Pynter Bender

by Jacob Ross

  Mister Bostin pulled out his handkerchief and sopped his forehead. He gave Pynter a hard sideways glance. ‘You numerate?’

  ‘Yes, he kin count,’ Manuel Forsyth said.

  Mister Bostin turned the back of his right hand towards his face and examined his fingers. The nails were cut very low, except the little finger, which sprouted a long and curving outgrowth that he was clearly proud of.

  ‘Well, I’m reasonably satisfied that he’s doing something. I must refer the matter, though. A daily diet of the Bible may be just the, er, thing – morally, that is – but to school the boy must go. That’s what my job dictate.’

  ‘You mean, I waste all this time arguing with you?’

  The man got up. For the first time he smiled. Pynter was surprised at the brightness of it. ‘That’s for you to decide, sir.’

  ‘I’ll fight every one o’ you in court.’

  ‘You’ll hear from me, Mister Forsyth. Follow me, boy.’

  ‘Half-edicated jackass.’

  Pynter looked quickly at the man and then back at his father. His lips were moving angrily. Bostin paused as if he were about to say something. He thought better of it and tiptoed out of the bedroom.

  The man turned to face Pynter on the steps. His voice was almost a whisper. ‘Talk the truth now, lil fella, you really want to go on like that? The truth!’

  ‘For now.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Iz all he got right now.’

  The man nodded. ‘How old you say you is?’

  ‘I didn say how old I is. I almos’ ten.’

  ‘Ten?’

  ‘Almos’.’

  ‘Ten, you say?’

  ‘Yup, ten. Almos’.’

  ‘Look, son, it have a lot more, er, there is much more to school than reading books and counting fingers. You got to go to school, y’unnerstan?’

  ‘Pa say I don’t have to.’

  ‘What you going to do when he gone?’

  ‘He not going nowhere.’

  ‘Everybody got to go somewhere. He ought to be preparing you for that.’

  ‘Don’ unnerstan.’

  ‘S’all right. Tell me, where’s your modder?’

  ‘Home.’

  ‘Home where?’

  ‘Where she live.’

  He pulled a page out of his notebook and wrote quickly.

  ‘Give this to her. It got my name, place of employ and the name of the person – Miss Lucas, the headmistress in Saint Divine Catholic School. Come September, I want her to take you to that school and give this paper to her. It got to be September. Or you’ll miss your chance.’

  ‘What chance?’

  ‘The one I would have given my eye teeth for. Promise me you going give her.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Come September, I’ll be checking up on you pussnally.’

  ‘Who call you to come here – Miss Maddie?’

  Mister Bostin rested puzzled eyes on him. ‘S’far as I could tell, ’twasn’t a woman. He say that you his uncle.’

  Department of Education

  Division of the Ministry of Internal and Related Affairs

  San Andrews

  12th July 1965

  Mr. Manuel Forsyth

  Upper Old Hope

  Parish of Old Hope San Andrews

  Dear Sir,

  This is to confirm our conversation at your residence on May 15th of this year in which you stated your decision to keep your son and minor …

  ‘Pa, what minor mean?’

  ‘Go on, read the letter.’

  … your son and minor Pynter Bender from school. After much deliberation I have decided …

  ‘He decide! Who he think he is?’

  I have decided that it is not in the best interest of the child

  in question to be exposed solely to the literature available at your residence.

  ‘He goin to burn in hell fo’ that. Condemning God word!’

  In view of the above observation and consistent with the powers vested in me, Jonathan Uriah Bostin, Schools Inspector, San Andrews Division of the Associated State and its environs …

  ‘If fancy title was money, he would be a rich man. Read that part again fo’ me!’

  ‘It long!’

  ‘Read it, boy!’

  In view of the above observation …

  ‘Pure wind! Fart – that’s what it is. Read de rest fo’ me.’

  … I have agreed with the relevant authority to enrol the minor, Pynter Bender …

  ‘Pa, what’s a minor?’

