Pynter Bender

by Jacob Ross

  You see, Deeka said, there were birds and creatures with wings as wide as sails amongst them. There were Old Hope men, as ancient as the canes, who became balls of living fire in the night, crept through the cracks of houses and sipped the blood from the softest parts of women’s thighs. There were cakes a pusson found in the middle of Old Hope Road some time between midnight and no-time. You saw them there, laid out nice as any wedding cake, with icing too-besides. They smelt like cakes; they looked like cakes. But you cut them and drew blood.

  There were people who were so fed up of dying, she said, they discarded their bodies like old clothing and took over those of youngsters. And a pusson wouldn’t even mention them long-dressed wimmen of the night who waited for drunken, drifting men at crossroads. A fella saw her back first, curved like a spoon, then her hair spilling down her shoulders like dark water. She cooed his name. He followed her. And that jackass would not see her cloven hoof until she raised a leg to kick him down a precipice. In fact, a lotta man who walk when night-time come don’t end up overseas. Is precipice they get kick over, which is why you never hear from them again.

  And what about the unborn children that the wimmen of these cane valleys refused to bring into this world? You listened hard enough at night, you heard these half-borns whispering against the doorways of all the childless wimmen. And then there were those who had no right to be amongst them, who sneaked their way into the world behind a true-born. But God make it so their time was never long with yoomans.

  It was what people said that raised the agitation in Deeka’s voice, this shu-shuing, these river-wimmen whisperings, this fly-buzz of ugly words that had attached themselves to the Bender name about children with eyes like flames. Who walked the night when the world outside was quietest. Who needed no light to see by, becuz them eyes carry their own inside-shining. They conversed with ghosts, spoke the language of bats and owls and, according to the talk, knew of things before they happened.

  Matter o’ fact, those who lived in houses beside the road said they often heard them in the deepest, darkest of all nights. Nights a lil bit like this one, in fact. They hear them whistling – soft an’ pretty – like a rain-bird calling down the clouds. And if a pusson brave enough to put one eye against a crack in their house wall, they sometimes saw the white glow of a shirt, but they never heard the footsteps.

  Pynter’s feet took him down towards the river. In his head he carried Patty’s laughter, his mother’s hand over the basin of pigeon peas, and the parting words that Santay whispered in his ear.

  When she’d finished talking to the women, she’d come over to him. This time he’d allowed her thumbs to pull against his lower lids. His eyes, she said, were getting darker now. Was he eating the things she’d told him to? Was he still partial to fish? Then she’d brought her lips closer to his ear and her voice turned cocoa-dark and soft inside his head. ‘Watch that face o’ yours, Osan. It don’ know how to lie.’

  He knew where he was going; he hadn’t worked out why. He did not know what he would say to the stranger his mother met down there. He did not know what he looked like, apart from the print his body had made on the bed of leaves he’d left there. A slim man, heavier than his size suggested, a man who had placed a caul of secrecy over his mother. Who’d brought on a furtiveness in her that he could not understand.

  He hadn’t been looking. He hadn’t followed her. His mother wouldn’t believe him when he told her that. He’d been following his eyes.

  There was a dark patch of green that began where the cane fields ended. His feet had taken him there because, whatever the time of day, and however bright the sunlight, it never seemed to change.

  It was much further than he thought and when he arrived it was cool and strange. The trees laid their shadows along the riverbank the way the women spread their clothing on the river stones. He’d found himself standing at the mouth of a long leaf cavern through which the river slowed then slipped like a snake entering its hole.

  It was not like Eden. Here the light made him think of smoke, not water. The earth was softer too, and darker. The riverbank yielded to his weight as if to ease him down into itself. And the oddest of all things, he could smell the sea as if it were right at his feet.

