by Breanne McIvor
My grandfather was a mas man. Before I was born, he would sit in his garden and breathe in the air spiced by spines of chadon beni plants. He looked for the colours behind colours: the tangerine, saffron and flame that made the Imortelle flowers blaze orange on the hillside. He learned nature's curves and crevices like the way a blackbird's beak arched like a church door, before coming to that savage point that tore food out of the neighbour's trash. He would feed the kiskadee (that bird that could only say its name) ripe bananas every morning just so his eyes could trace the moment when its yellow breast became brown.
His hands would later carve Styrofoam spheres into the moon's craters, make the transparent turquoise of an emperor butterfly's wings bleed into teal and cover the kiskadee's breast with butter and gold feathers. His Kiskadee costume was the King of Carnival and he kept all the newspaper photographs, carefully stuck in an old-fashioned children's scrapbook.
“When you going to write a story about your Grandad, Erin?”
“Soon. I have an article due this week and then I've got to enter the Commonwealth competition but I'll do it soon.”
When I won the Derek Walcott Literary Prize a year later, he asked me to visit. But, Nikolai threw a rum-soaked congratulations bash for me and I stayed in bed the next day trying to banish the remnants of cocktails with cold water.
“I bought your favorite coffee, Erin.”
“I'll come up soon Grandad. Right after I finish this story for Big In D Dance magazine."
I eventually arrived two weeks after I promised I would. Stuck to the door, for all the neighbours to see, was a white sheet of Bristol board that read CONGRATULATIONS ERIN! WE LOVE YOU! His now-shaky hands had drawn a constellation of stars in the background, encircling my name like a halo.
A knife cut through me as I thought of my grandfather forcing his fingers to do what they had once so easily done for a granddaughter who never came.
“You know those journalists always chasing me for my story," he said when we settled at the table. I noticed the way that his fingers vibrated like violin strings played by a cruel hand. He saw me looking and his fingers disappeared behind his coffee cup.
“But, I tell the journalists my granddaughter is a better writer than all of them!"
He'd never read anything I'd written but I heard in his voice the quiet steel of surety.
I promised —myself this time– soon I would write his story.
When I got back home, I composed the questions that I would ask him about his costumes. I made sure there was enough space on my phone to record an interview.
That week, Nikolai proposed and I told myself, well now I tell myself, that I couldn't really be expected...
Later the editors of Big In D Dance offered me a book deal and, of course, I took it. I would get back to Grandad's story.
But, it was not until Salvatore called and asked me to read at his celebration of Caribbean culture that I returned to it. I parked outside Grandad’s old house with white paint flaking off the walls and the chadon beni overrun with clumps of crab grass.
I'd visited Grandad in the hospital two months ago, but I'd thought that he'd bounced back like some eternal rubber ball. The decay suggested I was wrong.
Grandad began heating water on the stove for coffee but I saw, from the way his hands rattled the pot against the stove's iron rings, that he wasn't used to doing this anymore.
"Actually, I had a cup before coming."
He let me get away with it.
"I want to write about you," I said and he smiled a noncommittal stretching of dry lips that I found strangely blank.
"You want to write about your Grandad?"
"Of course! I want to write about your Carnival costumes: Stalking Ocelot, Birds of Paradise, Kiskadee."
He stretched out his arm as if he could catch the words.
"Kiskadee?" he asked with the low voice of a person who knew the word should mean more to him that it did
His fingers pulsed, but there was no coffee cup to hide them behind.
He looked away and I saw, behind the film of grey that had descended over his eyes, a mind struggling to pull memories out of nothing.