Pynter Bender

by Jacob Ross

  She got up when Leroy came. He said good evening and hovered at the edge of the yard with a small flashlight in his hand. Pynter felt Patty’s eyes on him. He looked up at her and smiled. The women followed the uphill meandering of the blade of light until it disappeared. Tan Cee sighed and muttered something to Elena. His mother did not answer her. Deeka went to the steps, made a hammock of her dress and leaned forward, one hand propping up her chin, the other fingering her ear lobe exactly as Patty had been doing.

  Pynter folded the paper he’d been scribbling on, stuffed it down his pocket.

  ‘I takin a walk,’ he said.

  24

  THE FADING BLUE of jacarandas and the frothing blooms of tamarind and damsons – that was what they expected from October. A milder, cooler time. Not this.

  October had stolen the heat of August and July, wrapped it up in a parcel and thrown the whole lot at Old Hope. It had already turned good soil to ashes, deprived the canes of all hope of growth and left shimmering heat-ghosts over the road.

  Still, a pusson didn’t mind the funny weather too much. It was all the trouble that was playing hide-an’-seek behind it.

  A hurricane was better, Deeka said. At least it announced itself before it hit. It came from a place a pusson could lift a hand and point to. It did what hurricanes were s’posed to do: it flattened the island, took some careless lives wiv it and left. People’s hands would go back to doing what they always did: mend the wreckage, put the pieces back in place. Becuz life was like that. Life never lost its way for long. But this creeping silence to which a pusson could not put a name – it bothered them.

  Rumours started to travel down the western coast and put Deeka in a mood. Someone from the village Birdie had run to – that place of slow-talking men and quick-tempered women, who walked the length of the island selling the fish their men brought back from the ocean – said that an old man named Skido had watched a soldier shoot a young man over an argument the soldier was losing. The boy’s blood had spilled in the old man’s drink. Deeka said it was not true. Rumours like these came with the seasons and went away with them. Over the years there had been so many – so preposterous and wonderful – they became entertainment. Like all the rumours that came before, this one would go away.

  But this one stayed. It fed on the wind and grew fat as it travelled southwards, so that by the time it reached San Andrews it was not one soldier but twenty of Victor’s henchmen who had shot a running child for nothing.

  Every day Pynter returned from school with different versions. The boys collected them and swapped them. They examined each one for imperfections, brushed it up a bit and passed it on, much as they would with marbles. But unlike Deeka, they never doubted. They simply selected the one they wanted to believe and kept it in their heads.

  Talk of the shooting, and the curfew which followed it straight after, arrived at a time when the voices of Birdie’s educated prison men began to reach them from behind the thick stone walls on Edmund Hill. Young men who’d served their time were returning to their yards. They had stronger voices and prison had made them less afraid.

  Besides, Old Hope had not recovered from Jordan. His mother sat him like an accusation on the step to her house. From morning, she left him there tangling and untangling his fingers, until she brought him in at night. And the sight of Jordan quietened Old Hope. It made this village above the canes exchange words in hushed tones.

  It couldn’t last. Something had to give. So in a funny way when Leroy brought his hand to Patty’s face it came as a brief release.

  Leroy couldn’t have chosen a worse time. That Sunday morning, Tan Cee sat wringing the tail end of her dress and staring into air. Elena had little Lindy across her lap, and was stroking the child’s curls with hands that had been restless from the night before. Peter was oiling the wheels of his scooter somewhere behind the house, while Pynter lay on the floor with a book on his chest and Sislyn’s pen between the pages.

  The sound of Patty crying killed his thoughts and brought him to his feet. When he got outside, Peter was already in the middle of the yard.

  Leroy was strolling down the hill behind Patty, one hand in his pocket, the other dangling beside him, and he was saying something in a gruff voice to their aunt.

  Patty was trying to ignore him. She had one hand against the right side of her face and was moving the other about her in wrathful, fluttering agitation. Leroy halted on the little mound of rocks just above the yard. Patty hung there, a little way from him, her palm still pressed against her face, her shoulders shuddering from time to time.