  He’d stood for a long time at the mouth of that river tunnel, expecting something but not knowing exactly what. Finally, beneath the tick-ticking of dry leaves, the shifting of the branches above his head, the sighing of the water at his feet, he heard then saw what moved about him: crabs – blue as fallen fragments of sky, their finned legs flat and white like those that lived beside the sea. He watched them slip sideways into the water and swim away like fish. Flat-tailed iguanas nodded at him from branches. The silver backs of fish – long and sleek as conger eels – ghosted past his eyes. Flies bright as sparks were settling on his naked arms and nibbling at his skin; and crayfish, large and transparent as the glasses in his mother’s cabinet, drifted along the edges of the water.

  It had taken him a long time just standing on the soft mud bank to work it out. That in this little forest, so far away from the shoreline, the sea was also present. That it had crept into these animals and changed them, the way yeast did Uncle Birdie’s bread. The way his mother’s secret child was changing her.

  It suddenly came to him that this land, this valley, this place he was born in, carried more secrets than all the washerwomen in all the rivers in the world. And he found himself laughing – at what he did not know. He stood on the water’s edge and shouted down the long leaf gloom, shouted Birdie’s name and then his Uncle Michael’s. He said everything he wanted to say to Deeka Bender, including what a bad-minded, wicked so-an’-so she was. He called John Seegal Bender a son-a-va-biiitch and liked the sound of it so much he said it eight more times. And still he wasn’t satisfied, so he told John Seegal what a foolish fool he was to walk, and lose ’imself in swamp mud, and leave his wimmen with so much don’-know-what-dey-want-to-do confusion. He’d cackled at the dark ahead of him and stuck his tongue out at Old Hope, danced and stomped on the riverbank and dared the soft, wet mud to suck him in. Then he’d called his father’s name and felt himself go quiet.

  He was tired when he left, and so pleased with the puzzle that place had left him with he decided that he would take it to Peter just to watch his brother’s face go funny-an’-twist-up when he told him that the sea was not just water, the sea was also soil.

  He’d taken the shorter walk back home through the bamboo forest. It was one of those days when the bamboos talked amongst themselves, sounding as if they were grumbling to each other. And it was there, just above the river, at the far end of the high leaf houses the bamboo made, that he found the little room.

  The stranger wasn’t there but he’d left his smell of cinnamon and cloves and the print of his body on the leaves where he slept. The traces of his mother were there too – not love leaves this time but the yellow vines that did not grow on soil but tied themselves around the canes and suckled on their sap. She’d made her curlicues and scratches almost like the signatures that he and Peter had left on her stomach. Against the trunk of a bamboo, just where he thought the man would place his head to sleep, was a string of beads. They were spotted black in places, like little ladybirds. He’d picked them up and brought them to his nostrils, and knew at once that the hands of the man had made them.

  His mother was standing over the fire when he returned. She lifted her head to say something to him, but her lips froze over the words. Her eyes were on the chain of ladybirds around his neck.

  He expected her to come at him straight away. He did not expect the quiet turning back towards her cooking, the casual sideways glances thrown at him from time to time; the gradual hardening of her movements with the pot spoon. It didn’t look like anger; it did not look like any emotion that he knew.

  He was oiling the wheels of Peter’s scooter when her shadow fell over him. He hadn’t heard her coming. His head was still turned down, his hand spinning the metal wheels,
when he felt her hand brush his collar. When he looked up, the beads were in her fist and she was staring hard into his face.

  He stood up, wiped the grease on his trousers and faced her. Something in her eyes retreated briefly; but then she leaned in suddenly towards him.

  ‘You! You! What wrong with you?’ It came out as a whisper. Like a secret they were sharing.

  ‘Not me,’ he said, his voice tight and urgent, and strange to his own ears. The thing that had stuffed his throat all morning, that had sent him down to the river to that leafy room, that had made him place the string of beads around his neck, seemed suddenly to free itself. He stepped back from her; looked over to Patty, sleepy-eyed and smiling, with her chin on Leroy’s shoulder. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘look what you gone and done.’

