Pynter Bender

Now that the dry season had come, his aunt, Tan Cee, would be down there among those tiny black dots crawling along the green edges of the never-ending fields of sugar cane. Patty the Pretty would be home because Leroy had taken her out of cane. They would no doubt be doing what his grandmother said his youngest aunt always did when Leroy was around: trying for a child.

He never wondered what that meant. It was some kind of magic between adults that involved hiding themselves away and, if he were to judge by what he saw from Patty, looking very sleepy and smiling all the time.

Tan Cee would be down there with the men, swinging her machete at the roots of the cane, his mother just behind her, gathering them in bundles, tying them and lifting them over her head onto the tractors that looked like big yellow beetles from where he stood. Home was just a walk away, but from here it seemed as if it would take an entire lifetime to reach them.

He wondered if Birdie was with them, then he remembered Tan Cee saying that Birdie only ever sweated over bread.

It was quiet up here. The quietness stretched beyond the house. At the back of it, the land ran wild for miles, all the way past the hellish quarry-land of Gaul through to Morne Bijoux on the other side of the ridge of hills that separated them from the rest of the world. Afternoons, when the heat of the day pushed the old man into a deep sleep, he left the room and retreated into the bushes, making his own little pathways among the borbook and black sage.

There was a long, narrow ravine that went down to a tall wall of plants with bright blossoms. His first few visits there, he couldn’t figure out why everything seemed to be either in fruit or flowering when everything else around was dry. He had gone closer, to examine those heavy deep-scented flowers, when he felt himself falling. He landed in a tangle of wist vines, was shaken but not hurt. Sat there while his eyes adjusted to the thick green light.

He was in a gully that he would never have known existed had he not fallen through the bush that covered it like a roof. The earth was dark with dampness, though it hadn’t rained for weeks. It was cool here too, like the riverbank. There were the same darkish odours of growth and fermentation.

He began picking his way through the tangle. This place puzzled him. The earth was covered with guavas. They hung thickly from the branches above his head. A slight brush of his fingers and they fell into his hands. Wherever there were guavas there were serpents. Santay had told him about the reddish ones that grew long and fat and wrapped themselves in tight knots around the branches. And sure enough he saw them, untying themselves, their heads stretched out towards him, their tongues flickering like small flames in their mouths. He made a hammock of his shirt, selected the fruits he wanted and left there quickly. Later, in the dimming light of the late evening, he sat on the steps and broke open the fruit, tasted each one tentatively before stuffing himself full.

He came back to that place often, because he could find food there. He found crayfish canes and water lemons further down the gully, and a little walk beyond that, sapodillas and star apples. Everything was growing there in that long green tunnel of light and leaves, a secret place that only he, the birds, the millipedes and serpents knew about. He called it Eden.

It was during one of his visits there that Gideon came. When Pynter returned to his father’s house, he heard a new voice pitched high and fast. It sounded like an argument. His father’s rumblings were soft and subdued against the other. Miss Maddie was bending over a pepper plant on the side of the house, a can of water in her hand. His father was lying back on the canvas chair. A man in a pressed blue shirt sat on a chair he had taken from the living room. His legs were close together and he was leaning forward slightly. There were papers on the bed.

The stranger turned and saw him, looked at him as if he knew him. His eyes paused on his face, then dropped to his naked feet. They stayed there a while before travelling back up to his face again. Pynter was suddenly aware that he hadn’t washed his hands. Hadn’t poured water on his feet and cleaned them in the grass outside. He felt an urge to go outside and do it.

‘So you the one they call Half Pint?’ The man was showing him his teeth. His face was strange. It was long like his father’s but thinner, with all the bones showing through. His eyes were round and bright like polished marbles and when he spoke, his lips hardly moved.

‘Pynter,’ his father said, ‘dis is Gideon, your brother.’

Gideon closed his mouth as suddenly as he’d opened it to show his teeth. He turned back to face the old man. ‘So, how you gettin on, Ole Fella?’

‘Don’t “Ole Fella” me, I your father. Pynter?’

‘Pa?’

‘Say hello to your brother, Gideon.’

Gideon threw a quick sideways glance at him. ‘I met the boy already.’

‘Gideon hardly come to look for me,’ his father said. ‘The more money he make, the longer he stay away.’

