Pynter Bender

by Jacob Ross

  It was somebody else’s invitation that brought Leroy to Old Hope. He was dressed as if he were about to start a new job. He stood in the road and called out Patty’s name, his voice high and tight with anguish.

  Patty leaned over on the steps, staring at her hands. She was shaking her head as if she were saying no to everything she saw there.

  Leroy was calling her the way he’d been accustomed to, like they were together in a place all on their own. Patty only shook her head faster. When the calling became too much for her, she brought the heels of her hands up to her ears and kept them there.

  He was a good fella, he shouted. Except for that last time. Was a mistake. He was upset. He would make the baby his. He would treat it like his own.

  Elena decided to stop him from making a bigger fool of himself in front of all of Old Hope. She went down the path, stood on the bank above the road and called his name, the palms of her hand opened out towards him.

  He did not come, but at least it stopped him calling, and apart from Patty’s sobbing, and the crackling of the woodfire, the yard was very quiet.

  They did not know exactly when Leroy left. They’d looked up and he was no longer there.

  Deeka cleared her throat and Pynter was surprised at the sadness in her voice. Life happm, she said. People change wiv it. Besides, Patty was her daughter. And if she, Deeka, had to choose between a good man and no granchilren, or no-man-at-all and granchildren, she would always choose granchilren. Which didn mean her daughters s’posed to go off and bring baby home that way all the time.

  It had Pynter wondering how his auntie’s love for a man she’d been sleeping beside from as far back as he could remember could slip so easily into revulsion. Tan Cee had her eyes on him. There was a small smile on her face. ‘Man do it all de time,’ she said.

  ‘You talkin to me?’ he said.

  ‘Who else?’ she said.

  ‘You tellin me what I thinkin?’ He closed his book.

  Something in Tan Cee’s face retreated.

  ‘You don’ know what I thinking,’ he said. He rose to his feet, stuffed his slingshot down his pocket. ‘I takin a walk,’ he said, and headed for Glory Cedar Rise.

  Pynter stood with his back against a tree, watching Windy climb the hill towards him. The slingshot swung lightly between his fingers. He folded the weapon, shoved it into his back pocket and leaned over the brink of the hill to pull her up.

  ‘Trouble comin,’ she said.

  ‘Trouble here,’ he said.

  ‘I mean Peter,’ she said.

  ‘I mean your mother,’ he said.

  ‘He your brother an’ he hate you so much? Cuz of …’

  ‘S’not that,’ he said. ‘He still play wiv you, not so? He don’ blame you for nothing. Yuh see, I deprive him of somefing. He – he never been inside our father house.’

  Windy went still against him. He felt himself struggling with his own hesitation. He’d never spoken of this before.

  ‘I – I make somefing happm. I ask Paso to burn our father house. I went up dere one time, a lil time after he pass ’way, to make sure that Paso done it. And then I come home and tell Peter. I say to ’im the house was sufferin,’ twas fallin down on itself, yunno. He look at me, quiet like I talking to you right now, an’ he say, “I never been inside my father house, Jumbie Boy. I never see inside it.” Mos’ times Peter don’ remember in his head. But de rest of ’im remember all de time. And now, you come … and …’

  Windy pointed past the trees to where their home was. They could see the roof of Patty and Tan Cee’s house, and the upper skeleton of the new house Coxy was building for Anita. ‘Down dere,’ she said, ‘who love you more, Pyntuh? Is Tan Cee, not so?’

  She’d asked him that question before. He hadn’t answered her. Now he felt he could.

  ‘When I got sick, yunno, I wake up wiv my mouth hurtin. Down here too.’ He touched his side. ‘Deeka beat me up, she even force-feed me.’

  Windy nodded.

  ‘Who love you more, Windy? Somebody prepare to kill fo’ you? Somebody prepare to die fo’ you? Or a pusson who will hurt you, just to save you from yuhself?’

  She didn’t answer him. She took his hand and laid it on her own, seemed to lose herself in the contrast that they made, his dark as the shell of nutmegs, hers the pale brown of mahogany.

