Pynter Bender

by Jacob Ross

  Elena was leaning against the doorway.

  ‘Somefing have to happm,’ Pynter said, wrestling for words. ‘Somefing…’

  ‘Time,’ she breathed softly, barely moving her lips, ‘give my sister time. He not Leroy,’ she said, lifting an eyebrow at Coxy’s retreating back. ‘He worse. You tol’ Winny I wicked, not so? Well, I tellin you now, Tan Cee worse. Jus’ give ’er time.’

  She lifted Lindy off her shoulder and handed the child to him, just as she did every time he came home. While Windy moved around the yard, laughing with Peter, and glancing at him from under heavy, lidded eyes, he could not move. There was no one he could pass Little Lindy over to, since the child would not be held by anyone but his mother and himself.

  He ruffled her lettuce-curls and grinned at her. This baby girl, so partial to the hands that held her, who laughed a lot in her sleep and would not eat meat, was, he believed, the picture of the stranger they had never seen: eyes dark and wide as river pools, limbs so slim and long they made him think of bamboo, and toes as supple as her fingers.

  Elena kept her greased and prettily clothed all the time. He would watch his mother pause over the child sometimes with her head lifted as if she’d suddenly heard her name. She would finger the baby’s hair, and then catch herself with a little start before turning back to whatever she was doing.

  He loved to lay Lindy on his chest and talk, while she busied herself with parts of his face, or with pulling at his hair. Talking became easier because, these days, Lindy agreed with everything.

  ‘You’z a wicked lil baby-girrrl!’ he said. The child nodded. ‘A nice one, though. The best. You’z a star apple, dumplin’-an’-fry-bakes and sapodilla chile.’ Lindy poked at his ear and nodded. ‘Yunno what a metaphor is? Is a lil bit like a parable – sometimes. Yunno what a parable is? Well, is a kinda metaphor. You goin stop squeezin me nose and lissen? Well, I been thinkin. Me an’ Paso had a big argument about history. Yunno what history is? S’awright, I tell you next time. I tell ’im that de story about Sodom an’ Gomorrah is about us right here in Old Hope. Y’ever hear ’bout Lot’s wife? Dat’s all dey call her. Lot’s wife. She didn have no name, but she’s de one everybody remember. God chase them out of Sodom and Gomorrah before he turn the whole place into smoke-an’-ashes. In them days, that fella,’ Pynter wagged a finger at the ceiling, ‘he used to lay down a whole heap of unrealistic conditions for ord’nary people. Y’hear me? He tell them don’t look back, else they become a pillar of salt. De whole heap o’ them keep their head straight. You kin imagine Missa Lot and all hi people runnin up dat mountain ketchin arse to hold their head straight, except the wife. She didn just look back, she turn round. She face it. And she was the only one who know what she see before she freeze up and stay right there and become seasoning for food, y’unnerstan? My father used to call that foolishness. I say the woman brave. I say that p’raps what she see worth all the salt she turn to, an’ p’raps a damn lot more. She not like we. We don’t look back. We ’fraid dat it … it … petrify us. Uh-huh. Yuh hear de word, Star Apple? Petrify! You wan’ hear me say it again? Petrify! Well, none of Old Hope, in fact none of dis whole flippin island – they don’t wan’ to look back. But me! I’z Lot’s wife. Uh-huh – dat’s me. I’z she. I have to look back, y’unnerstan?’

  Outside, they were choking on the laughter. As if he cared! Straight-head-people, all of them! He adjusted the sleeping child and closed his eyes.

  Coxy’s hammering woke him. The week before, Coxy had brought his Fire-Flyers to the yard, built Anita’s roof and lifted it in place. There were windows now, a little veranda that overlooked a small garden. The floorboards had been laid in a single afternoon and the whole yard was steeped in the smell of paint and pinewood. Coxy promised Anita that he would finish the house before the hurricane season hit them. And he’d done as he promised. Already the river had become brown and muscular. And the mists that clothed the Mardi Gras were rolling down its sides in thick, grey swirls. They could hear the swelling ocean making a church organ of the rock caves beyond the Kalivini swamps.

