The Bone Readers

by Jacob Ross

  I went inside and lit the kerosene lamp, then returned to the steps. The sound of a vehicle pulled me out of my thoughts. I watched a little car skew abruptly to a halt on the verge of the road directly below. The engine shuddered, then cut off.

  I hurried inside, dropped my bowl on the table and covered it with a plate.

  DS Chilman took his time coming up the hill. Now and then he paused to survey the bananas that bordered the stone path up to my grandmother’s house. When he got to the yard he hitched up his trousers, tightened his belt and stood there breathing hard.

  ‘Okay. So, you happy to see me again. And so soon. Right?’

  He dropped a bruised leather bag on the step – his stringy neck jerking like a turkey’s as he inspected the house. He pushed past me and walked inside.

  He took in the little stove, the kerosene lamp, the stacked bookshelf I’d built against the partition, the photographs I’d pasted on the walls. He reached for the picture of my grandmother, then changed his mind. I saw the outline of the pistol under his shirt, stuck into the waist of his trousers.

  I remembered the books I’d taken from the library with no intention of returning them, and sure enough he slipped a couple from the shelf.

  ‘You read a lot?’

  I nodded.

  ‘All of these?’ He made a gesture that took in the whole shelf.

  I nodded again.

  He’d taken out several more and laid them on the table, muttering the name of each one as he did so. ‘Poems of Resistance… Social Anthropology – A Beginner’s Guide… Bending the Mind – Principles of Persuasion…’ He turned around to face me, holding up the last. ‘How Yourope Underdevelop Africa…’ Government banned that one in ’74. You planning a coup?’

  He dropped the book; lifted the two smallest of my trophies from the top of the bookshelf. He read the inscriptions, then slid his eyes at me. ‘You don’t look like no sprinter to me.’

  Chilman replaced them one by one. Had I not been there it would have been impossible to know that my belongings had been tampered with.

  When he took up the shoe-box with my documents, I sprang forward. He stopped me with a glare.

  He sifted through my papers, picked up my black notebook. He hefted it. ‘You glue all them front pages together, why?’

  ‘Is personal,’ I said.

  ‘The rest not personal too?’ He turned a couple of pages, brought the notebook closer to his face. ‘And the church bell tolls, fading, ever-fading beneath its shell of stones. Hard as the heart of blue-eyed men… long gone…’ he raised his head at me, laid the notebook on the table and turned to go. ‘Pretty words. No rhyme, though. So! How come you didn’ win the island scholarship. Who they give it to? Because from what I see…’ He tapped his pocket and I heard the jangle of keys ‘Who they give it to?’

  ‘Not me,’ I shrugged. I did not care to talk about it.

  He stood above me, arms making handles on his hips. ‘So! you got nothing preventing you from taking the job then?’

  ‘What job,’ I said.

  ‘The one I offering you right now.’

  It took a while before his words sank in.

  I went outside and sat on the step. He lowered himself beside me. I stood up and stepped away. He leaned forward, reached back and adjusted the gun. He fixed me with those eyes of his. ‘It wasn the way you identify that bunch of fellas who kill the boy today. Some people will call that obeah. Was a stupid thing you say that make sense to me.’ He showed me his teeth again. ‘They hide their face before they start the argument so was obvious they plan it.’

  ‘Now, youngfella, a good lawyer could make a fool of you in court for saying that. But I not a good lawyer. You want the job? You tell me, yes, I fix the rest, and to hell with procedure.’

  ‘I want nothing to do with police.’

  ‘You prefer to keep rolling in this shit? That what you prefer? Lemme tell you what I just work out, Pretty Boy. You bright as hell. You got enough brains to give away most ov it and still have nuff to bamboozle everybody, but vexation make you stupid. You remind me of my first daughter. Look at you, you starvin. Is poor people round here you depending on to feed yuh? I offering you a chance to get off yuh arse and do something and all you could do is twist your mouth and say, “I want nothing to do with police” – eh?’

  ‘I got my reasons.’