Gideon protested, his stammery voice rising and falling quickly. His father chuckled. Soon Pynter was not hearing them. He stood at the doorway, his shoulder pressed against the side of it, watching the face they said his mother feared more than any other in the world, following with his eyes the hands that had almost taken Peter and him away from her. Gideon was still wearing his grey felt hat. It looked new. Everything about him looked new, even his pale blue shirt and shiny brown leather shoes.

Gideon turned his head and saw him staring. He glanced at their father, who was busy with figuring out the exact value of the farmland he’d stopped working in the far end of Old Hope. When Gideon turned back to Pynter it was with a look that reminded him of Deeka, like that time she pushed him off the top of her steps and Tan Cee came so close to striking her.

He retreated into the living room and sat on the chair closest to the bedroom door. He didn’t know what was making Gideon talk so low and rapidly, but occasionally he heard the old man chuckle, and just once Manuel Forsyth’s voice rose sharp and clear: ‘You can’t make a fool of me, Gideon. I still got my senses. I not signing anything, specially now that I can’t see too clear what I going be signing.’

Miss Maddie was still out there shuffling around the house. She was nearer the back now, uprooting grass or something. With Gideon here and Miss Maddie at the back, things made a little more sense to him. This dusty wooden house suffused with its deep and sweetish odours of wood-rot and neglect was theirs. Gideon, Miss Maddie, Sister Pearly and Eileen-in-America wouldn’t have minded the shadows in the corners, the very faint odour of Canadian Healing Oil, the smell of bay leaves and black sage that grew on the windward side of the house. It was their feet that had smoothed the wooden floor. The walls had thrown their voices back at them. His father’s house would never be his and Peter’s the way it had been for them.

His mind must have taken him a far way off. Miss Maddie was no longer moving around the house. He got up and went to the bedroom door. ‘Pa tired,’ he said. ‘Dat’s why he not answerin you no more.’

That sudden sideways glance again. The expression was still there when Gideon laughed. ‘’Kay, Pops. I see you again soon.’

Gideon stood up, took out a roll of money and peeled off two brown notes and three green ones. He shoved them in his father’s hand.

‘Thirty-five dollars. All I have. Come, walk me to the door, Quarter Bottle.’

‘My name is Pynter.’

‘What’s the other one call?’

‘Peter. He your brother too.’

Gideon’s hands were stuffed inside his pockets. Keys jangled.

He pulled them out. ‘How you know dat, uh?’

‘Everybody know dat,’ Pynter told him flatly.

Gideon brought his face down close to Pynter’s. ‘Look here, Half Eights.’

‘Pynter!’

‘Okay, Pinky! Either I lookin at a miracle or you and whatever-his-name-is is the fastest one anybody ever pull on my old man and get away with it. Jeez! And believe me dat is a miracle, cuz he never was nobody fool. I don’ see no part of us in you.’

‘Me neither!’ Pynter said, and he turned to run back in, but Gideon’s hand had closed around his collar. He could have cried out, let his father know, but he didn’t want to. He spun round, stared into the man’s face, putting the weight of all the memories of all the things the women by the river had said behind his words. ‘I don’ like you, Gideon. I never like you since before I born. An’ long as I live, I never goin to like you.’

Gideon stiffened. Pynter thought he was about to hit him. But something in Pynter had changed from the night when Coxy had pinned his back against a tree and looked into his eyes. He would never let a man lay his hands on him again. He closed his fingers around Gideon’s wrist and had twisted his shoulders to sink his teeth into his arm when a voice came suddenly between them, ‘Let the little fella go, Gidiot.’

Gideon stepped back. Pynter turned his head to see a young man leaning against the house. He had both hands in his pockets and his legs were crossed. His eyes were like Miss Elaine’s – large and wide and bright. There was no collar on his white shirt. A small book with a blue cover peeked out of one of his pockets.

‘What the hell you want?’ Gideon squeezed the words out through his teeth.

‘Pick on somebody your size – you flippin thug.’

‘Lissen, Mister Pretty Pants – watch your … ’

The young man’s movement cut Gideon’s words short. He’d pushed himself off the wall so quickly, so unexpectedly, that Pynter felt his heart flip over.

Gideon stepped closer. ‘You try anything, I give what you got coming to you.’

‘Not from you. For sure. And don’t forget, you beating up a child and threatening me in my mother yard.’

