Tell No-One About This E-Book

Jacob Ross

• Herausgeber: Peepal Tree Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 587

Beschreibung

This substantial collection brings together short stories written over a span of forty years, including those first published in the highly-rated Song for Simone (1986) and A Way to Catch the Dust (1999) and more than a dozen new stories. The previously published pieces have been extensively revised. They range from stories set in Grenada at different periods from the 1970s onwards, to several set in the UK. These are stories that have a narrative drive, a meticulousness of construction, an exactness of image and a rigorous economy in the prose. They are inventive in their explorations of a variety of narrative voices – from children to adults, male and female, Caribbean and British – that establish a persona and capture the reader from the first sentence.

Leseprobe

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Tell No-One About This began as an idea for a London-based collection of short stories. The fact that it has turned out to be far more embracing – reaching as far back as my teenage writing life – is due entirely to editor, Jeremy Poynting. Bernardine Evaristo’s always frank assessment and belief in my work from the very beginning have proved to be precious over the years. Olive Senior showed me how much she cared by sitting me down a couple of years ago, and giving me a stern talking-to at a time when I most needed a shake-up. Her words turned me around and will always remain with me. I owe a great debt, and depthless gratitude to Lindsay Waller-Wilkinson for the reading, the feedback and the comprehensive support over these past few challenging years.

Earlier versions of some of these stories appeared in Song for Simone and A Way to Catch the Dust and Other Stories.

JACOB ROSS

TELL NO-ONE ABOUT THIS

COLLECTED SHORT STORIES 1975-2017

First published in Great Britain in 2017

Peepal Tree Press Ltd

17 King’s Avenue

Leeds LS6 1QS

England

© 2017 Jacob Ross

ISBN13 PRINT: 9781845233525

ISBN13 EPUB: 9781845234201

ISBN13 MOBI: 9781845234218

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may bereproduced or transmitted in any formwithout permission

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CONTENTS

Dark

Dark Is the Hour

Cold Hole

Acquainting

The Canebreakers

Walking for My Mother

The Understanding

Girlchile

A Game of Marbles

The Room Inside

Song for Simone

Dust

Look Who Talkin

De Laughin Tree

First Fruit

Roses for Mr. Thorne

Rum an Coke

And there Were no Fireflies

Fives Leaves and a Stranger

Oceans

A Way to Catch the Dust

Deliverance

A Different Ocean

Listen, the Sea

Flight

Is Easy

Flight

Raising Tyrone

Giving Up on Trevor

A Quiet Time

Tell No-one About This

A Better Man

Bird

I: DARK

DARK IS THE HOUR

The boy raised his head when the door scraped open. His heart leapt with a relief that surprised him, then he closed his eyes and sank back on the floor.

‘Gertrude?’ His father’s voice was gruff.

The boy didn’t answer. He peeped under his arm at the man’s dark shape leaning against the door. He held a bundle in his right hand; in his left he balanced his machete. The boy watched his father’s shape double as he dropped the bundle and the cutlass in the corner near the door.

‘Gerty!’

The boy pressed his face into the bedding until the floor was hard against his cheek. He felt the weight of his father’s boots sinking in the floorboards as he stepped over the little girl, then the younger boy and finally himself.

The room darkened further as the man’s shadow fell on him. His father reached for the tiny kerosene lamp on the table and turned it up.

The boy knew that the man was staring at the bed against the wall. He waited, fearing the wrath that would follow when he saw that the bed was rumpled and empty.

His father’s silence was unbearable, his breathing low and deep.

The boy’s body bunched when the man’s hand dropped on his back and he went through the motions of someone just awakened.

‘Stanford! Fordy, wake up, boy. Stan boy! Where you’ modder? Tell me, where your modder is?’

When the boy sat up and raised his eyes, he stared directly into his father’s. He shifted his gaze to the paper-pasted board walls across the room. From outside came the drone of jeeps, and louder, sharper sounds. He knew that beyond the flimsy house the darkness threatened.

‘I talking to you, boy!’ This time his father shook him.

‘Sh… Sh… She gone!’ the boy said, and the pain of the day and the night began to show on his face. His father’s eyes followed the trickle down his cheeks. The man raised his hand and the boy shrank back. His father brushed away the tears with a knuckle.

‘Hush!’ he said. ‘When she gone? She say where she going? She leave any message? Who… What she went wid? She leave any message?’

The little girl woke up crying. The boy turned to her and began patting her back, cooing softly in the child’s ear. He felt his father’s eyes on him.

The man straightened up, the lamp held a little way above his head. He replaced it on the table, stretched himself out on the floor and pushed an arm under the bed. A basin rattled against something hard. He kept on feeling for a while. Then he stood up. In the yellow lamplight, his face glistened with sweat.

‘She gone,’ he said. ‘De grip, she take dat too. You’ modder gone for good.’

Now the little girl was crying in loud, sharp spurts. The boy lifted her onto his lap. He began to rock her.

‘Hush Po’ Po’ hush, Mammy gone to town…’

His father stopped him. ‘When last you feed her?’

‘Dis evenin. I make sweet-water fuh she. Milk done yestiday.’

The boy pointed at the empty beer bottle on the table with a rubber nipple over the mouth.

‘And you, y’all eat?’

‘Steve was crying from hungry. I boil de last green fig dat was there. I save some for you.’

The little girl had fallen asleep again. The boy turned his head toward the door, his face twitching.

‘Mammy, she leave since morning, just after you… you…’ His voice trailed off. He was shaking when he spoke again, ‘She send me by Nen-Nen… to borrow salt, an’ when I come back, she gone.’

His father left him, began to stray around the room. He was passing his hands over the walls, the table. He stopped and stared down at the bed.

‘Didn’t even make it up,’ he said. ‘Not even de bed.’

Words began to flow from him. ‘Is how I mus feel? Not cold I mus feel? Is me who cause crisis? Me who en’t want to give wuk? Is not cold I mus’ feel? Is nothing I could do. She know is nothing I could do. Is the same drown I drowning that everybody on dis islan drowning. Now she leave y’all in me hand – for what? What I mus do? Is not cold I mus feel?’

He trailed around the room and stopped at the doorway. He lifted the bundle that he’d dropped there, removed the cutlass and opened it.

