Pynter Bender

by Jacob Ross

  And all the while, Tan Cee kept Windy at her shoulder. Nights, she brought the girl over to her house and made her sleep there. For they’d seen enough of this to know that those people in Anita’s head were going to multiply. That some time soon, they were going to step out of Anita and merge with the people and the children around her, and that swinging machete would not know the difference. They explained everything to Windy.

  One day Elena dressed herself in a way they’d never seen her do before and left for San Andrews. She returned in a white van, with five strapping young men beside her. Anita smiled at them as if she had been expecting their arrival. They threw a long white canvas shirt around her shoulders and laced it up, talking all the while to her, their voices soft and soothing like a chorus of urgent lovers. Anita was laughing as she went with them.

  Elena sat on the stones and wept.

  Tan Cee returned to her house and threw out what remained of Coxy’s belongings: a bunch of photographs wrapped in a grey plastic bag, mainly of himself and his brother in Barbados; a wooden case packed with tools; a green transistor radio; a limp scattering of work shirts and trousers; and five boxes of Anchor matches. Deeka poured a cupful of kerosene on the pile, struck a match and dropped it on them.

  Coxy wasn’t there when the wardens came. He’d been working on somebody’s house somewhere on the island. When he returned, he walked into Anita’s house, pushed open the windows and returned to stand on the steps. He lit a cigarette and when the smoke cleared they saw that he was looking down on them. Coxy hung there a while, scratching his head. Then he went into the house.

  That night Deeka had her eyes on Tan Cee; she was laughing too easily and teasing the hem of her dress.

  ‘Leave Coxy to me,’ Tan Cee said. ‘Is all I askin. Please.’

  She dropped the bit of yam she’d been eating on the stones and stepped out into the night.

  Deeka turned to Elena and Patty. ‘Y’all sister jus’ wake up,’ she said. ‘An’ …’ Her voice retreated in her throat. ‘Like y’all dam’ well know, is hell to pay.’

  There was nothing they could do about Tan Cee. There was a saying in these foothills that a heart that loses its moorings drifts into a place much worse than madness. It gets bitter as a galba seed, and the quietness it sinks into is as unforgiving as a grave. Which was why when Tan Cee told them a couple of days later, ‘I sendin Windy over to her mother house to sleep,’ they barely blinked at her. They did not bother to point out that Coxy was still there and didn’t want to leave. That he’d bought new blinds and hung them up himself. He sat on the steps the way he used to with Anita, smoked and hummed the songs she taught him.

  ‘S’your modder house,’ Tan Cee said. ‘It belong to you now. ’Twill always belong t’you. De same way.’ She closed a fist around Windy’s hair. ‘De same way this belong to you.’

  Tan Cee scarcely ate. She walked the path between her doorway and Anita’s when Coxy wasn’t there, slept during the day and would spend the nights sitting on her step.

  She remembered how the trouble had begun with Coxy. Pynter was ten at the time. He’d just returned to the yard from one of those night-time disappearances he used to worry them with. He was rubbing his throat with his hand. She remembered the trembling fingers, the rage in his eyes.

  ‘If a woman married a fella, Tan,’ Pynter said, ‘dat fella s’pose to go kiss-up an’ hug-up in anodder woman house?’

  They played it like a game, the child telling her in bits and her fitting in the rest.

  Soon she had a picture of the woman in her head – not only what she looked like, but the kind of person she was, the sort of clothes she would ask a man to buy her, the colours she preferred. What unmentionable things she would whisper in Coxy’s ear to get the kind of answer that would make her laugh out loud and then roll over. How much of a man she made him feel; and why, over the years, even if Coxy always came back to her bed smelling of sex and frangipani, he would never want to leave the young woman he’d built that little house for. For such a girl could cost a man his soul. And she’d done so to Coxy even before he could lay a hand on her. So much so that Old Hope and the people of Déli Morne could never forget the price that Coxy had to pay for Wednesday nights with that Laughin Girl from Kara Isle.

