye not goin to get dark too? Just give it time, Pynto.’ Her fingers traced the welts across his arms and the small gashes on his face. ‘You not goin tell me what happm down dere, not so?’

She came to her feet as if lifted by some invisible hand behind her. Now her face was a dark full moon above him. ‘Well, Elaine done come an’ tell me.’ She’d pulled her lips back so that he could see her teeth. ‘Come Saturday, you’n me goin down dere together.’ And suddenly she was no longer there, just the scent of nutmeg oil and the throb of her thumb above his eyes.

The throb was still there when he climbed to the top of Glory Cedar Rise next morning to get nearer to the sun. To turn his face up towards it and outstare it. But the sun was a hot metallic eye that didn’t blink, and so it left a burning ember behind each socket in his head and reduced the green of the world to a charred and shapeless darkness.

His eyes stared back at him from the glass of the cabinet in his mother’s hallway, the enamel of the cups in there, the flake of mirror above her bedhead, the water in the buckets brought home from the standpipe by the road. From the liquid, broken light of running river water. They stared back at him, pale like a washed-out sky, from behind the red curtains of his lids; were still staring back at him on Saturday, when Tan Cee arrived, placed a hand between his shoulder blades and steered him down towards the river.

He could hear his naked feet pounding like a heartbeat against the earth and feel the sweat running down the drain of his back. He could smell the danger rising from his aunt as she pushed him along the winding path towards the women.

He was thrust by his aunt’s hard hand among the swirl of voices: Miss Maisie’s teasing, Miss Lizzie’s laughter, bright and sharp like a blade against a stone. The chorus of chuckling and curses and the quietness that always surrounded Miss Elaine. Miss Elaine – tall and bright-eyed, under the bamboos as usual – another red dress coiled around her elbow as if she’d never left the river.

Tan Cee left him standing in the water and walked towards the bank. The sun was a hot sheet on his skin, and the swirling cold water numbed his feet. He wanted to call to her, but the tightness in her face stopped him – that and the little knife that appeared in her palm, curved like a fingernail. Miss Lizzie saw it too. Her eyes followed the arc of the tiny blade as his aunt’s arms darted among the shrubbery, slipped through stems, gathering leaves.

The women turned their heads back down to their washing, their large round shoulders hunched against the day. In the midst of all of them, Miss Lizzie seemed alone, her unblinking eyes fixed on his auntie’s face. Pynter turned towards the women and shivered. The silence among them was dense and tight and terrible.

Returning from the bank, his auntie walked through the water towards him. She dropped the herbs on a stone beside his feet, tossed a handful of water on them and bent down to crush them with the heel of her palm. The plants surrendered their odours, which prickled like needles in his nostrils. And when the herbs had been mixed into a green and oozing paste, Tan Cee reached out and dragged him towards her. He was aware of her hands at his armpits, of his feet leaving the water, his body being lifted onto a tall stone so that all of the river lay before him, and all of the eyes of the women.

She dragged his shirt from his shoulders, slipped his short trousers past his knees, and now he was naked, and he wasn’t embarrassed or afraid.

Pynter stood there with her propping him up, still shivering in the heat, looking down at himself as if his body no longer belonged to him: his small penis dark and curved like a bean-pod; his stomach round and tight and smooth; his navel a tiny hill which his grandmother said had anchored him so stubbornly to his mother that when they’d severed it, it had almost killed her. And his feet, which his mother said had to have come from his father, Manuel Forsyth, because they were too long and narrow to be a Bender’s.

The water fell in a sudden scalding shower down his shoulders. Its coldness knocked the breath out of him. It stopped his shivering. Tan Cee coated him in the sap of the plants and he felt his skin grow stiff and tight like paper, and then very, very slowly she rinsed the paste off him.

Now he saw that each of the bruises he’d suffered the week before had risen up again, and stood like purple worms against his dark skin, as if they had only retreated to wait for his auntie’s hands to bring them back.

‘Look at ’im,’ she said. ‘He got anyting y’all boy-chile don’t have – dat is those of you who kin have! Hi skin don’t bruise-an’-bleed like everybody own? He different? Yes, he different. Lemme tell y’all what make ’im different: he mine! Dat’s what make ’im different. He mine.’ Her voice had climbed above the bamboos. It was bright and hard like the blade she carried somewhere in her bosom. ‘An’ so help me God, if dis ever happm again, I kill de bitch who cause it.’

She swung her head away and turned to leave, with his clothes still tucked under her arm. He climbed down the stone to follow her.

‘Where you goin?’ Her rage washed over him like cold water. ‘You not leavin here now. You leave here when you ready. Y’hear me!’

He watched the blue flash of her bright headscarf receding as she climbed the hill through the restless netting of the canes. He was left naked on the stone in the middle of the river before the eyes of the women.

Santay was the woman who had given him back his sight. Hers was the first face he’d ever seen, the first lips that had shaped words before his eyes, the first eyes he’d ever looked into with his own.

They hadn’t prepared him for her coming. Santay was Tan Cee’s friend – the woman who lived in a small wooden house above their valley, who spoke to the departed and knew every plant on earth that cured or killed. She knew poisons that could put a man to sleep for good or kill the fire in his loins. Tan Cee told him that. His aunt also told him that men never went to her, only the women. They carried their illnesses, their children and their tiredness to her. And there were those like Tan Cee who, every new moon, travelled to her place, lit a fire in her yard, danced and sang songs which she repeated to him from time to time.

He’d woken one morning and she was there – a woman with a man’s voice. He knew it was a woman because there was more breath around each word, and of course her smell. Men smelled of sweat and earth and meat things. They never smelled of plant things. His body had tensed, his skin flaring with the awareness of her presence. A hand that belonged to no one he knew rested briefly on his shoulder. Then two thumbs pressed hard against his eyes.

‘Leave ’im to me,’ the voice said.

They left him in the room with her and it became a war in which her hands seemed to reach out from anywhere and hurt him. His body was crouched, his nerves all flared and snarling, and whenever he felt her move he struck out in a wide, violent arc. But she was too quick, seemed to be everywhere at the same time. He lashed out until his arms were aching, and then two strong hands were pinning his arms against his sides. He stood there screaming for Tan Cee.

She said her name was Santay. She called him by a name different from his own. Santay lowered him to the floor and told him that she was there to give him back his eyes and that he must stay with her. That meant leaving the yard with her with a bag strapped to his back, guided by her hands at the nape of his neck. It meant going up a long, steep hill that seemed to have no end.

Pynter felt himself rising out of the valley to lighter, chillier air. A low, deep-throated snoring replaced the rustling of the canes, the sound of the World, she told him, the wind mixed up with all the noises and movements that came from down below and bounced against the bowl of the sky above their heads.

If he was to have back his eyes he would have to lie on the floor at nights and listen to the cheeping, whistling, tik-tok-tinkling of the world outside which slipped into his ear and filled his head to overflowing. It meant learning her moods by the way her feet sounded on the floorboards. It meant being fed the flesh of fruits he’d never before tasted, especially when the pain in his eyes curled his fingers in, made talons of his nails that sunk into her arms as she prised the bandage loose and replaced it with a fresh one.

Once, her hand had paused against his face and he could hear her breathing. ‘You’z a real pretty boy,’ she said. ‘You should see yourself one day.’

Those last few words had made it easier for him.

‘Plants,’ she said, ‘carry in their sap, their bark, their roots, their leaves, the answer to every livin sickness in a yooman been. Some know what should be in a person blood and what don’ ought to be in dere. Some unnerstan de skin. Some have knowledge of de eye. Same way y’have heart doctor and eye doctor, y’have plant that carry the exact same unnerstandin. In fact, sometimes a pusson get to thinkin that God make tree and den tree make we.’

She fed him light the way she fed him fruits, slowly and in fragments. She took the bandages off at night and brought him out into the yard. She showed him where the stars were, the dark unsteady rise of trees, the dizzying slope of hills and the patterns they made against the paler sky. She made him watch a full moon rise until his head began to throb.

It was raining when she first took him outside during the day. Through the thick white haze, she stretched out her finger at shapes and places and said their names to him. Mardi Gras Mountain, tall and dark, pushing its head up through the mists way beyond his vision, at whose feet Old Hope River flowed. The cane fields of Old Hope, whose sighs and whisperings he knew so well. The houses were brown pimples against the green of the hillside, his own home hidden behind a tall curtain of glory cedar trees.

They were sitting on a stone above the valley. He was feeding himself on guavas – the glistening white-fleshed type which smelled of a much gentler perfume than the pink-fleshed ones. She pointed down at the canes and showed him gauldins skimming with outstretched wings above the green surf of the canes. He watched them wheel and settle on the topmost branches of the bamboos that fenced the river in, and he remembered something Tan Cee had told him when the skin still covered his eyes and he’d asked her what the world was like.

‘De world is life; and life is de world,’ she told him. ‘S’like dis room, but it so big-an’-wide it ain’t got no wall around it. An’ it carry millions an’ millions an’ millions of other living things inside itself. De world is like dat – an’ dat’s just a little piece of it.’

‘Miss Santay,’ he said, softly, hopefully. ‘I – I don’t want to dead.’

His words swung Santay round to face him. The scarf on her head was a throbbing yellow. It framed a face so dark he could barely see her features. She looked down at him and his heart began to race.

‘My granmodder … Deeka, say I dead soon,’ he explained, looking down on the rain-swept canes, the birds fluttering above them like a host of living lilies. ‘When I reach ten, she say.’

‘If that granmodder of yours have she way, everybody dead soon.’

Santay lowered herself onto her haunches and placed a hand on his shoulder. She felt different from every person who had ever touched him. In all the time he had been with her, he’d never heard her laugh. She moved so silently, as if she did not dare to disturb the air.

‘Listen, sonny, I don’ know what your people make you out to be. Talk reach me that you have to be one of de Old Ones come again – Zed What’s-iz-name again …? On account of the way you born. And lookin at dem eyes o’ yours, I not so sure they wrong. But …’ She got up suddenly, went inside the house and returned with a sheet of plastic and threw it over him. She told him he would spend the day out there and watch the way night came.

When it was too dark to see the valley any more she called him in and made him change his clothes. He was shivering by then – shivering and hungry.

‘Eat,’ she said, placing a plate of fried fish and bread in his hands. She sat on the small table before him, her elbows almost touching his. ‘Now tell me what happm, Osan.’ It was the name that she had given him.

‘Tell you …?’

‘’Bout dis fella you s’pose to be.’

He was surprised she did not know the story. Everybody knew it, even Miss Lizzie. The story was always there, even when no one was telling it, there in his grandmother’s eyes whenever she turned her gaze on him. Perhaps she knew but she wanted to hear it from him.

He chewed the bread and stared at her uncertainly. He swallowed and closed his eyes.

‘My auntie, Tan Cee, say the cane was always there – the cane and us. She say we come with the cane. A pusson got to count a lot of generation back till dem reach Sufferation Time, when we didn belong to weself, because de man who own de cane own de people too.’

He lifted his head in incomprehension. Santay nodded slightly.

‘Had a fella name Zed Bender. He didn feel he belong to nobody, but in truth he belong to a man name Bull Bender. Bull Bender had a lotta dog. He teach dem to hunt people down. He teach dem to rip off de back of deir leg when he catch dem. If is a woman, he bring ’er back. But he never bring back a man.

‘It happm one day Zed Bender decide to run ’way with a girl name Essa. She was pretty an’ he like ’er bad, real bad. He like ’er so bad he wasn’ ’fraid o’ nothing o’ nobody. He run ’way with her. Bull Bender catch ’im – catch ’im …’ He lifted his eyes past Santay, frowned, shook his head and pointed where he thought the purple mass of the Mardi Gras might be. ‘Up dere.’ Cross dere it have a tree. S’big. It got root like wall. Part of it like a lil house. It got a lotta little bird in dere. Dey ain’ got no feather on dem. It don’ smell nice in dere eider. Missa Bull Bender catch dem dere after de dog tear off de back of Zed Bender leg.’

He placed the bit of bread he was holding on the table and looked at her. He was tired. Wasn’t hungry any more. He wanted to sleep.

‘Finish,’ she told him quietly.

‘He put hi back against one of dem wall root. He want to stand up. He make ’imself stand up cuz he want to watch Bull Bender in hi eye – like a man in front of a man. Bull Bender tell ’im to kneel down. He won’ do it. He tell Bull Bender if he have to kill ’im, den he have to do it with ’im standin up. He tell ’im dat he put a curse on him an’ all hi famly, an’ de seed of all hi famly to come. He dead. Dead real vex. He tell Bull Bender that is come he goin come back. Don’ know when, but he goin come back, and when he come back … ’

Pynter looked away. ‘I don’ know, don’ know what goin to happm when he come back. Nobody never tell me dat part.’

Santay brought the heel of her hand up against his eyes, so softly he barely felt it. ‘You cryin,’ she said.

He watched her move across the floor towards the back door in that quick, whispery way of hers. She stood there and sniffed the air. The rain outside had stopped and he could hear the rising-up of the night-time bush sounds. He heard her call his name.

‘Come, look down dere.’ She was pointing at the black hole that was Old Hope Valley. He saw showers of lights stippling the darkness below them. ‘Firefly,’ she said. ‘Never seen so much in one night.’

While he watched and marvelled, she turned her gaze on him. ‘Dat tree up dere, de one where dat young-fella get kill, your auntie tell you dat part too?’

He stared back at her, said nothing.

‘Well,’ she said, turning back to face the night, ‘sound to me like dis Zed Bender fella had a real mind of hi own. You don’ fink so? The way I figure it, if he decide to make someting happm, den is happm it goin to happm. It cross my mind dat if he really come again an’ he decide he don’ want to go back, nobody kin make ’im go until he damn-well ready. A pusson have to ask demself a coupla question though. Like why he come back now, an’ whether he come back alone. Cuz dat lil Essa Bender lady he run ’way with the first time was sure to meet ’im up again – in the end, I mean. Love like dat can’t dead. An’ if she loss ’im once, she not goin to loss ’im twice. She goin want to follow ’im. An’ if what them say ’bout you is true, your brodder should ha’ been a girl.’

She switched her head back round to face him. ‘So! Let’s say dat girl come back with him – mebbe different passageway – and she somewhere on dis island, what you think goin happm if dey meet up?’

He looked at her, but she did not seem to expect an answer. She got up and tightened the knot of the cloth on her head.

‘Well, I figure she come to take ’im back. I figure dat she not good for ’im. Come, catch some sleep. Tomorrow I take you home.’

2

HOME WAS THE yard his grandfather had blasted out of rocks. It was a hill above the road that no one had found a use for until John Seegal claimed it for himself. Ten years it took her husband, Deeka Bender said, ten solid years to break through the chalk and granite with dynamite, crowbars and sledgehammers.

The work was as simple as it was breathtaking. With every girl-child he gave Deeka, he carved out a place where one day they would build their house. He went further up the hill each time a girl-child came. As if he knew that they would never leave his place. Or perhaps it was his way of tying them to this rock above Old Hope Road. Or maybe it was just his way of making sure his words came true.

And what were those words? Deeka splayed her fingers wide and laughed: that no man alive would ever rule his women. He said it when Tan Cee, their first girl-child, was born; said it again when Elena arrived a couple of dry seasons after her; said those very same words a final time when Patty the Pretty was born.

For Birdie – the only boy – he made no place at all. He told Deeka something different. ‘Man,’ he said, ‘have to make a way for himself.’

He wasn’t thinking about Birdie when he laid a nest of stones in the middle of the yard to make a fireplace. Or when he perched the great metal cauldron he’d brought from the sugar factory on three boulders, under the ant-blighted grapefruit tree which he’d planted with his hands. He put it there for the times they would need to feed a wedding or celebrate a birth, or when, just for the hell of it, one of the women decided to clear out the leaves, fill it with water and toss the children in.

It was the only thing he ever built, because all his life he had been paid to pull things down. Used to be the person the government called to blow up hills and buildings. Old bridges too; or when, during the rainy season, the face of one of those mountains on the western coast broke off and, on its way down to the sea, flattened every living thing in its wake, including people foolish enough to put their houses there. He was the one they sent for to clear the mess. Once he blew up the house of a man Deeka had worked for as a servant girl for the liberty he’d taken with her.

No wonder then, that in the eyes of lil children and a lot of foolish wimmen, her husband, John Seegal Bender, was the nearest thing to God, since with a little red box and a coupla pieces of wire, he could make thunder.

He’d built his house with storms in mind. A kind of ark on thirty legs, it half stood, half leaned against the high mud bank, which was, in turn, reinforced by the roots of a tres-beau mango tree. The posts were cut from campeche wood, chopped down at the end of the dry season, just before the new moon, since the blood-red core was hardest then.

He’d rebuilt the house in ’51, the year before he ‘walked’. Four years before Hurricane Janet pulled the island apart, lifted most of what people were living in and flung them at the Mardi Gras a thousand feet above them.

The house had grown since then, in various directions and according to its own fancy, to accommodate the swelling family. Elena added a couple of rooms to the west side with the money that, in Deeka’s words, Manuel Forsyth’s conscience had given her when Peter and Pynter were born. And because the house could not decide in which direction it wanted to lean, different parts leaned different ways.

They called it home because, although Patty and Tan Cee had their own places, John Seegal’s was the one in which the family always gathered.

Deeka Bender ruled it with her presence, especially those evenings over dinner when she chose to talk about John Seegal. Theirs had been the greatest love story in the world, she boasted. And whether they wanted t’hear it or not, she was going to tell them. These days they watched her more than listened: for the way her own words changed her, and how the white mass of hair, let loose like an unruly halo round her head, threw back the firelight. How the long brown face, the cheekbones and nose – high-ridged like the place from which she came – was alive once more. They watched and marvelled at the miracle of those fingers, thin and knotted like the branches of sea grapes, becoming supple and young again.

She was a north-woman, and when a pusson say north-woman they mean a woman with pride. And Deeka Bender was prouder still, becuz she carry the blood of de First People: Carib blood, thick-hair-long-like-lapite blood, high-steppin, tall-walkin blood. And in them days Deeka walked taller than everybody else, no matter how high they was above her.

