Pynter Bender

by Jacob Ross

  ‘Miss Dee,’ she croaked, prodding her stomach and turning to Elena, who’d put on the dark-eyed, tight-lipped face of Deeka. ‘Miss Dee, I got something growing in here dat no doctor could cure and I know fo’ sure is not no chile.’

  Patty adjusted the bowl and made a face at Deeka’s back. ‘Now, I want to ask you, Miss Dee: how long I been comin here to pick up Birdie? What’s de longest time I keep ’im ’way from you? A hundred years, right? Not three, not four, just one. Only one lil hundred. An’ dat, Miss Dee, is only becuz he thief dat whiteman dog, and it ain’t got no way you kin thief a whiteman dog an’ prove is yours in court. Cuz Englishman not like we. English people an’ deir dog does talk.’

  Elena was still mimicking Deeka’s expression but she had trouble holding it. Tan Cee’s shoulders were twitching.

  ‘So, when dat Englishman call hi dog – dat Birdie say is his – in front of everybody in court and tell de dog to turn round an’ jump up an’ smile, an’ every time de dog wag it tail an’ do it,’ Patty lifted a finger limply in the air, ‘it ain’t got no way a judge from Englan’ not goin to charge Birdie for abduction. F’twas a local dog, or in fact a local judge, Birdie would only get charge fo’ thiefin. But,’ the finger wagged, ‘Englishman dog get treat like people. An’ accordin to Judge Crichlow, you don’ thief people, you abduct dem, an’ dat’s de same as thiefin a Englishman dog. So you see, Miss Dee … ’

  Patty didn’t finish the joke. Deeka came after her with a bowlful of water. They ran rings around the house while the others staggered about the yard, so drunk with laughter they could barely stand.

  Patty’s new way with words sent ripples of pleasure and surprise through Pynter. It was as if his youngest aunt had found the handle of a door that took her further into herself.

  The week before, he’d been muttering words that Miss Sislyn told his class to memorise. Words, she said, that were going to speak more and more directly to them of the coming times. He turned his head and realised that Patty had been listening. Her eyes were wide and she’d frozen the yellow comb above her head.

  ‘Say dat again, Pynto.’

  ‘“In the dark you call my …”’

  Her hand released the plait of hair. ‘Say it like you just say it.’

  ‘“I have told you …”’

  ‘Nuh! Not so!’ She jerked her head, sharply, pettishly, as if he were about to deprive her of something that belonged to her. ‘Say it like you say it firs’ time.’

  In the dark you call my name

  I have told you, child

  Outside is not the same

  Hard heels crash against the night

  And our streets run red with tears …

  When he’d finished, she sat with her head cocked at an angle as if she were still hearing him. After a while she stirred. ‘Them your wuds?’

  Nuh, he told her, they’d come from the mouth of a jailbird and a drunkard. And suddenly he wanted to tell her more. ‘They more dan words, Tan Pat. Is the trouble an’ the danger dat dey carrying inside dem.’

  He paused, finding pleasure in the way he’d just described it. He told himself that he was going to put it that way to Miss Sislyn.

  But he was not sure that Patty understood him. He thought for a while, then offered her an image. ‘Take cane, Tan Pat. Cut it, break it, crush it, strain it. Boil all the water and the nonsense out of it. What you got left?’

  She curved her neck and laughed. ‘Syrup, Sugarboy. Pure syrup.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ he said. ‘Same like these words.’

  She pulled at her hair with a sharp movement of the comb. It made her wince. As if prompted by the pain, Patty lifted her head and held his eyes. Her voice dropped to a whisper and only her lips moved when she spoke. ‘I comin after you, Pynto. I breakin out of here. It don’ matter what I have to do, you not leavin me behin’, y’unnerstan?’ She turned away from him.

  He remembered staring at her back and nodding, wanting to ask her where she intended to follow him to.

  Now there she was, shrieking and laughing at the back of the house. His grandmother’s chuckles came like the crackling of firewood. He knew exactly where Deeka was holding Patty to make her laugh like that.

