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‘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 (#u28d22412-8e31-55e2-b13f-1fa9a7d51d72)
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 (#u28d22412-8e31-55e2-b13f-1fa9a7d51d72)
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.