  ‘Patty believe is Deeka,’ he said. ‘Is what she been tryin to tell me when I wake up in her house.’

  He thought she sensed it too, the urgency he’d been feeling when he left the yard. The knowledge that if they were ever to come up this hill again and be together, they would never see what lay below them in the same way. That last look of Tan Cee told him so; they’d already decided amongst themselves.

  Pynter reached for a stick and drew four figures at Windy’s feet. He scratched each woman’s name beside them. He erased the names and connected them with lines.

  ‘You gotta think o’ dem as one person, not four,’ he said. ‘This is Deeka.’ He pointed at one of the shapes. ‘She the eyes: she look at things, she read them. Tan is the feeling part. Patty’z all the niceness and the softness. My mother…’ He paused, lifted the stick and pushed it in the soil. ‘My mother is de hammer. When nothing else don’ work, she hit.’

  Windy was shivering. She’d folded her arms around herself and was leaning into him.

  Did she think that when Anita arrived with her, said nothing about themselves – where they’d lived and why they came – that all they’d brought with them were their names? The women weren’t interested in Anita. She, Windy, was the one who told them everything. They knew she was a town girl and that she wasn’t from San Andrews. It had to be some place like Trinidad. Her feet told them that, her heels were soft as her hands and she always reached for slippers. Those hands had never lifted a bucket of water. She had no marks on them, no scars from lifting or peeling things. Her arms were like she’d just sandpapered them. Too many things surprised her and she ate too carefully. And they knew, he said, they knew even before it happened that he was going to like her, like he’d never liked no girl before.

  ‘And what you know?’ she said.

  He took her hand and folded his around it.

  ‘That your mother didn come to stay. She come to leave you here. She don’ know what to do with a full-grown girl who she been standin between and any man who try to come near her. She lock you in so tight you hardly have a scratch on you from life. She follow you everywhere. She – she killin you wiv love.’

  He lifted his head at the wall of borbook plants and cactus some way beyond the trees. He didn’t tell her that the women also knew this, and that even if Anita wanted to take her somewhere else, they would not allow it.

  The yard was quiet when they returned. His mother sat on the top rung of the steps with a grater and a bowl. Tan Cee sat in the shade of the large iron platter that John Seegal had placed there. Deeka was busy with the fire.

  Patty would be in her house paging through one of his books for baby names. Somefing different; somefing pretty. A name a lover goin like to call.

  He glanced at Windy briefly and went into the house. From the window directly above them he looked down at the jigsaw of his mother’s plaits, and the neat crossroads that the partings in Windy’s hair made. Tan Cee saw him there watching them and turned her head away.

  Elena patted the wood and offered Windy a smile. Windy perched herself beside her, one leg pushed forward as if she were about to start a race.

  ‘S’nice up dere, not so?’ Elena said.

  Windy nodded and said nothing.

  ‘Nice an’ quiet, and if you close them two pretty eyes o’ yours is like de whole world turn a big wide cradle, rockin you to kingdom come. Ain’t got no right or wrong up dere, especially when you with Pynter. Becuz that son-o’-mine kin make a pusson believe anything. Problem is,’ Elena popped a piece of coconut in her mouth, kept it there at the back of her jaw while she adjusted herself on the step, ‘problem is, Miss Winny, it go
t right an’ wrong. You an’ my boy is first cousin, blood o’ de same Bender blood, y’unnerstan? Dat’s de first ting. De second is Pynter ain’t got no knowledge of no girls yet. De time don’t reach for dat, an’ like I say, is jus’ not right.’ Elena began chewing. The coconut made a terrible crunching sound. ‘And third – God give me eyes dat see everything. I see when nobody think I see, so if you and, er – ahem!’

  Pynter had shifted his weight against the sill and they all looked up at him. ‘Tell ’er, Windy, that she can’t kill a dead thing twice,’ he said. He hopped out onto the steps, rested a hand on Elena’s shoulder and squeezed his way past them. ‘See what I tell you, Windy? My modder is the hammer; she the one that hit.’

  Elena flung the bowl at him, but he shot out an arm and caught it, glaring at her rage and laughing.