  He looked into her eyes and held her gaze, did it because Tan Cee always told him that to hold an adult’s gaze like that was downright freshness. He curled his lips around the words, and what came out of him was more air than sound. ‘Who you tink you foolin, eh?’

  He felt her movement before she struck him, felt his head go dizzy, but he did not drop his gaze. She hit him again, and because he did not move, because he did not run away from her like Tan Cee told him he was s’posed to, the flat of her hand exploded against his face again.

  His mother was breathing hard. She was staring at her hands now, and shaking her head as if she’d just discovered them. And when she lifted her eyes, her mouth was working around words that did not come. She dropped the beads. She said something. She called his name. Called his name again. Reached out an open hand towards him. He stepped back. Kept stepping back from her. And when he could step back no further, he turned around and ran.

  17

  WHAT COULD MAKE a pusson hit a child so hard that they could make them blind again? Where all dat wickedness come from, eh? And what about the nice new school that he jus’ begin to go to? What left for him to do? How come God always givin chilren to people who does maltreat dem so bad? Eh?

  A pusson want to know dat. A pusson want to know how come and why?

  Patty’s crying came from some further, darker place inside herself. That was what it felt like when she came down to the yard next morning. The song in her voice had dried up. She’d gone deaf to Leroy’s pleading to come home and rest herself. She greeted no one. She aimed her questions at the air.

  She said these same words over and over again, in different ways, her voice coming from every corner of the yard. His young aunt’s words seemed to push Elena towards him – slowly, awkwardly like a child that did not trust its feet. He would feel the heaviness she carried now; the fumbling uncertainty with which his mother tried to speak to him or touch him. But Patty always drove her back with words.

  What she wan’ to touch ’im for?

  Is hit she goin hit ’im again?

  Is beat she goin beat ’im up again?

  She wan’ to murder ’im this time?

  His mother left the yard and did not return till evening. Pynter heard the dragging of her feet on the asphalt road below before it went so quiet it felt as if he were the only person left in Old Hope.

  After his mother struck him, he’d taken his rage all the way down to the river. He’d returned to that place of crayfish and iguanas where the sea had crept into the soil and changed them. His head was still throbbing from the blow. His mother had thrown her weight behind it; and something in his head had been knocked back hard and it had not righted itself. His body told him so. On his way down to the river, he’d tried to walk in a straight line and found he could not do it. The road beneath his feet seemed to want to shake him off. He’d stood on the bank and looked down into the darkness of the long leaf tunnel that hung over the water, and when he looked back towards the bamboos and the light, the world had suddenly dimmed and he could hear the hollow snoring of the winds above the Mardi Gras.

  The sun still hot on his skin, and his limbs feeling even looser now, he’d drifted back to the yard. He’d sat on his stone, brought his hand to his face and stared at it. His mother’s hand had sent him blind again.

  All he could think of was his friend Arilon and the moon. Old Hope used to call Ari Crab-Hands until he, Pynter, made him change the way he used them. When they asked his friend to stretch out his fingers, Arilon would refuse. He hadn’t always been like that. Arilon became that way after his mother left their pretty red and blue house one early Saturday morning. She told him she was going shopping in San Andrews with her new man-friend, and ended up in Trinidad.

  There was going to be a full moon tonight. He would have gone up to Glory Cedar Rise with Arilon, sat on the fallen tree up there and watched it rise and burst above the Mardi Gras. They would have looked up at the dark shapes on the branches of the glory cedar trees and argued over the amount of birds there were above their heads. They would have talked about Gideon, Paso and Miss Maddie – Paso’s mother – the old woman who was s’posed to be his and Peter’s sister. He would have told Arilon about his Uncle Michael, who’d drowned and left all of his inside-self between the pages of a ragged book. Pynter would have recited the words of Michael’s poems, wanting his friend to also live that part of the life that his brother Peter had never had with their father.

