Mammy Ansah was revived with a bucket of water, which Mabel the goat watched with deep approval, and I think the whole of Highway Road agreed it was the most satisfying thing they had seen all year.
After that, my uncle took charge.
I say uncle because I had to. There was no other word. I tried it several times in my head on the walk home, the way you test a new tooth with your tongue. Uncle. Uncle Martin. My uncle. It did not fit. It was far too large. It sat in my mouth like a plum stone.
He did not speak much. He walked beside my father, a little behind, with one hand lightly on his shoulder, as if he were afraid he might vanish. The crowd followed us at a respectful distance. At the corner, he turned, and lifted one hand, and said in a mild, level voice, "Thank you, everyone. I think that will do for today."
They went away.
I want you to understand that nobody had ever managed that before. In twelve years I had seen that crowd stand its ground against policemen, a thunderstorm and a very persuasive man selling soap. But a tall man in a white shirt said I think that will do, and they melted back down the road like milk into tea.
"How did you do that?" I whispered.
"Do what?"
"Make them go."
"I asked," said my uncle, "nicely."
Behind him, Steven let out a small, exhausted, hysterical laugh.
* * *
We sat in the dining hall.
It is a long room with a cracked lamp, and it had never held so many people at once. My mother sat at one end, very upright, with her hands folded. Beside her sat Derrick, who had gone grey, and Jesse, who had not, and who had brought a pencil and a notebook with an expression of steely professionalism. Steven stood by the door, trying to look like furniture. Danny, who had refused to leave, sat under the table with a biscuit, and nobody had the heart to move him.
At the head of the table sat my father.
He looked ten years older than he had that morning. He had washed his face at the tap, and his eyes were swollen. His hands lay on the table in front of him, big and square and trembling slightly, and he looked at them as though they belonged to somebody else.
My uncle took the chair opposite.
"Don," he said. "Where would you like to begin?"
My father did not answer.
"I can start," said my mother.
Everyone turned.
She had not spoken since we sat down. She had been sitting very still, with her scarf pulled forward and her head high. But now she lifted her chin, and I saw something in her face I had seen only once before, on the porch, when she told Mammy Ansah to go.
"I will begin," she said, "because he can't. And because I would rather you heard it plainly."
"Mara," said my father, hoarsely.
"No, Donald. It has been thirteen years."
* * *
I will tell it the way she told it, in her own plain, even voice, because I have never heard it told better.
My mother's name is Mara Jackson, though it was not always. She was born Mara Quaye, the daughter of a carpenter in a small town on the coast of County V. She grew up in a house that smelled of sawdust and pine resin. She trained as a nurse. She was twenty-three years old and working in a clinic near the sea when, one rainy afternoon, a young man with a sprained wrist walked in.
"He told me he was a clerk," said my mother.
"I was a clerk," said my father, in a small voice.
"You were the second son of the Wilson family."
"I clerked on weekends."
There was a faint, strangled noise from Steven.
"He sat in my waiting room for two hours," said my mother, "because he didn't want to say who he was, and he didn't want to cut in front of an old woman. I thought he was the most foolish person I had ever met." Her mouth curved, very slightly. "I married him fourteen months later."
I looked at my father.
I had never seen him blush. It was an extraordinary sight. It went all the way up to his hairline, in a slow, slightly bewildered tide, and he put his hand over his eyes.
"And that," said my mother, more quietly, "would have been all, if it hadn't been for the eyes."
* * *
My uncle took up the story.
He did it carefully, as if he were handling something that might break. He said that the Wilson family was very old, and very rich, and very proud, and that it kept a number of customs that no one outside it understood. One of them was a rule about the eldest grey-eyed child of the main line.
"We call it the Keeper," said my uncle.
"What does it keep?" said Jesse, pencil poised.
"A thing. A family heirloom. A very old one." He hesitated. "I could not tell you exactly what it is for. Nobody could. Only that, for as far back as anybody has written anything down, the person who holds it is the one who leads the family. It is a title as much as an object. And the Keeper is always chosen by the eyes."
"Why?"
"Because it is said that only a grey-eyed Wilson can hold it."
"That's a ridiculous rule," said Jesse.
"It is," said my uncle. "I have always thought so."
"So who was the Keeper before?"
"My father," said my uncle. "Then, after he died, nobody. It has been empty for twenty years. The family has been run by a council. By trustees. And the chief of the trustees is my father's younger brother." His face did not change. But his voice dropped, slightly, the way water drops in a well. "Cassius."
At that name, my father flinched.
It was the smallest movement. A tightening of the hands on the table. But I saw it, and Derrick saw it, and I think every person in the room saw it. It went through them like cold air.