‘But what God leave for a pretty young girl to do in a lil ole place sittin on the edge of a precipice over de ocean? Eh? Especially when she don’ want to live and dead like everybody else up dere with no accountin fo’ the life she live. And life for a woman in those days could mean just movin out, knowin a lil bit o’ de world, hearin different voices an’ seein whether everybody cry or laugh the same way. It wasn’ askin much, but it mean a lot.

‘It so happm that one day news reach me that Missa John Defoe’s wife want a servant girl,’ Deeka said. ‘Defoe was a big Béké man who own the coconut plantation an’ most other plantation you find round there. Everybody work for Defoe because it don’t have no work apart from the work that Béké fella have to give. And for poor people girl-chile with a lil bit of ambition it was a good position to start from. So ’twasn’ a nice thing to come home six months after, bawling like hell wid me pride mash down an’ bleedin becuz dat man grab hold of me in de back o’ de kitchen, tell me he will kill me if I make a sound for hi white-’ooman-wife-from-Englan’ to hear ’im. And den, well, he take advantage of my situation. Make it worse, nobody couldn do nothing ’bout it becuz, like I tell y’all, everybody work for Defoe, including my own father.

‘Must ha’ been a week after I decide to go back kind of meek and quiet to that man house. People find it kinda funny. My fadder who never go anywhere widout hi couteau – his special kind o’ knife he use for openin lambie – even he was more surprise than everybody else. An’ that was kinda funny becuz he leave dat knife right on de little table in de room where I used to sleep. Still, you should see de shock on hi face when I tell dem I goin back to John Defoe house.

‘I went back to de kitchen same way, and start doin de cookin and de washin same way, and sure enough I see ’im throwin eyes at me.’

A soft throaty laugh escaped her.

‘It don’t have a woman who don’ know how to stop a man. For good. Most woman don’ know dey know. But I know. I know it from since I was a girl bathin under the same standpipe with my little brothers. You see, lil girls not de same as lil boys. Y’all tink you know dat, right?’

She’d turned her eyes on the men: Patty the Pretty’s man-friend, Leroy, Tan Cee’s husband, Coxy Levid – deep-eyed and always with a cigarette and a small smile on his lips, and Gordon and Sloco, who had come to have a couple of quiet words with Coxy.

‘Well, y’all don’t, becuz you don’ know what I going to tell y’all in a minute. You see, lil girls don’ see what lil boys got. Dey see what lil boys got to lose. Is something I learn from early.’

The visitors shifted on their seats.

‘Y’all think that is that lil dumplin’ y’all got that rule the world. So y’all use it like a gun, like a nail, like a stone, like something y’all got to shame woman with. Y’all hear say that God is a man and God have one, an’ dat give y’all de right to rule woman de way God rule de world. Well, fellas, I got news for y’all. Me – Deeka Bender – I have a cure for God.’

Coxy placed a cigarette between his lips, struck a match and lit it. Held the burning stick up before his eyes while the flame chewed its way down to his fingers. The fire fluttered there a while, like an injured butterfly just above his nails, and then went out.

It was the way Deeka told these stories, the events the same, the messages different every time. It might be about daughters who disappeared in secret and returned home with children whose fathers they refused to name, in which case her eyes would keep returning to Elena. Or her tongue might rest and remain briefly on the sorts of women who married themselves in secret and who, for some sin known only to themselves, hadn’t given any children to the world. This time the bony shoulders would be turned away from Tan Cee, for this daughter’s tongue was quieter than hers, her temper very, very slow to wake. But when it did, it knew no respect or boundary.

The first time Patty brought Leroy to the yard she spoke about girl children who came home with their men, locked themselves up in their bedrooms with them for days, doing what she just could not imagine. She was beautiful then – beautiful and terrible – with the firelight sparkling those dark north-woman eyes, her voice so high and clear it seemed to come from a different person altogether.

‘In fact, I always believe dat what Delilah cut from Samson wasn’ no long hair from hi head. But y’see, de Bible not a rude book. Missa Moses find another way to say it, an’ so dem call it hair. But I tellin y’all dat is not no dam hair dat she take ’way from dat Samson fella. Anyway, I spend eight months in jail for de damage I do Defoe and it would ha’ been longer – p’raps me whole life – if I wasn’ carryin proof o’ de liberty he take with me. I was six months pregnant wid dat man chile when I walk out o’ Edmund Hill Prison. I wasn’ going back home. I know dat from de time the warders open de gate and left me standin outside in the hot sun. I walk down dat road with a lil cloth bag in me hand and a coupla wuds in me head dat a man lef ’ with me almost a year before I got in trouble. You see, de time I was workin fo’ John Defoe, dis fella used to come buy dynamite becuz dat Béké man was de only one allow to sell it on de islan’. I used to watch ’im from de kitchen without ’im noticing. I s’pose ’twas because I never see a man like ’im before. Most times a fella come to Defoe he stay outside the gate. But this fella walk right in. He put hi hand on hi waist and look round him, like a surveyor. Big fella, strong fella – the kinda man God build to last.

‘When he talk to Defoe he watch ’im straight in hi eye.

‘He was there when I come out with de washing. He look at me like if he surprise. He look at me like if he jus’ make up hi mind ’bout something. It cross me mind dat for me to get to the clothes line I had to pass under dem eyes of his. Not only that, but I was wearing one o’ dem cotton dress without no sleeve, and for me to hang up dem clothes I had to stretch to reach de line. I didn like dat. I didn like no man making me feel so confuse without my permission. I was vex like hell. I look at ’im an’ tell ’im, “What de hell you looking at?” He look back at me like he more vex than me and say, “Tell me what you don’t want me to be looking at and mebbe I won’t look.” An’ den he laugh.’

Deeka laughed out loud at the memory.

‘I never hear man laugh so sweet. He start comin more regular for dynamite, till I got to thinkin that he mus’ be plannin to blow up de whole islan’ o’ someting. Missa Defoe get wise to ’im and start refusin to sell ’im any more dynamite. An’ den one day that Béké fella tell ’im straight, “Oi’m never going to sell you no more dynamite.”

‘“I’ll come anyway,” John Seegal tell ’im.

‘“Then Oi’ll have you arrested for trespassing, or shoot you moiy-self,” Defoe say.

‘“Make sure you succeed first time you try,” my husband tell ’im back.

‘Lord ha’ mercy, them words frighten me. Them frighten me to know dat I become a woman dat a man prepare to kill for. He keep comin like he promise. Used to stand up on the lil hill across the road an’ watch me. I never talk to ’im. But if I look up an’ he not ’cross dere, I start to sorta miss ’im. It last a coupla months till he couldn take it no more. One day he stay ’cross the road an’ call me. Was de kinda call dat make you know dat if you go, you was sayin yes to a question he didn ask you in the first place. Was like sayin, “I give in, I’z yours.” I never go. I should ha’ gone. I didn go. He call my name again an’ tell me if I didn come to ’im right now, he never comin back.

‘“I tired holdin on,” he say. “You wearin me down,” he say. “Dat lil Béké man ’cross dere make it clear he want you for himself. I could break his arse as easy as I look at ’im but you have to give me reason. I won’t bother you no more. When you ready, you come to me.” He stay right across the road and shout it. Then he leave. Was de last time he come.’

Deeka had been standing all the while. Now she sat on the steps, her elbows resting on her knees. She seemed to have forgotten they were there.

‘Still, it don’t take a half a man to have a woman come to him from jail carryin a child that not his, far less a child for a man who was threatening to shoot ’im. He cuss me, he even bring hi hand to me face. But was de beginnin of a kind of forgiveness, although he never accept the child. A woman know these things. Is what a man don’t say. Is how he look at that baby when he think you not watchin. Is how he dress an’ undress dat chile if he have to. Is how he look at it when it not well, that sorta thing. Must ha’ strike ’im, every time he look at her, dat it ain’t got no way dat lil red-skin girl could pass as hi own child. And in Ole Hope here, a man who take in a woman dat carryin another man seed, he either born stupid or born wrong-side. Is all of dat must ha’ got to ’im in the end. And of course my lil girl, Anita.’

This was the place they were waiting for her to arrive at. Perhaps this time she would go past it and tell them the bit that seemed to stop her right there every time. Over the years she’d been inching closer to it. A word here, a sentence there, softly mumbled sometimes, like slipping on pebbles at the edge of some precipice. She always recovered at the last minute. She became herself again, the weight of all her years settling back on her shoulders and bowing them very slightly. The light in her eyes receding.

3

THE TALK OF WOMEN taught Pynter Bender one thing: men walked.

The women spoke of it as if it were an illness – a fever that men were born with, for which there was no accounting and no cure. It could come upon them anytime, but more likely halfway through the harvesting of the canes in April – those months of work and hunger that Old Hope called the Stretch, when the children were thinnest.

A man stripped and cut the canes for ninety-four cents a day. A woman tied and packed and lifted bundles onto trucks for seventy-eight. And with the coming of the first rains, the tractors with the ploughs arrived. They walked behind them for a month, clearing the valley floor of stones and the diseased roots of last year’s crop.

That was when their men started looking southwards at the triangles of blue between the hills. Over dinner, the man would not really hear his woman when she told him something trivial about their child: that it would have his lips or eyes and be as good-looking as him. He might nod or stare through her, wondering aloud if she’d heard that another stoker in the sugar factory south of Old Hope, or in one of the little mills further east, had lost an arm to the machinery. That some quick-thinking friend had the presence of mind to cut the arm off at the shoulder before the cogs could pull him in. Or that an overladen truck, carrying a couple of tons of cane, had rolled over and crushed the loaders – boys really, boys barely old enough to earn a wage.

It was not always the rumour of an accident that started the man off daydreaming. One ordinary day he would look up from pulling ratoons from the earth and suddenly see nothing but the canes, stretching all the way to the end of his days, beyond life itself. And he would imagine himself walking on streets with lights, or standing at the foot of some tall glass building with cigarettes and money in his pocket, a coat around his shoulders and a newspaper tucked under his armpit. His woman would sense the change in him because he was irritable with her all the time, raised his hands at her more often, couldn’t stand to hear the baby crying.

Over the months, the savings, the borrowed money, would go towards the beige felt hat with the widish rim, a couple of thick Sea Island cotton shirts, two pairs of heavy flannel trousers, that started narrow at the heels and got looser all the way up to the waist. And of course a coat. Nothing was more confirming of his intentions than that coat. It would be the last thing that his friend – the only person he’d trusted with his plans – would hand over to him as they stand on the Carenage in San Andrews with their backs towards the island. And he would promise that friend, over a quick and secretive handshake, that he would make a way for him as soon as he got ‘there’.

‘There’ was anywhere, anywhere but home. ‘There’ was wherever in the world someone wanted a pair of hands to do something they didn’t want to do themselves. ‘There’ was anywhere a man could turn his back on cane. And it all started with that walk which, one quiet night, took him past the small dry-goods store with the single Red Spot sign, past the crumbling mansions that sat back from the road, their facades half-hidden by ancient hibiscus fences.

At Cross Gap, the last and only junction that marked Old Hope from the rest of the world, the man would begin to walk faster, the beige felt hat pulled down over his eyes, his last journey up Old Hope Road, his arms swinging loose, the walk of no return.

There were other Old Hope walks too, shorter walks, the night-time disappearances that lasted until morning. After dinner he would get up, wash his hands, hitch his trousers higher up his hips, and with barely a turn of the head he would say, ‘I takin a walk.’

‘Where you off to?’ a woman’s quiet query would come.

And just as softly his answer would reach her: ‘Don’ know, jus’ followin my foot.’ And the soft pad of his shoes would melt into the night.

Tan Cee’s husband would never explain himself. Wednesday nights, Pynter would watch his auntie watching her husband sitting cross-legged on the stool a couple of feet away from her. He imagined her counting the cigarettes he pulled out of the packet, the gestures his left hand made to light the match, how close to the butt he smoked each one and the slowness with which he crushed it into the dirt between his feet. That long, still face of his was always lifted slightly, like a man whose head was buried in a dream. And as the night drew in, he took longer drags and made the match burn closer to his fingers.

Tan Cee’s head was angled just like his, but slightly away from him, her eyes switched sideways so that only the whites showed in the firelight. He could hear the whisper of Coxy’s clothing as he came to his feet, smell the Alcolado Glacial he’d rubbed along his neck and shoulders. It was only when his sandals hit the asphalt on the road below that his aunt got up and headed home.

Pynter had his eye on Coxy too. There was something about the soft-voiced smoking man that made his aunt a different person. However quietly Coxy called her name, she always seemed to hear him. She would lift her head, drop whatever she was doing and go straight away to him. It was as if she had an extra ear that was always listening out for him.

Sometimes Pynter would catch Coxy’s eyes on him. It was a different look from Deeka’s. It didn’t seem to wish he wasn’t there. It didn’t switch from him and then to Peter and back to him again. It was quiet and direct; and if he looked back at him, Coxy would nod his head and smile.

He was going to get an answer to the question that Coxy always left behind every Wednesday night. It felt a natural thing to do because lately he had been following his eyes. He left the yard on mornings and made his way to places he’d spotted in the distance. The week before it had been the high green rise of a silk-cotton tree on the slopes of Déli Morne. The day after that a patch of purple down the furthest reaches of the river, or a bit of rock that stood bare and brown like a scar against the green face of that precipice they called Man Arthur’s Fall. His eyes had even taken him down to that stinking place of tangled roots and mangroves into which they said his grandfather had disappeared. He’d stood there staring at the boiling mud, wondering what could ever make a person want to do a thing like that.

Now, he’d only just got back home from the sea. He’d sat on the pebbles that faced the ocean and looked out at the grey shape of the land that rested like a giant finger on the water, beyond which were darkness and the boom of water breaking over reef. He’d repeated in his head the last words Santay said to him the day she returned him to his yard: that to truly rid himself of Zed Bender’s curse, he would have to cross that ocean.

Deeka was talking about John Seegal again when he arrived. He wondered if she’d ever been to see the swamp that her husband had left her for. He wondered if anyone in the yard had ever done so.

His mother came and placed his dinner in his lap. He wasn’t hungry, but he fed himself all the same, keeping his eyes on Tan Cee and her husband. He glanced across at Deeka’s face. She was talking too much to notice him, and for that he felt relieved.

Following Coxy in the dark was easier than Pynter expected. He had been behind him for so long his heels were aching and a film of sweat had broken out on his face. He was not afraid of the night. It was never the kind of deep black that Deeka spoke of in her stories, where you couldn’t see your hands even if you held them up before your face.

The night was full of shapes, some laid back against the skyline, some leaning hard against each other. The track curled itself around the roots of trees that rose as high as houses. It dipped into small ravines, turned back on itself so suddenly he sometimes lost his sense of where he was.

He thought there would be no end to Coxy Levid’s walking.

Past Cross Gap Junction, Coxy turned left and suddenly they were in the middle of a cocoa plantation that spread out before them like a warren of dark tunnels. Pynter had a sense of how far ahead of him Coxy was because of the glow of his cigarette and because he sometimes whistled a tune. Sometimes he stopped and pulled his shirt close because it was cold beneath these trees.

Tan Cee had told him of the snakes that lived beneath the carpet of leaves which every cocoa tree spread around its trunk. Crebeaux, she told him, were creatures so black they glistened. They moved like tar but were quick enough to knot themselves around the foot of a careless child, a rabbit or a bird and make a soup of their bones before swallowing them whole.

He’d lost sight of Coxy, had emerged on the edge of a small hill and hung there, leaning against the bark of a mango tree, looking down at the houses scattered along the hillside facing him. Lamplight seeped through their wooden walls. Their galvanised roofs glowed dully in the dark.

He was about to turn and make his way down when he caught the smell of cigarettes. He brought his hands up to his face. A hand reached around his shoulders and he felt himself thrown backwards. He’d lost his balance but he wasn’t falling. He felt his breath leave his body as the hand lifted him and slammed his back against the tree. Pynter opened his mouth and drew his breath; and there was Coxy Levid’s face, level with his own.

‘Why you falla me?’ Coxy shook him hard. ‘Yuh aunt send you after me?’

Pynter shook his head, made to speak, but his tongue had seized up like a stone inside his mouth.

‘You lie fo’ me, you never leave dis place.’ Coxy made a circle with his head that took in the bushes and the darkness around. ‘Y’unnerstan?’

A match exploded in his face again. Coxy’s lips were peeled back, his teeth white and curved like seashells. The light-brown eyes glowed in the matchlight like a cat’s.

‘Why you falla me, boy!’

‘I don’ know, jus’ … You squeezin me.’

‘That woman send you after me?’

‘No. I come – I come by meself. You, you squeezin me.’

‘So if I break your fuckin neck right here fuh mindin big man bizness, nobody goin to know.’ The fingers pressed harder against his forehead.

Pynter looked into Coxy’s eyes. He searched his head for words. Found nothing.

‘So what you fallain me for?’

‘I – I not goin to tell nobody.’

‘Tell nobody what? What you got in your mind to tell nobody, eh? A man cyahn’ take a walk? You think anybody could walk behind me for me not to know? You feel say you is spirit? You feel say all dem shit dem talk ’bout you is true? You feel say you can’t dead. You wan’ me to prove it?’

Coxy shifted his hand sharply down beneath Pynter’s chin. Now there was a terrible pressure at the back of his neck. His jaws were so tightly locked he could barely whimper.

‘You so much as breathe my name to anybody, you so much as tink a lil thought about where you falla me tonight, you so much as dream ’bout tryin it again, I make you wish you never born.’

The hand released him suddenly and he fell backwards.

Pynter stayed leaning against the tree, his breathing coming fast and hard. He listened to Coxy’s footsteps going down the path until he could hear the man no more. A little way off a dog barked. A few others across the hill replied, followed by a man’s voice – low and deep like far-off thunder. A woman’s laughter climbed the night air, so bright and musical it made him think of ribbons in the wind.

