Esi Edugyan - Half-Blood Blues

Ain’t no exaggeration to say I never got over it. Sits like a burn in my mind, a darkness at the edge of my thoughts. Every day of my life.

Chip turned off the road onto a narrow grassy path. Walking up it, both of us winded, I began to get the strangest feeling, like we was being watched.

And then we come around a corner onto a bald patch of grass, and seen it.

I thought for a minute it was a ravaged scrap of machinery. Standing seven feet tall at least, hammered out of twisted iron. Its hollowed eyes was staring in horror at something overhead. It was a monstrous human face.

We stood before it, astonished. Chip gave a low whistle, dropped his luggage, waded out through the grass.

‘Aw, what you doing, Chip,’ I called. ‘Leave it.’

‘What you figure it is?’ he called back. He ran his hands along the iron. ‘Look how it’s pitted and scored,’ he murmured, as I come on over. ‘That ain’t from the weather. You know how much damn work this got to be?’

‘I don’t,’ I said. ‘Neither do you. We going now?’

But Chip stood back and gave it a long hard stare. ‘You ain’t going to believe this. I mean, you going to think I’m crazy. But what do it look like to you?’

I ain’t said nothing.

‘It don’t look just a little bit like the kid?’

‘Except it ain’t got no eyes,’ I said.

But damned if Chip wasn’t right. It did look like Hiero.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘It’s creepy. Let’s go on.’

Chip sort of shook his head, walking back to the path. ‘You think it’s creepy?’ he said. ‘I don’t know. Seems more sad to me.’

But a few yards ahead loomed another rusted sculpture, this one of a human body, a good ten feet tall, its legs bent in submission, its arms twisted out like terrible forks. It didn’t have no head, just a long stumped neck.

‘You sure we got the right place?’ I said.

Chip kept going. And there was more of them. Decayed iron chairs, faces melted and folded over themselves, gnarled iron hands the size of windmills. Monolithic shovels with hands still attached. All of them leaning into the long grasses, or already fallen over.

Then we broke through a last stand of larches and there was the house. Hell. I ain’t never seen such a place. It was rusty looking, like those nightmarish sculptures, but beyond the long wooden porch — nearly obscured under browning papers, rubber boots, old tables — the house’s grey walls was all plastered with mounted steel shovels and ladders propped against it. There was three front doors, every ten feet or so. All stood open.

‘He lives here?’ Chip muttered, looking at me.

I shrugged. ‘We just go on in, do you reckon?’

Chip cleared his throat. We left the luggage in the yard and shuffled closer. Old Chip stepped up on the porch, the boards creaking beneath him. He leaned through the nearest doorway. ‘Hello?’ he called in. ‘Hello?’

No one answered.

With a glance back at me, he wiped his shoes and gone inside.

‘Hold up, Chip,’ I called.

But when I stepped forward to follow him, all a sudden it was like my legs gone dead. I couldn’t feel a damn thing. My hands, they just started shaking. I was filled up with some strange sensation. This enormous heat just going through me. And then it was over, and I started to shiver.

I stumbled after him, into a kitchen. It was all blond wood, everywhere: ceilings, floors, walls, tables and chairs, the huge shelving units at the centre of the kitchen, even the cooking implements strung above the old stovetop. Like I’d walked into a birch copse. And there wasn’t no clutter at all. I could see through an arch into the dining area. Framed mosaics hung on the wall, along with bright paintings of geometrical shapes, and African masks. There was just one small dining table, one small chair.

Whole house smelled sweet, like brandy.

Chip was standing at the counter, looking at the door. ‘Hello?’ he called again. He gave me a questioning look, the two of us just listening.

I shook my head. ‘Maybe he gone out,’ I said.

But Chip held up his hand.

And then we heard it. A faint thump from somewhere in the house, like a door closing. And then a sharp voice called out: ‘ Kto tam jest? ’

My throat froze. It was older, filled with rust, and I couldn’t understand a word. But I known that voice.

It all seemed so slow then. Dreamlike, like we was gliding through all that light the way you push through lake water. Chip drifted over to the arch, passed on through, and I followed. We stepped into the brightest room I ever seen, lined with vast tall windows just pouring with daylight, and all that light radiating back up off the blond wood.

We both come to a stop. Across the room, seated in a cracked leather chair, his hair and beard completely white against his dark skin, was the man I’d reckoned dead all these years.

‘ Kto tam jest? ’ he said again, frowning. ‘Ewa?’

‘Hiya kid,’ said Chip, real soft.

That old man ain’t seemed like he understood. He turned his head directly at Chip, his eyes staring right through him. And then I seen his face open right up, just start to bloom.

‘Chip?’ he said. And then, in rusty German: ‘Is that you, Chip?’

My god. I seen his old milky eyes, the cast of his face toward us and then away, the sharp tilt as he listened for some reply, and I understood.

The kid was blind .

Chip walked up to the chair, crouched down before him. ‘It’s me, it’s Chip, brother.’ But then he just put one damn arm around the kid, and then the other, and then he was hauling the old kid out of his chair and they was both embracing.

‘Up you get.’ Chip was laughing, his voice thin. He stood back, staring at the changes in Hiero’s face: the even gaunter cheeks, the beard white as pure ash. Still got that frightened twist to his mouth. ‘You look good , brother,’ he said. He gave a little grunt. ‘ Damn good. Like Sidney Poitier.’

‘You ain’t the only one hasn’t seen my face in years,’ said Hiero, smiling. Then he lifted his chin, tilted his face to the wall. ‘Who you brought with you?’

And all a sudden my mind gone white with panic.

Chip let him go and come over to me. ‘Come on, brother. Go on say hello.’

It was the strangest thing. I gone over to Hiero then, unable to say a word, and just put my old hand on his shoulder. He raised his sightless eyes almost right on mine and said, real soft, ‘Sid?’

His rough palm touched my face, the fingertips passing over my closed eyes, my nose, my chin. I was nodding like a fool.

‘You crying,’ he said.

‘I ain’t crying,’ I said.

And then he pulled me into a rough hug. All I could feel was his damn thin frame shaking.

‘Used to be the old Ironworks,’ Hiero was saying in his deep, cracked voice. ‘For years it produced all the steel round here. I trained as a blacksmith. When the cooperative finally shut down, they let me stay on, me and a few others. Used the space as a house. Well, one by one the others moved on, but here I am, still. I ain’t never going to leave.’

‘Those your sculptures outside?’ I glanced out the brilliant windows, tried not to meet his eyes.

Hiero smiled. ‘No.’

‘They ain’t done by you?’ Chip said, smiling. ‘Those old monsters out there?’

‘No,’ said Hiero. ‘They was here when I come.’

Well, son of a bitch. He was older, frailer, but the kid still couldn’t lie for nothing. It was clear as day he done them. I looked over at Chip and could see he known it, too.

‘Well,’ said Chip. ‘They really striking, whoever done them.’

Hiero looked pleased. ‘You like them?’