  Arilon would have asked him about the new school he’d won the scholarship to in San Andrews, and he would have told him again of the building that sat on a small hill just above the mouth of a volcano which the ocean had flowed into and made into a lagoon, which was why o’ course that lagoon had no bottom.

  Arilon liked to hear him talk about the yachts coming in on evenings, with pale half-naked men and women whose eyes were exactly like his own – yachts slipping along the path of light the sun made, like giant white-winged birds. He would have told his friend about the lady teacher who leaned so closely into him he could smell her armpits. If they’d gone up there, with a full moon over them, he would have pointed at the silver rope that was the horizon along the far edge of the ocean.

  He would not let them touch him. Not even Tan Cee. He did not want Santay to take him to her house again.

  He asked for noni leaves and candlebush, and the sap of aloe vera. He fed himself on fruits, and the leaves of the plants he described to Arilon. He sat through whole nights in the yard, went in to lie down on the floor on mornings. And when he woke, Arilon would be out there waiting on the steps. Pynter would sit with him for most of the day, talking of the things they were going to do when he started to see again.

  And with the passing of the time, Pynter slept less, ate more of the oily, soft-fleshed fish he asked for, brought the sap of aloe vera to his eyes less often. He came out of the house earlier each evening, and wanted to know when there was going to be a moon.

  They moved around him like a crowd of drifting ghosts. Nights, he heard the footsteps of Tan Cee on the stones before she lowered herself beside him and placed her lips against his left ear. And with a voice so tobacco-dark and soft he barely recognised it, his aunt said that if he loved himself half as much as she did him, he would stay with them, with her. If she had her way, she would pour all the remaining life she had into him. Did he know that? Did he? Did he know that when he came she’d lost the wish for children? She could’ve done like his mother, Elena, if she wanted to. Could’ve gone off and proved the fault was not with her. Same way that ’twas not with Patty either. It was the men that life had brought them. That was why a pusson couldn’t blame Elena for doing it a different way. God gave her eyes for men who carried life inside their loins.

  She’d spoken of her husband, and of a kind of loving that sounded more like hate. The tearing that the men who walked at night always left behind them. Until a woman couldn take the tearin no more. Like Miss Anna-Jo, who made a powder of the bottle that her baby drank from, mixed it in her cookin and fed her man to death because all dis night-time walkin, this leavin and returnin in the mornin with the smell of some other woman on him, all this been strippin her down, strippin her right to th
e bone.

  And did he know why? Becuz wimmen like Miss Anna-Jo was different. They was like Deeka, like Miss Edwina who went crazy coupla months ago. They was like her, Tan Cee. They couldn’t find a way to let a man inside themself then let him out so easy. He become part of what make blood-an’-bone – lovin ’im so hard same time that you hatin ’im for the hold he got on you. For findin the kind o’ comfort in some other woman he make you feel you can’t provide. For feelin that woman you never seen in the movement of his body, specially them hardly-come-at-all times when he reach out a hand and turn you over.

  It didn’t always use to be like that, she whispered. There were those early days of slipping through the back window of her father’s house at night; of concealing their night-time meetings from John Seegal – the terror and the trembling while waiting in the shadow of some roadside tree for Coxy Levid, before the lightness and the lift that came from just seeing him arrive.

  Coxy Levid didn’t build houses. He made them. The way a careful child would shape a spinning top; the way Patty brought a bit of broken bottle to a piece of wood and made a perfect face with it. In fact, it was Coxy Levid’s way with wood that first drew her eyes to him.

  It was that house she’d seen on her way to the canes at the lower end of Old Hope. It appeared on a hill above the road one morning, just so, and began to take shape at the hands of a man who sat way up there astride the frame, his back against the sky, a cigarette glued to his lips, cutting, measuring, driving nails.

  After a while he noticed her. She knew because he made his measuring more deliberate, his way with wood more precious. It made perfect sense that she should begin to want him, because by then a certainty had settled in her heart that no man could build a house so perfect if he wasn’t like that inside.