4

FROM THE SETTLEMENT of twenty dwellings or so east of Glory Cedar Rise a man sat hidden under one of the houses, dreamily looking down on Old Hope Valley.

The occupants did not know that he was there. He could have chosen any of the houses scattered about the hill, since they all offered the same view of the valley. After resting a couple of hours there, he’d picked up enough from the conversation that filtered through the floorboards to know that the woman’s name was Eunice and the man’s was Ezra, and that he worked in one of the quarries in the south.

He had dozed a little and then woken up. His feet still ached from the walk from Edmund Hill. The eight miles had taken him longer than he’d anticipated, but that was because for many years he had lost the habit of walking distances.

Having also lost the habit of sleeping a whole night through, he would sleep again for another couple of hours and then wake up to watch the morning come. By then, those above him would begin to stir. He would take the mud track down towards the river, or perhaps wait a couple of hours longer. The quarryman might find him there. He might move to say something, as any man would do to a stranger sitting beneath his house, but then the quarryman would stop and examine him more closely – the coarse old cotton shirt with faded numbers stencilled below the breast pocket, the heavy pair of leather boots, resoled and passed on to him as a present. And of course his face. The quarry man’s eyes would pause there and he would think better of whatever he was about to say and maybe go inside to tell his woman.

It was what always happened when, every few years, a man found him beneath his house waiting for the morning.

In the valley below, he’d counted the fires in the yards as they went out one by one with the deepening night, each bit of dancing yellow like a tiny signal of hope against all that darkness. He had watched the moon rise and smelled the morning, and had begun to wonder how they would receive him this time and what, if anything, had changed since he last saw them. And then the sky lit up a couple of hills ahead of him. It was in the general direction of where he wanted to go. He eased himself forward, thinking how strange it was that anyone would want to light a boucan this time of night, in fact so close to morning. He watched it burn till the flames died down, becoming no more than a glowing scar against the dark.

It was daylight and the valley filled with birdsong. He got to his feet. He moved with the litheness of a man accustomed to hard work. It would take him a couple of hours to get there, perhaps longer, because on his way up the other side of the valley he would pause to gather guavas, water lemons, perhaps carve a spinning top or two for the children. He always brought home something for the children.

He turned his face up to the morning, the almond-shaped eyes catching the soft, indifferent light. A gold tooth glimmered between his parted lips and his large head dipped down. He picked up a cotton sack, which he swung onto his left shoulder. The sudden flurry of air raised the scent of bread. His eyes were still fixed on the scar against the hillside when he started marching down the hill, the smell of yeast and hard-dough bread following him.

He emerged into a bright, harsh day from the cocoa plantation near Cross Gap Junction a couple of miles away. And it was from there that he started greeting people.

Tan Cee heard him first about a quarter of a mile out on the road. Somebody must have set him off laughing. Her head cocked up like a chicken’s and suddenly she was squealing, ‘Birdie! Birdie!’, running down the hill towards the road with the tub of washing spilt all over the ground and Coxy’s trousers trailing in the dirt behind her.

‘That sister o’ mine crazy,’ Elena laughed, but she too was dancing on the steps.

Birdie brought Tan Cee back up the hill kicking and choking with laughter in between her pleas for him to put her down. He was holding her high above his head and tickling her at the same time.

They collapsed in the yard together and before he knew it they were all over him. Patty arrived running and simply dumped herself on them. Elena almost took a flying leap from the steps and trusted Birdie’s body to take care of the rest. Tan Cee was somewhere between them. They pinched him, they bit him, they kicked him, they dug and squirmed their fingers in his ribs, which brought out thunder-rolls of laughter from him and set the whole yard laughing too. For Birdie’s was the kind of laughter that was in itself a joke.

He rolled them off eventually and they sat in the dirt and stared at him, the giant they saw once in every few years. They reached out their hands and brushed the bits of grass and dust from his beard, wiped the sweat off his forehead with their hands. Tan Cee straightened the collar of the khaki shirt they’d just crushed while Patty and Elena rested their elbows on his shoulders. He got to his feet, bringing them all up together with him, like a tree might move with all its branches, and now that the children could see his full size they were open-mouthed.

If Birdie had been born after his father’s passing, they would have said he was John Seegal born again, and he had the same effect on Deeka. She was sweeping up the fallen flowers of the grapefruit tree when she heard his laughter. The sound of him had frozen her. She hadn’t moved from under the grapefruit tree, still held the broom in her hand in mid-swing.

She didn’t say a thing when he got up, eased the three women aside and turned around to face her with a grin as wide as a beach.

Birdie lifted his mother off the ground and held her, broom and all, as one would do a child. The smile gone now, he looked down at her face and rumbled softly, ‘Ma!’

Everything was in that single word, all the time and distance there had been between them. Deeka dropped the broom. She reached up and looped her arms around his neck.

‘Put me down,’ she ordered.

He held her for a while longer then carefully let her down among the stones, passing his hands through his hair, his beard, then his hair again.

‘When you goin back?’ she asked.

‘I goin straight this time, Ma. No more jail for me.’

‘Until you break in somebody house again and clean it out? I try to straighten you out from small, but this son o’ mine born crooked. Come lemme feed you some proper food, you thief!’

His laughter filled the house till evening. He ate everything they placed before him, and when he finished he kicked the heavy boots off his feet, reached for the canvas bag that hadn’t left his shoulder, even when his sisters were wrestling with him, and pulled out several loaves of bread.

It was what they had been waiting for: Birdie’s prison bread. Pynter and his brother knew more about his bread than they did about their uncle himself. It was the taste of Birdie’s bread they talked about when they were really missing him. It was a way of talking about his strength too, for the secret to his making the best bread on the island – and a pusson won’ be surprised if it was de best bread in de world, Elena told them – lay in the power of those hands. She’d said those last words the way a preacher in church would say them. Only she didn’t get an amen at the end but a loud ‘Uh-huh!’ from Tan Cee.

Those hands – they kneaded dough so tight a pusson could hang it on a branch and swing on it and it won’t stretch loose an’ make dem fall an’ bust their tail. That was bread – that was de fadder an’ modder of all bread. In fact, bread was Birdie salvation. God might forgive him his thiefin ways on account of his talent for baking. And not just bread. Dumplings too. Cornmeal dumplings, plain-flour dumplings, cassava dumplings: dumplings for oil-down and crab stew; for pea soup and fish broth. Or jus’ dumplings stan’-up by itself.

You bit into one of Birdie’s dumplings and it protested. It stewpsed. It sucked its teeth like an irritable woman. It went ‘chiiks!’ Like it was answering you back or something. Like it asking you what the arse you playin, biting it so hard.

In fact, a woman could get de measure of a man by the dumplin’ that he make. By de size of it, the toughness and de strength of it, an’ whether it could answer back when you sink your teeth in it. And if a pusson want proof dat Birdie was a real man, dem only had to eat his dumplin’. Just one. In fact, you didn even have to go to all that lovely trouble. All you have to do is ask his woman, Cynty. Cuz soon as Birdie reach from jail, he does go an’ cook she food!

Woman-talk. Sweet-talk. Bender-talk that sent them up in quakes of laughter and left the children smiling back suspiciously at them.

Birdie spoke of prison as if it were another country – one with walls too tall to escape over. And why a person goin want to do that anyway? They could break a leg, and if they got away, where they goin to hide on a little island that the sea fence in better than any barbed wire? And that was only if they got that far, because there were dogs – he knew the name of every one of them. Real dogs. Not no bag-a-bone pot-hound like people got in their yard at home, but Rockwylers and Allstations. Them is serious dog! Them could follow a man shadow in the night. No joke! All they need was a little sniff of the bench that fella sit down on a coupla years ago. And they good as got him.

He told them of troubles they knew nothing about, and of men who’d spent their entire lives behind those old stone walls, who, when let out, were so confused and terrified of all that light and air around them they ran straight back inside. Some spent all their days trying to figure out what they did to be up there.

There were the bright ones, he told them, put inside for something they might have said that somebody did not like. With their quiet words and educated ways, they changed the men without the wardens noticing. Taught them how to talk up for themselves, how to hold on to an argument. And those who could not take their minds off their women and their children were made to think of things that had never crossed their minds before. Like why cane was so cheap and they couldn’t afford to buy the sugar that was made from it; why the dry season always brought with it so much rage and hardship on an island where the soil they walked on was so rich. So rich, in fact, that if a pusson dropped a needle on the ground it grew into a crowbar.

The smile left his lips, and his hands grew quiet in his lap. Now the young ones were coming, he told them, children who had no place among big men. Sent there by men who thought they owned the country. Who could not abide the impatience of these young ones who asked more questions and wanted a life that took them further than these narrow acres of bananas and sugar cane. Which was why there were more guns and soldiers now; which was why something had to break. Soon. It didn’t take the edicated men to show him that. He could see it coming.

Pynter eased his head off Tan Cee’s shoulder.

‘An’ you, Missa Birdie, if it so bad in dere, how come you like jail so much?’ He didn’t understand the sudden silence and the look that Deeka shot him.

Birdie raised his head and laughed, but the furrows on his brows that had not been there before made his face look different.

‘You de funny one – not so? You de second-born?’ Birdie said.

Tan Cee rested an arm across Pynter’s shoulder and drew him in to her. ‘And you the one who name we give ’im.’ She smiled. ‘Hi first name is your middle name. We call ’im Pynter.’

Tan Cee’s words seemed to take Birdie somewhere else. His face relaxed. His eyes got soft and dreamy.

‘I ferget that,’ he said. ‘I ferget that name. S’what happm when you got something and you never use it. Dat remind me,’ he rose up like a small earthquake from the floor, ‘Cynty down dere waiting.’

That night, curled up on the floor beside Peter, Pynter realised that his uncle had not answered him. His head was a hive of questions he never got to ask – why, especially, was he always thiefin things that were never really useful?

The last time the police had come for him was after he arrived in the yard with a fridge on his head and a television under his arm, even though the whole world knew that Lower Old Hope didn’t have electricity. And it was a waste, because the chickens made their nest in the fridge and one of the policemen who came to take him went off with the television.

‘Peter, you like Birdie?’

‘Uncle Birdie,’ Peter hissed.

‘Uncle Birdie – you like ’im?’

‘Uh-huh. And you?’

‘He not well an’ he don’ know it.’

He felt Peter shifting in the dark. ‘S’not true – Tan Cee tell you so?’

‘No, I tell Tan Cee so.’

‘Which part of ’im not well?’ Peter said.

‘You say s’not true, so I not tellin you.’ He felt his brother moving towards him, felt his breath against his ear.

‘Jumbie Boy – you’z a flippin liar.’

Elena Bender was smiling when she asked Pynter to come and sit with her beneath the plum tree. That was not good. His mother never smiled so early in the day. She picked up a piece of stick and began making patterns in the dust with it. A thin film of sweat had settled among the very fine hairs on her upper lip. She glanced sideways at him, briefly, tried to smile again, but he could see that she was forcing it.

‘You goin to your father house from Sunday.’

‘My father – Manuel Forsyth?’

‘You don’ call ’im Manuel Forsyth; he’s your father.’

‘He got another name?’

‘Is the same rudeness you bring to your Uncle Birdie yesterday. You see how upset you make him? Peter know what y’all father look like. You don’t think you ought to know him too?’

He didn’t answer straight away, preferring to follow the flight of a pair of chicken hawks high on the wind above them. Their cries reminded him of bright sharp things – knives and nails and needles.

‘He a old man,’ he said. ‘Ten times older’n you. Dat’s what Miss Lizzie say. I not goin nowhere.’

‘What else Miss Lizzie say?’ She was looking at him sideways.

‘Lots o’ things.’

‘Like what?’ She was speaking but her lips were hardly moving.

A small current of uneasiness ran through him. He turned his head away from her, remembering the evening he returned from the river after Tan Cee had taken him there. During dinner, Patty the Pretty had come to sit with him. She’d asked him what had happened down there by the river. He told her, finding that he’d lowered his voice like hers. When he finished she was shaking her head and she wasn’t smiling as she did most times.

‘You must never tell your mother about these things, y’unnerstan? You talk to me or Tan Cee, but never your mother, y’hear me?’

He’d asked her why. She seemed to be making up her mind about something, then she touched his arm, ‘Know Miss Maisie?’

He nodded.

‘See that long white mark that run across she face?’

He nodded.

‘Well, one time, when y’all was little baby, Maisie say something to your mother about y’all and Manuel Forsyth. Elena put you an’ Peter down by the roadside and went fo’ her. It take four people to pull her off. She only had time to do that to her face. Imagine if she had another coupla minutes.’

He looked across at his mother, his voice a plea this time. ‘Let Peter go – I don’ like ’im, Na.’

‘You don’ like somebody you don’ know? Is you he ask for.’

‘Why?’

She looked away.

‘I wan’ to stay with Tan.’

‘What you say?’

He felt the change in her. It was as quiet as it was frightening. He jumped to his feet to run. Her hand shot out and closed around his shirt.

‘Siddown!’ The voice came from her throat. ‘Lemme teach you something. I’ll never have to do this with Peter – but you, you different. I don’ know what kind o’ child you is. You want to know who’s your modder? Well, let me,’ she shook him, ‘show you,’ she shook him again, ‘who your modder is!’

She was loosening the buttons of her bodice with the other hand. He watched as she lifted the ends of the garment. Still staring into his eyes, she took his hand and placed it on the small bulge on the left side of her stomach. He tried to pull away. She dragged him back.

‘Peter was here fo’ eight months an’ thirteen days. You,’ she pulled his hand over to the other side, ‘you was here a extra two days. This,’ she forced his finger along the lines that ran like a faint network of vines around the bulges, ‘is y’all signature. Is de writing dat y’all leave on me. Dis is Peter; dis is you. Me, Elena Bender, I’z your modder. So!’ She shook him hard. ‘Don’ get renk with me, y’hear me! I not askin you, I tellin you – next week you goin live with your father.’

She pushed his hand away, got to her feet and went inside.

A couple of mornings every week, when it was still so dark even the chickens beneath the house had not begun to stir, there came the clip-clop-clipping of his father’s donkey, the thud of a bag of provisions hitting the ground, then the voice, ‘Elen-ooy!’

Pynter would listen to his mother in the bedroom as she got up, quickly dressed and hurried down the hill to the road.

Pynter would hear the rhythm of the donkey’s hooves fading into the distance, following them in his imagination through the sea of plantation canes in the lower valleys of Old Hope, over the Déli Morne River, past the stony wastelands of Salt Fields, where they said the bamboo rose so high their branches swept the sky.

For a long time Pynter had tried to put a face to that voice.

The hands that lifted him onto the back of the donkey were big like Birdie’s. A face turned back at him – brown and smooth and hairless, the eyes resting on him almost as a hand would. And then a voice, ‘Is quiet where we going; you sure you want to come?’

He nodded. He liked the smell of the man.

His father’s house stood on a ridge that looked down on Old Hope. From there he could see the deep green scoop of the valley winding towards the Kalivini swamps where his grandfather disappeared, and the purple-dark hills that seemed to hold back the sea from spilling over onto the canes and the people who worked in them. His father’s house was smaller than his mother’s and had no yard to speak of, just the lawn he was not allowed to walk on, which belonged to Miss Maddie – a greying woman whom he’d only caught a glimpse of, and who his father called his daughter.

A window with six glass panes let light into the bedroom. It was the only room with a door that was open to the day.

His father pointed at the back room first – a lightless doorway that stood gaping like a toothless mouth, and from which came a warm and unexpected breath – the odour of musty, nameless things. ‘Don’t go in there,’ he said, without offering a reason. ‘And leave this place alone,’ he added, turning to the living room.

He’d said ‘this place’ as if the living room did not belong to the house. It had been abandoned to spiders and dust mites. A mahogany table, on whose surface he drew finger faces and curlicues, stood in the middle of it. The matching chairs were arranged around it strangely, as if the people who had been sitting there had suddenly got up and, without looking back, had left the room for good. Two brownish photographs hung in the gloomiest corner of the room. The smaller one was just the head of a young man, his hair cropped short, staring directly out at them. In the other, a man sat on a beautiful chair with a gaze that was direct and grave. A still-faced woman rested a gloved hand on his arm. Four children, a boy and three girls, were arranged around them like flowers in a vase.

His father gave him their names the moment he stepped through the doorway: Maddie, a sour-faced child, knock-kneed and resentful even then. To the left of her, Eileen – beautiful and dreamy. His father’s voice had gone dreamy too. Eileen left the island soon’z she was old enough to travel. Never look back. Pearly was the youngest – too young then to know that she had to sit still to get a proper picture, which was why her face was no more than a smudge.

He left Gideon for last. Gideon was the only boy. ‘Apart from y’all, of course. Gideon build bridges for the government.

‘Gideon fifty next year. Pearly forty-seven. Eileen,’ he smiled, ‘she thirty-five next month.’

For a while Pynter felt that the man had forgotten he was there. The bag he’d taken off the donkey was still hanging from his shoulder. His eyes were on the photograph. A stillness had come over his face.

‘Time pass. Time pass too fast, son. Time does pass too fast.’ His voice had grown thick and slow. There was a sadness there that made Pynter turn his eyes up at the heavy shape against the backlight of the doorway.

Once, this shape had been no more than a sound. A voice. It used to stop his hands from whatever they were doing. His father’s voice – different from the voices of all the men he’d ever heard. And now that he could see him, it was the only voice that fitted the face to which it belonged. A large face, brown like burnt ginger, not smiling, not strict, not young, not old. A face that shifted easily, like shadow over water.

Miss Lizzie’s words came back to him, ‘Ole Man Manuel, s’not s’pose to be.’ Words that invited him to shame. Words that tried to force themselves into him the way his mother and his aunts would pin his arms against his sides, pull his head back and pour medicine down his throat. Old Man Manuel … Peter and he were not supposed to be. Something, something must’ve happen. Something …

And whatever that something was, it shone like a dark light in their eyes; in the women’s laughter by the river. It was there in the silence of his mother when she pulled him and Peter close to her to inspect their hair or skin. It was there when she combed their hair or bathed them. There in the words they said that Gideon had told her. It was the reason why Gideon had tried to take them away from her before she’d even had them. It was there, always there, in his grandmother’s quiet gaze.

