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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 clockswhose hands
have spannedso 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.