The man mumbled something under his breath and turned to leave.

Paso smiled. ‘Say what you thinking, Big Fella.’

‘You and your mother won’ like it.’

Paso curled a beckoning finger at Pynter. ‘Come this side,’ he said. He was looking at Gideon sideways. ‘That’s bad blood there. Sour blood.’

‘At least I’m a man.’

‘You say that again, I make you sorry.’

Their voices had drawn Miss Maddie out onto the porch. Gideon saw her, straightened up and strolled out of the yard.

The youth stared down at Pynter, smiling. ‘First time you meet that dog?’

Pynter nodded.

‘Don’t go near ’im. He’ll bite anything that move. When he come, jus’ give ’im space.’ He stepped back, playfully almost, as if he were dancing. ‘So you my mother brother? I hear a lot ’bout y’all. People round here talk!’ He thumbed his mother’s house. ‘Call me Paso, and you – you Paul – no, Peter. Not so?’

‘I Pynter. Peter home.’

Paso reached for his hand and shook it. ‘So how I must call you – Uncle?’

‘Pynter.’

‘Pynter, okay – nuh, I think I’ll stick with Uncle. It got a certain, uhm, ring, nuh resonance to it. See you around, Big Fella.’

He winked and strolled away. Pynter watched him walk towards the porch, watched him until he stepped behind his mother and seemed miraculously to be swallowed up by her bulk.

Later in the evening, when dusk had just begun to sprinkle the foothills with that creeping ash that would thicken into night, Paso appeared again, this time with Manuel Forsyth’s food. He had changed his trousers but not his shirt.

‘Still there, Uncle?’

Pynter nodded. He’d spent most of the afternoon waiting to catch a glimpse of Paso again.

Paso placed the plate on the step beside his foot. ‘I tell the Madre to put a little extra in for you – not just this time, but every time. You been inside that lil room yet?’

The question caught him unawares. Paso dropped questions the way a person threw a punch when the other was least expecting it.

‘Which room?’ Pynter asked.

‘The dark one.’ He winked.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Find what I find in there?’

Pynter turned his head and shrugged. Paso laughed.

‘Take me a coupla days and a bottle of the Madre cooking oil to grease them hinges. The Old Fella used to keep it locked. He shouldn ha’ tell me not to go in there. S’like an open invitation, s’far as I concern. I leave it open so he could know I was in there. He never close it back.’

‘Where you go to every night-time?’

The smile left his nephew’s face, but only briefly. In less than a heartbeat it returned. ‘Wherever night-time want me. Ever hear this one?

The road is long, the night is deep, I got promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

‘Uncle Michael?’

‘Nuh, Merican fella name Robbie Frost – with all the warmth from me, of course.’

He was fingering the little blue book in his shirt pocket. ‘Know any poetry?’

‘Wozzat?’

‘You serious?’

Pynter nodded.

‘You been reading Mikey’s stuff – and …’ He laughed, looked at Pynter closely and laughed again.

‘Jeezas, man! Moon over your shoulder.’

‘Shadow in me eye,’ Pynter cut in. The words had come almost despite himself.

‘You been reading Mikey stuff and you don’ know what it call? Listen to this …’ His fingers slid the little notebook from his shirt. He held it up before him. The way Missa Geoffrey sometimes held Miss Tilina’s face.

In the morning dark

my people walk to the time of clocks whose hands

have spanned so many nights

His voice was as soft as Missa Geoffrey’s too, and it was as if he were talking to himself from a bellyful of sadness.

Paso stopped, looked up. He didn’t smile. Pynter shifted under his stare and before he lost the courage, before it became impossible to say what had been sitting on his heart from the moment his fingers retrieved that strange little book from his uncle’s grip, he turned up his face at Paso.

‘I wan’ to make wuds like dat too, I want … I …’ Something desperate and quiet fluttered in his heart. He turned his head away.

Paso steered him towards the steps and sat him down. ‘That book was the most interesting thing you find in there, not so?’

Pynter nodded.

‘Why?’

‘Don’ know.’