He felt a movement from his father, more a stirring of the air about him, and then the hand, rough like bark, resting against his right brow. His father’s hand moved down and cupped his chin. Pynter eased himself away.

‘You’ll meet Maddie tonight,’ he said, swinging his head slightly at the large white concrete house a little way behind them. ‘Call her Miss Maddie, y’hear me? And when Pearly come to see me, call her Sister Pearl. As for Gideon … ’

‘Gideon – he – he come here?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘He my brother too?’

‘He my son, you my child. He your brother.’

Pynter shook his head.

‘Whatsimatter?’ The man looked at him concerned.

‘Then, den how come …’ His tongue felt heavy on the words.

‘How come, what …?’

‘How come he try to kill us? Before we even born.’

As soon as he said it, he knew that something terrible had come out of his mouth. So terrible it froze the shape above him. Made it lower itself before him, reach out solid hands that closed down on his shoulders. He felt the deep ruffle of the bag just before it struck the floorboards. The vibration travelled up his feet and made his heart turn over. Now he felt his father’s breath on his face.

‘Who tell you that? Who tell you that!’

He feared the rage seeping out of that voice. He feared the strength he felt in those fingers.

‘Nobody,’ he stammered. ‘Nobody tell me nothing.’

The fingers released him. ‘You never use them words again, y’hear me, boy. Never lemme hear you say them words.’

‘No, Pa.’

His father stood up then, spoke as if he were addressing something that lay some place far beyond the walls of the house. ‘You call me Pa. I like dat. You must always call me Pa.’

Pynter nodded, swallowing hard on the soft knot in his throat.

He never asked his father who he left his rich garden to or why he gave it up as soon as his mother sent him off to live with him. Why so soon after Santay they were so quick to see him off again. Why they had chosen him instead of Peter. Why they would not tell him for how long.

‘Is you your father ask for,’ his mother said. But she could not hold his eyes. She couldn’t put words to the other things that her tied-up lips and drifting eyes were concealing from him.

He never asked his father about the silence which sat like an accusation between Miss Maddie and himself. Why Miss Maddie looked past him the way she did from the very first morning he called out to her, made her leave her porch and cross her lawn to come over and see her lil brother.

He was not sure she saw him. Her eyes had drifted skywards, over to the Kalivini hills, up to the Mardi Gras and finally down to some point above his head. They passed briefly over their father’s face and settled on the concrete steps on which they were all standing. Small eyes in a face as dark and swollen as blood-pudding.

‘Uh-huh,’ she grunted, and waddled back to her porch. He was sure she hadn’t seen him.

Her son Paso came just when the small pre-dawn birds began to stir the early-morning stillness with their chirping, when the crickets quietened suddenly and altogether, and the silence they left behind got filled in by the humming of the ocean a couple of hills beyond and the whispery shiftings of the canes. He came like the tail end of a dream and seemed to disappear soon after, making Pynter wonder if he had ever been there at all.

‘A scamp,’ his father told him, ‘a child of the night, that Paso. I don’t remember what he look like now, becuz I don’ know when last I see him. You never see him in the day.

‘Not surprising when a pusson know how and where the boy was born. Maddie picked ’im up in Puerto Rico, see? Take a boat back home when she was big as a full moon. Bring the belly back with her but not the man. She didn make it back to land on time. Had him on the sea. Matter o’ fact,’ the old man slapped his knee and laughed, ‘she had him in the middle of it. Now, a chile that come like that can’t tell nobody which country he from, not so? Cuz he wasn’ born in one. Now that’s between me and you, y’unnerstan?’

Pynter thought about his father’s words and began laughing too.

The old man seemed surprised by it. ‘’Mind me of a uncle you had – that laugh.’

‘He here?’

‘He out there. In the hallway. Just the picture. He not with us no more.’

‘He … ’

‘Before you born. Sea take him.’ His father passed his hand across his face as if he were washing it with air. ‘Funny fella he was, your uncle. But nice. Dress like a king. Dress in black, only black. We used to call him Parlourman because of the black. Pretty face. Smooth like a star apple. Talk pretty too. Every woman he meet used to want to kill for him; but he never was interested. I could never figure ’im out. He didn have no children either. Sank with a boat between Curaçao an’ Panama.’

‘What dead feel like, Pa – it hurt?’

‘Don’ know. Why you ask?’

‘Jus’ want to know … ’

‘When it come, I s’pose the part of you that know jus’ not around to know no more, y’unnerstan?’ As he touched the boy’s face with the meat of his hand, a chuckle rose from his chest. ‘Even I don’ unnerstan what I jus’ tell you. Come eat some food. I glad you here.’

Over the steamed yams, sweet potatoes and fried shark that Miss Maddie had covered up and left on the steps for him, his father’s eyes were on him again. This time it was a different look. It seemed impossible that the anger he’d seen there earlier could reside in eyes so soft.

‘You talk kind of funny too – like him.’

‘Like …?’

‘Like your Uncle Michael.’

He wanted to know more about this odd uncle that the sea had taken. To understand the nature of the quietness that came over his father when he called his name. But all he got was a promise that wasn’t really one, ‘P’raps I’ll get the time to tell you about it one day, if I manage to find de mood.’ Or a statement that was so tied up it took him many fruitless days of trying to unravel it. ‘When a man put hi dog to sleep, then is sleep it have to sleep, y’unnerstan?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I can’t explain no better.’

5

HE UNCOVERED HIS Uncle Michael in a grip in the room his father had told him not to enter. He also found his mother there.

He didn’t understand why his father should forbid him to enter a room whose door was wide open. He could see, dimly, right through to the furthest wall. Mornings, he stood at the lip of that door-mouth, his head turned sideways, his father’s voice like a staying hand inside his head. But the fingers of light that entered through the cracks in the board wall on the other side kept drawing him back to the gloom inside. However bright the day, the light in there was always yellow. It made burning pathways across the floor, on books and piles of paper, along the red handle of an axe, over the bunched darkness of a broom, and small piles of clothing strewn like debris thrown up on an abandoned shore.

The room had an odour, too, that spread itself throughout his father’s house – the smell of things that had dried too fast to rot.

It took him days. Of tiptoeing and stopping. Of stopping and tiptoeing. Each time a step or two further in, listening to his dozing father’s breathing in the room next door, mapping out the space around him with his eyes, summoning up his courage. It was a while before he noticed the grip in the corner. It was partly concealed beneath a child’s small mattress. A small, deep-brown case, worn and raw at the edges, with bright brass studs at each corner. The three latches at the front were also made of brass, the handle shaped from some white-veined material that had a wondrous glasslike translucency. He laid it gently back against the mattress, wondering how it could have got there. If the sea had swallowed the boat his father’s brother had been travelling on, wouldn’t it have also taken this with it?

There was a small book in there. It was laid on top of the folded clothing, with pages that looked and smelled like paper money. There was a picture of a slim-faced man at the front of it, with large, light-flecked pools of eyes staring out at him, and a mouth that was soft and curved like his Auntie Patty’s.

He’d seen pictures before but never one like this: the paper so smooth and shiny it seemed to preserve something of the darkness and the glow of his uncle’s skin. Those eyes were really watching him, still on him when he reached beyond the little book and began to slowly lift the clothing aside. Things in there were cool to his touch even though his hands were sweating. His thumb was bleeding where he’d pulled on the catch too hard and a splinter had slipped into his flesh.

It was like reaching into a dream. The lining that ran around the box shifted like water beneath his fingers. The shirts were made of fabrics soft as soap suds. The white ones seemed to give off their own glow in the gloom. A razor folded in a soft brown square of leather. Talcum powder in a pouch that smelled like cinnamon, like the ocean, but mostly like the scent that came off the skin of limes.

Further down beneath the razor and the shirts, past the heavy grey trousers, his fingers hit on something hard. He touched its edges and it slid away from him. He could not close his hand around it. Realising what it was, he slipped his hand under and eased it out – another small book, its cover as rough as bark, its pages ragged at the edges as if they had been ripped from something else and put together by absent-minded hands. Nothing in it but small, haphazard markings like a nest of disturbed ants spilling over the edge of every page. Nothing much worth looking at apart from the photo of a boy.

Perhaps it was the smell of the fabric, the sheen of all those things in that dirty time-scratched box, that held him there.

The boy in the photograph was sitting on a step, his head thrown back as if he were in the middle of the most beautiful daydream. The houses and the people around him were bleached almost to a whiteness, but the boy wouldn’t have seen them because his eyes were closed. And as Pynter used to do in his time of blindness, he shut his eyes, rubbing his thumb against the upturned face in the photograph. He found himself slipping into a happy dreaminess, and he knew that this boy, at some time in his uncle’s life, had meant everything to him.

He found his mother in that room too, scribbled over the fat purple-veined leaves that people called the love leaf. Santay had shown it to him – a strange leaf that took root anywhere, even between the covers of a book, and which threw out little plants exactly like itself from the little dents around its edges. They called it love leaf because it fed on air, drank the water from itself and gave life to its children just long enough for their roots to reach the earth. The mother plant could release them only when she dried up and died. Until then, they fed on her and lived. What better love than that?

But, like his uncle’s markings, his mother’s made no sense to him. He’d seen those lines and curlicues of hers before, from the very first week that Santay sent him home. Peter said she’d always made them. These were different, smaller, packed tightly together, but they had the same loops and curves as those she made on the earth between her feet when she sat alone beneath the grapefruit tree, a stick in her hand, a strip of grass between her teeth, her eyes so far away she wouldn’t have seen him if he’d stood in front of her and waved.

The leaves were dried up now, even their children, because, lodged as they were between the covers of the large brown book, they could not fall to earth. It smelled of earth, the book, dropped carelessly in the corner by the door, its covers riddled with the little tunnels the worms had made through it.

He found nothing else among the pages, just the leaves with those marks he’d always thought his mother made only in the dust.

The days merged into each other like the lines he marked on the steps with the bits of chalk and charcoal he found inside the room. His father rarely left the house. He would sit on the long canvas chair beside the door, muttering to himself over the Bible, solid like a slab of rock on his knees, its pages spread like wings on the altar of his palms.

They hardly talked. Pynter didn’t mind. He had the room to go to.

Over the weeks, Pynter came to know the cracks that ran like little ravines in the flooring of that room, from which he’d extricate buttons, marbles, needles, rusty pins, little bits of coloured glass, a child’s gold earring, three silver coins with birds on them, a small chain of beads that slipped from the crease of his palm in a glittering liquid stream, a tiny copper buckle and bits of fingernail.

Still, he felt that even if he’d entered this room, had explored every part of it with his fingers, it had not really opened up itself to him.

‘Pa, I want to learn to read.’

The old man stopped the spoon before his lips and, without looking up, he said, ‘I been thinkin that you’ll have to soon. I’ll start you off with this.’ He nodded at the Bible.

By the time the man with the white shirt and the stick with the head of a lion came, Pynter had begun to make sense of all his mother’s writing on those leaves. Her words, he realised, were not meant for his father. Not in the way that Uncle Michael’s were meant for the boy in the photograph. She wrote them the way she talked, almost as if she were answering Miss Lizzie and the women in the river. A story which over time he slowly pieced together, ignoring the nudge of hunger in his guts, not hearing his father calling him sometimes as he sat in the gloom shuffling the leaves, sorting and re-sorting them until the words followed each other easily. A strange feeling it was too, rebuilding his and Peter’s history with those dead leaves, one he now knew began long before either of them was born.

When John Seegal walk i use to wish i went with him. i use to wish i didnt have to wait no more for him to come back home. from the time he leave all I find myself doing was just waiting. i used to like Fridays by the river fridays was quiet like you dont have nobody else in the world excepting you and the river water running over stone like it want to tell you something, and the quiet wrap itself nice and safe round you. i use to like that. It feel like if the water was my thoughts running through my head.

One morning i take the washing early. i take the long way down, through the ravine that was a road when rain didnt fall and the bottom get dry.

i come to the place i like to wash because it got a flat stone there. It was big and wide like a bed, like a place you want to sleep on. The top was bleach like a sheet from all the soap that dry on it.

i like to finish wash and leave the clothes to dry so i could watch the water turn white or get dark according to what cloud pass over it. But dat time for no reason at all i get tired of just sitting down dere and I decide to walk down the river. i was talking to myself, or maybe thinking to meself i dont remember now so I didnt notice tie-tongue Sharon and she son a little way ahead of me.

i know her. she cant talk because she tongue was sew down to she mouth. is so she born. People treat her different because of that, but i never. First time i look at her close i see how pretty she is. She got the prettiest teeth anybody ever see and she got eye that look at you as if they watchin from inside a room.

i see how she say things with she face too, if you look in she eye you understand everything she cant say with words. i did always like miss sharon.

She was standing by the end of the stretch of water in front of me, and the little boy was standing up in the middle of the water with her too. They was naked as they born and she was bathing him. It dont have no words for it. i feel sometimes that is because she cant talk words that she show so much love with them two hand she have. i remember the light too because the sun did find a place through all dem leaf and it fall on them. the little boy was shyning like if fire itself did bathing him. i could hear he voice and hear him laughing to heself sometimes and sometimes answering questions i never hear miss Sharon ask him. she was full with child, contented and full, that is what i remember. Like was them alone in the world and still them wasnt missing nobody. Not like me.

One time she rest her hand on her belly. I see the boy face. I see how perfect and happy he was. Was like if all the question I been asking ever since my father leave get answer right there, all them question I didnt even know I want a answer for. I didnt miss my fadder John Seegal no more.

I know miss Sharon know dat I was there because after a while the two of them was lookin over where I was. I wonder to meself how come they know I there on that stone behind the bush. But then seein as I know she was watching me I get up sort of guilty.

She do the funniest thing when I stand up. She laugh.

I didnt hear her laugh but I know she laugh because she whole body do it. It shift that way and this way like she koodnt keep the funniness inside of she. I didnt want her to hold it in eider because she look nice an pretty laughing like that. I get up from where I was and walk down to her because she call me with she hand and when I reach she look in my face kind of soft and deep. The little boy was pretty like her. He was slim and and smooth like guava wood.

Dat light, is de light I still remember. All dat light around dem and I was in dat light now, like if I did belong dere too.

I know she must have hear me thinking because she take my hand and rest it on she belly like i was touching the whole world with my hand or the reason for the world, or something.

I ask her how I could come like her. what I did mean was how I could be so happy and contented. She look at the boy and she understand and her body laugh. Her face and her hand tell him something dat he tell me afterwards. he say dat she say I have to be a woman first. A woman. Like that word was something that she just hand over to me.

i get impatient with de years. I get sort of fed up waitin to turn woman, sometimes. And a couple of times I try to hurry things up. I start talkin to meself too, bicause all them thoughts was running round inside my head like ants and when I couldn hold dem in, I sort of let dem roll out of me and i write dem down on anything my hand fall on. Is how they begin to think that I gone crazy. Dat my father spirit get tired of that dirty swamp down dere and seein as I was his favrite before Patty come he come back to possess me.

I know you long before you know me. I know you from de time you look down straight at me one morning, when I get up early to go to the pipe for water.

I had my bucket on my head when you reach me and I lift my eye to say Mornin Missa Manuel Forsyth. I tell myself afterwards that I shouldnt do that. I should a keep my head straight but I was remembering what Miss Sharon tell me by the river. Everything I been waitin fo ever since she tell me come back to me.

You didnt look like no old man to me. Wasnt no old fella I see when I look and wasnt what I see afterwards.

I dont know why it had to take three months of getting up early in the morning and saying Good Morning Missa Manuel befo I work meself up enough to tell you what I want. And it wasnt no old fella lookin at me when I ask you first time even if you look at me as if I mad.

I keep asking till I wear you down. After a little time I see you couldnt hide behind your age no more because all thats left was a man looking at a woman.

That was how I come to feel alright again since my father leave, because after that I was going to have something dat bilong to me.

What I never understand …

He could not find the leaf that would have told him what she never understood. Not a whole one, but fragments that, whichever way he placed them, did not fit together …

…dam fool to believe ——

—— crazy l——

——y —— mother and all th——

—— love and ——

—— chilren who is ——.

—— dam fool ——

—— hatin all —— ——nofabitch tha—

How did it end? Was it with love and —— or was it with — — hatin all ——?

Uncle Michael’s words were stranger than his mother’s, colliding in odd and unexpected ways.

moon over your shoulder shadow in my eyes.

Today you looked much older.

Today I made you cry.

Aruba, May 1945

And it was strange that even when he’d forgotten them, it still felt as if they’d left some part of themselves inside his head. Short words, not half as long as his mother’s; sometimes a line running across a page – like a tiny ant-trail against a vast white desert.

Day yawns, cracks the egg of dawn. A coq-soleil’s sopranoing rises and circles a clean sun. Panama, August 1947

Those words did not help him understand why his uncle never wanted children. They were like the doorway that had invited him into this abandoned room. Everything was laid out before his eyes but their messages remained hidden. A darkened room that was as full of stories as the women in the river. Only these were littered in untidy heaps across the dusty floor, and stranger to him than anything he’d ever heard before.

It going to be quiet up there, his father had told him, but it was not quiet in his head. He missed the voices of the women in the yard. The foolish and the awful things they talked about and laughed over. He missed his fights with Peter and above all he missed his auntie’s hands.

Now that the dry season had come, his aunt, Tan Cee, would be down there among those tiny black dots crawling along the green edges of the never-ending fields of sugar cane. Patty the Pretty would be home because Leroy had taken her out of cane. They would no doubt be doing what his grandmother said his youngest aunt always did when Leroy was around: trying for a child.

He never wondered what that meant. It was some kind of magic between adults that involved hiding themselves away and, if he were to judge by what he saw from Patty, looking very sleepy and smiling all the time.