‘Look!’ he told the boy. ‘I bring somet’ing. I get somet’ing; I wasn idling. I get somet’ing.’

He laid a jumble of items on the floor – what looked like yams and sweet potatoes.

‘Look, these ripe,’ his father said. ‘Full yuh belly.’ He handed him two ripe bananas. The boy took them. They were wet and he wiped them on his nightie. He dropped them when he saw the blood.

‘Is all right,’ his father said. ‘Blood come from the fowl.’ He pointed at two heaps on the floor. ‘Is better when dey dead, easier to carry, no noise.’

He took up the bananas, wiped them on his own shirt and gave them to the boy. The boy took them, turning his eyes to the sleeping children.

‘Let dem sleep. It have more,’ his father said.

The man turned away and settled himself in the doorway. The boy ate quietly behind him.

‘She didn have to go, no reason to go and leave me with de chil’ren. Okay we been fighting, but she didn have to leave me. Me didn believe her when she tell me she going go. Look the food I bring tonight. She could’ve cook something nice. Give y’all a good feed.’

He raised his head and stared out over the sleeping houses down below. It’d been almost two months since all the lights went out. The night was pressing close. He heard the growl of police jeeps in St. George’s Town below, the far-off howl of dogs, gunshots, and the wind snoring through the bamboo clump that hung over the little house.

The boy yawned. The man stirred; turned towards him. The last banana skin, licked clean, was dangling between his fingers. The man watched him, remembering the way he put his sister to sleep, the little maternal ministrations of his son. He was small – too small for his eleven years.

The boy was watching him too and swaying on his feet.

‘Come. Look, more fig. You wan more ripe-fig?’

The boy shook his head.

‘No? You wan’ sleep den?’ The man tapped his thigh. ‘Come, doh-doh, on me.’

The boy shuffled closer, the lamplight exposing his naked front.

‘Res’ yuhself. Lemme put you to sleep.’ He lifted the boy, and settled him in his lap.

The boy turned searching eyes on the man’s face. His little body relaxed into a shy smile before his eyes drooped and closed.

COLD HOLE

Somebody was chopping wood on the other side of the valley. Sunlight dripped through the holes of the old board house and settled on his stomach. From the yard outside, there came the smells of wood-smoke and early morning breakfast.

The boy’s feet propelled him from the floor through the open door and into the yard.

He was thirteen today and nobody remembered, not even his mother. But the sun and the wind and the trees knew it because they had given him a special Sunday. A day for the river.

The house was too quiet. He did not trust the silence. His mother was not singing.

If she caught him running off this early, when there were the rabbits to feed, the goat to tie out, well… water more than flour.

Still, nothing was going to stop him going fishing today, still burning as he was with a week-old memory that hadn’t left him, even in his sleep – that afternoon after school when his two cousins and his little brother, Ken, were admiring him as he told them his latest river story.

‘Cold Hole was deep! I dive in. I dive down, down, deep-deep down, and guess what I see? A guaje! De biggest crayfish in de world… I spend one whole hour underwater, tryin to catch it, so when…’

‘You lie!’ Two voices had boomed behind him: Ashton and Mandy. They smelt like men, walked and talked like men. Even the teachers stepped out of their way.

Ashton, a big grin spread across his slab of a face, was standing over him. Mandy the taller of the two, his hands pushed down his pockets, was throwing him a nasty sideways glare.

He felt his mouth go dry. ‘Who say I lie?’

Ken, flimsy and defiant, stood at his side, ‘Is true. My brodder never lie.’

The young men laughed and the child flinched at their loudness.

‘Who ‘fraid of Cold Hole more than yuh chupid brother here? Me an Mandy tired lift him up to cross deep water or climb river bank.’

‘I not ‘fraid now!’ he’d shot back.

‘Since when?’

He’d rested his hand on his brother’s shoulder, balancing on the balls of his feet. Everything had become still. Vehicles droned in the far-off distance. Leaves fell and made clicking sounds on the road.

‘Since I know I’z me and not nobody shadow,’ he said.

Ashton stuck two fingers in the air. ‘Talk sense, likkle boy!’

Swallowing on the shame, he’d stood on the grass verge and stared at their shifting shoulders until they disappeared.

He ducked beneath the house, gathered his line, the bait, a rusted piece of machete and – still doubled at the waist – tiptoed toward the stool of bananas fringing the house. The trick was to disappear when no one was looking.

‘Hold it, Mister Man!’ His mother carried her heavy body easily over the stony yard, her hands stripping a whip from the bowlie tree that hung over the house.

A couple of months ago, she caught him trying to chop down that bowlie tree with a blunt machete. She’d complimented him on his efforts, assuring him that the smaller branches would all be kept for warming him up. He would, of course, have to dig a coalpit, and make bags of charcoal with the rest of the wood.

‘What day today is?’ Her voice was almost caressing.

He searched his head for a way out, ‘You see, Ma, today is my birthday. You – everybody – forget.’ He sensed her hesitation. ‘And I thought that, well… I goin go an fish for my birthday.’

‘Come!’ She drew him out into the yard.

The windows of the surrounding houses swung open and spilled the upper halves of full-breasted women.

The other children were quiet. Even the fowls in the yard ceased scratching.

‘Is a naaasty habit you have! Every Sunday so, you leaving tea behind, tying the goat any old place to starve, and you gone and dreeve-way whole day in the river. Suppose you drown? Suppose you drop down an’ dead!’

She was piling up his sins – her war dance.

‘Last Sunday, I hear that Gordon cow nearly butt you and break yuh likkle arse. You so farse. You been jookin the man cow wid stick.’

The yard shook with laughter.

‘And yesterday, you been voonging stone at Ayhie mango tree. You nearly bus’ the old lady head in she own garden.’ She shook him violently when he denied this.

‘The other-day, you tell me you goin and help Nen pick peas. You end up quite in the sea with Ashton and Mandy. Which part of the sea you does pick peas eh? And where you learn all them bad-words that you could cuss Missa Joe-Joe, who worth yuh gran’faddah, and tell im how he born ‘n where he come from? You get too damn mannish now!’