‘I tell you something. Once, it cross my mind to take it. Yunno – copy all of it over to this lil book and make meself believe is mine. I start doing it. But then, that same night, I had a dream. I was walking down some kinda road. Long road. I couldn see the end of it. The more I walk, the more I see road in front of me. When I was close to givin up, I realise I had somebody walking beside me. It wasn’ Michael. It was hi friend, the boy.’ Paso threw a sideways glance at him. ‘Yunno what that young fella was to ’im?’

Pynter shook his head.

‘One day it will come to you. Right now nothing in life ain’t prepare you for that kind of … of awareness. Mebbe you’ll never work it out. Don’ know … Anyway, that fella say something to me that I wake up with in me head. It come like a realisation. I can’t forget it. Now I going to pass it on to you. “Find your own words” – that’s what he say to me. “You done have all of dem inside you; you just got to take dem out and put dem in de order that make your living and your thinking and your feelings make sense.” Y’unnerstan?’

Pynter nodded, even though he wasn’t sure he did.

‘When you try to steal a pusson words, s’like you trying to steal their soul. You want to make words work like that? Then feel with your eye and see with your heart.’ He elbowed Pynter gently. ‘Now tell me, Uncle – what is the colour of my eye?’

Pynter looked at him, a shy sideways glance. ‘Black.’

Paso shook his head, worked his mouth as if he’d just munched on something awful.

‘Nuh! That’s seeing with your eye, not feeling with it. Now feel – turn your mind to all the things the old man must ha’ tell you about me. Talk to me, fella, jus’ … ’

‘Night.’

‘Wha’?’

Pynter smiled, tentatively. ‘De colour of your eye is night.’

‘You sure?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘The colour of yours is water. History too – a lot o’ things looking out at me from dem eyes o’ yours. What’s the taste of cane? Think of your mother, think of all your people down there. What’s the taste of cane?’

Pynter lifted dreamy eyes up at the Mardi Gras. ‘Bitter. Cane is bitter. An’ dat mountain up dere is ah old, old man, quarrellin with God.’

He felt Paso’s eyes on him. ‘Them your words?’

‘Dem my words,’ Pynter told him.

‘Well, dem is words – y’hear me, Uncle?’

They laughed out loud together.

For the second time that day, Pynter watched his nephew walk away. So strange. So different, so, so … bee-yoo-tee-ful.

The next morning Pynter’s sister called him to collect the old man’s breakfast. He came out and took the plate. He noticed an extra helping of sweet potatoes. The food was also warm. He didn’t trust her smile. The rest of her face wasn’t smiling.

‘Gideon stay with y’all a long while,’ she said.

‘Yes, Miss Maddie, with Pa not with me.’

‘First time you meet him?’

‘Yes, Miss Maddie.’

‘He talk about a lot o’ tings?’

‘Fink so.’

‘You think so – you didn’t hear what he say?’

‘Culatral,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Culatral, o’ something like that.’

‘Collateral – the sonuva …’ Her voice retreated into her throat and kept rumbling in there. ‘He say for what?’

‘Say what fo’ what?’

‘Collateral – he say collateral fo’ what?’

‘Don’ know.’

‘Is the land, right?’

‘Which land?’

‘Never mind, you hear de word “land” come from deir mouth?’

‘Who mouth?’

‘Paso say you smart – I wondering which part o’ you he find the smartness, cuz …’ She sucked her teeth and began walking back towards the house.

‘Thanks for de two extra piece o’ fry potato,’ he called after her, remembering his manners.

She stopped short, shook her head and continued walking.

6

WHENEVER GIDEON CAME, Pynter left the house for the gully. Now he knew he shared Eden with two people. They came from the other side of the hill, where a cluster of small, brightly painted houses were huddled beneath a line of corse trees whose branches swept the sky.

They arrived together, the woman holding the front of her dress high above the water grass and crestles. The man was the colour of the mahogany chairs inside his father’s house. His hair rested on his shoulders. The woman stepped onto the boulder so that she was like a giant butterfly above the water grass, and called his name.

‘Geoffrey!’ she said, and the words came out like a bird call, like the beginning of a song.

He called her Petal, sometimes P, or Tilina, and from where he sat in the nest of elephant grass, Pynter gathered that her father’s name was Pastor Greenway, and that Geoffrey herded sheep somewhere in the valley beneath Morne Bijoux. He spoke of his sheep the way the women in the river spoke of their children. He learned that Pastor Greenway would kill Miss Petalina if he knew she ran away to meet Geoffrey here. The fear was there on her face when she arrived, coming off her like the perfume she was wearing.