Tan Cee would be down there with the men, swinging her machete at the roots of the cane, his mother just behind her, gathering them in bundles, tying them and lifting them over her head onto the tractors that looked like big yellow beetles from where he stood. Home was just a walk away, but from here it seemed as if it would take an entire lifetime to reach them.

He wondered if Birdie was with them, then he remembered Tan Cee saying that Birdie only ever sweated over bread.

It was quiet up here. The quietness stretched beyond the house. At the back of it, the land ran wild for miles, all the way past the hellish quarry-land of Gaul through to Morne Bijoux on the other side of the ridge of hills that separated them from the rest of the world. Afternoons, when the heat of the day pushed the old man into a deep sleep, he left the room and retreated into the bushes, making his own little pathways among the borbook and black sage.

There was a long, narrow ravine that went down to a tall wall of plants with bright blossoms. His first few visits there, he couldn’t figure out why everything seemed to be either in fruit or flowering when everything else around was dry. He had gone closer, to examine those heavy deep-scented flowers, when he felt himself falling. He landed in a tangle of wist vines, was shaken but not hurt. Sat there while his eyes adjusted to the thick green light.

He was in a gully that he would never have known existed had he not fallen through the bush that covered it like a roof. The earth was dark with dampness, though it hadn’t rained for weeks. It was cool here too, like the riverbank. There were the same darkish odours of growth and fermentation.

He began picking his way through the tangle. This place puzzled him. The earth was covered with guavas. They hung thickly from the branches above his head. A slight brush of his fingers and they fell into his hands. Wherever there were guavas there were serpents. Santay had told him about the reddish ones that grew long and fat and wrapped themselves in tight knots around the branches. And sure enough he saw them, untying themselves, their heads stretched out towards him, their tongues flickering like small flames in their mouths. He made a hammock of his shirt, selected the fruits he wanted and left there quickly. Later, in the dimming light of the late evening, he sat on the steps and broke open the fruit, tasted each one tentatively before stuffing himself full.

He came back to that place often, because he could find food there. He found crayfish canes and water lemons further down the gully, and a little walk beyond that, sapodillas and star apples. Everything was growing there in that long green tunnel of light and leaves, a secret place that only he, the birds, the millipedes and serpents knew about. He called it Eden.

It was during one of his visits there that Gideon came. When Pynter returned to his father’s house, he heard a new voice pitched high and fast. It sounded like an argument. His father’s rumblings were soft and subdued against the other. Miss Maddie was bending over a pepper plant on the side of the house, a can of water in her hand. His father was lying back on the canvas chair. A man in a pressed blue shirt sat on a chair he had taken from the living room. His legs were close together and he was leaning forward slightly. There were papers on the bed.

The stranger turned and saw him, looked at him as if he knew him. His eyes paused on his face, then dropped to his naked feet. They stayed there a while before travelling back up to his face again. Pynter was suddenly aware that he hadn’t washed his hands. Hadn’t poured water on his feet and cleaned them in the grass outside. He felt an urge to go outside and do it.

‘So you the one they call Half Pint?’ The man was showing him his teeth. His face was strange. It was long like his father’s but thinner, with all the bones showing through. His eyes were round and bright like polished marbles and when he spoke, his lips hardly moved.

‘Pynter,’ his father said, ‘dis is Gideon, your brother.’

Gideon closed his mouth as suddenly as he’d opened it to show his teeth. He turned back to face the old man. ‘So, how you gettin on, Ole Fella?’

‘Don’t “Ole Fella” me, I your father. Pynter?’

‘Pa?’

‘Say hello to your brother, Gideon.’

Gideon threw a quick sideways glance at him. ‘I met the boy already.’

‘Gideon hardly come to look for me,’ his father said. ‘The more money he make, the longer he stay away.’

Gideon protested, his stammery voice rising and falling quickly. His father chuckled. Soon Pynter was not hearing them. He stood at the doorway, his shoulder pressed against the side of it, watching the face they said his mother feared more than any other in the world, following with his eyes the hands that had almost taken Peter and him away from her. Gideon was still wearing his grey felt hat. It looked new. Everything about him looked new, even his pale blue shirt and shiny brown leather shoes.

Gideon turned his head and saw him staring. He glanced at their father, who was busy with figuring out the exact value of the farmland he’d stopped working in the far end of Old Hope. When Gideon turned back to Pynter it was with a look that reminded him of Deeka, like that time she pushed him off the top of her steps and Tan Cee came so close to striking her.

He retreated into the living room and sat on the chair closest to the bedroom door. He didn’t know what was making Gideon talk so low and rapidly, but occasionally he heard the old man chuckle, and just once Manuel Forsyth’s voice rose sharp and clear: ‘You can’t make a fool of me, Gideon. I still got my senses. I not signing anything, specially now that I can’t see too clear what I going be signing.’

Miss Maddie was still out there shuffling around the house. She was nearer the back now, uprooting grass or something. With Gideon here and Miss Maddie at the back, things made a little more sense to him. This dusty wooden house suffused with its deep and sweetish odours of wood-rot and neglect was theirs. Gideon, Miss Maddie, Sister Pearly and Eileen-in-America wouldn’t have minded the shadows in the corners, the very faint odour of Canadian Healing Oil, the smell of bay leaves and black sage that grew on the windward side of the house. It was their feet that had smoothed the wooden floor. The walls had thrown their voices back at them. His father’s house would never be his and Peter’s the way it had been for them.

His mind must have taken him a far way off. Miss Maddie was no longer moving around the house. He got up and went to the bedroom door. ‘Pa tired,’ he said. ‘Dat’s why he not answerin you no more.’

That sudden sideways glance again. The expression was still there when Gideon laughed. ‘’Kay, Pops. I see you again soon.’

Gideon stood up, took out a roll of money and peeled off two brown notes and three green ones. He shoved them in his father’s hand.

‘Thirty-five dollars. All I have. Come, walk me to the door, Quarter Bottle.’

‘My name is Pynter.’

‘What’s the other one call?’

‘Peter. He your brother too.’

Gideon’s hands were stuffed inside his pockets. Keys jangled.

He pulled them out. ‘How you know dat, uh?’

‘Everybody know dat,’ Pynter told him flatly.

Gideon brought his face down close to Pynter’s. ‘Look here, Half Eights.’

‘Pynter!’

‘Okay, Pinky! Either I lookin at a miracle or you and whatever-his-name-is is the fastest one anybody ever pull on my old man and get away with it. Jeez! And believe me dat is a miracle, cuz he never was nobody fool. I don’ see no part of us in you.’

‘Me neither!’ Pynter said, and he turned to run back in, but Gideon’s hand had closed around his collar. He could have cried out, let his father know, but he didn’t want to. He spun round, stared into the man’s face, putting the weight of all the memories of all the things the women by the river had said behind his words. ‘I don’ like you, Gideon. I never like you since before I born. An’ long as I live, I never goin to like you.’

Gideon stiffened. Pynter thought he was about to hit him. But something in Pynter had changed from the night when Coxy had pinned his back against a tree and looked into his eyes. He would never let a man lay his hands on him again. He closed his fingers around Gideon’s wrist and had twisted his shoulders to sink his teeth into his arm when a voice came suddenly between them, ‘Let the little fella go, Gidiot.’

Gideon stepped back. Pynter turned his head to see a young man leaning against the house. He had both hands in his pockets and his legs were crossed. His eyes were like Miss Elaine’s – large and wide and bright. There was no collar on his white shirt. A small book with a blue cover peeked out of one of his pockets.

‘What the hell you want?’ Gideon squeezed the words out through his teeth.

‘Pick on somebody your size – you flippin thug.’

‘Lissen, Mister Pretty Pants – watch your … ’

The young man’s movement cut Gideon’s words short. He’d pushed himself off the wall so quickly, so unexpectedly, that Pynter felt his heart flip over.

Gideon stepped closer. ‘You try anything, I give what you got coming to you.’

‘Not from you. For sure. And don’t forget, you beating up a child and threatening me in my mother yard.’

The man mumbled something under his breath and turned to leave.

Paso smiled. ‘Say what you thinking, Big Fella.’

‘You and your mother won’ like it.’

Paso curled a beckoning finger at Pynter. ‘Come this side,’ he said. He was looking at Gideon sideways. ‘That’s bad blood there. Sour blood.’

‘At least I’m a man.’

‘You say that again, I make you sorry.’

Their voices had drawn Miss Maddie out onto the porch. Gideon saw her, straightened up and strolled out of the yard.

The youth stared down at Pynter, smiling. ‘First time you meet that dog?’

Pynter nodded.

‘Don’t go near ’im. He’ll bite anything that move. When he come, jus’ give ’im space.’ He stepped back, playfully almost, as if he were dancing. ‘So you my mother brother? I hear a lot ’bout y’all. People round here talk!’ He thumbed his mother’s house. ‘Call me Paso, and you – you Paul – no, Peter. Not so?’

‘I Pynter. Peter home.’

Paso reached for his hand and shook it. ‘So how I must call you – Uncle?’

‘Pynter.’

‘Pynter, okay – nuh, I think I’ll stick with Uncle. It got a certain, uhm, ring, nuh resonance to it. See you around, Big Fella.’

He winked and strolled away. Pynter watched him walk towards the porch, watched him until he stepped behind his mother and seemed miraculously to be swallowed up by her bulk.

Later in the evening, when dusk had just begun to sprinkle the foothills with that creeping ash that would thicken into night, Paso appeared again, this time with Manuel Forsyth’s food. He had changed his trousers but not his shirt.

‘Still there, Uncle?’

Pynter nodded. He’d spent most of the afternoon waiting to catch a glimpse of Paso again.

Paso placed the plate on the step beside his foot. ‘I tell the Madre to put a little extra in for you – not just this time, but every time. You been inside that lil room yet?’

The question caught him unawares. Paso dropped questions the way a person threw a punch when the other was least expecting it.

‘Which room?’ Pynter asked.

‘The dark one.’ He winked.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Find what I find in there?’

Pynter turned his head and shrugged. Paso laughed.

‘Take me a coupla days and a bottle of the Madre cooking oil to grease them hinges. The Old Fella used to keep it locked. He shouldn ha’ tell me not to go in there. S’like an open invitation, s’far as I concern. I leave it open so he could know I was in there. He never close it back.’

‘Where you go to every night-time?’

The smile left his nephew’s face, but only briefly. In less than a heartbeat it returned. ‘Wherever night-time want me. Ever hear this one?

The road is long, the night is deep, I got promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

‘Uncle Michael?’

‘Nuh, Merican fella name Robbie Frost – with all the warmth from me, of course.’

He was fingering the little blue book in his shirt pocket. ‘Know any poetry?’

‘Wozzat?’

‘You serious?’

Pynter nodded.

‘You been reading Mikey’s stuff – and …’ He laughed, looked at Pynter closely and laughed again.

‘Jeezas, man! Moon over your shoulder.’

‘Shadow in me eye,’ Pynter cut in. The words had come almost despite himself.

‘You been reading Mikey stuff and you don’ know what it call? Listen to this …’ His fingers slid the little notebook from his shirt. He held it up before him. The way Missa Geoffrey sometimes held Miss Tilina’s face.

In the morning dark

my people walk to the time of clocks whose hands

have spanned so many nights

His voice was as soft as Missa Geoffrey’s too, and it was as if he were talking to himself from a bellyful of sadness.

Paso stopped, looked up. He didn’t smile. Pynter shifted under his stare and before he lost the courage, before it became impossible to say what had been sitting on his heart from the moment his fingers retrieved that strange little book from his uncle’s grip, he turned up his face at Paso.

‘I wan’ to make wuds like dat too, I want … I …’ Something desperate and quiet fluttered in his heart. He turned his head away.

Paso steered him towards the steps and sat him down. ‘That book was the most interesting thing you find in there, not so?’

Pynter nodded.

‘Why?’

‘Don’ know.’

‘I tell you something. Once, it cross my mind to take it. Yunno – copy all of it over to this lil book and make meself believe is mine. I start doing it. But then, that same night, I had a dream. I was walking down some kinda road. Long road. I couldn see the end of it. The more I walk, the more I see road in front of me. When I was close to givin up, I realise I had somebody walking beside me. It wasn’ Michael. It was hi friend, the boy.’ Paso threw a sideways glance at him. ‘Yunno what that young fella was to ’im?’

Pynter shook his head.

‘One day it will come to you. Right now nothing in life ain’t prepare you for that kind of … of awareness. Mebbe you’ll never work it out. Don’ know … Anyway, that fella say something to me that I wake up with in me head. It come like a realisation. I can’t forget it. Now I going to pass it on to you. “Find your own words” – that’s what he say to me. “You done have all of dem inside you; you just got to take dem out and put dem in de order that make your living and your thinking and your feelings make sense.” Y’unnerstan?’

Pynter nodded, even though he wasn’t sure he did.

‘When you try to steal a pusson words, s’like you trying to steal their soul. You want to make words work like that? Then feel with your eye and see with your heart.’ He elbowed Pynter gently. ‘Now tell me, Uncle – what is the colour of my eye?’

Pynter looked at him, a shy sideways glance. ‘Black.’

Paso shook his head, worked his mouth as if he’d just munched on something awful.

‘Nuh! That’s seeing with your eye, not feeling with it. Now feel – turn your mind to all the things the old man must ha’ tell you about me. Talk to me, fella, jus’ … ’

‘Night.’

‘Wha’?’

Pynter smiled, tentatively. ‘De colour of your eye is night.’

‘You sure?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘The colour of yours is water. History too – a lot o’ things looking out at me from dem eyes o’ yours. What’s the taste of cane? Think of your mother, think of all your people down there. What’s the taste of cane?’

Pynter lifted dreamy eyes up at the Mardi Gras. ‘Bitter. Cane is bitter. An’ dat mountain up dere is ah old, old man, quarrellin with God.’

He felt Paso’s eyes on him. ‘Them your words?’

‘Dem my words,’ Pynter told him.

‘Well, dem is words – y’hear me, Uncle?’

They laughed out loud together.

For the second time that day, Pynter watched his nephew walk away. So strange. So different, so, so … bee-yoo-tee-ful.

The next morning Pynter’s sister called him to collect the old man’s breakfast. He came out and took the plate. He noticed an extra helping of sweet potatoes. The food was also warm. He didn’t trust her smile. The rest of her face wasn’t smiling.

‘Gideon stay with y’all a long while,’ she said.

‘Yes, Miss Maddie, with Pa not with me.’

‘First time you meet him?’

‘Yes, Miss Maddie.’

‘He talk about a lot o’ tings?’

‘Fink so.’

‘You think so – you didn’t hear what he say?’

‘Culatral,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Culatral, o’ something like that.’

‘Collateral – the sonuva …’ Her voice retreated into her throat and kept rumbling in there. ‘He say for what?’

‘Say what fo’ what?’

‘Collateral – he say collateral fo’ what?’

‘Don’ know.’

‘Is the land, right?’

‘Which land?’

‘Never mind, you hear de word “land” come from deir mouth?’

‘Who mouth?’

‘Paso say you smart – I wondering which part o’ you he find the smartness, cuz …’ She sucked her teeth and began walking back towards the house.

‘Thanks for de two extra piece o’ fry potato,’ he called after her, remembering his manners.

She stopped short, shook her head and continued walking.

6

WHENEVER GIDEON CAME, Pynter left the house for the gully. Now he knew he shared Eden with two people. They came from the other side of the hill, where a cluster of small, brightly painted houses were huddled beneath a line of corse trees whose branches swept the sky.

They arrived together, the woman holding the front of her dress high above the water grass and crestles. The man was the colour of the mahogany chairs inside his father’s house. His hair rested on his shoulders. The woman stepped onto the boulder so that she was like a giant butterfly above the water grass, and called his name.

‘Geoffrey!’ she said, and the words came out like a bird call, like the beginning of a song.

He called her Petal, sometimes P, or Tilina, and from where he sat in the nest of elephant grass, Pynter gathered that her father’s name was Pastor Greenway, and that Geoffrey herded sheep somewhere in the valley beneath Morne Bijoux. He spoke of his sheep the way the women in the river spoke of their children. He learned that Pastor Greenway would kill Miss Petalina if he knew she ran away to meet Geoffrey here. The fear was there on her face when she arrived, coming off her like the perfume she was wearing.

Pynter always got there before they did. He would listen to the man sing to himself with that heavy bullfrog voice, watch him gather leaves before Miss P arrived. Sometimes he would close his eyes and feel the man’s low thunder vibrate deep inside his head – a rich voice, dark and thick as molasses, bouncing around the gully.

He liked to watch Miss Lina coming across the sprays of light pouring through the undergrowth, falling over her yellow dress, making her look pretty as an okra flower. She would come to rest beside Geoffrey on the nest of leaves he’d made for them both.

Pynter waited until their wrestling was over, until her chirpings had subsided, and Geoffrey’s croakings had grown low. And then he crept away.

Back at the house, with Gideon gone, he would find his father quiet. He knew it was a kind of war between them – a battle in which his father was struggling to hold on to something that Gideon wanted badly. It left the old man sleepy and exhausted. Pynter would reach for the large black book, lower himself on the floor, his toes resting lightly on the old man’s feet, and begin to read for him.

Pynter loved this time of quietness, when the last of the evening light poured into the room and settled like honey on the bed, on the wood of the long canvas chair and on his father’s arms. He loved the feeling of lightness that rose in him when he knew that Gideon would not come again for another week.

But a shadow had crept into these moments, something his father had been keeping from him and Gideon. It was there in the way the old man avoided signing the papers brought to him each week, how he passed his hands across his face more and more these days. Their father was going blind. Pynter saw it approaching the way night crept down the slopes of the Mardi Gras. He saw it wrap itself around the old man like a caul and settle him back against the canvas chair. He saw how it made his gestures smoother, softer and less certain. How it steadied his head and made his body slow and unsure of the spaces it had been so accustomed to.