The whip curled around his shoulders. Pain snaked down his back. He twisted like a mad worm. Subdued, the children counted. Fifteen.

It was then that Dada’s voice cut in. ‘Stop! You want to spoil the blasted child skin, or what!’ It checked his mother, as though a hand had pulled her back.

Pain-crazy, he ripped himself loose and bolted through the bushes beyond the house.

He sat there for a long time and fought his tears while his mother regained her voice. It rose and fell in the near distance, then broke into song.

Ken came fumbling through the black sage and borbook, trouserless as usual. ‘I bring yuh fishin rod an’ t’ing for you.’

His brother handed him a rumpled paper-bag. It contained home-made bread with a spread of guava jam. It was his greataunt’s way of saying that she felt for him.

He gathered his rod and bait and began marching down the hill.

‘I want come wit you,’ Ken called.

‘Nuh!’

‘I carry the bait and crayfish for you.’

‘Nuh!’

‘I cominnn!’

He looked back at his brother. ‘You not wearin no pants. Ants go bite yuh ki-kiss. Today, I goin all de way down to Cold Hole. It have a mermaid down there that like nice-lookin boys wid pretty face like you. I bring a mango, piece-a-cane and a red-tail crayfish for you, okay?’

‘‘Kay.’

He took the mud track for the river, said ‘G’morning’ to some of the elders he passed, ignoring those who brought complaints to his mother. He met Elaine, tall and big-breasted, balancing a basin of river-washed clothes on her head. She was grinning wickedly. ‘It damn good yuh modder cut yuh arse!’

Elaine’s laughter bounced down the hill behind him and did not stop until he reached the river.

His hook was a needle he’d held over a burning candle, then bent and attached to a fine string which he tied to a slender stick. Baited with earthworm, it became a living thing in his hand. He flipped beating crayfish out of the water and skewered them on the spine of a coconut leaf as he moved steadily downriver.

He would have to go past Concrete Basin where the mullets were. They liked the smoky-blue pools surrounded by tall, black rocks. It took a quick hook and rapid hand to catch them. Then Dragon Place where the water-grass and crestles made a pale green carpet, and the stones surfaced like heads from the water. River crabs and zandomeh lived in Long Water and Young Sea. A couple of miles further down he would come to Cold Hole.

From there the river deepened and darkened, its banks reduced to slippery humps riddled with crab-holes. Branches drooped and brushed the earth, hiding my-bone nests and serpents. Dada said there were other kinds of water creatures in the darkness of Cold Hole. Come nighttime, she added, Dealer-men met on its banks to barter the souls of children with the devil. And it was true that sometimes he thought he heard them joining the chorus of crickets and bullfrogs that sang all night to the moon. Besides, the old woman had told him, Cold Hole was waiting to swallow any boychile who left his work at home and went off fishing.

Halfway there, four coconut flexes bristled with crayfish in his hands. Boys working their way up-river whistled at his catch. He’d passed men kneeling over pools with machetes, slashing at mullets as they ghosted past. A mad man’s game, Ashton always said, because a cutlass swung through water became a crazy thing that flashed back at its owner’s legs. Others, pushing their bare hands under rocks, dragged out river crabs, water snakes and bull frogs. If they chanced to pull out a ling, its claws crunched down on their fingers, and he would watch them dance the shuddering dance of agony.

He tossed some of the sun-yellow guavas and water-lemons he’d gathered to some women labouring over multicoloured mounds of clothes. A mango or two, if he knew them well. He’d hidden the sapodillas and sugar-apples in his shirt. The gru-grus were for sale in school tomorrow. His mouth was white, his stomach tight from chewing sugar cane.

The sun was melting over the Kalivini hills when he arrived. From where he stood, he could not see Cold Hole, roofed as it was by the interlocked branches of kakoli trees and thick-hanging lianas. But already he felt the chill. He halted outside the wall of vegetation, took a breath, parted the weave of vines and entered the smell of fermenting leaves, heard the hollow hum of the river further down, the shift and groan of branches overhead.

The pool glinted like a giant reptilian eye. A wall of mosscovered rock buried its feet in the darkness of the basin.

He rested his things on the bank beside an overturned calabash. There was a toss of rice around it. Saraka-people came here, too, to offer saltless food to Oshun.

He stripped and wrapped his crayfishes with his clothes so that lizards could not get at them. He walked to the edge of the pool and stood above it until his eyes adjusted to the gloom.

Somewhere beneath these silent waters there was a hole in the rock where Ashton never failed to catch the king of all crayfishes – a guaje. A great lobster-sized creature, so ancient, a hardened crust of silt covered it from head to tail. Its saw-toothed pincers could cut through any line.

He packed his lungs and plunged. The cold closed around his nakedness and shocked his senses. He surfaced, snorting, and struck out for the dripping rock wall. There, gripped in the vice of the freezing water, he allowed his body to sink and began a sidewise groping along the rock. Moss and mud gave way between his fingers. Now, he felt the heavy drift of the water nudging him toward where the river flowed out and carried on.

Starved of air, he heaved himself to the surface. The water churned around him and something slippery slid across his chest. He threw himself backward and began thrashing for the bank. He scrambled onto it and remained there, stooped, teeth chattering. He realised it was a river-eel, a zangri. An image of the fish swam inside his head: flat and silver like the blade of a new machete, with the teeth of a barracuda.

It was a while before the shivering stopped.

At the dripping rock face, he raised his eyes. Flecks of sky winked at him through the canopy. He thought of the eel, then turned his mind to home. It would be easy to gather his fruits and crayfish and walk away. All that food would put his mother in a good mood. She would sit beside him on the step while they ate, sidle a glance at him, nudge him with an elbow, then offer him a smile. But this vision was muddied by the memory of Ashton and Mandy sneering down at him.

He rose, shuffled to the edge, tensed and plunged, this time angling his body the way he’d seen Ashton do, heading for an area of darkness at the base of the rock. Once there, he allowed himself to sink.

The hole was much further down than he’d expected. Its jaggedness surprised him. He felt around its edges for a while, relaxed his arm and eased it in, following the upward angle of the opening until his shoulder was flush with it. Something stirred against his fingers. He withdrew rapidly, surfaced, took in air and went down again.