  Solomon had been Coxy Levid’s best friend – the kind of friend a man told almost everything to: the amount of years that he, Solomon, had tried for children, and the shame he felt when he realised his life was cursed to dry up and die with him. It made a fella restless. It pushed him out there, searching for some woman to rescue him from oblivion.

  That was the feeling that sent his best friend Solomon travelling north by boat to Kara Isle – the silent, arid place of docile men and beautiful women whose complexions ranged from sapodilla brown to the blue-black of star apples. The women, they said, were as silent as the island. That was why Miss Florelle – this Laughin Girl – stood out from all the rest. She did not fit in. Laughin Girls had no business being born on Kara Isle. She was not no ordinary Laughin Girl either, but a special one whose age didn show nowhere on her skin or in them big brown eyes of hers.

  Coxy claimed her, in his mind, the very day Solomon brought her back and made her say hello to him. Solomon should have known straight away that there was trouble ahead when Coxy lit a cigarette and did not place it in his mouth until the fire reached his fingers.

  A coupla months later, Coxy was still thinking of that girl when he began to build the house on the lil piece of land he won in a gambling game of rummy. He started building it before he made his intentions clear even to himself. He always make ’imself believe that piece of land was a secret. As if he think a pusson stupid. As if people never talk. So the little wooden house took shape in privacy, except of course for what he hinted to Miss Florelle. And even then it was always the kind of house that fit a girl like her: small-bone, y’know, put together perfect like a postcard. A pine house settlin back on twelve pretty legs, with flowers all the way around. She could just smell the flowers, not so? And the pine, didn she smell the pine oil on his fingers?

  Florelle was his to have on the seventh of November – two days after Guy Fawkes Night, just a coupla days after Solomon danced and burned. It was the very first thing Coxy did after Solomon burned. He went to his friend’s shack and told the girl that the house he’d built was hers. He said he planted canna lilies, spider plants, white anthuriums and frangipani flowers in the yard because he took the time to learn the things she liked. She would like the wooden veranda, which was not yet painted because the colours were for her to choose. Hers, as long as she allowed him in once a week to smell the pine of the bed he’d built with his own two hands, and sleep on the sheets she washed and ironed every week. Just once a week. The rest of the time was hers to do with as she pleased. Just give him Wednesday nights.

  It was the thing he had had to do to get those Wednesday nights that Déli Morne did not allow Old Hope to forget. They threw it in their faces every Guy Fawkes Night. They would keep reminding Old Hope for ever of that fireball that fell on Solomon.

  Solomon was laughing when it came straight out of the sky and fell on him, clothing him in blue. Blue flames – not yellow like it ought to be, but a hungry, licking blue that fed on him as if his skin were fuel. Solomon never stopped laughing. The terrible blue did that to him. It made him dance and laugh because screaming wasn’t enough. They watched him till he fell at the feet of men too dumbstruck to do anything to help. Except Coxy, of course, who’d been battling with the flames that were feeding on his best friend. Coxy rushed over to the drum of water and started howling like a dog. How could a pusson account for that – cry out so hard-an’-loud and not mean it at all?

  But Solomon brother told it another way. He swore Coxy went to the drum not just to cry but to wash the smell of high-octane petrol from his gloves – fuel that had no business in a Guy Fawkes Night. And besides, he saw Coxy Levid’s lil smile as his brother lay there sizzling, and a whole heap of satis
faction was in that grin.

  Solomon’s Laughin Girl took her little brown case packed with personal things: a blue cotton dress, the nightdress that felt and looked like water, a very large bottle of Pond’s Face and Hand Care Lotion, three shades of Island Palm lipstick, a bottle of Jeyes antiseptic lotion and a small plastic bag crammed with seeds, dried flowers and rooting things. She left with Coxy, he carrying her case, she the flowers and the seeds. The little mauve church hat with the perfectly rounded top that he’d admired so much on her the first time that they met was tilted over her left eye, the way the women in American magazines wore them.

