Pynter Bender (10 page)

His mind shifted back to those evenings in that empty house, so crowded with the memories and ghosts of other people – other lives that the old man said was family. And with Peter beside him, the shuffle of feet outside the door, the waves coughing against the rocks outside, he started reading.

‘“And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again…”'

He lifted his head. Peter's eyes were on the gulls wheeling in the air outside and his father was snoring softly. When they came outside, Birdie was where they had left him. Gideon had disappeared and his dogs were lying on the grass with their jaws resting on their forelegs. The woman was leaning out from the veranda as if she wanted to place her lips against their ears.

‘Y'all not – y'all not goin meet him again like…like…'

‘I know.' Peter looked back at him with a little surprised smile. They'd both said it at the same time.

In the light of the decaying evening, the large concrete houses were no more than shapes against the sky. He didn't realise that they had been that long inside Gideon's house. He looked inland in the direction from which they had come. He could see no houses, not even the canes, just the ash-blue hills that squatted like children at the foot of the towering Mardi Gras. The concrete road was now a wide grey snake cut out against the side of the sea cliffs, threatening, it seemed, to slip into the ocean at any time.

Birdie placed his big hands on their shoulders. He was looking straight ahead at the road, his head pulled back, listening it seemed to something that was somewhere beyond their hearing.

‘Life's a lil bit like dat, fellas,' he said finally, his voice a rumble above their heads. ‘A pusson have to walk it. Ain't got no choice. And a time mus' come when dem have to stop cuz dem can't go on no more.'

He was silent for a while and when he spoke again his voice was different. The thunder was no longer in it.

‘Do me a favour, fellas. Tell y'all mother I really beat that man up. Tell 'er I beat 'im bad. Tell 'er that for me. Go 'head o' me. I meet y'all at home.'

H
IS FATHER'S WORDS
–
Remember me
– were like the drumming of fingers in Pynter's head. He patterned his walking to the rhythm of their syllables, searching those two words for the meaning he knew was hidden there. And with the passing of the months, they fleshed themselves out with all the things that people said around him.

It amazed him that even when he'd listened, he'd never heard what Deeka was really saying when she loosened her hair and talked; that beneath her words there lived another story – one that sat at the back of almost everything the adults said, especially when they spoke of those who had come before them and those who would come after.

This new thing that his father's last words taught him: that in the villages above the canes people did not die. As long as memory lived they did not. They passed. Leaving always something of themselves behind. John Seegal, their grandfather, had passed most of himself over to Birdie, except for the thieving ways, o' course, which came from a great-grand-uncle whose name Deeka refused to say. And the long-gone aunts, the grandmothers, the uncles were there with them right now. They were scattered among the children the way the leaves of a forest tree became the flesh of other plants around it. They were there in the curve of a young man's spine, the turn of a girl-child's head, the way their lips shifted from their teeth in a grimace or a smile.
There too in the shape of a baby's feet or the quickness of its temper. There even in the flavours they preferred, and the things their bodies asked for.

For wasn't it true that Columbus, John Seegal's only brother, had passed on his singing voice to all the Benders that came after? And where did that shine-eye beauty of Patty come from, if not from the very best parts of all those cane-tall Bender women who knew how to unravel dreams and turn their hands to medicines; and who, sometimes just for the sake of it, created new and marvellous things from rope and thread and fabric? And what about those children born with a wisdom older than their age? Did that come from nowhere, eh?

It explained, at least, the querying hands of those adults who, like his father, mapped the bones of children and sought to read their futures and their past there. And it explained why the idea that his body was a house to a man who had lived long before his time made perfect sense to Deeka Bender, his grandmother.

Her problem was the way he had come. Not a little while after Peter. Not even later in the evening. But two days after his brother. She who had brought him out still talked of the way he'd fought her. For all of two bright dry-season days when, with the whole world living life outside, night hadn't left that birth room. And that cry, when he'd finally released his death hold on her daughter – that cry wasn't the cry of a child at all, but the raging of a young man. And then, of course, they saw the eyes, or what hid the world from them.

It was not so, Tan Cee told him. Not as Deeka said it. She did not remember it that way. In their first few years, Deeka didn't remember it that way either. But remembering was like that. Remembering was like life, like people: it got better or worse with time. There were women like Deeka, she said, who tied their lives to a man's so tight they forget they ever owned one. And when that man got up and walked, it was not just his life he took, he went with theirs as well.

‘So what left for them to do after?' She smiled dreamily at him. ‘They look for something they kin blame. And you – you the one your granny pick.'

He'd asked her what John Seegal looked like, because even if they'd said he looked like Birdie, he could not make an image in his mind. Just a shape – a scattered force that inhabited his grandmother and the children he had left with her. He used to imagine him within the stones he'd used to build the yard, especially the large flat rock beside the steps which they said he used to sit on.

He wasn't sure that Tan Cee heard his question. Her eyes were on her husband, off again, he'd told her, to start work on a house somewhere in the south. He would be away a coupla days.