He blanked his mind and sent in his arm. Something erupted against his palm. A jolt of pain flashed down his arm, stiffened his spine and convulsed his legs. It was as if he’d been driven through with nails. Bracing himself, he closed his fist around the armoured head and pulled. It was like ripping away a piece of rock, but inch by inch the creature came, and it came out fighting.

He heaved to the surface and struck for the bank, levering his body up the slippery incline with his elbows. There, he half-lay, half-knelt among the stones and grass and watched the enormous creature clinging to his hand. A lacework of blood trickled down his wrist and forearm. The guaje swivelled its crablike eyes at him – the tail splayed and thrashing the air with heavy strokes. He forced open its pincers and dropped it on the ground.

He lay there cradling his injured hand, the pain pulsing through his arm and pooling at his shoulder. He turned his eyes on the creature. It had raised its pincers, its tail curved inward under its belly.

‘So is fight you want,’ he hissed.

He stood up and nudged it with a foot, passed a provocative toe along the coarseness of its carapace. It convulsed, then lay still. He prodded it again, tensed his legs and raised his heel above the creature’s head. For a moment he hung there in a dreamy paralysis, seeing himself walking up Old Hope Road with the guaje wrapped in cocoa leaves, strung from his shoulder with strips of vine. He pictured the unbelieving eyes gathered along the roadside, the amazed utterances of his name. But the vision stirred nothing in him, no anticipation of his mother’s pleasure, or what Ashton’s and Mandy’s words might be when they saw him with the giant crayfish. In that dreamy pause he felt the creature’s whiplike feelers stroke his toes then come to rest there, and its gentleness surprised him.

With a scooping movement of his foot he flipped it in the air. The pool received it with a gurgle and a sigh. Then came the churn of disturbed water followed by the quiet.

He pulled on his clothes, gathered his things, halted at the vine-door to look over his shoulder. And with a voice that pulsed from his throat and shocked him, he shouted down the long river-corridor.

He listened for his echo. Heard none. Spun on his heels and headed home.

ACQUAINTING

Thomas came back from school to find a man sitting in his mother’s yard. He had deep wide eyes, and the lashes of a woman. His hair fell about his face like the petals of some dark mysterious plant.

The boy dropped his books on the step and walked around the stranger slowly, never looking directly at the man’s face, never responding to his smile.

He shifted his eyes towards his mother in the doorway, then back to the man. He was thin as a whip, but not frail; the skin of his arms and legs were cocoa-dark. A quiet, watching man whose long dark fingers remained still in his lap. Thomas noticed that his toes – peeping from the busted front of his canvas shoes – were almost as long as his fingers.

Thomas felt his mother’s eyes on him. Her gaze was underhand and secretive, and however quickly he turned his head he was never fast enough to catch her eyes. She kept wiping her hands on her dress and twisting the little plaits of hair at the nape of her neck.

He didn’t like that look on her face when she handed him his dinner. She was smiling at him too much. Didn’t even tell him to change his school clothes before he ate. He raised a hand and pointed a finger at the doorway.

‘Mammy, what kind o man he is?’

He saw the irritation in his mother’s face as she turned to him. But he really wanted to know and Mammy must have seen this because she clasped both hands in front of her and made a small step back, as if she were holding a bat to protect herself from the googly he might bowl.

It wasn no googly he had in mind. Was a coupla bouncers. He goin remind her that, after all five of his uncles came to their yard last year and dragged Missa Ashton out of the house and sent him away for good, she promised she would never bring a fella to their house again, unless he, Thomas, tell her that he liked the man. And if she bring a fella, he had to be a gentleman. An’ even if he was a gentleman, she would test him for a couple weeks to see if he was any good; and even if he was any good she go give him a coupla months before she moved him in; and if she moved him in, she had her five brothers as backative to drag him out soon as he start behaving like bad-john.

‘You never see a Indian man before?’ she said.

He shook his head, ‘Nuh, I never see a man like he. Where he from?’

The smile left her face. ‘How you mean where he from? He from the same place everybody come from.’

‘And where that is?

‘Somewhere,’ she said – as if somewhere was a place that he should know. ‘Everybody come from somewhere. Talk to him, he won’t bite you.’

‘He could talk?’

‘He not yooman? He ain got a tongue?’ Now she seemed aggrieved. ‘A gen’leman come to a pusson yard, a gen’leman come to stay with us and people not saying boo to him. Look how you was walkin round the Mister like if he’s a maypole. Is a miracle you didn get giddy an fall down. Is so people does make acquaintance? Eh?’

Thomas turned his head and looked out. The stranger hadn’t moved. He did not have the barrel chests of his uncles. His muscles snaked along the bones of his arms like rope. It crossed his mind that if this new fella had been a plant he would be bamboo.

Thomas pushed his plate aside. A little knot had tightened in his throat. He didn’t feel hungry anymore.

He wanted to tell Mammy that he didn want no father, ‘specially since he never meet the one they said was his. He thought about the fella she brought home the year before and asked him to make ‘acquaintance’. She said he was a gentleman – not so? And mebbe he was – until he lost his job and started beating up the boss through her.

His mother was standing in front of him, her eyes large and moist. Thomas saw the tension in her body. All of a sudden he wanted to take her hand and press his head against her side. He stared out the window at the stranger, lifted his face to hers and mumbled, ‘He awright, Ma? Not so? I hopin and supposin he different.’

His mother smiled. She blinked at him and turned her gaze towards the window.

‘Go way,’ she told him softly. ‘You come here to upset me?’

THE CANEBREAKERS

Evenings, I used to watch the women coming home from work, wading through the orange light, their frocks fluttering like wings. I would stand on the only boulder in our yard and peer down, searching amongst that line for my sister.

I struggled to pick her out, not by her face but by that long stride of hers and the curious way she angled her body forward, as though she was pushing against winds felt only by herself. But these women were no more than shapes against the white feeder road that stretched behind them till the distance narrowed it to a needlepoint.

‘Sis,’ I asked her once. ‘Why I could never make you out from mongst all dem wimmen comin home from work?’

‘Coz we’z de same, Ah s’pose.’ Then she looked me straight in the eyes: ‘Yep, we de same. Besides, y’all men never choose de right light to look at us in.’