  After her rough play with Deeka, Patty slipped away from them. She lifted a finger at Pynter and winked. He pretended he did not see her. When she returned, her arrival killed the women’s conversations and brought them to their feet. She stood amongst them in a blue dress – the colour of a halfway season’s sky.

  Pynter looked across at her and smiled. He’d been holding Patty’s secret all week and was tiring of it.

  The very morning after she told him that he was not leaving her behind, she’d met him halfway up Old Hope Road. He’d seen her in the distance and for a moment he could not believe that it was Patty, for she hardly left the yard except to go to the cinema in San Andrews once a month with Leroy.

  She’d spoken to him in whispers. Handed him a roll of dollar bills and told him to buy a dress for her. A nice one, she said. One worth all the money she was handing him. And by the way she said it, he understood she wanted something that would make sense of the past few months of labouring in the canes. He told her he knew nothing about dresses. Dat’s awright, she said, and passed him a reel of sewing thread. Made him run lengths of it across her shoulders and around her waist. She pulled the string along an arm, broke it when it reached her wrist and gave the string to him. She anchored the thread to the nape of her neck with one finger and dropped the reel, then instructed him to break it off just under her calves. He took out his ruler, measured each piece of thread and wrote the numbers down. One more thing, she told him. She slipped a dollar into his shirt pocket and said it was for him. She was smiling when she finished.

  She pointed at the numbers on the paper. ‘I want a dress like dat,’ she said. ‘A proper one, y’hear me?’

  Later, he chose one without sleeves, spent a long time fingering the fabrics in the store until he felt the exact softness that he wanted.

  His heart had stepped up a pace when he brought the bag and handed it to her behind the house.

  She didn’t take it straight away. She’d dropped her hands to her sides. They were trembling slightly. The trembling was also in her voice when she looked at him and asked, ‘It goin gemme de job?’

  ‘Which job?’ he said, before suddenly remembering.

  For a moment he did not know what to tell her. He lifted his shoulders and dropped them. ‘A pusson have to do, Tan Pat,’ he said. ‘S’long as dey live dey have to do. Else do will get up an’ do them.’

  ‘Them your wuds?’ she said. She took the bag.

  ‘My fadder words,’ he told her.

  Now there she was standing in the dress as if she were clothed in seawater. It hugged the length of her body all the way down to her calves.

  Tan Cee and his mother were inspecting her, not with their eyes but with fingers which slipped quickly under the sleeves and hemline, adjusting the curve of the collar, pausing over the downward curve of Patty’s shoulders, the flare of her hips. As if, with those caresses and pats and pauses, they were not only measuring the way the blue dress fitted with the matching shoes Patty had borrowed from Miss Elaine, but were tracing the shape of what was to come tomorrow.

  And yes, they told her finally. Right there. Just as she was in front of them. Like that. Just so!

  The way she stan’ up an’ look down she nose at them. Uh-huh. It didn have no doubt ’bout it. She was a proper front-store girl. Not no shop-front girl! No! Store-front! A department one – wiv glass-wall an’ pretty-shiny-counter, an’ ’lectric light an’ everyting in between.

  S’matter o’ fact, she was more proper than all them proper store-front girls in San Andrews. It didn make no flippin’ difference if she get de job or not.

  If Leroy had raised his head from staring at the stones, he might have caught Deeka’s eyes on him – a gaze that took in all of Patty’s man in rapid little passes. The way she’d lo
oked at the faces of the soldiers when they came for Birdie.

  And while the women teased and fondled Patty, Deeka did not take her eyes off Leroy. She prodded her headwrap, moved her lips and nodded as if a thought had just occurred to her. She gave him a final sideways glance before turning back to her daughters.

  Pynter could not remember a time when Deeka spoke to any of her daughters’ men directly. When they were sent with something for her, she did not take it from their hands. She pointed to the table or the steps and busied herself with something else. She pretended not to hear them when they greeted her. And the few times that she chose to answer, it was with a grunt.

  Word was, she used to be much worse with his and Peter’s father. She’d almost taken a machete to Manuel Forsyth once, they said, but his mother had stopped her.