  He threw me an awful grin. ‘You think I dunno your reasons? What job you think I do?’ He got up, walked into the house again and inspected the photographs on the wall. Chilman raised an index at the picture of my mother.

  ‘Lorna Digson, not so? May 1999. Rape Riot.’ He was silent for a long time. He’d creased his forehead and his fingers were making useless movements at his side. ‘That one really upset me. Real bad. I was on leave at the time. Off the island, yunno. But that don’t make no difference to you, right? I think I unnerstand that.’

  For the first time DS Chilman would not look at me.

  ‘I not saying we perfect. Ain got a police force in the world with a clean cupboard. We not no church. Sometimes the thing they do to stop a crime is worse than the crime itself. Used to be a time when they never recruit the smart ones – fellas with the soft hands and fingers long-and-slim like yours. They too quick to talk back and ask hard question, so they didn’t qualify because they too qualified if-yunno-what-I-mean. Nuh – in them times what you want is the kinda policeman who got just enough language to follow orders. You could instruct him to shoot his mother and he’ll do it without question. That’s not what I offering you. What I…’

  ‘Nuh.’

  The old man snapped to his feet, a movement so sudden it startled me. He pointed at the house. ‘You sinking and it stinking – and that’s a rhyme, Missa Poetry. Maureen, my secretary, say, “Chilly, leave the boy alone; you wasting your time. He look like he finish. He gone through.” So I say to mihself, for once I going to prove she wrong. Is the waste I can’t stand. That’s all I see around me now. Waste! Like that boy-child them ramgoat kill today. A blasted waste!’

  He dug into his shirt pocket and pulled out a tiny notepad, ripped out a leaf and scribbled on it.

  The red eyes turned on me. The old lips barely moved. ‘Loitering is a punishable offence, yunno that? Stay away from San Andrews unless you got a valid reason to be there.’

  He laid the square of paper on the step, cleared his throat and sidled a look at me. ‘After I look you up and find out about all what happen, it cross my mind that mebbe, if you accept my, erm, proposition, you kin work out a way to… yunno… make your own enquiries, so to speak. Call me if you change your mind.’

  He hitched up his trousers, turned his back on me and began picking his way down the hill.

  Down below, the car shuddered to life, the headlights came on – a glow so faint, I wondered how he saw the road. I followed the farts and belches of the vehicle until the racket melted in the quiet evening.

  Night filled the valley. Fireflies flecked the air. The fruit bats in the eves of the house launched themselves into the darkness, their geiger-counter chittering painful on my eardrums. I knew of no one else who heard them. Me – I could single out each creature by the difference in their cheeps.

  I went back in and sat down. The shoe-box was on the edge of my vision where Chilman had left it on the table. The photograph of my mother lay on it. It was clear he had been digging up my past. But in all his talk about policing and my mother, he made no mention of my father and the part he played in killing her.

  3

  I used to wake with my grandmother’s face above mine, her hand on my forehead, her voice soft and shushing. She would stroke my forehead and my throat until my shivering subsided. My head would remain clotted with the remnants of the dream: the vague shape of a woman in a white cotton dress sitting on our step, her right hand around my stomach, rocking me on her knee. There would also be the dim remembrance of a laugh. It is the dream-image of my mother.

  Awake, I see her differently: I a
m eight years old. She is in the yard in a yellow t-shirt and dark-blue jeans, a white bandanna holding her dougla hair in check.

  The air is thick with rumours of some disturbance in San Andrews. The women of the village crowd her with their questions. Whatever the trouble is, its awfulness is in their voices. They are talking about men – fuckin wicked men.

  My mother’s upset is sleepier. I could smell it on her skin like the leaves of the borden tree that I’d strip in later years and bring to my nose to remember her.

  I remember following her to the main road where a car was waiting.

  She noticed me on the grass verge; saw perhaps the fear that held me there. She lifted a finger at the driver, came out of the vehicle and stooped in front of me. Her breath on my face was dry and sweet. I remember that. I remember her kissing my ear, the sockets of my eyes, feathering her lips on mine, pulling me close, her mouth against my ear: ‘Don’t worry, Sweetman, I home a lil later.’