  Hard as it was, a pusson force demself to live with it. They fool demself into believin it not there – like a soreness you been carryin so long yuh mind make you ignore it. Becuz a pusson can’t let a man inside demself the way she, Tan Cee, gone-an’-done, and then let him out so easy. Deeka was proof of it. A man was only gone when you let him die in you. But what if a pusson keep him there? What if even all the hurtin an’ the hatin keep the love alive? How a woman s’pose to start to purge sheself of twenty years of that? Eh?

  But over the years, something else had lodged itself at the back of Tan Cee’s mind. It had made its own little nest in there, from the night Coxy started to sleep out. And it would not be shifted. It stayed in her head like this lil knife she carried.

  This knife – she could not remember how she came by it; could not remember a time when she did not have it. Years of honing on the sandstone in the yard had reduced it to a bit of curved silver, bright as a first quarter moon, that felt natural in her hand.

  She’d always felt comfortable with a knife. At nineteen she moved from grafting trees and harvesting the bark of cinnamon to things that bled. Had become so good at it no one within fifteen miles of Old Hope would have a tree or animal seen to by anyone else but her. She and the knife. They had made a name for themselves in Old Hope.

  She began placing it under her pillow the week Coxy began to disappear on Wednesday nights. It just being there made her feel safer. S’matter o’ fact, she hardly recalled she had it except on Thursdays. And if it wasn’t for the occasional gelding, the grafting of somebody’s fruit tree or the changing of her bed sheets on Thursday afternoons, she would have forgotten about it completely.

  But there were a few times when she did remember it. Like the first night Coxy did not return from Anita’s house. But that was only because she plumped the pillow a little too violently and it fell onto the floor.

  She remembered it after the five men came and took Anita away, realising that, with her sister gone, Coxy had no intention of leaving Anita’s house. That night she slept with the knife sitting on her mind. Shame did not allow her to tell the other women in the yard that exactly three days after Anita left, on that next Wednesday, he’d slipped the latch of her door and crept into her bed as if that space still belonged to him.

  And she’d smiled in the dark and told herself that she was right in thinking that she knew him. That a time would come when the Laughin Girl would turn to someone younger, stronger and more interesting. That Anita would not always be there and he would return to her with what remained of the nothing that was left inside of him, which in their early days of loving was worth something, because taking care of it made her feel he valued her.

  Now here he was offering his emptiness again.

  But the years of not being claimed as she had been by him in the beginning had done something to her. They’d dried her up and made her unreachable with men. But in other ways she had grown strong and wet and fertile. She had a turned-in-on-yourself, don’t-take-no-chances kind of loving for the children in the yard, for family. For anything that belonged by blood.

  That one last time, she’d allowed Coxy back to her house so that she could say what she needed to say to him. And that time was done.

  In a way, her husband made her laugh. He was one of those men who wooed with gifts and smiles. And a pusson couldn’t tell which was more important, because the smile was what they saw first and remembered long after the gift got used or worn, or eaten, or simply thrown away. A pusson remembered the way his hands held it out as if it were the Eucharist itself, and the look in his eyes that went with it. And if he really wanted you, if you began to settle on his mind, Coxy started building things.

  Perhaps Coxy thought he would surprise them all when he built Windy a pretty blue cage for birds. He brought home eight little yellow parakeets the next day, let them loose inside it and hung the little house up on the veranda. They began whistling and chiming straight away as if he’d let loose all the bells of Christmas inside that cage.

  The little gifts of gold for Windy were not so obvious: the ring topped with a tiny blue stone that glinted on the girl’s finger; a matching pair of earrings seven days later. Then, just yesterday, the finest of all gold chains with its own little heart dangling at the end of it.

  It might have been the memory of foreman McKinley and the young girls in the cane that stirred a bunch of women to come to Deeka’s yard. They was just passin, they said, and it cross their mind dat since they passin so close, they might as well drop by. And seein they already in her yard, it make sense to tell her what they been hearing about Coxy-in-dat-house-wit’-de-young-lady. Furthermore, nobody couldn say ’twasn’t their business, becuz bad bizness is everybody bizness. And ’twas one thing to have dat foreman behavin like dog with poor-people girl-chilren. But this different. This inside a pusson yard.