  Now that the house was almost done, Anita had no time for them, not even for Deeka. Apart from her daughter, Windy, the only person she laughed with was Coxy. She barely left her steps, although her laughing seemed to make her presence larger in the yard.

  Lindy would lift her head and cry sometimes, and it brought on a kind of lethargy in Deeka, who moved in an aimless orbit around Tan Cee. His mother talked less, stood in the doorway more often, turned her head at every sound, exactly like Deeka used to.

  Wednesday nights, Coxy stayed on Anita’s steps with her and smoked. Sometimes they shared a cigarette. One evening, she eased herself up on the rung above him, made an arch of her body and covered his head with her hair. And while Coxy and Anita sat and laughed above them, all Deeka talked about was water – river pools and oceans – the kind of water a pusson got drowned in. Did they know there was a lil bit of sea east of where she came from that people called Nowhere? Waves did not rise and hit the rocks there. The ocean pushed against the land like a man heaving with his shoulders. The water was an indigo so deep you dipped an oar in it half expecting the sea to stain it blue.

  There was a river that ran beneath the sea there too, that came all the way down from the north. The fishermen had a name for it, they called it the Cradle, although ignorant Old Hope men, who returned from building the Panama Canal, brought back a different name for it, Neenyo-something-or-the-other. A lot of careless man up north fall asleep in their boat sometimes and when dem wake up an’ look round, de Cradle done gone and rock dem all the way to Venezuela. It happen to Deeka’s uncle. It happen to him twice. And it would ha’ happen to that foolish fella all the time if he didn decide to remain in Venezuela second time.

  And past that far place where the Cradle ended … Deeka turned to Pynter, her eyes all hollowed out and pleading. Did a pusson know what was past that far place?

  Nothing, Pynter said. Ain’t got nothing past that place, just the underbelly of the world.

  29

  THE TROUBLE OUTSIDE had finally spilled over into Old Hope. Not the shootings and the small bonfires of protest that sprang up like a rash elsewhere on the island, but the procession of jeeps that took over the roads. A soft voice on the radio would announce the places where the roads were to be cleared by six o’clock.

  Pynter watched their homes from his perch on the hill opposite. Paso walked the foothills, talking with the villagers, and when they returned, his nephew’s language seemed to have changed his companions a little more. Oslo in particular became agitated about the news of the troubles elsewhere. Paso called them ‘happenings’. He would name the soldier responsible for every atrocity, because each one, he said, carried the signature of the man who perpetrated it. Janus shot first and issued warnings afterwards. Manos pointed out the ones he wanted from the gatherings by the roadside, gave them time to get away, then went after them. Sylus stayed in his office in San Andrews, chose the places to send his men and told them the kind of youth to bring to him. He needed to tell them a lil bit about Sylus, Paso said, and he was going to take his time.

  ‘Everyting I say now, people, I want y’all to remember. I want y’all to burn it in y’all brain, an’ keep it there.’ It didn’t matter how a pusson come to know these things, he said. What mattered was he knew.

  Sylus’s office was a low building above San Andrews. Two gates led up to it, one for walking through, the other for vehicles. There was no night up there; it was always bright with floodlights.

  A shed of corrugated iron leaned against a tree at the back of the building, with a bolt which was always drawn across the door. There was a little swamp around it from the overflow of the bathhouse, and the whole place was overgrown with tannia plants and callaloo. Tillock and that young-fella Jordan would have been taken there, Paso said, glancing at Pynter. They would have been left sitting in that shed for three days before Sylus came to them.

  Sylus had a
face that women liked. He laughed easily. He had pretty hands and the smoothest face they would ever see on any man. He dressed neatly. He never hurried. But all that was nothing, said Paso. All that was a distraction. Sylus would pull a wooden stool between his legs and sit. At his feet he would lay out a dozen candles, a large king-size box of Anchor matches, three cartons of Phoenix cigarettes, five pieces of wire stripped from a truck tyre and cut to varying lengths, a cotton bag the size of a small football filled with freshly mixed concrete. And if he felt he needed it, he would reach into his shirt pocket for a thin length of leather that uncoiled in his palm like a snake. That strip of leather was what Sylus always left for last.