I didn’t know what she meant by that, what my sister meant by most of the answers she gave to my questions. She hardly ever talked straight. Most people thought she never talked at all.

I used to think it was the canes that made her like that. Any person would feel small and confused and lost in those lil spiderlegged houses of ours, standing at the very edges of a tossing ocean of sugar cane.

Dry Season, she became even more firm-lipped. It was not a sudden change of mood, but a sort of deepening inside that grew with the shooting canes, their blossoming and their ripening.

I sometimes looked at her and found myself wondering about my mother. I couldn’t recall what she looked like, though people said my sister was her spitting image. I dreamt of this woman of indistinguishable features who had left for Trinidad.

I never met my stepfather, a brother and a little sister whom I only heard about.

Rumour had it that my mother gave Sis the chance to live with her. That was the year after she abandoned us. I was four, my sister, eighteen.

The boat ticket arrived and my sister’s departure date was fixed. She left me with my aunt with the promise that I would come soon after. The evening before she left, Old Hope threw a lot of farewell kisses and speeches at my sister.

She took them all in; left the following morning dressed for Trinidad, carrying a brown cardboard suitcase.

Imagine the confusion when the workers on the estate saw her return in the taxi she left in, borrow a machete and set to work – still in her best dress – as if leaving for Trinidad and returning a short while later was the most natural thing in the world. She said one of those puzzling things that I had grown accustomed to.

‘You have to break cane, not escape cane. Besides, it have cane in Trinidad too.’

She took me back from my aunt to live with her in the house my mother fled.

Sis got up every foreday morning, waking me with her. It was so quiet out there, you could hear the cane leaves rubbing against each other, and get the smell of molasses and rum from the sugar factory miles away. She told me where to tie the goats for the day, and while I was out she prepared our lunch – mainly steamed vegetables, salt-fish and a drink of black sage or lemongrass tea, which we also had for breakfast.

She tied her head, wrapped a band of cloth around her waist and strode out into the morning, the little machete in one hand, the old fire-blackened tin marked DANO MILK, which contained her lunch, balanced in the other.

She never said goodbye. But I didn’t mind.

Later I left for school balancing my books with the same care that my sister held her machete. I carried my lunch in an identical can in the other hand.

I never discussed school with Sis. She never asked. I told her what I wanted and she got it. I would hand her the slip of paper folded exactly as the teacher gave it, with the name of the book he’d scribbled there. Sis would take it between her fingers, as though she was afraid of hurting it and without a glance, she would place the note where she kept her money – in the cleft of her bosom.

One night, I woke up and caught her staring at the note I had brought from school. She did not know I was awake. I’ll never forget that picture of her, sitting on the edge of the little bed, squinting at the paper, her lips forming letters, words – or perhaps a wish? I dunno.

That very Saturday she got up early, put on what folks had come to call her ‘Trinidad dress’ and left for St. George’s on foot.

She returned in the afternoon with the new book and, like all the times before, asked me to open it while she sat in the corner near the window, staring at me with such a strange expression I felt nervous and proud and foolish at the same time.

I used to take these things for granted – I mean, getting up on mornings, tying out the goats, watching the people leave their homes and head like a long column of worker ants for the stretches of estate cane that fed the factory in the south.

Cane was always there and we expected to live and burn out our lives in the fields – less abruptly, perhaps, than my father who had passed away after being hit by a tractor carrying cane. My mother? Well, she gave up.

I was always home before Sis. Having brought the goats in, I did my homework sitting on the doorstep, hastening to finish it before the rest of the daylight faded. Then I climbed the boulder and watched the old cane road for her.

Arriving, she would lower herself on the steps and I’d hand her the big, white enamel cup. She drank with a satisfaction I envied, because she seemed to get such pleasure from a cup of water.

If working for the estate made water taste so good, then that, for me, was reason enough to want to spend my life there too.

*

‘Your sister don’ want you to work on no estate,’ Tin Tin told me once.

Tin Tin was my best friend – somebody I talked to and daydreamed with. We were the same age and shared so much of our spare time together, I often forgot she was a girl who was not supposed to throw stones, climb trees, pick fights and steal sugarcane. To be honest, she could do all of that better than I. Worse yet, I couldn’t beat her in a fight and was often obliged to retreat into silence whenever our quarrels became too heated.

‘My sis didn say she don’ want me to work on no estate.’

‘She don’ have ter, chupidy. She send you to school. Give you eddication, not so?’

‘Your modder sen’ you to school too.’

‘Yes, but she don expect me to – well, she not workin she soul-case out for me. My modder different, see! Is you an your sister alone; my modder have eight o’ we. Besides, my fadder pass away.’

‘My fadder pass away too.’

‘Yes, but not in no sugar factory. Is a lil ole tractor dat bounce off yours. Mine is a whole factory.’

‘Factory don’ bounce off people,’ I said.

‘I didn say dat.’ Tin Tin was getting annoyed.

‘Nuh, but you implied that. If you assert…’

‘Ass-hurt,’ she echoed scornfully. ‘Big wud! You start showin off!’

‘The word jus slip,’ I apologised.

‘Slip what. You showin off coz your sister buy you big book an’ you done scholarship exams. You know damwelly if…’

I knew what she was going to say. She was brighter than I. We used to be in the same class until The Accident; she would have been doing the exams, too, had not her mother said it made no sense. The two eldest boys would have to work in the fields alongside her and she – Tin Tin – was not going back to school ‘coz she couldn’ afford no school-expense and there wuz two lil children to take care of durin de day.

*

‘Sis, how come Tin Tin can’t go back to school?’

‘Ask ‘er.’

‘She tell me arready.’

‘So why you askin me?’

‘Tin-Tin bright,’ I said.

‘I know dat.’

‘Nearly as bright as me.’

Sis raised her brows at me. This was one of the times when I felt she didn’t like me at all.

She ignored me for the rest of the evening.

The season deepened. What had once been growing cane became a brown expanse of parched straw as they were chopped down and the trucks took them away.

The overseers walked up and down in their wide straw hats – potbellied men with thick books from which they looked up and thundered orders to the men who chopped and to the women who heaped the cane together and loaded them onto the waiting trucks.