  Leroy was still looking across at Patty. He’d crossed his legs and stuffed both hands down his pockets. And Pynter knew that it was not the chill that had risen up from the valley this evening that made him pull up the collar of his white shirt until the up-pointed ends were brushing against his ears. Pynter thought he also knew what his grandmother had been thinking when she looked at him. In fact, she’d said it the evening after Birdie left. Men, she’d told them, carried trouble inside them the way their wimmen carried their seed. It grew in them to bursting, till they couldn hold it in no more. Difference was, when they delivered it, they left the trouble behind and walked.

  It crossed his mind that perhaps Deeka had been lying to them all along. Perhaps it wasn’t John Seegal who didn have time for men, who did nothing at all for the only son he fathered. Perhaps it was Deeka who’d managed to slip all that flippin’ bad-mindedness into his head. S’matter of fact, might ha’ been one of the things that killed him.

  Pynter liked the thought. He liked it so much he was still carrying it with him the next day on his way down to the river.

  His passing paused the conversations of the women. A few lifted a hand and waved. Miss Elaine flicked her fingers and smiled. Lizzie acknowledged him on the little road above them by stiffening her spine.

  There was a small precipice up there above the river where he spent his weekends. Directly under him, there was the deep blue pool people called Young Sea. Even from the height he sat above it, he would feel its rising coolness brushing the soles of his feet, the water glittering through the leaves below, like eyes. Beyond that, there wasn’t much to look at apart from the brighter patch of green that marked the course of Old Hope River towards the sea.

  There weren’t any boys this morning. They would be fishing further up the river since they never went beyond Young Sea. They knew nothing of the creatures that lived in the leaf tunnels which began just after it.

  News of what was there would reach the other Old Hope boys and they would return with their fathers’ machetes, with lengths of wood and kerosene. They would chop their way through the tangle, and put fire to anything that burned. They would kill the living things they set their eyes on, carry them in sacks up to the roadside and scatter them along it, so that the rest of Old Hope could marvel at the strangeness they had discovered and destroyed.

  If he’d met them on the way there he would feel their eyes on him, especially Oslo, brown and upright as one of Birdie’s breads, his bright white eyes forbidding him to join them. A couple might call out his name, or mumble something they thought he couldn’t hear. One of them might beckon, Frigo perhaps, or, if Arilon was with them, he would detach himself from the group of boys, come over to him and rest a hand across his shoulders.

  He marvelled at the distance that a pusson eyes could place you, even when that pusson was smiling in yuh face. Then his thoughts fell back on what Birdie said to him the night he’d taken him up to the top of the island and left him there. A name. A single word that his uncle had thrown over his shoulder almost as a person might toss a careless coin, before his footsteps faded like a dying heartbeat in the night.

  Slimmer, he’d said, ask yuh people about Slimmer. Y’hear me?

  He was still wondering what a name he’d never heard before had to do with him, o’ anybody fo’ that matter, when, ahead of him, a figure detached itself from the overhang of rocks that stood over the cane track. He slowed down. He switched his plastic bag of books over to his left hand and pulled out his slingshot.

  His grandmother was coming towards him with that quick hill-woman stride of hers. The tail of her dress was flapping around her legs as if she were pushing against a high wind. She was holding her machete in her hand.

  He folded a ball bearing into the tongue of the weapon, halted in the middle of the track and waited.

  As she approached, he thought that there must have been a lot of truth in what she said she was like as a young woman. That if she were Patty’s age and it was at all possible for someone to place them side by side, a pusson would only have eyes for Deeka.

  Purpose gave his grandmother height. Anger made her larger. Although, right now, he could not decide which emotion was propelling her towards him. He dropped the bag of books beside his feet and kept his eyes on the machete. Deeka stopped abruptly a little way off from him. She looked down at the slingshot, then at his face. Then with a movement that seemed both sudden and contrite, she dropped the machete in the grass beside her.

  And in this quiet afternoon, on this little track above the river, it felt odd that he should come face to face with his grandmother for the first time. Until now, he’d never stood anywhere with her alone.