  ‘You.’

  ‘What it mean?’

  ‘A lil boy.’

  ‘And how you call a lil girl?’

  ‘A minor. Finish de letter, child!’

  … to enrol the minor, Pynter Bender, in the Saint Divine Catholic …

  ‘And he claim to be a man o’ God!’

  … Catholic School from first September. Failing which and without valid reasons, said authority reserves the right to proceed legally against you .

  ‘You mus’ never learn to write like that man, y’hear me?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘S’not natural.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Say what you have to say and finish it. Always.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It help to keep life simple.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Stop bothering me, boy.’

  8

  THE NEXT MORNING he got up and told his father he dreamt of screaming people.

  ‘You wasn’ dreaming,’ his father muttered, ‘I hear them too last night – Harris and Marlo.’ The old man’s face was thoughtful. ‘Only Harris I was hearing, though. And Harris the one you never hear at all.’

  Harris and Marlo lived in a two-roomed house at the bottom of his father’s hill.

  Fridays especially, nights in Upper Old Hope were reduced to a small room and Marlo was the hurricane inside it. Pynter had quickly grown accustomed to these weekly brawls, although the first time he’d heard Marlo he couldn’t bring himself to sleep. No reply ever came from Harris. And if, as his father told him that first time, it was a case of one man warring with himself, he used to wonder at the sense of it.

  A few times, after a particularly violent night, he woke early, crept out of the house and sneaked down to the road.

  Harris eventually came out, saw him standing there and, without breaking stride, waved his hat at him, ‘Hello, young fellow. How’s the Old Bull?’

  ‘Not bad,’ he answered as he watched the tall man’s body follow his feet up the road till he disappeared around the corner.

  Pynter wished he would grow tall enough to be able to step out of his own little house like that, stretch out his long legs like Harris and sway, not from side to side, but in a kind of roundabout way, as if the rest of his body were fighting to keep up with his feet.

  Harris was the tallest man he’d ever seen – the highest in the world. Always in the same loose khaki trousers and shirt that had been so bleached by wear and washing they were almost white. He wore his felt hat slanted down over his greying eyebrows, though it was never low enough to throw a shadow on his smile.

  Harris was one of those men who’d travelled to the oil refineries in Aruba and returned a couple of weeks later to tell Old Hope how he’d taken a fall and got tangled up among the vast spiderweb of steaming pipes there. He would have died, had actually died in fact, when a pair of hands to which he had never been able to put a face had reached through the steel and dragged him out. That night he cut through the high fences that locked in the thousands of working island men, ‘borrowed’ a rowing boat and, without water, food or sleep, spent months ploughing a passage through all kinds of high dark seas and hurricanes to his little house in Old Hope.

  ‘Look at the height of the man,’ Manuel Forsyth laughed. ‘What you expect from Harris – not tall tales?’

  But these stories only made Harris talle
r in Pynter’s eyes, so that sometimes on mornings, just when the night chill lifted itself off the valley floor and seeped like drizzle through his thin blue shirt, he would creep out of his father’s house and tiptoe down the hill to receive that special early-morning greeting.

  For this – just the sight of Harris, the rolling head, the long windmilling arms, the big yellow grin, the pale felt hat bobbing like a wind-rushed flame above the tops of the rhododendrons at the roadside – for all this, the early-morning coldness nibbling at the skin of his back and arms was more than worth it. Even standing in the rain.

  It was raining the morning the slight quiver in his chest was replaced by something else – a smell and something more. A sensation on his skin.

  Coming out of the house, he saw something squeezing itself through the doorway. It took a while before he realised it was a man. He did not move, not even when the great boxlike head lifted with some effort and swivelled towards him. Not even when the small red eyes fell on him and narrowed, and the man’s lips – purple-dark and thin – seemed to curl themselves around a curse.

  The heavy hands drifted to the dirty leather scabbard at his side. Just then Pynter caught the scent of the man. He began backing up the hill.