  Paso got up. They followed him with their eyes.

  ‘He not stupid,’ Paso said. ‘He smarter than the man who owns him. He knows what’s at stake. He knows we going to take the island.’

  Sylus also knew that Paso was down there with them. It explained the tension in his nephew, the way he looked down on the canes, the suddenness with which he stopped sometimes and listened to the wind.

  It was the canes that saved them every time, their simmering protestations at anything that leaned or breathed on them, the readiness with which they slipped their saw-edged leaves into exposed skin and drew deep-throated curses from the soldiers. It was the deceitfulness of cane, the brittle bed of straw they laid down like a mattress over meshes of fallen stems, which could snap the ankle of a careless man like a biscuit. It was the maliciousness with which their prickles, white as filaments of glass, would bury themselves in the soldiers’ eyes and nostrils.

  The wickedness of cane saved them every time.

  One afternoon they were puzzling over the weather, the fretful winds and sudden bouts of stillness. There was rain somewhere in the hills beyond the Mardi Gras, because the river was raging. But not a drizzle had reached Old Hope.

  Arilon cut through Oslo’s words about cadres and committees and reminded them that this was the perfect time for catching crayfish. Not the tiny kakados and red-tails, but the tiger-striped lings with claws that could crack a grugru nut. Pynter said he didn’t eat them. Wouldn’t put no creature near his mouth which had its stomach in its head.

  They were still laughing at his words when they got down to the river. He left them struggling with the water and climbed to the precipice under which the top of the trees made an umbrella over the pool they called Young Sea.

  Pynter pulled out a book from under his shirt and undid the plastic bag he kept it in. He listened to the river below and thought for a while about Sislyn. He hung his legs over the rockfall.

  He didn’t hear them at first. He was turning the pages of The Master and Margarita when they came. He was thinking of cats that talked, a fanged hitman with a bowler hat and red hair and a nicer name for Christ. Yeshua Ha-Notsri. He was going to take that name to Patty. He heard the rustle of the elephant grass behind him, and then a chuckle he did not recognise. He did not turn, not even when some cold hard thing rested on the nape of his neck and a voice told him to stand. Other voices were emerging from the bush behind him.

  The soldier couldn’t have been much older than him. The green khaki shirt hung off his narrow shoulders like a sail. His boots were thick with mud. The muzzle of the gun was hard against his left nipple where Windy touched him once. The rising coolness of the river crept up Pynter’s legs and stroked his shoulders. He wondered if the young man felt it too.

  There were five of them. Pynter could hear shouts in the distance. Frigo’s voice, then Arilon’s, a whistle high in the hills above them which could only be Oslo’s.

  He had no time. Just a fanciful notion which had just come to him from reading a book that Sislyn gave him. He moved before the thought completed itself in his head. His hand shot out and closed around the man’s wrist and by the time his other hand had grabbed the soldier’s collar they were already falling backwards. Everything became a whirl of green as their bodies broke through the branches. They hit the water hard. Pynter surfaced first, saw the young man rise in front of him, the shape of a scream his mouth was making before the river snuffed it out. There was pleading in his eyes. You kill anover yooman been, you add their weight to yours. For de rest of your life, you carry them wiv you. Patty’s words.

  Pynter reached out, grabbed the young man’s shirt and dragged him onto the bank.

  The babble of approaching voices, the sound of breaking undergrowth, did not worry him. He slipped into the water and let the river take him down its dark leaf tunnels.

  His mother came running over the stones towards him. She closed a hand around his shoulder.

  They brought him behind the house and pulled the clothing off him. He felt the quick querying fingers of Deeka down his shoulders and his legs. His mother slid a hand across his stomach while Tan Cee held him steady. Patty passed her fingers through his hair. Then Deeka stepped away and told them he was all right.

  ‘The others all right?’ his mother said.

  Pynter said nothing.