  Is help Deeka want? She want somebody to help her make dat dog-of-a-man see sense? Their men wouldn do it, cuz they follow Coxy like he’s some kinda Christ. But they could. They could kick ’iz arse out right now. They could give dat sonuvabitch so much hell he wish he never see Ole Hope, far less come to play fowl-cock round here. They want some help right now? Cuz is help a pusson come to help.

  There was not a person in the family who did not think that Tan Cee was going crazy. That in some funny way, Anita had passed her affliction on to her sister; for in that time too, the canes threw up their sweaty, rancid odour and filled her head with a dizziness that brought the chuckles bubbling out of her.

  Tan Cee couldn imagine what Coxy was thinking. He really believe she was so sick-head-an’-weak she wouldn notice when he left for the rum shop? Or that when he returned some hour long past midnight she would be asleep? Or that she would not hear his hand brushing against the latch of the door? Or maybe he thought that she, Tan Cee, would hear him and not give a damn.

  The girl was already struggling with him by the time she got there. And Tan Cee knew by the smell of him that Coxy did not have the guts to look his own nastiness in the face. Had to fill ’imself with rum to do it. Had to look for blamelessness in a bottle, so that he could explain his wickedness that way.

  Men, they done worse than this wiv rum in them; they mistake nieces, daughters-in-law, even daughters for wives and got away wiv it.

  She could just hear Coxy explaining it to all the fellas he sat with in the rum shop, with that smile that lied about his nature. She could see the look they would give him, the way they would shift their hips on the wooden benches, throw back their heads and knock back a glass of the hot white fuel to help them make a joke of the unheard of. A man joke. One they shared and laughed at ’mongst themselves, becuz Coxy Levid did for them what they didn dare to do themselves: leave de bed of yuh woman, take over her sister’s, and when that sister gone, turn round an’ take over de daughter. And they would reward him with a drink, because getting it second-hand was better than not getting it at all.

  And he would not be blamed. They would ask him for all the details. Everything! They would part company in the dark after clasping hands and slapping shoulders. Laughing.

  She found him in the dark, all right. Heard herself thinking even as she shifted the bit of silver in her palm that animals were more difficult. Pigs especially – funny creatures, dem! They always seemed to know when it was their manhood that her hands were reaching for.
r />   35

  SAN ANDREWS WAS like no town in the world. It could not die. Its face was turned towards the sea. It took everything that the hurricanes that came in from the ocean threw at it, fell flat on its foundations, then rebuilt itself straight after.

  The people of Zed Bender’s time had burnt it to the ground so many times they got fed up and turned instead to things that would stay destroyed. San Andrews simply took the punishment, shook the water and the ashes off itself and rose again like new.

  Despite all his years of passing through it, to and from his school above the ocean, Pynter had never got accustomed to San Andrews. He’d been here three months with Tinelle and still he found the brightness of the place unbearable: the metallic heave of sea, the shimmering burn of rooftops, the dizzying strobe of steel and glass and paintwork.

  Here, the houses clung to the hills above the harbour like barnacles – caught up, it seemed, in an endless tug-of-war with gravity – and when it was impossible for them to climb further up without falling back on themselves or taking flight, they flowed sideways around the hills.

  Pynter would lie beside Tinelle listening to her breathing. Sometimes, to pass the time, he lit a candle and eased himself up on his elbow to watch her sleep. She was different from her daytime self: she dreamt aloud – laughed a lot and said his name sometimes – and when she woke she wanted him to talk to her, especially about the women in his yard who seemed to fill up his head so completely.

  With the lifting of the curfew, nights in San Andrews were once more filled with the smell of roasted corn, barbecued chicken and the arguments of stevedores from the harbour below them. Hugo, her brother, was hardly ever there. Their father owned a small beach house on one of the peninsulas in the south, which he went to whenever the fancy took him. Now that Pynter had arrived, he was there most of the time.