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.
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