Sis was one of the few women who chopped cane. She did it because choppers were paid fifty cents more than loaders. It was hard work but she had grown accustomed to it.

‘Your sister is a chopper coz…’

‘Coz what?’

‘Coz she in favour.’

‘Ah don’t unnerstan.’ ‘Chupid boy. She have two overseer boyfren.’

‘Don’t say dat about my sister, Tin. I goin’ tell ‘er.’

‘Favour for favour, my modder say.’

‘Don say dat ‘bout my sister.’ I was close to tears and no longer afraid of her.

‘Well, is what I hear say.’

‘She work harder dan your modder an’ fadder put togedder.’ I couldn’t stop pounding my knee. ‘Is not only man should chop cane for money.’

‘Okay, Baldie, awright. I didn mean it. I sorry.’

‘I goin tell ‘er, you hear. I goin’ tell ‘er.’

‘Sorry, Baldie, sorry.’

‘Don’ talk to me.’

We didn’t speak for weeks. Tin Tin tried to make up several times and finally gave up, which disappointed me since I had planned to soften a bit the next time she came round.

I tied out the goats, waited for Sis with her cup of water and studied her with greater care. I asked her no more questions. In fact, we barely spoke.

I really missed Tin-Tin when the nights of the chill, bright moons arrived. We should have been sitting with the rest of the village children on the mounds of cut cane, sucking away and talking about anything that came to mind.

We talked about the things we had heard and read about – strange inventions, planes that flew backwards, machines that talked, wondering how our little world fitted into all of that. Our dreams for ourselves never went beyond the tallest cane.

Nothing compared with the pleasure we got from invading the fields. You would hear the dull poks as we broke the canes, the swish of the leaves as we hauled the plant, root and all, into the road.

There was a watchman somewhere in the night out there, but we didn’t care. He never caught anyone. Besides, it didn’t feel like stealing. Thinking back, there was something vengeful in those nighttime raids. We called it breaking cane.

I passed my exams, had done well enough to go to the secondary school of my choice. My name was even in the papers.

The following week, Tin Tin brought me a sapodilla. It smelled so good, I almost fainted. It would be my first for the season. The first fruit was always the best. You got more than just its taste; you got the promise of a whole season of ripeness ahead. We often did this with our first fruit, yunno – come together and argue over the first bite.

I forgot our quarrel and all the weeks of not speaking to her.

‘I wan’ de firs’ bite.’

‘Nuh,’ she said.

‘Gimme de firs bite, nuh.’

‘You say, ‘nuh’. Dat mean you don’ want it.’

‘Yeh, man, gimme de sappo, nuh.’

‘You jus’ say ‘nuh’ again.’

‘Jus’ one bite.’

‘Okay, come for de bite.’ I was blind to everything but the fruit. I came forward. She bit me hard on my arm. Tin Tin couldn’t stop laughing. Then she offered me the whole fruit. I ate half and handed her the rest. She shook her head. I had never seen her so serious before.

‘Tek it, Baldie, I bring it for you.’

She was lying and knew I knew it.

‘What you want for it?’ I asked.

‘Nuffing. Let’s go break cane.’

In a week or two the season would be over. We had a spot where we used to sit and chew our cane and argue. It was the steps of a broken-down plantation house.

‘You find place like dis all over de country, in all dem islands, always on de highest hill,’ I said to Sis, pointing at a picture in my history book. ‘I wonder why nobody never bother to pull dem down or p’raps build dem back?’

‘Lots o’ things remain besides dem old house,’ she muttered. ‘If I have my way, I pull everyting down, dig up de foundation an’ start clean – from scratch.’

‘Talk to me, Baldie,’ Tin Tin said.

‘Bout what?’

‘Anyfing. Like we uses, erm, like we ‘custom.’

‘Bout when we get big, you mean?’

‘Yup.’

‘Okay, like I tell you; we goin build a house wid – lemme see – nine room an…’

‘No, ten – you say ten is a balance number, remember?’

‘Oh, yes – ten.’ I looked at her. ‘And after?’

‘Don’ ask me. You tell me.’ She was angry. ‘You ferget arready? You don’ even start Secondry an’ you ferget arready. Go ahead.’

‘An mebbe, mebbe we married, s’long as you don beat me up when I make you vex.’

‘You never say ‘mebbe’ before.’

‘Well…’

‘Wish I was a boy an didn have no lil brother an sister to care for. Then I would ha show you.’

‘Is not my fault.’

‘Is mine?’ she snapped. She lowered her head at me, ‘What you wan to become?’

‘Lawyer mebbe; p’raps doctor – make a lotta money.’

‘You don’ want to drive cane-truck no more?’

‘Don fink so. Why you ask me all dem questions, Tin?’

‘Cuz is not fair.’

‘Is not my fault’

‘You say dat again, I hit you.’

‘Well is…’ I stopped short. I was struggling to clear the tightness in my chest and throat. ‘I hate cane,’ I said.

She, too, was close to tears. We rose and, together, picked our way over the stones of the same road that I watched the women walking on every evening after work.

‘Baldie,’ she said. Her voice was clear and strong again. ‘I hate cane too. Cane not always sweet. It have some dat salt, some dat coarse. It spoil yuh teeth, an if you not careful, you cut your mout’ wit de peelin. Take my fadder; take your fadder. See what happen? Dat’s why I don’ like no sugar in my tea. I ‘fraid I might be drinkin ‘im.’

She was talking like my sister. Did they all talk like that when things upset them?

‘I startin Secondary on Monday, Tin.’ I felt I had to tell her.

‘I know.’

We were almost home. Tin Tin was looking into my face. ‘Luck, Baldie.’ I saw that she meant it.

‘I see you tomorrow?’ I said.

‘Dunno, Baldie.’

‘We goin break cane togedder, right?’

‘I don fink so, Baldie.’ She dropped my hand and sprinted off home.

‘Sis?’

‘Eh?’

‘Why Tin Tin tell me good luck as if I done dead o’ something? As if she never goin’ see me again? She don’ even want to talk to me no more. She say if everybody can’t get eddicated, den nobody should.’

‘Coz she unnerstan.’

‘Unnerstan what?’