"Cassius Wilson," said my uncle, "is a very patient man."
* * *
I will tell you the rest quickly, because it is the part I like least.
When my mother was five months pregnant, an old lawyer came to the house on the coast, with a small black case and an expression like a closed drawer. He said that the family had heard. He said that the family was pleased. He said that when the child was born, if it had the eyes, it would be taken to County V and raised in the great house, under the care of the Council, by the family's best tutors, until it was old enough to take up its place.
"Taken," said my mother. "Raised. As though my child were a prize pig."
"What did you say?" I whispered.
"I said no."
"What did he say?"
"He said, Madam, it was not a question."
My father let out a long, shuddering breath.
"We left that night," he said. It was the first thing he'd said in half an hour, and it came out hoarse and flat. "I took what I could. I wrote a letter to Martin and I left it with the porter. I said we were going. I said please don't look for us."
"I never got it," said my uncle.
"I know that now."
"Cassius had it."
"Yes."
"He told me," said my uncle, in a very level voice, "that you had left because you didn't want to be a Wilson. That you had said it, in writing, in a very unkind letter. He showed it to me. It was in your handwriting. It said you wanted nothing from us ever again." He closed his eyes. "I was young. I was proud. I had just buried my wife's mother. I said something to the porter that I will regret until I die."
"What did you say?" said Jesse.
"I said, Let him go. Let him find out what it means to have nothing."
* * *
I think that was the moment I stopped being angry at my father and began, a little, to be angry at the world in general.
It was a strange, large, slow anger. It did not have a face. It sat in my stomach, a hot, round, heavy lump, next to the place where the hunger lives, and I could not decide which of the two was worse.
"They found us when you were two," said my mother.
I looked at her.
"In the town of Aburi. We had been in a rented room for a year. You were learning to walk." She was gripping her hands very tightly. "Cassius's men came at dusk. Seven of them. They had batons."
"Seven," I said.
"Yes."
"In black coats."
She stared at me. "How do you—"
"I dream it," I said. My voice sounded very far away. "Every month. They chase me. They always catch me at the end. Somebody lifts a baton, and I wake up."
My mother's face crumpled. She put her hand over her mouth.
"You remember," said my father, in a whisper.
"I thought it was a nightmare."
"It was." He was weeping again, openly, without sound. "It was. They beat me. I fell. They had you. A man had you under his arm. And your mother—" He stopped. He shook his head. "She hit him with a kettle."
"It was a very good kettle," said my mother, faintly.
"She hit him, and she took you, and we ran. We ran for six days. We slept in a church. And when we got here, I said to her—" He swallowed. "I said they'll never stop. They'll keep coming. As long as he looks like a Wilson, they'll find him."
"So what did you do?" said Derrick. It was a whisper. He was staring at our father with enormous eyes.
"I made him look like nothing," said my father.
* * *
There was a very long silence.
It was my mother who broke it.
"We did it together," she said. "I won't have you take it all, Donald. We agreed. We would let the neighbours call him names. We would keep him dirty. We would let people think the boy was cursed, so that nobody would look at him twice, and no one from the family would ever think to look in a gutter for a Wilson." Her voice shook. "It was meant to be for a little while."
"It was meant to be for a year," said my father.
"And then it was two."
"And then it was ten."
"And somewhere along the way," said my mother, very quietly, "it stopped being a disguise."
I looked at my father.
He did not look back. He was staring at the table. His shoulders had sagged. His great square hands were curled in on themselves like two shut doors.
"I told myself it was to protect him," he said. "I told myself every night. I drank because I was afraid, and I was angry because I was afraid, and I was cruel, JJ, because it was easy. Because you were there. Because you had his eyes. Because every time I looked at you, I saw everything I had run from." His voice cracked. "I'm not asking you to forgive me. I know there isn't an excuse. I had a hundred ways to protect you that didn't involve a belt. I picked the worst one. And I kept picking it."
I did not say anything.
I could not. I sat there, small and still, at the end of the long table, with my uncle's grey eyes on one side of me and my father's grey eyes on the other, and my mother's wet face in front, and I thought, with the odd flat calm of someone standing in the middle of a storm:
So I am not a jinx.
So it was never me.
I had imagined that discovery a thousand times. In my head it was always joyful. There were trumpets. There was a cake.
It was not like that. It was like being handed a very heavy parcel and being told it was yours all along.
"Thank you for telling me," I said, at last.
Everyone looked at me.
"I have a few questions," I said. I put my hands flat on the table. "I'd like to ask them in order. And I would very much like," I added, "a drink of water first."