  Pynter found himself beside Peter, and, like his brother, he couldn’t keep his gaze from switching between Patty and the women. Tan Cee was staring calmly up at the foothills. Deeka looked as though she was searching about her for something and she could not remember what it was. His mother was holding up a bottle to the baby’s mouth. There was no expression on her face. His mother left the baby propped up against some pillows in the doorway and went inside the house. Deeka strolled across the yard and placed an arm across Peter’s shoulder. His grandmother mumbled something in his brother’s ear, urging him backwards while she spoke, towards the grapefruit tree, her voice light and throaty almost as if she were telling him a joke. Deeka stopped with Peter under the tree. Her hands followed the drop of his arms and lightly folded themselves around his stomach. She placed her chin against his cheek and kept talking in his brother’s ear.

  Pynter felt a hand on his elbow. Tan Cee was smiling up at him. She’d been speaking; he hadn’t heard most of what she said. ‘… Somefing I have to tell you.’

  Tan Cee squeezed his arm and led him towards the steps. And then Deeka’s voice cut a path across the yard, dull and flat like a rusted blade. ‘What de sonuvabitch done to yuh, Patty?’

  Patty uncovered the side of her face and they saw the swollen eye, the inflated cheek. There was a thread of blood at the corner of her mouth.

  Deeka heaved with Peter, pulling her weight backwards, her chin snapping down, the tendons twitching along her arms like cables.

  Pynter had also surged forward, so certain of exactly what he was going to do to Leroy he already saw him dead. But Tan Cee had locked her legs around his feet. And suddenly her chin came down and hit the hollow between his neck and shoulder. He dropped back against her. And while he lay trapped and weakened against his aunt, he saw his mother coming down the steps.

  Elena had changed her clothes. She was wearing the rough brown cotton trousers she worked the canes with. She’d rolled the legs up to her knees, gathered one end of her khaki shirt and knotted it at the side. She walked over to Patty and stood in front of her. She eased Patty’s hand off her face and brushed the swollen shininess with a thumb. Then she lifted her chin at Leroy and narrowed down her eyelids.

  Tan Cee said afterwards that Leroy should have hurried away then. He should have forgotten he was a man and turned his back and run. But there were too many things he did not know about Elena. He didn’t work the canes, so this tall, pretty-face fella, muscled like a campeche tree, who paraded as a watchman and a driver for one of those rich landowners further east, had never seen how the people in the cane fields softened their walk around Elena. He didn’t realise that they had seen this coming, from the time Patty got that store job in San Andrews. You add to this the rememberin a man name Gideon who she never forgive for almos’ takin away her two boy-chilren a coupla months before they born. You add that again to watchin a useless brother waste most of hi life in jail – what else? – and all the troubles with the foreman and them young girls in the cane down there. And now, of course, seein Patty pretty face gone ugly with a slap. Well,’ twas all of that she hit Leroy with.

  And ’twas not even a fist. It was just the heel of Elena hand he got.

  The shock of it sent Leroy stumbling backwards. The impertinence of it. Becuz Elena a woman and woman not s’posed to hit a man like that. Not so bold-face. Not so hard. Not in front of other people. Cuz he
a man. He bigger than she. He stronger. He goin slap her down, like he just done slap down Patty. Only worse.

  She’s not in a hurry, Elena. She’s not even bothered about the baby in the doorway fretting after her. She’s chewing on a piece of coconut and taking her time with Leroy. She wants him to recover; to straighten ’imself up, to organise ’imself and fight her back, becuz, like John Seegal used to tell them, that is the only truly lasting way to make a fella unnerstan that he should never touch a Bender woman, unless she ask him to.

  Leroy swings at her. She bends an arm and brings it up. His wrist connects with her elbow. He clamps his lips down on the pain; and with all that hurting, he forgets that he is going to slap her down. He makes a fist of his other hand. Doesn’t even have time to raise it. She hits him hard. Tosses the rest of the coconut into her mouth and hits him again.

  Patty stopped her crying. She was out there beating the air with her hands and calling out to Elena in a voice fluttering with panic. She might have gone to save Leroy had Deeka not pinned her right there with her eyes.