Sis looked at me. She began speaking so softly her lips barely moved. ‘Coz dem offerin you a ticket so you could up an leave – like your modder – alone – and never come back. Leave everybody else behind. Tin Tin should’ve gone before you – you know dat?’

Her eyes seemed to have gathered all the lamplight, and were holding it in.

She was no longer my sister when she became like that. She was somehow stronger and stranger than anyone I had ever known or dreamed of – staring past me, through the walls, beyond the night.

‘What you want to become?’ She had pushed the new uniform on the table in front of me, as though I had only to put it on to become whatever I wanted.

‘Tin Tin ask me de same question.’

‘An you tell ‘er?’

‘Yep – doctor mebbe, o’ lawyer.’

‘Nuh.’

I looked up, surprised.

‘We don’ need no lawyers now, and we been gettin’ along fine widdout doctors. We want teachers and a school firs’.’

‘But we talkin ‘bout me; not no teacher an’ no school. Who it have to teach round here…’

‘We,’ she hissed. ‘We! Teach, Baldie, coz secandry ain’t no real escape. Long as we tie down, you tie down too. Learnin to escape cane not enough. How to break it – break out ov it, is what you have to learn. You unnerstan?’

I shook my head.

‘Tin Tin unnerstan: Sheez de real canebreaker.’

‘I could break cane too.’ I was hating them for making me feel so useless.

‘Den teach. When de time come, build a school; stay right here an teach de children so’z it don’t have no more Tin Tin; so’z it don’t have no more me. Canebreakers come befo lawyers, y’unnerstan?’

I wished she hadn’t thrown that weight on me. For the first time I saw the lines of fatigue on her face. I was wishing I could still experience the pleasure of handing her a cup of water and watching her drink.

WALKING FOR MY MOTHER

Old Hope turned out their children to watch Nella go. It was wonderful and frightening because the quiet in the air was all for her. All for her, the gifts, the utterances of pleasure, the sideways glances and sweat-rimmed smiles. Like they were seeing her properly for the first time.

Ken had gone into the bushes and brought back two glistening guavas. White and rare, they smelled of the last days of the Dry Season. Even the wrapping was unusual – a dasheen leaf, shaped like a heart and patterned with a web of purple veins. Her uncle placed the guavas on the table beside the bread they’d baked specially for her.

Aunt Gigelle had brought her a boiled egg. She came swaying down the hill, balancing one in each palm as if they were the globes of life.

‘Pretty peee-ople!’ she sang, bending low and curving her very, very long fingers around her face and Liam’s. ‘One from Bucky and one from me. One for Liam and one for you.’ Then, preciously, she placed them on the flowered tablecloth.

Uncle Ian had polished the new black patent leather shoes till they shone like pools of water in the morning light, while Gran Lil moved around her strangely. Her grandmother had taken off her headwrap and allowed her white hair to uncoil and settle like a halo round her face.

Even her twin brother seemed amazed. Liam had promptly offered her the other egg. Every now and again, he examined the brilliant white polyester shirt, passed the back of his hand against the dark-blue skirt and lifted the tip of the gold-striped, carmine tie.

They’d already begun preparing her. Aunty May had bathed her with the Cussons Imperial Leather soap they’d bought for the occasion. A new toothbrush that matched the ochre wrapping of the soap exactly and a little packet of Colgate toothpaste waited on the table while she ate in brand new socks and underwear. Occasionally, her mother glanced at her and then at Liam, furtively.

Breakfast over, her mother dressed her. Her hands were trembling slightly.

Over the weeks she’d seen her mother take complete command of everything. Her moment had arrived and she’d slipped into it like a garment cut especially for her. She’d become strange and secretive and oddly compelling, for her Mammy now ruled the yard with worry.

Mammy had worried for a month about the money she didn’t have, might never have, but had to have in order to buy the books and uniform. And gradually the yard began to worry too. She fretted for another week – her voice low, complaining, and very mildly accusing – till one Sunday, moody and fed up, Aunty May sent her, Nella, off to take the good news to a friend of hers in some place named La Tante.

She had returned home with fifteen dollars, which Mammy promptly took off her.

Gran Lil had also had enough, and spent an entire day rummaging her memory for names of distant cousins, nephews, nieces and great aunts up north. She then sent the good news off through friends, by bus. Soon, crumpled packets began to arrive with pairs of socks and underwear; and bags with beautiful, obscure books – whose only purpose had been to sit on shelves near Bibles because they looked important. Sometimes they came wrapped on top of sacks of provision or between a couple of live chickens.

That was good, but not enough, her mother fretted. What the chile needed most was money. ‘Mooneeey.’ Her voice drifted with the word, reluctant to let it go.

So over the evening meal, they helped each other recall ancient favours to old-time friends and once they’d settled on some names, they sent her off again, on her own. It was always on her own. Never, they warned, to mention money, or to remind them of the favours, just to pass the good news on.

Then one Sunday morning, with a long, momentous sigh, Mammy sat down on the steps, plunged her hand down her bosom and pulled out a handful of notes. She kept dipping and dropping fistfuls at her feet while they looked on fascinated.

‘T’ree hundred dollars an…’ She paused abruptly, her face rigid with anxiety. She beat a frantic tattoo on her chest, thrashed her skirt, stomped and heaved herself, before bringing her nose down to the stones in the yard. Finally, fingers poised as if to pick up a needle, her mother retrieved something, grinned a large democratic grin, and muttered fervently, victoriously, ‘…an one cent!’ which raised a wave of laughter.

Then she left the money there for anyone to examine it, as if to say that her figure was, well, just that – hers! – a mere probability – and they, after counting it themselves, might just as easily come up with a different but equally legitimate sum.

Some stared at the notes, others prodded them with their fingers, or nudged them with a marvelling toe, or, not uncommonly, brought their noses down to them. For nothing on earth smelled as satisfying as three hundred EC dollars, and one cent.

With that money, her mother had bought her everything, including the breakfast of bacon, the bowl of steaming Quaker oats, and the Milo drink she hated but felt obliged to drink because it was what eddicated children was s’posed ter have on their first day at any secondary school, anywhere in the world.