  Elena straightened up. ‘Ole Hope man got boy-chilren down there too. Dey quiet. Dey too quiet. I don’ know what dey thinkin, but dey too quiet fo’ too long.’ She drew him into the shadows of the banana tree behind the house and stood him there. ‘All dis goin pass,’ she said. ‘Y’unnerstan? All this.’ Her voice was the clearest he’d ever heard it. ‘Pynto,’ she said softly, urgently. ‘Times like dese, you never come straight home, y’unnerstan?’ She shook her head. ‘Cuz is de firs’ thing a pusson do when trouble reach dem, dey run home. You fink dey don’ know dat?’

  Elena slipped her arms around his waist and pulled him towards her. He felt her breath against his neck. He realised she was crying.

  He smelled the tree before he came to it. It had taken him a while to get to this small plateau beneath the Mardi Gras. And there it was – a silk-cotton tree – its buttress roots splayed along the earth like the fingers of a monstrous hand. He knew what lay beyond the opening of its converging root-walls. Even now, the fruit bats shot in and out of it like showers of dark rain.

  The only sign he’d found of another human presence here was an overturned bowl of rice, and markings in the soil beside it that looked like several crossroads. It was Santay’s way of telling him that she too had been here.

  Everything here was just as it always had been: the chipping away of beetles beneath the skin of bark, the chittering of bats so sharp at times it felt as if Pynter’s eardrums had been struck by something solid. Further up the trunk he could sense the soft disturbances of birds. Where the mist-wet sunlight touched the leaves, he could hear the throaty conversations of mountain doves.

  A young man named Zed Bender died here once. He, Pynter, was supposed to be this man born again. Zed Bender had died at the hands of a man who believed he owned him, cursing him to the end. Blood, Deeka had told them, had a memory of its own.

  Santay was sitting with her back against her door-mouth. Her hands were white with the manioc she was grating in a basin in her lap.

  ‘You goin stay behin’ dat bush whole day?’ she said.

  She hadn’t looked up. She covered the basin with a square of cloth and went to the oil drum behind her house to wash her hands.

  ‘Wash yuh foot,’ she said, and went inside.

  It was still early. The canes below were hazy and untroubled. Gauldins swirled above them in dizzy, aimless circles. When Pynter washed at the oil drum, he was surprised to see the swelling belt of a bruise across his shoulders.

  Santay came and sat beside him on the steps. She dropped a plate of fish and vegetables in his lap and while he ate she poured the contents of a small bottle into her palms and smeared it along his shoulders.

  ‘I see you fly, Legba. I stay right here an’ see you fly.’ It was the new name she had given him. A warm and throaty chuckle bubbled out of her.

  ‘Fall,’ he said. ‘Not fly.’

  ‘De way dey come dis time,’ she said. ‘So … so … heavy.’

  He told her abo
ut Paso.

  ‘Is he dey come for?’

  Pynter inspected a bit of fish, popped it in his mouth and nodded. ‘They didn get ’im,’ he said. ‘Not dis time.’

  The bracelets jangled. ‘Somebody tell dem he down dere?’

  He nodded again. ‘Dey got Arilon instead.’

  She got up and went inside, and when she returned she placed a handful of phials at his feet.

  ‘Tomorrow and de next day, s’all de time I got,’ he said.

  ‘Who’z Marilon?’ she said.

  ‘My friend.’

  Santay cleared her throat. She was busy with her headwrap for a while. ‘Dat’s why you come here?’

  ‘Don’ know why I come,’ he said.

  She reached for the basin of manioc. She lifted the cloth and held it in front of him. He swung his head away.

  ‘S’de poison you smell,’ she said. ‘Most people don’. Dey take it, dey grate it, dey boil de badness out of it. Dey make farine, bread an’ starch wiv it.’ Santay dipped her finger in the milky paste. ‘I been doin dat all my life. I never had no reason to do otherwise. Now,’ she convulsed her shoulders and sloshed the white paste in her hand, ‘now I want to strain it. I want to mix it wiv milk from de bark of a mangue tree, put it in dem bottle dere and give y’all to throw in other people face. An’ dat can’t be right.’

  She convulsed her shoulders again. The paste dropped from the bowl in heavy clots.

  They watched it trickle between the stones and settle there.

  ‘Dat’s how I know my time done pass. Ain’ got no place in de world for people like me no more.’