  Leroy was covering his face with one hand, the other stretched out before him in a swaying, staying motion. Elena turned her back on him and began to walk away. Now Deeka was running towards Elena with Tan Cee hurrying after her, because Elena was wrestling a small boulder out of the ground. The two women threw themselves on her but Elena shook them off. They threw themselves at her again. Now they were gesturing to Peter and Pynter to come help them hold her back. And even as he got there, even with Deeka and Tan Cee between himself and his mother, Pynter felt her enormous strength.

  That evening, Pynter felt the floorboards shift under her weight, looked up to see Elena standing over him.

  ‘What troublin you?’ she said.

  He saw no trace of the anger with which she’d brought her fists to Leroy that morning. Pynter pulled his legs together and sat up. Elena lowered herself beside him and handed him the baby. He loved this child and they knew it. They called her by the name he’d given her, Lindy the Lovely. Supple as a vine and long-limbed, with hair that was curled and black, which he’d taught himself to braid. A dougla girl.

  Lindy looked into his face with her glistening eyes, prodded his lips with her fingers, nuzzled her head under his neck and promptly went to sleep. They’d told him this child should have been his twin, not Peter. She had his moods and temper. Cried for the same things that he used to as a child. So ’twasn’t a hard thing to believe that, big as he was, lil Linny was the woman part of Pynto.

  Elena lifted the book from the floor. She took the pen, held it in her hand and weighed it. Then she brought it to her nose. All the while her eyes were on him.

  ‘Who the woman, Pynto?’

  ‘Woman? Which woman! You see any woman round here?’

  ‘Tuesday gone – you come home smellin of her. Las’ week Friday an’ yesterday – same thing.’ She brought the pen to her nose again. ‘Who the woman?’

  ‘She a friend,’ he said.

  ‘A friend? She a teacher?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘She know you got famly?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘But she don’ know de kinda family you got, not so?’

  ‘Nuh.’

  ‘You mus’ tell ’er. Tell ’er de kinda family you got. Tell ’er ’bout me. Y’unnerstan? Cuz, big as you is, you still a boy an’ …’

  ‘I don’ know whaaat yuh tryin to say. Cuz nothin not happenin and …’

  ‘I knooow dat.’ She gave the pen a quick, dry smile and spoke again as if she were addressing it. ‘You fink I don’ know that? But …’ She adjusted the dress on the sleeping child. ‘I sure you don’ wan me to come to no fancy school o’ yours, dress-down just like how I dress-down now,’ she pointed at her work clothes, ‘to ask no high-falutin ’ooman-teacher what she got wiv my son.’

  She rested the pen on the floor beside him and got up. ‘S’a nice pen though.’ She stopped at the doorway and looked back at him over her shoulder. ‘All I sayin t’you, young-fella, is dat ’ooman is a ocean; you swim in ’er too soon, you drown.’

  Outside, he could hear her whispering with Tan Cee. These days, they were like the canes – they whispered all the time. There was no end to it. They muttered about the new things they were learning about Patty and the trouble she was heading for if she was not careful; about the way his and Peter’s bodies had changed over the year; Peter’s edginess around him; the buried grief of his mother for a man she’d handed her heart to; the quietness of Old Hope men over what happened to Jordan.

  The night before, his mother’s irritation with Tan Cee had seeped through the floorboards. She wanted to know what Tan Cee was doing ’bout Coxy. When would she find the heart to break ’way from that dog she call her husband? How much mo’ hell she waiting for him to bring her? And when Tan Cee replied, her voice had been like a girl’s – thin and tremulous and so uncertain it had brought a lump to Pynter’s throat. Tan Cee said something about love. It couldn’t be, his mother said. Whatever it was,’ twasn’t love. Love don’ make a pusson feel so useless.

  Pynter knew what this was about – this mouth-running-like-a-river talking of the women. They had been heaping up all the worries. They’d been collecting and sorting them in little piles, preparing themselves for their visit to Santay.