Now that she was about to set out, something tight and warm had settled in her stomach. A hush had settled over the valley. The neighbours had brought their children to the side of the road and placed the younger ones directly in front, holding them there with hands firmly on their shoulders.

The new bag of books dangling from her shoulders, and a few dollars stuffed down her pocket, she made her way down the track to the road. Aunty Paula had set off in front, clearing the path of leaves and stones and whatever else she thought might make her trip and bruise her dignity.

‘Yuh modder don’t want you to take de bus from here,’ Aunty May whispered.

She nodded – she would have nodded to anything. Aunty May also told her that Mammy, at the last minute, had decided not to come with her. ‘She ain got nothin to put on,’ her aunt explained. ‘Never mind, she going ter be watching you. Everybody goin be watchin you.’ Then she’d paused a while. ‘An I not comin eider, so don’t bodder look at me.’

‘People gettin on as if I not comin back!’

‘You intend to?’ Aunty May grinned cheerlessly at her.

‘Is just a secondary school I going to, dat’s all.’

The woman stopped wiping her face with her hand. ‘You de first dis side of Old Hope Valley; in fact de first dis side of anywhere as far as I know to go to school in town. Once dem lil ones dere see dat you kin get to secandry, dey know dat dey kin get dere too, by de hook or by de crook. Dem tinkin mongst demself dat if Hannah girl-chile kin do it, deir own chile kin do it too. Jealousy,’ she chuckled loudly. ‘Dat kind o jealousy is good.’

‘People talk as if I deadin o someting.’

‘Hush you mouth, you always complainin. Deadin me tail! I hope you not going ter talk like dat when you reach inside dem people hifalutin, low-fartin school. You got to speak proper. Deadinggg – pronounce your G proper, hear? You got your handkerchief? ‘Kay! Hold orrrn, Hannah! Stop frettin at me! You can’t see I fixin ‘er?’ She gasped and laughed and stepped away. ‘Gwone chile, we give you broughtupsy, now go and get de eddication.’

‘And Liam? I want Liam to walk wit me, I want…’

‘Never mind Liam. Liam goin to be awright. Liam always goin to be awright. Liam is a boy!’

Aunty May moved up close. She did a strange thing. She licked a finger and made a circle on Nella’s forehead. She then kissed the spot she’d marked.

‘When you reach Cross Gap, you stop an wave, okay? Cos all o we goin be watchin over you.’

She knew straight away where they would be standing. Glory Cedar Hill was the only spot from which the whole snaking thread of asphalt could be seen all the way to Cross-Gap Junction.

‘Walk, Nella. Walk tall an proudful like you never walk befo. Gwone gyul! Start walkin for your modder.’

She lifted a querying face at her aunt, ‘Walkin fo my…?’ Then she understood.

Aunty May turned and hurried back up the hill.

Miss Ticksy broke away from the crowd lining the roadside, wiped her hand on her dress and handed her a dollar bill. The woman stepped back and wiped her hand again. ‘Hannah is me friend,’ she explained. ‘An Nella is she daughter.’ And she laughed a laugh that was loud enough for all of them.

She heard Missa Ram’s dry voice. ‘You break away, gyul! Look at my crosses! De lil gyul break away!’ It was one of the rare times she had seen the old man off his donkey.

She took her time, feeling lost and not a little awkward. The new unfamiliar leather shoe made walking appropriately difficult. Shereen called her softly from the verge. She smiled back, shyly, uncomfortably, from the distance that her friend was placing her. Their faces were open and friendly, but they were not reaching out to her. They seemed to be taking her in with a new interest.

Half an hour later, still dazed, still drifting, she arrived at Cross-Gap Junction. Turning, she squinted up at Glory Cedar Hill.

Shapes they were, just shapes: her granny, Mammy and Aunty Paula and Aunty May and Shereen and Miss Ticksie and the rest of them. Shapes, dancing against the morning sky.

She thought she heard them singing. Or perhaps they were shouting something down to her. It all sounded like music anyway.

She waved back, walking as she waved, sensing with a sobering, abrupt sadness that she was also walking away from something else.

THE UNDERSTANDING

Something is wrong with you. They keep telling you that because you burn to break through the iron door and go flying across the gravel-yard, over the wire fence into the sun.

What will they say if you tell them that this month the rainbirds sing their last songs and the yam-shoots will come snaking from the earth, redder than blood from a fresh-cut finger?

If they would only listen, they will hear the garden-people chopping in the deep bush, the sound, like heartbeats, coming, going, coming over the cane-fields, up and beyond the river-valley. Like you, they wouldn’t need to close their eyes to imagine that the trees, the grass, the vines are living things that talk among themselves of this, the rich time of warm soil and new leaves.

The river will be bright with sunshine. The stone on which you like to sit and watch the girls come on Fridays to laugh and tease and do their washing is cool.

The girls make fun of you – the boys too, who gather like blackbirds on the bank to stare at Ela, Jenny, Sara, Pansy, standing wet and almost bare in the pools, pounding clothes on the stones.

Then the bigger boys come racing through the sigin and wild calaloo. They chase the blackbirds off. But they leave you alone as they wrestle on the bank among the water-grass and shout in men’s voices.

In the pools, they splash white water and fish among the stones – their trick to draw close to the girls and fondle them.

‘Behave!’ the girls used to scream. Now they no longer laugh like girls; they plant their hands on their hips and leave their washing floating on the water.

Ela leaves the water and follows Carl. She is laughing as he tugs her along. They go through the guavas, past the tall breadnut tree, up where the kakoli tie their branches together and make leafy caves. Ela’s woman-laugh comes loud and clean above the bush. Then silence – except for the cee-cee birds, the johnnyheads and the pikayos cheeping among the foliage.

Jenny follows Masso; Sara, Sam, until they are all gone, leaving ugly Polo standing on the bank, his miserable eyes on Pansy who never looks up from her washing.

You used to wonder: what made the girls go? What happened there in the quiet where the vines hang down from the cutlet trees like a bright green waterfall?

It was Pansy who made you know. One day, when no one else was present, she woman-laughed and began teasing you. Why, she asked, did you always sit on the same ole riverstone, dumb like makookoo, and just watch the world run away? She said it nice and friendly, so you answered her. And she, pretty with her smile, was surprised.