  27

  THEY’D BEEN FOUR months away from their yards when Paso came. Paso was the nephew who had taught him about poems and had shown him a way to see. From their perch on the hill above Old Hope, they’d watched the slow emergence of the human shape on the road below. As he came closer they could make out his red canvas shoes, then the thread of silver at the wrist, and his bright belt like a rainbow around his waist.

  Pynter couldn’t contain himself and began running to meet him. His nephew saw him coming and started laughing too. They met by the old iron bridge over which stood the dead stone mill. Paso made a doorway of his arms and Pynter stepped into it. The old dance was there, the same flash of a smile. ‘Maan, you gone aall taaall and bee-yoo-tiful,’ he said. ‘In fact, you look like sumbady Ah know.’

  The accent was American, a tease. Paso mimed a mirror with his hand and laid an arm against Pynter’s. They laughed and back-slapped some more and then Paso’s smile dissolved.

  ‘Your people tell me y’all down here.’ He looked about him and waved an arm at the trees. ‘Which one is your mother?’

  Pynter shrugged. ‘I ask meself dat question all the time, cuz all of them believe that they my mother.’

  Paso laughed again. ‘Where the others?’

  Pynter pointed at the hill above them.

  ‘Gwone. I follow you.’

  ‘What you want wiv them?’

  The question stopped his nephew. ‘Call me a reaper, Uncle. Make me a gatherer of rage.’

  Pynter shook his head at Paso.

  ‘I travel the island. I follow the troubles. I find people like y’all. I organise them.’

  Pynter had heard about people like that in school, from bits of whispered conversations amongst the students from the north. He remembered the furtive lunchtime gatherings at the back end of the building. He pointed a finger at Paso. ‘You one of them?’

  ‘S’where de action is,’ Paso said.

  Pynter brought a finger to his lip. ‘Marlis Tillock,’ he said. ‘Y’ever hear the name?’

  He thought Paso would never answer. He remembered that expression: the tiny frowning hesitation, the steady eyes, the smile. The last time he saw it, his nephew had answered his question with a poem.

  ‘Tillock,’ Pynter repeated.

  ‘He was one of mine.’

  Pynter was suddenly aware of the babble of the river beneath them, the shivering of the old iron bridge under their feet. ‘Yuh mean, you the one that, erm, gather ’im?’

  ‘Organise, young-fella. Organise. Somebody have to do it. You goin take me to the others?’

  Paso greeted them with jokes and they accepted him warmly.

  ‘You look like him,’ Frigo whispered.

  ‘Nuh, he look like me,’ Pynter replied. ‘I’z his uncle.’

  They took Paso past the belt of flowering white cedars, where the trees plaited their branches together and made an endless suite of rooms. It seemed perfectly natural that they should take him to that high place where they could light a masantorch at night and be certain that the light would not leak out. He shook their hands, asked their names again and wanted to know how their families were doing.

  He told them why he was there. He asked them to lift themselves above the high green spine of the island and see themselves as part of a swelling tide of young people who ran from their homes at night. He made them see two streams, one flowing southwards from the north, another in the opposite direction. And they, he said, whether they were aware of it or not, had always been a part of these streams. They were part of others everywhere on the island, from the small, grey houses of galvanise and wattle that stood facing the sea, to those high on hillsides or locked in valleys full of ferns and boulders. Even the ones hidden amongst the lianas and the foliage further inland, they were all part of it, tributaries if they liked, that made that river what it was. And when those rivers met …

  Paso brought his hands together, and in the silence that surrounded them, its effect was like a clap of thunder.

  Pynter looked at the faces around him, the twitch of lips as Paso shaped his words, the catches of breath in the pauses between sentences.

  Pynter slipped away and went outside. Darkness had grouped the hills together so that from where he stood they looked like the hunched shoulders of giants brooding over the cane fields. He whispered Windy’s name, remembering something he’d told her. The sound of footsteps broke through his thoughts. Paso came and stood beside him. Pynter glanced at his nephew’s face. He was looking out ahead of him, perhaps at the bright fleck of moon that hung over the hill.