  Marlo’s eyes did not release him until he reached the top of his father’s road. He lowered himself on the steps, struggling with his breathing and the sudden urge to cry.

  ‘Dat’s Butcherman Marlo.’ Manuel Forsyth pulled his lips in slowly. ‘Don’t go near ’im, y’hear me?’

  From then on, those mornings became a gamble. Pynter did not know who would come out first and it didn’t occur to him to wait for Harris after Marlo. In fact, he never saw Harris come out after Marlo, so that sometimes he imagined it was the same man that the night had transformed into something else.

  If it were Marlo, he would hold his ground for as long as his thumping heart allowed him. He would keep his breath in while the dark, knuckle-curled head lifted and skewed itself around. Then his legs would propel him up the hill to the safety of his father’s steps.

  He knew now that the thick red man with the curly hair and bloodshot eyes was the father of all butchers. That the abattoir in San Andrews left the biggest bulls to him: the frothing, red-eyed animals that chewed through their ropes and broke their chains and routed San Andrews with their rage. When that happened, they sent for Marlo.

  And if, from time to time, someone decided to leave one of those animals too loosely tethered, or deliberately forgot to draw the bolts of the steel pen, it was so that they could watch the town take to the top of walls and barricade itself behind the closed glass doors of stores while Marlo placed his back against some building on the Esplanade, or planted his legs like tree trunks in the middle of the market square, his head lowered like the animal’s, his shoulders twitching, his right elbow bent so that his finger barely grazed the leather at his side as the animal charged. And at the very last moment, with a movement that the men would recall over dinner in words that would disgust their women and thrill their children, Marlo would call the length of sharpened steel to his palm. He never missed an animal’s heart whenever he reached for it with that knife.

  ‘Men like blood,’ his father told him quietly. ‘Some o’ them jus’ don’ know it.’

  ‘I don’ like blood,’ Pynter answered earnestly, staring at the milkiness in the old man’s eye.

  ‘That’s becuz you not a man yet,’ his father muttered softly.

  ‘Rain fall last night too. Dry-season rain. Mean a lot more heat to come. It still wet outside?’ His father’s voice pulled him out of his thoughts. Through the window he could see that it was drizzling, but he said he was going outside to check.

  There were people gathered by the roadside when Pynter got down there. Harris’s house looked tired and rain-sogged against the giant bois-canot tree that supported it. The door was partly open and the window facing the road hung on a single hinge. He stood on the wet grass, listening to the lowered voices, the grunts of disbelief, the quiet shock, subdued like the drone of bees. He didn’t think they had seen him. They were lost in talking their thoughts out to each other

  ‘ … such a nice fella.’

  ‘ … in hi own house.’

  ‘ … never do nobody no harm.’

  ‘An’ Marlo gone an’ done dat to him.’

  ‘ … a piece o’ bread … ’

  ‘ … murder … ’

  ‘ … worse than murder.’

  A rough wind shook the trees above them. The water that had settled on the leaves came down in a cold shower on their heads. He shuddered, began wondering what his father was doing now. Soon he would have to collect his breakfast from the steps before the chickens got to it.

  No one knew who called the ambulance. Although it was still very early, it had come and gone long before most of them were there. More people were arriving, some from as far up as the foothills of Mont Airy. A tall, slim-faced woman with a white headwrap kept repeating the story to them of what had happened – Marlo had disappeared, and the police were somewhere up there in the bushes at the foot of the Mardi Gras with their dogs; they were sure to find him before the day was over, she said.

  Pynter wiped his eyes and looked up at the Mardi Gras, its head buried in the greyness of the flat, soggy morning. He could hear the dogs barking. He didn’t like dogs. Dogs didn’t like him either. He could have told the police or the dogs that they were not going to find him up there in the forest. Marlo could hardly walk, far less climb a hill or run.