There were times when the old man spoke to Pynter of his days on ships in Panama, his journeying through the forests of Guyana searching for gold in riverbeds and streams, and his time in tunnels that ran like intestines in the belly of the earth. It was down there in one of those mines that he’d walked into a metal rod and damaged his left eye, had lived with that injury most of his life – a small white scar like a tiny worm against the black of his left eye that had suddenly come alive.

The questions his father asked him now were always the same. What was it like before Miss Santay gave him back his eyes? How did he manage when he needed something and no one was there to help him? How would he have felt if he had had to live his whole life with nothing out there to see? And so Pynter taught the old man not to fear the coming darkness. He told him about his own time of darkness, when, for him, the world was just a roar at first, how he’d come to use the sounds around him, how he’d learnt to recognise the things that touched his skin.

It was the other way around for him, his father said, for while he was heading into darkness with a clear picture of the world inside his head, Pynter, having just emerged from it, had only light and colour to look forward to.

‘Not all of it goin to be pretty,’ his father said. ‘But it can’t have pretty without ugly. It can’t have bright without dark.’

He was silent for a long time and so still it was as if he’d gone to sleep. When he spoke again, it was with an emotion that Pynter did not recognise.

‘One thing I’ll carry in my head to the end of my days is the first time y’all mother bring y’all to me. I didn know she was comin. I was weeding corn. I lift my head and see her walkin through my garden with two bundle in she hand, one on eider side. When she reach, she didn say a word, she just hand y’all over to me. She didn have to say nothin, you see? Was the way she do it. Like she was sayin, “Look, I givin you what’s yours.”’

He passed his hand across his face.

‘Gideon – as far as he concern, my funeral done happm and now is time to hand everyting over to him. Like y’all don’t count. Like y’all come from nowhere. Like somebody pick y’all off a tree. But when the time right, I got a nasty shock for him. Let’s hope that he kin take it.’

7

PYNTER COULDN’T FIGURE out how a person’s clothes could remain so smooth and perfectly pleated. It was as if the khaki shirt and trousers of the little man had just been taken still steaming from a hot iron and gently placed on him. He wasn’t walking up the hill – not as normal people did – he tiptoed as if he hated the idea of touching the ground with the soles of his glistening leather shoes. Pynter caught glimpses of his white socks as he lifted his shoes and carefully set them down on the patches of grass that dotted the concrete road. The man carried a little brown case under his arm. It matched his jacket and trousers exactly. In the other hand he swung a beautiful stick with a curved silver top. Despite the heat, he was not sweating.

‘Is there a Mister Manuel Forsyth living here?’

‘What you want my father for?’

‘That’s his place?’ A fat little finger shot out before him.

Pynter didn’t answer at first, but then asked the man to follow him.

The man walked across Miss Maddie’s yard and straight into his father’s house. He entered the bedroom as if he visited every day. His father sensed the stranger’s presence as soon as he stepped in.

‘Who’s it?’ he grumbled.

‘Mister Manuel Forsyth?’

‘I is he. Who you and what you want?’

‘My name is Jonathan, Mister J. Uriah Bostin, Schools Inspector for the parish of San Andrews – urban and suburban, that is – as well as the, er, outer peripheries.’

‘A what?’

‘Schools Inspector, Jonathan U. Bostin.’

The old man’s body relaxed, his face became vacant. ‘I name Manuel. Shake my hand.’

The man seemed to be thinking over the invitation. He stepped forward quickly and stretched out his right hand. Pynter’s father felt the air and got hold of it, his hand almost swallowing the man’s. He seemed to be examining the man’s wrist with his fingers. The stranger didn’t like it. He made an attempt to get his hand back, his large eyes bulging.

‘You short!’ Manuel Forsyth said, letting go. ‘You short-breed people. What you say you name was?’

‘J. U. Bostin.’

‘Those Bostins from Saint Divine – you one of dem?’

‘There is a connection there, I think. I’m here to see you about the boy.’

‘What happen, you not sure?’

‘Well, er, my father is from there – Saint Divine, I mean.’

‘And you?’

‘Well, I was born there, er, if you don’t mind, Mister Forsyth, I am very pressed by the matter at hand. This boy here, your, er, er…’ He frowned at the sheet of paper he’d slid out of the case. ‘It says here that he is your son. Sorry, a typing mishap, I should think.’

‘You shouldn think. He my son. What he done?’

‘Turned truant, I believe, aided and abetted by yourself.’

‘Pynter, get a chair for ’im.’

Bostin placed the brown case on the seat of the chair and the stick beside it. Pynter could see that the silver handle on the stick was the head of a lion. Bostin reached into his right pocket and pulled out a white handkerchief. He wiped not just the seat of the chair but also the back. Finally, with a smooth and curious sideways movement, he took up his things and slid onto the chair.

‘Well, er, yes. It has been brought to my attention that in relation to the education of this boy, and you might be quite unaware of it, you are contravening the law.’

‘Which law?’ His father seemed almost pleased with the man.

Bostin creased his forehead. ‘The law of the land, Mister, er, Forsyth. The one that bequeaths me the powers to bring this matter to your attention and to take the necessary action if my recommendations are not adhered to by yourself and …’

‘Which law you talkin ’bout, passed when, by who, under which sub-section of which article of which Act?’

‘Well, er, we don’t have an Education Act, per se, but …’

‘Then we don’t have no law which kin force me to send my child to school. That is why you come – not so?’

‘You kin say so.’

‘Is so or is not so?’

‘Depends on how you interpret the matter.’ The man lifted his case and placed it on his lap.

‘You a very frustratin fella, y’know dat?’ Manuel Forsyth had pushed himself forward in the chair. ‘You come here to tell me I breakin a law dat don’t exist an’ threaten me in my own house. I have a mind to report you to the head pusson in your place an’ make you lose your job!’

‘I am the head person, Mister Forsyth. You’ll have to, er, report my misdemeanours to me!’

‘Good. I’ll make you fire yourself then. You finish your business with me?’

‘No, sir.’ The man slipped his hand into his case and eased out a green notebook. He studied it for a moment. ‘Truancy is a punishable offence in, er, the, er,’ the notebook moved closer to his face, ‘in the case where parents have been informed and they persist in, er, withholding the subject of the enquiry from going to school.’

His father laughed. ‘Tell me, Bostin, what is de definition of truancy?’

‘Pardon me?’ Bostin wiped his brow.

‘Define truancy fo’ me.’ Manuel Forsyth was directing a kindly gaze in his direction.

Bostin folded the handerkerchief and dropped it on his lap. ‘I don’ wan’ no argument, sah! I jus’ doin my job, okay? Is confusion I tryin to avoid right now.’

‘Truancy occur in instances where – you lissenin?’

Missa Bostin nodded, sourly.

‘He lissenin, Pa,’ Pynter cut in gently.

‘Good! Truancy is when a child, for any kind o’ reason, decide not to go to school. An act of will on de part o’ de child. It imply an unwillingness to learn on the part o’ de child – a voluntary act of self-deprivation. You agree?’

‘I hearin you.’

‘Well, let me inform you that Pynter don’t need to go to no school. It is I who decide not to send ’im.’

‘Can you say that again?’

‘Pa, he writing down what you say in a lil green book.’

‘Let ’im write! I got a lot more for Mister Bostin to write down. I hope your book big enough. Tell dem fools who send you that de purpose of schoolin is to learn – to be educated. It don’t have no other reason for goin to school. Now once I kin prove dat Pynter here is not missing out on his education, you don’t have no case in a court of law against me. In fact, I would like for you to take me to court so’z I kin make a fool of every single one of you. Then I will take y’all to court for taking me to court and causing me a whole heap of stress I didn ask for. You out of place to come here in my house and call my child a truant. What I really want to know is who report me to you. Who do it?’

‘I cannot expose that, sir.’

‘I hope to God dat is not who I think it is. Pynter, get me the Bible. You a believer, Bostin?’

‘A regular churchgoer and a family man, sir.’

‘Well, listen to the boy read and be blessed at de same time. C’mon, Pynter – Matthew, chapter uh, lemme see, seven. Yep! Matthew, chapter seven – start from verse three.’

Pynter took the book and threw the man a sympathetic glance. He began to read. ‘“And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”’

‘Skip verse four,’ his father said. ‘Jump to five and six.’

‘“Thou hypocrite,”’ Pynter continued, ‘“first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye. Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.”’

‘Good.’ Manuel Forsyth smacked his lips. ‘You see my boy can read and with feeling besides.’

Mister Bostin pulled out his handkerchief and sopped his forehead. He gave Pynter a hard sideways glance. ‘You numerate?’

‘Yes, he kin count,’ Manuel Forsyth said.

Mister Bostin turned the back of his right hand towards his face and examined his fingers. The nails were cut very low, except the little finger, which sprouted a long and curving outgrowth that he was clearly proud of.

‘Well, I’m reasonably satisfied that he’s doing something. I must refer the matter, though. A daily diet of the Bible may be just the, er, thing – morally, that is – but to school the boy must go. That’s what my job dictate.’

‘You mean, I waste all this time arguing with you?’

The man got up. For the first time he smiled. Pynter was surprised at the brightness of it. ‘That’s for you to decide, sir.’

‘I’ll fight every one o’ you in court.’

‘You’ll hear from me, Mister Forsyth. Follow me, boy.’

‘Half-edicated jackass.’

Pynter looked quickly at the man and then back at his father. His lips were moving angrily. Bostin paused as if he were about to say something. He thought better of it and tiptoed out of the bedroom.

The man turned to face Pynter on the steps. His voice was almost a whisper. ‘Talk the truth now, lil fella, you really want to go on like that? The truth!’

‘For now.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yup.’

‘How come?’

‘Iz all he got right now.’

The man nodded. ‘How old you say you is?’

‘I didn say how old I is. I almos’ ten.’

‘Ten?’

‘Almos’.’

‘Ten, you say?’

‘Yup, ten. Almos’.’

‘Look, son, it have a lot more, er, there is much more to school than reading books and counting fingers. You got to go to school, y’unnerstan?’

‘Pa say I don’t have to.’

‘What you going to do when he gone?’

‘He not going nowhere.’

‘Everybody got to go somewhere. He ought to be preparing you for that.’

‘Don’ unnerstan.’

‘S’all right. Tell me, where’s your modder?’

‘Home.’

‘Home where?’

‘Where she live.’

He pulled a page out of his notebook and wrote quickly.

‘Give this to her. It got my name, place of employ and the name of the person – Miss Lucas, the headmistress in Saint Divine Catholic School. Come September, I want her to take you to that school and give this paper to her. It got to be September. Or you’ll miss your chance.’

‘What chance?’

‘The one I would have given my eye teeth for. Promise me you going give her.’

‘Okay.’

‘Come September, I’ll be checking up on you pussnally.’

‘Who call you to come here – Miss Maddie?’

Mister Bostin rested puzzled eyes on him. ‘S’far as I could tell, ’twasn’t a woman. He say that you his uncle.’

Department of Education Division of the Ministry of Internal and Related Affairs San Andrews 12th July 1965

Mr. Manuel Forsyth

Upper Old Hope

Parish of Old Hope San Andrews

Dear Sir, This is to confirm our conversation at your residence on May 15th of this year in which you stated your decision to keep your son and minor …

‘Pa, what minor mean?’

‘Go on, read the letter.’

… your son and minor Pynter Bender from school. After much deliberation I have decided …

‘He decide! Who he think he is?’

I have decided that it is not in the best interest of the child in question to be exposed solely to the literature available at your residence.

‘He goin to burn in hell fo’ that. Condemning God word!’

In view of the above observation and consistent with the powers vested in me, Jonathan Uriah Bostin, Schools Inspector, San Andrews Division of the Associated State and its environs …

‘If fancy title was money, he would be a rich man. Read that part again fo’ me!’

‘It long!’

‘Read it, boy!’

In view of the above observation …

‘Pure wind! Fart – that’s what it is. Read de rest fo’ me.’

… I have agreed with the relevant authority to enrol the minor, Pynter Bender …

‘Pa, what’s a minor?’

‘You.’

‘What it mean?’

‘A lil boy.’

‘And how you call a lil girl?’

‘A minor. Finish de letter, child!’

… to enrol the minor, Pynter Bender, in the Saint Divine Catholic …

‘And he claim to be a man o’ God!’

… Catholic School from first September. Failing which and without valid reasons, said authority reserves the right to proceed legally against you .

‘You mus’ never learn to write like that man, y’hear me?’

‘Why?’

‘S’not natural.’

‘Why?’

‘Say what you have to say and finish it. Always.’

‘Why?’

‘It help to keep life simple.’

‘How?’

‘Stop bothering me, boy.’

8

THE NEXT MORNING he got up and told his father he dreamt of screaming people.

‘You wasn’ dreaming,’ his father muttered, ‘I hear them too last night – Harris and Marlo.’ The old man’s face was thoughtful. ‘Only Harris I was hearing, though. And Harris the one you never hear at all.’

Harris and Marlo lived in a two-roomed house at the bottom of his father’s hill.

Fridays especially, nights in Upper Old Hope were reduced to a small room and Marlo was the hurricane inside it. Pynter had quickly grown accustomed to these weekly brawls, although the first time he’d heard Marlo he couldn’t bring himself to sleep. No reply ever came from Harris. And if, as his father told him that first time, it was a case of one man warring with himself, he used to wonder at the sense of it.

A few times, after a particularly violent night, he woke early, crept out of the house and sneaked down to the road.

Harris eventually came out, saw him standing there and, without breaking stride, waved his hat at him, ‘Hello, young fellow. How’s the Old Bull?’

‘Not bad,’ he answered as he watched the tall man’s body follow his feet up the road till he disappeared around the corner.

Pynter wished he would grow tall enough to be able to step out of his own little house like that, stretch out his long legs like Harris and sway, not from side to side, but in a kind of roundabout way, as if the rest of his body were fighting to keep up with his feet.

Harris was the tallest man he’d ever seen – the highest in the world. Always in the same loose khaki trousers and shirt that had been so bleached by wear and washing they were almost white. He wore his felt hat slanted down over his greying eyebrows, though it was never low enough to throw a shadow on his smile.

Harris was one of those men who’d travelled to the oil refineries in Aruba and returned a couple of weeks later to tell Old Hope how he’d taken a fall and got tangled up among the vast spiderweb of steaming pipes there. He would have died, had actually died in fact, when a pair of hands to which he had never been able to put a face had reached through the steel and dragged him out. That night he cut through the high fences that locked in the thousands of working island men, ‘borrowed’ a rowing boat and, without water, food or sleep, spent months ploughing a passage through all kinds of high dark seas and hurricanes to his little house in Old Hope.

‘Look at the height of the man,’ Manuel Forsyth laughed. ‘What you expect from Harris – not tall tales?’

But these stories only made Harris taller in Pynter’s eyes, so that sometimes on mornings, just when the night chill lifted itself off the valley floor and seeped like drizzle through his thin blue shirt, he would creep out of his father’s house and tiptoe down the hill to receive that special early-morning greeting.

For this – just the sight of Harris, the rolling head, the long windmilling arms, the big yellow grin, the pale felt hat bobbing like a wind-rushed flame above the tops of the rhododendrons at the roadside – for all this, the early-morning coldness nibbling at the skin of his back and arms was more than worth it. Even standing in the rain.

It was raining the morning the slight quiver in his chest was replaced by something else – a smell and something more. A sensation on his skin.

Coming out of the house, he saw something squeezing itself through the doorway. It took a while before he realised it was a man. He did not move, not even when the great boxlike head lifted with some effort and swivelled towards him. Not even when the small red eyes fell on him and narrowed, and the man’s lips – purple-dark and thin – seemed to curl themselves around a curse.

The heavy hands drifted to the dirty leather scabbard at his side. Just then Pynter caught the scent of the man. He began backing up the hill.

Marlo’s eyes did not release him until he reached the top of his father’s road. He lowered himself on the steps, struggling with his breathing and the sudden urge to cry.

‘Dat’s Butcherman Marlo.’ Manuel Forsyth pulled his lips in slowly. ‘Don’t go near ’im, y’hear me?’

From then on, those mornings became a gamble. Pynter did not know who would come out first and it didn’t occur to him to wait for Harris after Marlo. In fact, he never saw Harris come out after Marlo, so that sometimes he imagined it was the same man that the night had transformed into something else.

If it were Marlo, he would hold his ground for as long as his thumping heart allowed him. He would keep his breath in while the dark, knuckle-curled head lifted and skewed itself around. Then his legs would propel him up the hill to the safety of his father’s steps.

He knew now that the thick red man with the curly hair and bloodshot eyes was the father of all butchers. That the abattoir in San Andrews left the biggest bulls to him: the frothing, red-eyed animals that chewed through their ropes and broke their chains and routed San Andrews with their rage. When that happened, they sent for Marlo.

And if, from time to time, someone decided to leave one of those animals too loosely tethered, or deliberately forgot to draw the bolts of the steel pen, it was so that they could watch the town take to the top of walls and barricade itself behind the closed glass doors of stores while Marlo placed his back against some building on the Esplanade, or planted his legs like tree trunks in the middle of the market square, his head lowered like the animal’s, his shoulders twitching, his right elbow bent so that his finger barely grazed the leather at his side as the animal charged. And at the very last moment, with a movement that the men would recall over dinner in words that would disgust their women and thrill their children, Marlo would call the length of sharpened steel to his palm. He never missed an animal’s heart whenever he reached for it with that knife.

‘Men like blood,’ his father told him quietly. ‘Some o’ them jus’ don’ know it.’

‘I don’ like blood,’ Pynter answered earnestly, staring at the milkiness in the old man’s eye.

‘That’s becuz you not a man yet,’ his father muttered softly.

‘Rain fall last night too. Dry-season rain. Mean a lot more heat to come. It still wet outside?’ His father’s voice pulled him out of his thoughts. Through the window he could see that it was drizzling, but he said he was going outside to check.

There were people gathered by the roadside when Pynter got down there. Harris’s house looked tired and rain-sogged against the giant bois-canot tree that supported it. The door was partly open and the window facing the road hung on a single hinge. He stood on the wet grass, listening to the lowered voices, the grunts of disbelief, the quiet shock, subdued like the drone of bees. He didn’t think they had seen him. They were lost in talking their thoughts out to each other

‘ … such a nice fella.’