  The rubber straps of the catapult felt clammy in his hands. He felt his body turning sideways, his chin lowering itself, almost as if his body had taken over from his mind. Now he was looking back at her along the line of his right shoulder.

  Deeka cleared her throat. She pushed out a hand towards him. A bright red packet of something was sitting in her palm.

  ‘S’for you,’ she said.

  He shook his head, stepped further back from her. And yet when he looked up, the distance between them seemed the same.

  ‘Take it,’ she said. Her shoulder convulsed slightly. She took a small step towards him.

  The sweat had gathered at her brows and on the top of her upper lip.

  ‘S’for you,’ she said.

  He heard footsteps behind him. They were coming fast. He did not look round. He knew who those footfalls belonged to.

  Deeka broke her gaze from him. She looked even taller now. The sweat had broken the dam of her brows. It ran down her cheeks. She did not seem to notice.

  He heard his name.

  Tan Cee’s steps became slow and hesitant behind him. Her words seemed to reach him from a distance. ‘Take it, Pynto.’

  Her voice came like a release. It gave him something to hold on to.

  ‘I don’ want it,’ he said. ‘Whatever it is.’

  He turned to face his aunt and what he saw surprised him. He expected irritation, even anger, but not the tearfulness, not the pleading on her face.

  ‘You don’ know what it is,’ she said. ‘Take it, Pynto. Fo’ me.’

  ‘Don’ matter – I don’ want it.’

  A shuffle of feet turned his head back towards Deeka, but she was already striding back towards the rocks from which she’d seemed to emerge so miraculously.

  Tan Cee doubled her knees and picked up the little red ball. She lifted the tail of her dress and brushed the dust off it. He saw that a string was looped around it.

  His auntie straightened up and lifted it towards the light, as if it were an offering, not to him, but to whatever she was feeling for her mother.

  ‘She hurt,’ she said. ‘She hurt bad.’ For a while, her hands took over from her words.

  ‘I come runnin,’ she said. ‘Peter tell me you lef’ a lil while back and he see Deeka leave right after. He didn tell your modder. God bless ’im. He know better than to tell Elena dat Deeka gone after you wiv a cutlass in she hand.’ She glanced down at the slingshot in his hand. ‘I don’ know my own modder mind, Pynto. But I know e
nough o’ yours.’

  Her gaze felt like an accusation.

  ‘Deeka been tryin to tell you somethin.’ The way she said this, he knew that the hurt was also hers.

  ‘She can’t make de wuds. She can’t.’ Tan Cee gave him a brief, agitated smile. ‘She feel she owe you a life. Birdie life. And this … ’

  She held up the little red bag. It sat like a fat droplet of blood in her palm. She brought it closer to his face. He caught the scent of strangeness and pulled back.

  It contained oils, she said, saps and gums and barks from plants that grew only in the mountains of the north. There were the essences of seeds and shellfish in there, secretions from the rocks that hid the sulphur springs in the heart-part of the island. Hard-to-find things a pusson wear in a lil bag against the skin. It made old men remain fertile; kept the skin of wimmen young throughout their lives. It purified the blood of children. And whether a pusson believed it or not, fact was it take the best part of a lifetime to bring all of it together in that lil red bag.

  And all he could think of while she talked was that it would have been better if Deeka had really come to harm him with the machete she’d left lying in the grass. You can’t fight the hateful gazes that been following you all yuh life. A pusson can’t reply to twisted lips or half-said words that shaped the spite you never hear. Eyes that never met yours, that always saw above, around or past you. You can’t aim a slingshot at that.

  ‘He ours,’ she’d said to Chilway to save that thiefin son of hers who murder a man and make a couple of others useless. He ours, my arse. How come? For who? Since when? When she said it, he was thinking, No! I not. Not me. Cuz I’z the one that you want dead from time. Not so? I’z this Zed Bender fella born again to give y’all a whole heap of hell. I de one who s’pose to dead next year.

  And what happm if is so? Eh? S’pose I’z really he? S’pose I got jus’ one more year to go? Is I who make meself? I ask y’all to bring me back? Eh? How come y’all don’ blame my modder? How come is only me?