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BRICK 112 and drop of the days. There was only this fallen tree by the creek on which I sat and the sunshine on my chest that was hot and yellow. There was the shadow of a bird with broad and dark wings spiralling down in shrinking circles. There was the wind fluttering over the water and through the trees like a mantra for the world’s hollow. I was reaching the end of a prayer, and soon I would need to make my way.
page 115
The Classics Can Console? ISHION HUTCHINSON Short cut draws blood. — Jamaican proverb Homecoming, in the Odyssean sense, is the source of my title. I will arrive there by circumvention. I promise. I am going to take the mythic course and traverse many siren songs getting to my source. I will start with a sound you cannot hear. The name for that sound, a strange word from my childhood, is kaachi. That word—kaachi— ordered life in the sugar-cane districts of Saint Thomas, the easternmost parish in Jamaica. When it sounded, conversations ended and bodies departed abruptly. After the rush of their disappearance, a brief silence always followed. I heard in that silence the sharp green of the sugar-cane flags. I heard the heat rising off the asphalt. And, if it was late at night when the bodies left, I heard the many sighs between bush and stars. The kaachi had been sounding and ordering lives in Saint Thomas for centuries. Perhaps at first it was an iron bell, like that one shaken at my primary school. Or it was no other instrument but an overseer’s voice, calling the enslaved people to the sugar-cane field. History has swallowed its origin whole.

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BRICK

112

and drop of the days. There was only this fallen tree by the creek on which I sat and the sunshine on my chest that was hot and yellow. There was the shadow of a bird with broad and dark wings spiralling down in shrinking circles. There was the wind fluttering over the water and through the trees like a mantra for the world’s hollow. I was reaching the end of a prayer, and soon I would need to make my way.

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