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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.
    â€˜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 OleHope 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.

3
    T HE 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