  ‘You do this all the time?’ Pynter said.

  Paso stirred. ‘S’bigger than you think, not so?’

  Pynter closed the front of his shirt. ‘You say the same thing all the time?’

  Paso cocked his head at him and smiled. ‘All the time,’ he said.

  In all the years of not seeing Paso, it was the thing he remembered most about his nephew: the open smile, the beautiful teeth, the flash of eyes that went with it. He’d never stopped missing him.

  ‘You didn finish it,’ Pynter said.

  ‘I don’t follow you.’

  ‘The metaphor, the river; you didn finish it. You didn tell them de colour of the water, when the two rivers meet.’

  ‘You think I don’ know that? Word reach me that you don’t only have my face, you smart too. I been lookin forward to seein you. Don’t spoil it for me now.’

  Pynter shook his head, ‘All I sayin is … yunno …’

  ‘What you learn ’bout history in your school?’ His nephew’s voice was calmer. ‘That all of it is in the past, not so?’ Paso’s arm made a quick contemptuous arc at the darkness before them. ‘So how come it still right there in front of us? How come your people still killing demselves in it? For us, young-fella, history not something we look back at. History is now. To put it behind you where it belong, somebody have to break it. Get rid of it. An’ yes, for that to happen, we goin have a few more Marlis Tillocks.’

  Paso stuffed his hands in his pocket. In the distance beyond the hills, the soft white arc of headlamps brightened the sky from time to time. Dogs too, a long way off, were arguing with the dark.

  ‘Tell them that then,’ Pynter said. ‘Not no story ’bout no river.’ Pynter turned to face him. ‘And you?’

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘Feel with your eyes, see with your heart. You ’member that? Well, they tellin me right now dat Victor want you more than all of us put together. Not so?’

  Paso flashed a smile at him, turned and went to join the others.

  28

  OLD HOPE BEGAN dreaming and it was Patty who started it. She came down the hill each morning, her eyes dark and heavy with the disturbance of the night, and spoke to them in whispers.

  She told them of women whose hair was a nest of snakes, dark rivers that ran backwards, gatherings of clouds that rained down scorpions on Old Hope, men as tall as palmiste trees covered in robes of flaming red, pregnant boys, rocks that bled, bloated babies with messages in their cries and fierce hot winds. The older folks tried to unravel these dreams. A brown and muscular river meant confusion, spiders
promised money or deliverance, scorpions were spite, and a red-dressed man who danced the dance of palm trees meant that Shango, Orisha of all Orishas, had been awakened by the troubles in Old Hope and would not go away.

  ‘Y’all talk like if trouble went somewhere,’ Tan Cee said. ‘But in dem dreams, you fly, Patty. You always fly. Dat mean … dat mean you not beat-an’-defeat, y’unnerstan? You not.’

  These days Tan Cee hardly talked. She sat alone with her back against the iron platter watching the world through half-closed eyes. She lifted her head from time to time to look up at the house that her husband was close to finishing for Anita. They chuckled a lot, Anita and Coxy, and the sound of them together would turn Tan Cee’s head, as if however often she heard them, their laughter never ceased to startle her.

  Anita brought Coxy’s meals to him. She sat beside him on her new step, dipped bread into her plate sometimes and held it up to his mouth. It was the only time that Tan Cee would not look.

  Pynter felt the sinking of his auntie’s spirit, watched the detachment with which she looked on the rest of them now, the flat-eyed daze of someone who had collided with something they could neither walk around nor climb over.

  It was worse when Wednesday nights arrived and Coxy did not leave the yard. The first evening it happened, Coxy came down in his usual Wednesday get-up: the pleated trousers, the two-tone leather shoes, the soft white cotton shirt smelling of Cussons Imperial Leather soap and Alcolado Glacial. He stood at the edge of the yard with his chin pulled slightly inwards. He took out a cigarette and brought a fizzing match to it. His eyes met Tan Cee’s and she stared back at him. There was a slight lifting of the corner of her lips, the tiniest thread of a smile and Pynter saw a shadow briefly cross his auntie’s face.