‘ … in hi own house.’

‘ … never do nobody no harm.’

‘An’ Marlo gone an’ done dat to him.’

‘ … a piece o’ bread … ’

‘ … murder … ’

‘ … worse than murder.’

A rough wind shook the trees above them. The water that had settled on the leaves came down in a cold shower on their heads. He shuddered, began wondering what his father was doing now. Soon he would have to collect his breakfast from the steps before the chickens got to it.

No one knew who called the ambulance. Although it was still very early, it had come and gone long before most of them were there. More people were arriving, some from as far up as the foothills of Mont Airy. A tall, slim-faced woman with a white headwrap kept repeating the story to them of what had happened – Marlo had disappeared, and the police were somewhere up there in the bushes at the foot of the Mardi Gras with their dogs; they were sure to find him before the day was over, she said.

Pynter wiped his eyes and looked up at the Mardi Gras, its head buried in the greyness of the flat, soggy morning. He could hear the dogs barking. He didn’t like dogs. Dogs didn’t like him either. He could have told the police or the dogs that they were not going to find him up there in the forest. Marlo could hardly walk, far less climb a hill or run.

He left them by the side of the road, scratching, shifting and murmuring among themselves, their hands moving aimlessly about them, as if they were rummaging the air for something they’d forgotten or misplaced. He criss-crossed his way back up the hill.

Miss Maddie was on her porch, craning her neck towards the road while still managing to keep her eyes on him.

‘Boy!’

He lifted his face at her.

‘What happenin down there?’ It was the first time he’d ever seen her smile.

‘Don’ know,’ he said, not even bothering to break his stride.

Her smile went out like a light.

‘Is true what I hear about those two down there?’

‘Don’ know, Miss Maddie.’

‘You don’ know and you just come from down there?’

He shrugged.

‘I ask you a question, boy!’ Her tone had hardened.

‘And I answer you,’ he replied, and broke into a run.

He waited till his father had finished eating and then he told him all that he had just heard from the mouths of the people by the roadside.

When his father found his voice, he asked, ‘You sure?’

‘’Bout what?’

The old man passed the heel of his hand across his face. ‘Why?’

‘Uh?’

‘Why he done it?’

‘Missa Marlo?’

‘Yes, why?’

‘Don’ know, Pa, don’ know. For piece o’ bread, Miss Tooksie say. For a piece o’ Missa Marlo bread dat Missa Harris take becuz he was hungry. A piece o’ bread, Pa. Marlo rip hi guts out fo’ a piece o’ bread.’

‘Pynter! Don’t talk like that. Don’t talk like that!’

Pynter leaned his head against the bedroom door and stared at the ceiling.

9

THEY CALLED IT Rainbow Weather – that time during the dry season when the sun was bright above their heads and a drizzle came down from the Mardi Gras and covered the valley with a spray so fine it was almost as if the air were filled with talcum powder. There were rainbows everywhere, some of them as faint as washed-out ribbons, but there was always the one they called The Mother. It curved high and glowing above their heads, its foot planted in the water somewhere behind the hills that kept the ocean back.

A gardener might catch a glimpse of it, straighten up and lean against his machete, suddenly aware of the flowering okras, the pigeon peas and the amazing likeness of their blossoms to little yellow butterflies. He might see the manioc differently, how their shiny, dark-limbed trunks resembled the skin of a well-greased child. And he would feel a tiny tug of sadness in his heart that a day would come when he would no longer be there to see all this. A woman would stop mid-laugh and for some reason turn her mind to the children she did not have. Or another would sketch a private smile, remembering the time when Dreena’s little girl-chile – now a woman who worked the canes with them – tried to follow a Mother Rainbow to where she thought its root was planted in the sea. Dreena’s lil girl returned to her mother’s yard exhausted and in tears because, however far she walked, it never got any closer.

Rainbows reminded Pynter of the strap that Paso wore around his waist for a belt. It reminded him of the wish that Deeka carried in her eyes, and then when it faded he took the track to Eden.

Earlier that morning and most of the afternoon, the dogs had been searching the foothills for Marlo, but Pynter could no longer hear them; they must have given up. Men with guns had arrived, their Land Rovers came roaring down the road. He had heard the slamming of doors and the thud of feet on asphalt. But they too had left a couple of hours later. And soon after the sound of their engines had faded in the distance, Gideon’s white Opel came gunning up the hill.

Pynter had forgotten that his father had told him that Gideon was coming. His father also said that he should go to see his mother. But he didn’t feel like it. He wanted this to be one of his by-himself days, and so he was down here at Eden, where it was quiet, even the birds were silent for once. And where Missa Geoffrey made his leaf bed for Miss Petalina, the earth was bare and brown. Maybe they’d found another place. P’raps Pastor Greenway found out and killed Miss Petalina. Everybody was killin everybody these days. For no flippin reason a pusson could understand. But if Pastor Greenway really done that to his best an’ p’raps only daughter, news didn reach nobody yet. And he better not, because he, Pynter Bender, would pussnally ask Birdie to bus’ his arse real bad when Pastor Greenway got sent to jail.

Pynter wondered what Peter was doing now. What would he say when he told him about Marlo and Harris? He sat on the earth, not bothering to settle himself down in his hideaway in the elephant grass. He wanted a stick to make markings like his mother on the ground. He wanted words to make all of it make sense.

He saw the man the instant his hand reached out to pull a twig – a shadow at the corner of his eye almost as if one of the trees had moved. He was on his feet before he’d even thought of it. Felt the wet grass give way beneath him and his shoulder hit the trunk of the guava tree in front of him. He heard a grunt, felt the tree heave. A shower of guavas hit the grass. A hand closed around his ankle. He kept moving. He kept moving because Tan Cee had told him to. He couldn’t remember how long ago, or how many times she’d said it to him and Peter. He’d forgotten where he was or exactly when she’d said so, but now her voice was like a whisper at the back of his ear. ‘If a pusson get hold of you, and you know dat they don’t mean you no good, you don’t jus’ stand up there. You move, you kick, you bite, you make a whole heap o’ noise. You don’ tell yourself you weak, you don’ tell yourself you finish, you never tell yourself you lose. You keep movin, even if they lock you down, you never stop movin, y’hear me? Jus’ move … ’

The hand slipped off his ankle. He swung himself away and in that single eye-blink of a turn he caught a glimpse of Marlo’s fleshy face, the leather scabbard at his side and his bulk against the guava trees. And then there came a shout from another man nearby.

‘Ayyy! What de hell goin on ’cross dere?’

Pynter found his back pressed against Missa Geoffrey’s stomach, the man’s hand holding him firmly there. Missa Geoffrey’s chin was lifted high, his body rigid. He held a large stone firmly in his free hand.

There was a crash of trees, branches breaking, and suddenly Marlo was no longer there.

Missa Geoffrey stepped away from him – with his light brown eyes and a tiny brown moustache. ‘Who de hell is you, and what bring you here?’

‘Pynter – I’z Pynter.’

‘You know who dat was?’ Missa Geoffrey lifted his chin at the bushes beyond them.

Pynter nodded.

‘You know what could’ve happen if it didn cross my mind to come here now?’ His face was hard and unsmiling.

Pynter nodded again. He realised his knees were shaking slightly. Missa Geoffrey was there beside him, yet he sounded as if he were speaking from a far way off.

Missa Geoffrey dropped the stone. He looked about him. His face and shoulders were twitching. ‘Why dat murderer had to come here, eh? Dat sonuvabitch could ha’ gone everywhere else, but is here he had to come. I have to report this now, not so?’ He gestured at the bushes. ‘An’ what happm when I get out o’ here and call police? Next thing you know, this place full up of all kind o’ people.’ He looked about him again as if the gully were his house. Pynter thought the man was going to cry.

‘And you,’ he turned brown accusing eyes on Pynter, ‘what de hell bring you down here? This look like place for chilren?’

‘I come here when I hungry,’ Pynter told him.

‘Come here when you – you playin de arse wit’ me, not so?’ The man was staring at him closely. His eyes narrowing down to slits.

‘I don’ look, Missa Geoffrey. Not all de time.’

‘Don’ look – look at what? Look, you say?’ Geoffrey moved his lips to say something else but coughed and rubbed his chest instead. He swung his head around as if expecting all of Old Hope to be there. He brought his hand up to the side of his face and coughed again.

Missa Geoffrey looked around him. ‘Look? What de hell it got down here to look at? Dem guava? Dem serpent over yuh head?’

Pynter found himself replying in his father’s flat irritated tone. ‘A pusson not blind, yunno.’

His words stopped Missa Geoffrey short. Left him open-mouthed and confused. He kept smoothing the hair back from his forehead and then he coughed a very distressed cough.

‘Lissen, lil fella,’ his voice rumbled out of him deep and low exactly as it did with Miss Petalina, ‘I just save your life. You know what dat mean?’

‘Nuh.’

‘It mean,’ he dropped his voice to a half-whisper, ‘it mean you owe me a life.’

‘I don’ have no life to give back.’

‘I don’ want no life back, man. You tell anybody ’bout …?’

‘You an’ Miss Tilina? Nuh.’

‘Me an’ Miss – Jeezas, man. Jeezas! Then you keep it so – okay? You keep it so, cuz … ’

Pynter nodded. ‘A life fo’ a life.’

‘Eh?’

‘Pastor Greenway goin kill ’er if he get to know.’

Missa Geoffrey sat back on the wet grass. ‘You prepare to swear on de Bible?’

Pynter nodded.

Missa Geoffrey slapped his pockets with both hands. He pulled out something bright and red and shiny and held it out to Pynter. ‘Look – look, I want to give you this.’ It was a small penknife. ‘Dis mean me an’ you’z friend. Dis mean you can’t tell nobody nothing. Dis mean me an’ you agree man to man, y’unnerstan?’

Pynter took the knife.

‘Okay fella, we settle then.’ Missa Geoffrey looked up as if suddenly alerted to something. ‘Come, let’s get outta here. And don’t come back again, y’hear me. Is my land.’

‘Is not.’

‘You hear what I say?’

‘Yessir.’

When Pynter reached the yard, it was raining again. Warm dry-season rain, the kind that fell with all the violence of a flash-storm and lasted just a short while. Pynter wondered if Gideon had left yet. He was trembling, but he wasn’t cold and he didn’t want to go inside if Gideon were still there.

He stooped between the pillars of the house and watched the rain come down.

10

‘GIDEON TAKE MY father,’ Pynter said.

Elena shook her head. She didn’t understand him.

‘I come from Eden. I shelter under de house and when I went in he wasn’ there.’

His mother shook her head again. She still didn’t understand him. ‘You look in dem other room?’

‘Gideon take my father,’ he repeated.

‘Where he gone to?’

He heaved his shoulders and turned his face away.

‘Where…’ She stopped herself short. The cloth that she was drying her hands with dropped softly on the floor. She brought her face down close to his. She touched his cheek and looked into his eyes. ‘Gideon take your father where?’

He heaved his shoulders again. ‘Gideon come and take ’im when I wasn’ there.’

‘You get wet,’ she said. ‘Your head soakin wet. You couldn shelter from the rain?’ She began unbuttoning his shirt.

He was staring at the wall behind her head.

‘Pynter,’ she said.

He did not answer. She peeled the shirt from his shoulders. ‘You must learn to cry. Y’unnerstan?’

She touched his cheeks again. Her face was working. ‘When you feel like this, when you feel like you feeling now, you must try to cry. Y’hear me? You have to learn to cry.’

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and pulled him close to her.

He did not tell her everything – how he’d gone to Miss Maddie’s house to ask her where his father was. How she had looked away from him as if she didn’t want to answer, her eyes red. And all she had said was that she wished Paso had been there when Gideon came. She had stood him in the kitchen and wiped the rain off him. She’d done it the way Tan Cee or his mother would have done, pausing every now and then to examine him. She’d stretched his arms out and slid her fingers along the bones all the way down to his wrists. Had turned his palms up towards her and examined them under the gaslight in the kitchen. She’d passed her fingers along the small drain at the back of his neck, followed the fissure all the way down to his spine. She had come closer to his ear as if she were about to whisper something, traced the shape of his lobes with her fingers, and spent a long time over his feet. She’d gone to the fridge and offered him some food. He didn’t want anything to eat. She’d left him for a while and come back with a towel. She had tried to smile. He had seen that she had three gold teeth. She had told him the towel was hers, spent a long time wiping his hair dry.

‘You got feet like Paso,’ she had said. ‘An’ them fine little hairs on your back same like all my father children.’

‘Miss Maddie,’ he had turned his head to look up at her, ‘you could tell me where Gideon live?’

He could not make out the expression on her face because the evening had thickened into night. He had only her voice to go by.

‘You shouldn think of goin there.’

‘Tell me where he live.’

‘He’s not a good man. He my brother, but I have to say it.’

‘If you don’ tell me, I’ll still find him.’

She had nodded. ‘Take one o’ your people with you. He got dogs.’

‘Where he live?’

‘Westerpoint. Take your family with you.’

‘G’night, Miss Maddie.’

‘Y’hear me!’

‘G’night.’

She had placed two mangoes in his hands and told him she was sorry.

He didn’t tell his mother either that he knew now why they’d chosen him instead of Peter to go to live with Manuel Forsyth.

11

PREPARING FOR GIDEON meant standing in the sun on Glory Cedar Rise and staring into the distance. It meant lifting his vision above the canes, beyond the far green weave of bamboos that made a tunnel over the river.

There, past the festering swamps that his grandfather had walked into, at the foot of five pale low-lying hills, sat the big white houses of Westerpoint, scattered at the end of the long concrete road like bleached seashells against the blue heave of the ocean.

Gideon had come along that road one day to enter Lower Old Hope for the first time. The rumour of a cane girl carrying his father’s seed had brought him to their place one morning. He found the cane girl waiting her turn at the standpipe by the road. He’d called her name, and when she turned he began striking her with the sawed-off piece of piping he’d brought along with him. And all she could do was curl her body down away from him, offer him her shoulders and save the children she was carrying for his father. Elena saved herself by playing dead.

Two years later, Birdie’s woman told him of these things the very first night he returned from prison. He left Cynty’s bed, forgetting the loving he had come for, and walked back to the yard. He sat on the stone that John Seegal had placed there for himself and which Deeka would not have anyone else sit on apart from God and Birdie. He’d looked into his sister’s face and asked her if the things that Cynty had just told him were true. He was close to tears, they said, not because she did not answer him, not even because she knocked his hand off when he reached out and touched her shoulder, but because he understood then why she’d given his middle name to Pynter: the difficult one, the strange one, the one born blind, the child not born to live. Not as a way to please him, but as an accusation.

Preparing himself for Gideon meant reminding himself of all these things – recalling the words of the women in the river and learning, while he did so, the way the days unfolded in that place at the edge of the sea.

He sat there until night settled over the long, flat piece of land that stretched itself out like a tongue into the sea, and then with a tightening of the brows he slowly made his way back home.

‘Y’awright?’ Tan Cee’s eyes were steady on his face.

He smiled at her and nodded.

Birdie was stoking wood into the fireplace. Peter stood beside him. He’d missed watching Birdie chopping wood. His uncle did not cook with sticks and bramble; Birdie preferred trees. He brought large portions of their trunks down from the foothills and dumped them against the grapefruit tree. Mid-mornings he took out the axe, shed his shirt and laid into them. The sound of his chopping reached the foothills and bounced right back in their faces. It drew boys to their yard, small crowds that stood and watched in flinching circles. It paused the women on the road below and turned their eyes up towards him, standing there, rigid as a tree and half as tall as God, his legs straddling the wood, the axe coming down and rising, down again and rising, with the sweat and sunlight glistening on his back like grease.

Tonight they would have man food, large portions of everything: wild yams the size of logs that Birdie had also brought down from the foothills, dasheen he’d dug up from the banks of Old Hope River, dumplings, of course, and every kind of meat his uncle could lay his hands on. During the day people passed and dropped lengths of pigtail, a bag of sweet potatoes, or something surprising like pink-fleshed pum-pum yams, or a bowl of dried peas that they’d been hoarding for the hard, dry times like these. Half of Old Hope would turn up later, drawn by the giddying smell of Birdie’s cooking. Elena and Patty got out the plates, the calabashes and bowls. They served the smaller children first, then the bigger ones and finally the adults, whose silence lasted longer than their words these days, whose gazes, while they ate, were always turned away and downwards towards the darkness where the canes were.

These nights Birdie left with Peter. And as the dryness and the heat dug in, they would return later and later, with Birdie sometimes carrying the sleeping boy on one shoulder, a bag of provisions slung over the other. Birdie would lay Peter down so tenderly his brother barely stirred.

There grew a creeping uneasiness about these night-time journeys that saw his uncle and his brother returning to the yard closer to morning every time. Pynter saw it in his mother’s face, in Tan Cee’s glances at Patty, in their wordless avoidance of Birdie’s greeting when they got back. His uncle began to bring home a different kind of food, fat chickens and beautifully tended vegetables and fruit. Their avoidance of Birdie turned to whisperings in the dark, the mutterings of Patty and Tan Cee in his mother’s ear. Pynter knew that whatever it was that was nibbling away at their ease required them to say something to Birdie, and those muttered words were a way of talking themselves into a kind of urgency. A way of making whatever they had to say to Birdie come out of them more easily.

If his uncle sensed this, he did not show it. Hard times had changed him. He laughed less, frowned more, would pass his fingers thoughtfully through his beard. There was a temper there too – tight and uneasy behind the passing smiles he would throw at them.

As if to ease her mind of all these things, Tan Cee played a game with Pynter. Nights, she came and placed presents in his hands while he slept: seashells, seeds, sweets; marbles, strange beans and buttons; dark blue pebbles veined with streaks of glowing white; flakes of crystals that winked at him like tiny eyes. Pynter would unfold his fingers in the morning and find them there.