  He left them by the side of the road, scratching, shifting and murmuring among themselves, their hands moving aimlessly about them, as if they were rummaging the air for something they’d forgotten or misplaced. He criss-crossed his way back up the hill.

  Miss Maddie was on her porch, craning her neck towards the road while still managing to keep her eyes on him.

  ‘Boy!’

  He lifted his face at her.

  ‘What happenin down there?’ It was the first time he’d ever seen her smile.

  ‘Don’ know,’ he said, not even bothering to break his stride.

  Her smile went out like a light.

  ‘Is true what I hear about those two down there?’

  ‘Don’ know, Miss Maddie.’

  ‘You don’ know and you just come from down there?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘I ask you a question, boy!’ Her tone had hardened.

  ‘And I answer you,’ he replied, and broke into a run.

  He waited till his father had finished eating and then he told him all that he had just heard from the mouths of the people by the roadside.

  When his father found his voice, he asked, ‘You sure?’

  ‘’Bout what?’

  The old man passed the heel of his hand across his face. ‘Why?’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘Why he done it?’

  ‘Missa Marlo?’

  ‘Yes, why?’

  ‘Don’ know, Pa, don’ know. For piece o’ bread, Miss Tooksie say. For a piece o’ Missa Marlo bread dat Missa Harris take becuz he was hungry. A piece o’ bread, Pa. Marlo rip hi guts out fo’ a piece o’ bread.’

  ‘Pynter! Don’t talk like that. Don’t talk like that!’

  Pynter leaned his head against the bedroom door and stared at the ceiling.

  9

  THEY CALLED IT Rainbow Weather – that time during the dry season when the sun was bright above their heads and a drizzle came down from the Mardi Gras and covered the valley with a spray so fine it was almost as if the air were filled with talcum powder. There were rainbows everywhere, some of them as faint as washed-out ribbons, but there was always the one they called The Mother. It curved high and glowing above their heads, its foot planted in the water somewhere behind the hills that kept the ocean back.

  A gardener might catch a glimpse of it, straighten up and lean against his machete, suddenly aware of the flowering okras, the pigeon peas and the amazing likeness of their blosso
ms to little yellow butterflies. He might see the manioc differently, how their shiny, dark-limbed trunks resembled the skin of a well-greased child. And he would feel a tiny tug of sadness in his heart that a day would come when he would no longer be there to see all this. A woman would stop mid-laugh and for some reason turn her mind to the children she did not have. Or another would sketch a private smile, remembering the time when Dreena’s little girl-chile – now a woman who worked the canes with them – tried to follow a Mother Rainbow to where she thought its root was planted in the sea. Dreena’s lil girl returned to her mother’s yard exhausted and in tears because, however far she walked, it never got any closer.

  Rainbows reminded Pynter of the strap that Paso wore around his waist for a belt. It reminded him of the wish that Deeka carried in her eyes, and then when it faded he took the track to Eden.

  Earlier that morning and most of the afternoon, the dogs had been searching the foothills for Marlo, but Pynter could no longer hear them; they must have given up. Men with guns had arrived, their Land Rovers came roaring down the road. He had heard the slamming of doors and the thud of feet on asphalt. But they too had left a couple of hours later. And soon after the sound of their engines had faded in the distance, Gideon’s white Opel came gunning up the hill.

  Pynter had forgotten that his father had told him that Gideon was coming. His father also said that he should go to see his mother. But he didn’t feel like it. He wanted this to be one of his by-himself days, and so he was down here at Eden, where it was quiet, even the birds were silent for once. And where Missa Geoffrey made his leaf bed for Miss Petalina, the earth was bare and brown. Maybe they’d found another place. P’raps Pastor Greenway found out and killed Miss Petalina. Everybody was killin everybody these days. For no flippin reason a pusson could understand. But if Pastor Greenway really done that to his best an’ p’raps only daughter, news didn reach nobody yet. And he better not, because he, Pynter Bender, would pussnally ask Birdie to bus’ his arse real bad when Pastor Greenway got sent to jail.