  She never came back.

  *

  My grandmother gave no explanation for my mother’s absence. She did the things my mother used to do, and the village kept its silence, as if, whatever the reason for her disappearance, there were no words for it.

  Over the years, my brain tried to make some sense of it by feeding on the few words from other people’s mouths, and the newspaper cuttings I dug up in the old library, since washed away by a storm surge.

  What I learned was that it was a demonstration. A school girl had been raped somewhere in Canteen on her way from a revision class in her school. It was perhaps what they’d done to her that stirred the women of the island. They had not only killed the girl, they’d desecrated her in other ways – bits of wood and dirt in every orifice. They left her splayed out in the open field in Canteen. When the news broke, the ring leader, the son of a politician, had already been smuggled off the island to some place in America.

  The women took to the streets of San Andrews; the police arrived with guns. And whichever way I looked at it, it had to be my father, the Police Commissioner, who ordered his men to shoot. But then it would have hardly mattered to him since she was just his servant girl that he’d impregnated, and I was no more than an ‘outside’ child.

  From the time my mother disappeared, my Fire Baptist grandmother became a cane-stalk of a woman. She began shedding her flesh as if she were lightening her body for her final flight to Zion. She had meandering conversations with a growing assembly of childhood friends and family. Dead brothers with Old Testament names popped out of her mouth like a new language: Hezekiah, Nathaniel, Zebediah…

  She had fretful arguments with a man named Suresh. I deduced he was my great grandfather who wanted her to return his belt. ‘It is for the boy!’ she said.

  Sometimes she disappeared. When I got back from school, I dropped my books and walked the village. Someone always intercepted her and kept her in their yard until I came to pick her up.

  The old woman went wherever her mind told her that her daughter, Lorna, might be buried. Once I caught her staring into a woman’s face and calling my mother’s name, as if she had become a soucouyant and dressed herself in the skin of another person.

  I cooked, I cleaned; I tended the kitchen garden and sent myself to school.

  One Friday afternoon I entered the house, called out to her and got no answer. I dropped my books, was about to go out again when something stopped me. It was the brightness of her bedroom. The single window in there was open wide. The old woman was on her bed in the white raiment of her religion, her string of prayer beads laid out around her headwrap like a broken halo. I knew she wasn’t sleeping.

  She’d left me messages. The room was full of them. She trusted me to understand them by the colours of the bits of cloth she laid on every item: yellow for the things that would matter in the future – a will for the house and a rectangle of land somewhere in the barren south of Camaho. I did not know the bit of land existed. She’d folded her eight silver bracelets with white ribbons. They were for the girl-children I might have.

  She’d topped a large clay jar with a wad of notes and left it on the floor. Around its base were five gold bracelets and a couple of fine-linked chains. She’d surrounded the jar with a blue fragment of cloth and by this I understood that these were the things that I could sell in desperation.

  Four donkey-eye seeds were on the white tablecloth, each representing a corner of the earth.

  Beneath the open window, among a toss of shells, she’d laid a picture of me in my school uniform.

  When her mind belonged to her, my grandmother preferred seashells to the bones of birds for her floor X-rays. She would throw them like a handful of dice, bring her face down to the patterns, spend hours on her knees muttering to herself – part of her ritual of discernment of the shadows and silhouettes that preyed on troubled minds. Things the doctors in San Andrews neither detected nor understood. I wondered if this last reading had been for me – my granny seeking some assurance from Oya, her personal orisha, that I would manage on my own.

  I left the room, felt the welling in my chest, heard my own voice pitched high and tight and desperate as I laid on the stones in my grandmother’s yard, hugged myself and broke.

  4

  Chilman’s threat prevented me from going back to hang out in San Andrews. He’d decided to make me prime witness in the case of the murdered boy. That meant the courts, a trial, my name and face in the papers, and I would not put it past the sonuvabitch to implicate me. I thought of his digging eyes and the way he talked to me as if he had a right. I decided I hated him. I counted the money I’d put aside during the time I worked in Beach Bum Bar. I combed my hair, pulled on a tee-shirt and a pair of jeans and walked to the Drylands.