Pynter always got there before they did. He would listen to the man sing to himself with that heavy bullfrog voice, watch him gather leaves before Miss P arrived. Sometimes he would close his eyes and feel the man’s low thunder vibrate deep inside his head – a rich voice, dark and thick as molasses, bouncing around the gully.

He liked to watch Miss Lina coming across the sprays of light pouring through the undergrowth, falling over her yellow dress, making her look pretty as an okra flower. She would come to rest beside Geoffrey on the nest of leaves he’d made for them both.

Pynter waited until their wrestling was over, until her chirpings had subsided, and Geoffrey’s croakings had grown low. And then he crept away.

Back at the house, with Gideon gone, he would find his father quiet. He knew it was a kind of war between them – a battle in which his father was struggling to hold on to something that Gideon wanted badly. It left the old man sleepy and exhausted. Pynter would reach for the large black book, lower himself on the floor, his toes resting lightly on the old man’s feet, and begin to read for him.

Pynter loved this time of quietness, when the last of the evening light poured into the room and settled like honey on the bed, on the wood of the long canvas chair and on his father’s arms. He loved the feeling of lightness that rose in him when he knew that Gideon would not come again for another week.

But a shadow had crept into these moments, something his father had been keeping from him and Gideon. It was there in the way the old man avoided signing the papers brought to him each week, how he passed his hands across his face more and more these days. Their father was going blind. Pynter saw it approaching the way night crept down the slopes of the Mardi Gras. He saw it wrap itself around the old man like a caul and settle him back against the canvas chair. He saw how it made his gestures smoother, softer and less certain. How it steadied his head and made his body slow and unsure of the spaces it had been so accustomed to.

There were times when the old man spoke to Pynter of his days on ships in Panama, his journeying through the forests of Guyana searching for gold in riverbeds and streams, and his time in tunnels that ran like intestines in the belly of the earth. It was down there in one of those mines that he’d walked into a metal rod and damaged his left eye, had lived with that injury most of his life – a small white scar like a tiny worm against the black of his left eye that had suddenly come alive.

The questions his father asked him now were always the same. What was it like before Miss Santay gave him back his eyes? How did he manage when he needed something and no one was there to help him? How would he have felt if he had had to live his whole life with nothing out there to see? And so Pynter taught the old man not to fear the coming darkness. He told him about his own time of darkness, when, for him, the world was just a roar at first, how he’d come to use the sounds around him, how he’d learnt to recognise the things that touched his skin.

It was the other way around for him, his father said, for while he was heading into darkness with a clear picture of the world inside his head, Pynter, having just emerged from it, had only light and colour to look forward to.

‘Not all of it goin to be pretty,’ his father said. ‘But it can’t have pretty without ugly. It can’t have bright without dark.’

He was silent for a long time and so still it was as if he’d gone to sleep. When he spoke again, it was with an emotion that Pynter did not recognise.

‘One thing I’ll carry in my head to the end of my days is the first time y’all mother bring y’all to me. I didn know she was comin. I was weeding corn. I lift my head and see her walkin through my garden with two bundle in she hand, one on eider side. When she reach, she didn say a word, she just hand y’all over to me. She didn have to say nothin, you see? Was the way she do it. Like she was sayin, “Look, I givin you what’s yours.”’

He passed his hand across his face.

‘Gideon – as far as he concern, my funeral done happm and now is time to hand everyting over to him. Like y’all don’t count. Like y’all come from nowhere. Like somebody pick y’all off a tree. But when the time right, I got a nasty shock for him. Let’s hope that he kin take it.’

7

PYNTER COULDN’T FIGURE out how a person’s clothes could remain so smooth and perfectly pleated. It was as if the khaki shirt and trousers of the little man had just been taken still steaming from a hot iron and gently placed on him. He wasn’t walking up the hill – not as normal people did – he tiptoed as if he hated the idea of touching the ground with the soles of his glistening leather shoes. Pynter caught glimpses of his white socks as he lifted his shoes and carefully set them down on the patches of grass that dotted the concrete road. The man carried a little brown case under his arm. It matched his jacket and trousers exactly. In the other hand he swung a beautiful stick with a curved silver top. Despite the heat, he was not sweating.