‘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