  They turned me down at every bar and hotel where I asked for work. The owner of Beach Bum Bar had passed my name to his employer friends. They reminded me of the incident; spoke as if they’d been there to witness it. The owner of Nutmeg Bar and Grill ordered his security man to escort me off his premises.

  Sometimes I returned home soaked and dripping. A whole week of bad weather and, according to the radio, it was just the beginning. A low-pressure front which they had not given a name to, because it was not yet a hurricane, was marching down the East Caribbean islands, trampling the trees and houses that could not stand up to it. The weatherman said that it would hit the southeast hardest and there was no place more south-east on the island than Old Hope.

  I drove nails through the wooden posts that the little house stood on. I crawled up on the roof and hammered a handful through the galvanised roof. The old woman had surrounded the place with wind-breaking trees – mainly cutlet and mango. As a last line of defence, she’d grown a semicircle of wild pine whose roots reminded me of mangroves.

  The sky above the Mardi Gras had become the purple of an infected wound. Everything had gone still. I could hear the growling of the sea beyond the hills, the knock of cutlery against utensils in the houses down below.

  The animals were always first to know. Chickens began huddling under houses hours before roosting time. Sheep – restless and plaintive – pulled loose from their tethers and hurried home to their pens.

  The valley vibrated with the sound of hammering.

  I was in bed when it struck, woke up to the house straining against the assault of wind and water. Some time close to morning, a sheet of galvanise peeled back from the rafters and began thrashing. The weather stormed in and kept me hostage in my little bedroom until daylight broke. When it passed, I unlatched the window and looked down on a dripping, roughed-up world – trees laid low, the little river down there raging, the gurgle and tap of water everywhere; and directly above my head, an angry strip of sky where the sheet of galvanise had been.

  I spent the next two days bailing out the house, fixing what I could, and cleaning.

  *

  I got up and walked the three miles out of Old Hope to the main road. I stood at the junction for a while, then counted the cha
nge in my pocket. The rain of the night before had stopped, but the grass on the verge was still glittering with droplets. A hard wind was pushing against me. I leaned into it and lengthened my stride.

  An hour later, I tapped the side of the door of San Andrews Central Police Station. Chilman raised his head from the paper he was writing on, the pen held level with his ear. He curled a finger at me and I walked in. The sonuvabitch was smiling.

  A young woman stood at a photocopier at the far left of the room, neatly dressed in white bodice and purple skirt, her hair pulled back in a slick bun. Big round eyes travelled down the length of me, stopped at my shoe, then repeated the journey upwards to my face. I felt myself shifting under her gaze. She smiled and I relaxed.

  DS Chilman dropped the pen on his desk. His voice rasped at me. ‘I glad you come, youngfella. Come in.’

  A couple of men in plain clothes approached his desk with papers in their hands – potbellied men his age who spoke under their breaths. At a nod from him, the officers retreated with barely a glance in my direction.

  ‘Best thing that happened to me today.’ He rose from the desk, placed a hand against my lower back and propelled me toward the middle of the room.

  ‘People,’ he said. ‘Meet Michael ‘Digger’ Digson. Y’all might remember h’was here before under different circumstances.’

  One of the men chuckled and promptly lowered his head.

  ‘That young lady there name Lisa; the one that showing you her prettiest smile name Pet. You met Malan already. Miss Maureen is my right hand and foot. I run this office; she run me. She will do the paperwork. Most of it done already.’ He patted me on the back. ‘Follow me, I’ll introduce you to the others later.’

  His office was a tiny room, empty except for his desk, stacked at the rear with box folders. A small table hugged the corner of the space, two plastic chairs pushed right up under it. He pulled out a chair, gestured for me to sit.

  ‘Now that you make up your mind, how you feel?’

  ‘Conscripted.’