The morning he left for Gideon’s place, Pynter was smiling inwardly. A little way down the road, he saw Tan Cee’s blue headscarf and his heart flipped over. She was sitting on a culvert on the side of the road, chewing on a stick of cinnamon and trying to smile at the same time. He pretended not to see her.

‘Taking a walk, Featherplum?’ She stepped out in front of him and placed an arm across his shoulders. ‘Whapm, fowl pick yuh tongue? Not talking to me this morning?’

She placed more of her weight on him. It slowed him down. ‘Take Peter with you,’ she said. The smile had left her voice.

He glanced quickly up at her. ‘Take Peter where with me?’

‘Wherever you goin.’

‘I not goin nowhere.’

‘Then take him nowhere too. In fact,’ her face twitched as if she were about to sneeze, ‘he and Birdie waiting fo’ you ’cross the river. That the way you goin, not so?’

She glanced at his face and burst out laughing. She was shaking with it, like a joke she had been holding in for years. Her eyes fell on his face again and a louder burst came out of her. People must have heard her at the top end of Old Hope.

Pynter rolled his shoulders violently in an effort to shake off her arm. Her laughter was nettling his temper.

‘Gimme the gun,’ she said, pointing at his pocket.

‘What gun? Somebody gotta gun? It got gun round here? Which gun?’

Her hand darted into his pocket and pulled out his catapult. She tied the rubber straps around her wrist, leaned back from him, shaking her head.

‘I watch you knock a coupla bird outta the sky with this last week, an’ I tell myself, God help the fool who cross you. All that hatin. You full of it. You been full of it from the time you come home from your father. You been feedin yourself on it. Look how it make you magga-bone and dry! See what hatin done to your grandmother? You want to ’come like her?’

He lifted blazing eyes at her. ‘You better don’t come round me no more. You better don’t – specially when I sleepin, cuz…’

‘Cuz what, pretty boy? You goin beat me up? You have to be awake to do dat.’

He searched his head for words to throw back at her but he couldn’t find them, so he stomped off, complaining long and loudly to himself. Her laughter followed him all the way down to the river.

Birdie grunted when he arrived. He’d taken to having his woman plait his hair but today he’d loosened it. It stood up like small clumps of cus-cus grass from his head and made his eyes seem larger. He carried two bags on his shoulders, the big bottomless one he made his night-time forays with and the long canvas sack he’d brought with him from prison.

He was looking down at Pynter. The gold tooth at the front of his mouth glittered like a little flame. There was an expression on his uncle’s face which he did not understand, the look of someone trying to see into the distance while the sun was in their eyes. He shifted the bags on his shoulder, rested a hand on Peter’s head and pushed him gently forward. ‘Go ’head o’ me. I meet y’all down there.’

Down there was a walk through the cane plantation, past the collapsed windmill around which giant cogged wheels were scattered like the teeth of a decaying monster. Wheels which Tan Cee told Pynter used to be turned by mules when there was no wind. When they looked back, they could not see Birdie. The mud had forced Peter to take off his shoes. They’d greased his brother’s feet and fitted him with a new pair of rubber sandals. Pynter could see that Peter was tense and distressed, almost tearful. As the gleaming houses with their tall cast-iron gates came up, Peter’s eyes turned more and more urgently behind, looking for Birdie, who now could not be seen.

They walked until suddenly there was the ocean rearing up ahead of them. The concrete road glistened like a silver bracelet. It was all sky and water and wind, and the gusts that came off the sea seemed to want to push them back along the road they’d just travelled.

Even if Miss Maddie hadn’t told him that Gideon’s house had a big yellow door and light-blue blinds, he would have found it anyway. Gideon was sitting on the wall of his veranda. Two women were on chairs. They held glasses in their hands and were nodding while he spoke.

He was bringing a glass to his lips when he saw them standing against his gate. His hand came down and he got slowly to his feet.

Pynter knew that sideways look of Gideon’s, but Peter didn’t. His brother began shuffling backwards. Pynter didn’t move. Gideon came down the steps, his eyes no longer on the two of them but on the three Alsatians chained to the concrete pillar. They had been quiet when they arrived, but now that Gideon was approaching them they began peeling back their lips and barking. Pynter saw Peter against the gate of the house behind them and smelled his brother’s fear. He had been counting on his slingshot. Would have blinded Gideon from the moment he came down those steps. Would have done that first to him and then the dogs. He’d been practising for months. But then he heard Peter’s cry behind him, shrill and high like a gull’s. Then the sound of pounding feet. Saw Gideon straighten up. Felt himself dragged backwards. Saw the fear twist Gideon’s face into something dark and tight and ugly as Birdie stepped inside the gate.

Pynter felt a sudden tightening in his throat, didn’t know what sound came out of him, but whatever it was, it halted his uncle and brought Gideon’s hands down from his face.

Birdie swung his eyes back round to Gideon.

‘Jus’ touch dem…’ he said, slowly, with a terrible gentleness. Gideon stumbled away from the lunging dogs, his eyes on Birdie.

Birdie lowered himself to the grass and laid the axe across his legs.

‘Gwone, fellas,’ he said. ‘I relaxin out here.’

Pynter did not know what he expected, but not the sight of the old man spread out on a clean white sheet with all that light and wind coming through the window above his head.

The young woman was there with him. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, holding his hand. She looked up anxiously at them, smiled and said that Grandad had been expecting them. He realised that his father knew nothing of the trouble outside, which was strange because he should have heard the dogs. The young woman smiled again and got up to leave.

Pynter did not return her smile. Peter was looking at the way her skirt swished about her feet as she walked out of the room. ‘She nice,’ he whispered.

‘Patty nicer,’ Pynter grunted.

Manuel Forsyth seemed to have been expecting them. Not on that day exactly, but any day soon. And it was clear that, lying there with the light from the window on his face and neck, it was all that he had been doing.

‘What take y’all so long?’ he muttered.

His father lifted his hand and Pynter nudged his brother forward. Those hands had spent a long time knowing Pynter, but in all these years their father had hardly ever laid his hands on Peter.

‘Peter?’ the old man said softly, his eyes switching from side to side. Pynter noticed how thin and drawn he looked. His father traced Peter’s arms with the tips of his fingers, passed his palms across his back and waist, his face still turned up towards the window, almost as if he were listening with his hand.

‘Pynter will grow taller. You goin make a broader man. Solid.’ The old man chuckled. ‘You, Peto – you carry me inside you.’

In the silence that followed, all Pynter could hear was the sea. He wondered where Gideon had gone, whether Birdie was still on the grass out there. Their father’s voice came to him as if it were floating down from the ceiling.

‘I wasn’t always good to y’all mother. Y’all know that?’

‘Yes,’ Pynter answered softly.

The old man didn’t seem to hear him. He smacked his lips and stirred. ‘Have children. Remember me. Remember me to dem. Y’all hear me?’

Peter mumbled something. Pynter glanced at him.

‘A lawyer will come to y’all one day when time right. He’ll hand y’all papers and ask both o’ you to sign them. Sign them. Y’hear me? Pynter, you goin read fo’ me?’

‘Which part?’

‘Any part. Just wan’ to hear your voice.’ That seemed to turn the old man’s mind to something else. ‘Paso come to see me last time, Pynter.’ Pynter nodded and slid his hands beneath the covers of the book. The leather sighed against the skin of his palms. Its weight was familiar; its smell was like much-used money, and now something else hung over the pale yellow pages: the smell of the woman who had just left the room.

His mind shifted back to those evenings in that empty house, so crowded with the memories and ghosts of other people – other lives that the old man said was family. And with Peter beside him, the shuffle of feet outside the door, the waves coughing against the rocks outside, he started reading.

‘“And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again…”’

He lifted his head. Peter’s eyes were on the gulls wheeling in the air outside and his father was snoring softly. When they came outside, Birdie was where they had left him. Gideon had disappeared and his dogs were lying on the grass with their jaws resting on their forelegs. The woman was leaning out from the veranda as if she wanted to place her lips against their ears.

‘Y’all not – y’all not goin meet him again like…like…’

‘I know.’ Peter looked back at him with a little surprised smile. They’d both said it at the same time.

In the light of the decaying evening, the large concrete houses were no more than shapes against the sky. He didn’t realise that they had been that long inside Gideon’s house. He looked inland in the direction from which they had come. He could see no houses, not even the canes, just the ash-blue hills that squatted like children at the foot of the towering Mardi Gras. The concrete road was now a wide grey snake cut out against the side of the sea cliffs, threatening, it seemed, to slip into the ocean at any time.

Birdie placed his big hands on their shoulders. He was looking straight ahead at the road, his head pulled back, listening it seemed to something that was somewhere beyond their hearing.

‘Life’s a lil bit like dat, fellas,’ he said finally, his voice a rumble above their heads. ‘A pusson have to walk it. Ain’t got no choice. And a time mus’ come when dem have to stop cuz dem can’t go on no more.’

He was silent for a while and when he spoke again his voice was different. The thunder was no longer in it.

‘Do me a favour, fellas. Tell y’all mother I really beat that man up. Tell ’er I beat ’im bad. Tell ’er that for me. Go ’head o’ me. I meet y’all at home.’

12

HIS FATHER’S WORDS – Remember me – were like the drumming of fingers in Pynter’s head. He patterned his walking to the rhythm of their syllables, searching those two words for the meaning he knew was hidden there. And with the passing of the months, they fleshed themselves out with all the things that people said around him.

It amazed him that even when he’d listened, he’d never heard what Deeka was really saying when she loosened her hair and talked; that beneath her words there lived another story – one that sat at the back of almost everything the adults said, especially when they spoke of those who had come before them and those who would come after.

This new thing that his father’s last words taught him: that in the villages above the canes people did not die. As long as memory lived they did not. They passed. Leaving always something of themselves behind. John Seegal, their grandfather, had passed most of himself over to Birdie, except for the thieving ways, o’ course, which came from a great-grand-uncle whose name Deeka refused to say. And the long-gone aunts, the grandmothers, the uncles were there with them right now. They were scattered among the children the way the leaves of a forest tree became the flesh of other plants around it. They were there in the curve of a young man’s spine, the turn of a girl-child’s head, the way their lips shifted from their teeth in a grimace or a smile. There too in the shape of a baby’s feet or the quickness of its temper. There even in the flavours they preferred, and the things their bodies asked for.

For wasn’t it true that Columbus, John Seegal’s only brother, had passed on his singing voice to all the Benders that came after? And where did that shine-eye beauty of Patty come from, if not from the very best parts of all those cane-tall Bender women who knew how to unravel dreams and turn their hands to medicines; and who, sometimes just for the sake of it, created new and marvellous things from rope and thread and fabric? And what about those children born with a wisdom older than their age? Did that come from nowhere, eh?

It explained, at least, the querying hands of those adults who, like his father, mapped the bones of children and sought to read their futures and their past there. And it explained why the idea that his body was a house to a man who had lived long before his time made perfect sense to Deeka Bender, his grandmother.

Her problem was the way he had come. Not a little while after Peter. Not even later in the evening. But two days after his brother. She who had brought him out still talked of the way he’d fought her. For all of two bright dry-season days when, with the whole world living life outside, night hadn’t left that birth room. And that cry, when he’d finally released his death hold on her daughter – that cry wasn’t the cry of a child at all, but the raging of a young man. And then, of course, they saw the eyes, or what hid the world from them.

It was not so, Tan Cee told him. Not as Deeka said it. She did not remember it that way. In their first few years, Deeka didn’t remember it that way either. But remembering was like that. Remembering was like life, like people: it got better or worse with time. There were women like Deeka, she said, who tied their lives to a man’s so tight they forget they ever owned one. And when that man got up and walked, it was not just his life he took, he went with theirs as well.

‘So what left for them to do after?’ She smiled dreamily at him. ‘They look for something they kin blame. And you – you the one your granny pick.’

He’d asked her what John Seegal looked like, because even if they’d said he looked like Birdie, he could not make an image in his mind. Just a shape – a scattered force that inhabited his grandmother and the children he had left with her. He used to imagine him within the stones he’d used to build the yard, especially the large flat rock beside the steps which they said he used to sit on.

He wasn’t sure that Tan Cee heard his question. Her eyes were on her husband, off again, he’d told her, to start work on a house somewhere in the south. He would be away a coupla days.

She took her eyes off Coxy, adjusted her skirt and sighed. ‘Some things have to …’ She stopped short, considered what she was about to say and smiled quietly at him.

‘Your granny always talk ’bout how she meet John Seegal. She never talk ’bout how he left. She never say much ’bout Anita either. Y’ever wonder why?’

She told him of a morning her mother was sweeping the yard when a child arrived and called her by her real name. He stood at the edge of the yard, his stomach exposed, his thin legs crossing and uncrossing, his hands small and thin like a bird’s, moving around his face as if he were washing it with air.

Deeka asked him what he wanted. He told her that he wanted nothing. She asked him why he came then. He said his father sent him with some news. She told him that men never sent their children anywhere with news. And a woman wouldn’t have sent him because she would bring the news herself. And so she turned her back on him.

But he was still there at the corner of her eye. Still washing his face with his hands. And then, when she was least expecting it, his voice came across the yard as clear as if he was standing right next to her.

He told her that her husband Big John Seegal had wagered her, his house and his three girl-children that he was going to cross the Kalivini swamps in the early hours of the morning and emerge from it alive.

Deeka smiled at the joke at first, found herself remembering it throughout the rest of the day and laughing. But by late evening, when she heard her husband’s footsteps coming up the path, the words of that boy seemed somehow less ridiculous.

He came home full of his own thunder. Sat on the steps stinking of the rum he’d despised all his life. Sat there working up a murderous argument with himself. He raised his hand at Deeka and told her for the first time what he really thought of her and the four children she had given him. And at the end of it he stretched himself out in the yard and would not look at them.

Deeka gathered the children around her and told them what their father was about to do. Down there, she told them, way past cane, there is a place where the Old Hope River meets the sea. The river does not die there; it becomes something else: a stinking, bubbling tangle of mangrove where the sharks swim in on the early-morning tides to feed on all the things the land rejected. She told them that their father, overtaken by some demon for which there was no accounting, had decided to cross that place in the small hours of the morning.

Deeka fought all night to keep him: I ever give you cause to feel you not a man? That you less than another woman man? What about the children? Eh? What about them? They not healthy? They not yours? You want somebody to tell you sorry for something they didn do to you? Okay then, I sorry. If me, the children or anybody do anything to push you to where you is, to make you come like you come home tonight, I want to tell you sorry.

She turned to the girls with a deadly, soft-voiced rage. I want every one of you to tell y’all father sorry. Tan Cee, the eldest, was more temper than tears. Elena fixed him with an unblinking, tight-lipped gaze. And Patty the Pretty, his last, his youngest, the dark-skinned miracle he’d named himself, Patty who could stop her father in mid-stride, who could melt his anger with a touch, the muttering of his name, even Patty could not turn him. And Birdie, the son who looked like him and had the strength to hold him down or tie him against a post or tree or something solid till he came back to his senses – Birdie was in jail.

By the morning, they had grown quiet, the girls starved of sleep, and Deeka just too tired to be tearful any more. Defeated also by a realisation that had come to her during all those hours of pleading. That there was something in John Seegal’s decision that went beyond his drunkenness. That it had not been made over a glass of rum, but over time. So that in the still grey hours of that morning, even while she stood on the top of Glory Cedar Rise and called out his name as they watched him walking down Old Hope Road, watched and called until the canes and distance swallowed him, she knew that all the pleading in the world would not make him turn around.

She went back to her house, pulled the trouser leg from under the mattress they’d conceived their children on, emptied the contents on the floor, counted the money she had placed there over the years and began preparing for his wake. And while she prepared she cursed the canes. She blamed this shallow valley she had come to from the north, this long, blue gorge of sighing, coughing, whistling grass which consumed their men so casually.

‘But you can’t beat cane,’ Tan Cee muttered. ‘You can’t do much to hurt it back.’ Which was why, she said, Deeka retreated into a dark-eyed, watchful bitterness and kept reminding them of the miracle their father used to be.

‘And soon after,’ Tan Cee sighed and got to her feet, ‘Elena body start changin with y’all.’

‘And de baby girl – Anita?’

‘She wasn’ no baby girl de time de trouble start. I got a coupla things to look after.’ She dusted her skirt and walked away.

13

THE FOOD THAT Birdie brought back now was meant to last them longer. Peter confided that he’d even tried to bring along a cow but it wasn’t to be persuaded. Besides, the cow had horns that were long enough and sharp enough to win the argument.

Peter talked with a look of puzzlement that brought the laughter out of them, all the more because he couldn’t understand what they were laughing at. Couldn’t see the joke either when Birdie sneaked off during the day and returned home with ridiculous things: a couple of giant plants sitting in heavy, white stone pots; an iron gate; three beach chairs; an aluminium oar; the two back wheels of a car; a child’s plastic bicycle.

The women seemed to recognise this change in Birdie. They responded strangely: they touched him more, kept back the best of everything for him; made difficult dishes like cornki and farine which took them two days to prepare, and sat and watched him while he ate.

He held their gifts of food between his fingers and brought them to his mouth as though the pleasure was not just his to have but also theirs.

And during these nights of bright moon and still air, when voices and laughter travelled down the foothills to their yard, riding it seemed on the achingly sweet fragrance of the lady-of-the-night, he repeated the stories of his time in prison.

It was only Peter who did not understand this ritual. Not even when his uncle tried to make him know by almost saying so. By leaving him at home without an explanation, by the quick flushes of irritation that left Peter tearful and ill-tempered, by not having time for him these days. Perhaps the women had spoken to Birdie. Perhaps he’d read their worry all along and was doing something about it now. Pynter wasn’t sure.

And then one night Birdie took Peter away. It was close to morning when Birdie returned – a night of lashing rain and the kind of cloth-thick darkness that made it impossible to see ahead – but he did not have Peter with him. Birdie dropped his bag, pulled off his boots, took the cloth that Deeka held out to him and began wiping himself dry. He sat amongst them without a word.