  It was the beginning of the hurricane season. Crabs, flushed from their holes by the first rains, brought flocks of little children down to the river with pointed sticks and bags. Men were uprooting wild yams from the foothills, callaloo and crestles from the river, and were cooking tall butter tins of ‘man-food’ which they left for anyone to fill themselves with. They were putting their shoulders together and rebuilding or straightening houses in preparation for the storms. Girls, chattering like gulls, made sieves from tins, rolled their skirts up to their thighs and walked the waters of the river, harvesting migrating swarms of chi-chi-ri, the tiny silver fish so densely shoaled they looked like underwater rain.

  They’d also put off the proper naming of their babies for this time. Up there, in Santay’s place, where only women and young children were allowed, they would give the baby the name they’d argued over and agreed on at home. And at some time when it suited them, they would take it to the priest in the Catholic church at Cross Gap, pretend the name had just occurred to them, and have him sign the papers.

  This year was different. For the first time the women of Old Hope wanted men up there in Santay’s yard. But they had to wait. The first hours were for them and their business alone. It was for Patty and her troubles with Leroy; for the promise that a man had left his mother holding on to, which she refused to let go of. For Birdie and the way he left them and the way Deeka secretly feared he might return. For Miss Lizzie’s strivings for a child, and all the things that required the stripping of a woman or a young girl to fix what had gone wrong with her.

  Pynter sat with Peter in the darkness of the yard, watching the dancing masantorches – a climbing thread of fire that marked out the turnings of the track that led up to Santay’s house. Up there, this night, small miracles would happen. And they’d prepared themselves for them. They’d left with bamboo poles and flags, calabashes and coloured candles, bottles of grated nutmegs mixed with olive oil and mint; crushed cinnamon and garlic, flakes of asafoetida, unsalted rice, a bottle or two of methylated spirits; a couple of live chickens, the seeds and sap of plants, and the best of everything they’d grown and reaped and kept for this time. They’d waited for the moon, and now that it had presented itself – bright like a one-eyed god on the crest of the Mardi Gras – they’d lifted their children onto their shoulders and, with a masantorch in one hand, climbed up to Santay’s house.

  When, later, Pynter joined them up there, the light from the torches was so thick the women seemed to be wading in it. They were moving across the open space like giant night-time butterflies. Miss Meena was all snake and grace and water. Rough earth had become air beneath Tan Cee’s feet, the stones of
the yard an oil slick for his mother, and Patty was thrusting a blade of bamboo at the throat of the world. Deeka stood tall above them all, rocking like a palm frond in a hurricane.

  With his back against a tree, his head on Peter’s shoulder, Pynter followed Miss Maisie, Miss Lizzie and Miss Anna-Jo – their shoulders fused, their palms parallel to the earth, journeying around the edges of the yard, as if their bodies were propelled only by the oaring of their arms.

  This agitation, the touching of the four corners of the earth, the stammering of the drum in Santay’s lap and the strange words slipping from their lips like pebbles – Eshu, Yemanja, Olokun, Oba, Orissa – were for Jordan. For the week before, the demons that Sylus and his soldiers had placed inside Jordan’s head had finally consumed him. They would send his soul off dancing. They would urge him on with a tripping rhythm which Jordan, being the kind of boy he used to be, might just decide to dance to.

  Peter shook his shoulders and woke him. Pynter opened his eyes and saw that night had begun to roll out of the valley. He caught the morning smell of the river down below. The first birds had begun to stir the air with song. Having danced their way past Babylon and Zion – and all the rivers and mountains in between – the long and arduous journey back to this hill above Old Hope had left the women stern-faced and exhausted.

  ‘Had a dream,’ Pynter said.

  His brother shook him off and came to his feet. Peter looked as clear-eyed as if he’d just arrived.

  ‘Serious,’ Pynter said. ‘’Twas one helluva dream.’

  ‘I know.’ Peter scratched his head and looked away. ‘Everybody hear you.’ He lifted his chin at Santay. ‘She tell me not to wake you, Jumbie Boy!’

  Soft as Peter’s voice was, Santay seemed to hear him, or if she hadn’t, his brother’s movement must have caught her eye.

  Santay lifted a hand and called him over. She looked into his face and smiled. ‘Lord ha’ mercy, Osan! You gone tall-an’-smooth like cane. An’ you still wiv us.’