She took her eyes off Coxy, adjusted her skirt and sighed. ‘Some things have to …' She stopped short, considered what she was about to say and smiled quietly at him.

‘Your granny always talk 'bout how she meet John Seegal. She never talk 'bout how he left. She never say much 'bout Anita either. Y'ever wonder why?'

She told him of a morning her mother was sweeping the yard when a child arrived and called her by her real name. He stood at the edge of the yard, his stomach exposed, his thin legs crossing and uncrossing, his hands small and thin like a bird's, moving around his face as if he were washing it with air.

Deeka asked him what he wanted. He told her that he wanted nothing. She asked him why he came then. He said his father sent him with some news. She told him that men never sent their children anywhere with news. And a woman wouldn't have sent him because she would bring the news herself. And so she turned her back on him.

But he was still there at the corner of her eye. Still washing his face with his hands. And then, when she was least expecting it, his voice came across the yard as clear as if he was standing right next to her.

He told her that her husband Big John Seegal had wagered her, his house and his three girl-children that he was going to cross the Kalivini swamps in the early hours of the morning and emerge from it alive.

Deeka smiled at the joke at first, found herself remembering it throughout the rest of the day and laughing. But by late evening, when she heard her husband's footsteps coming up the path, the words of that boy seemed somehow less ridiculous.

He came home full of his own thunder. Sat on the steps stinking of the rum he'd despised all his life. Sat there working up a murderous argument with himself. He raised his hand at Deeka and told her for the first time what he really thought of her and the four children she had given him. And at the end of it he stretched himself out in the yard and would not look at them.

Deeka gathered the children around her and told them what their father was about to do. Down there, she told them, way past cane, there is a place where the Old Hope River meets the sea. The river does not die there; it becomes something else: a stinking, bubbling tangle of mangrove where the sharks swim in on the early-morning tides to feed on all the things the land rejected. She told them that their father, overtaken by some demon for which there was no accounting, had decided to cross that place in the small hours of the morning.

Deeka fought all night to keep him: I ever give you cause to feel you not a man? That you less than another woman man? What about the children? Eh? What about them? They not healthy? They not yours? You want somebody to tell you sorry for something they didn do to you? Okay then, I sorry. If me, the children or anybody do anything to push you to where you is, to make you come like you come home tonight, I want to tell you sorry.

She turned to the girls with a deadly, soft-voiced rage. I want every one of you to tell y'all father sorry. Tan Cee, the eldest, was more temper than tears. Elena fixed him with an unblinking,
tight-lipped gaze. And Patty the Pretty, his last, his youngest, the dark-skinned miracle he'd named himself, Patty who could stop her father in mid-stride, who could melt his anger with a touch, the muttering of his name, even Patty could not turn him. And Birdie, the son who looked like him and had the strength to hold him down or tie him against a post or tree or something solid till he came back to his senses – Birdie was in jail.

By the morning, they had grown quiet, the girls starved of sleep, and Deeka just too tired to be tearful any more. Defeated also by a realisation that had come to her during all those hours of pleading. That there was something in John Seegal's decision that went beyond his drunkenness. That it had not been made over a glass of rum, but over time. So that in the still grey hours of that morning, even while she stood on the top of Glory Cedar Rise and called out his name as they watched him walking down Old Hope Road, watched and called until the canes and distance swallowed him, she knew that all the pleading in the world would not make him turn around.

She went back to her house, pulled the trouser leg from under the mattress they'd conceived their children on, emptied the contents on the floor, counted the money she had placed there over the years and began preparing for his wake. And while she prepared she cursed the canes. She blamed this shallow valley she had come to from the north, this long, blue gorge of sighing, coughing, whistling grass which consumed their men so casually.

‘But you can't beat cane,' Tan Cee muttered. ‘You can't do much to hurt it back.' Which was why, she said, Deeka retreated into a dark-eyed, watchful bitterness and kept reminding them of the miracle their father used to be.

‘And soon after,' Tan Cee sighed and got to her feet, ‘Elena body start changin with y'all.'

‘And de baby girl – Anita?'

‘She wasn' no baby girl de time de trouble start. I got a coupla things to look after.' She dusted her skirt and walked away.

T
HE FOOD THAT
Birdie brought back now was meant to last them longer. Peter confided that he'd even tried to bring along a cow but it wasn't to be persuaded. Besides, the cow had horns that were long enough and sharp enough to win the argument.

Peter talked with a look of puzzlement that brought the laughter out of them, all the more because he couldn't understand what they were laughing at. Couldn't see the joke either when Birdie sneaked off during the day and returned home with ridiculous things: a couple of giant plants sitting in heavy, white stone pots; an iron gate; three beach chairs; an aluminium oar; the two back wheels of a car; a child's plastic bicycle.

The women seemed to recognise this change in Birdie. They responded strangely: they touched him more, kept back the best of everything for him; made difficult dishes like cornki and farine which took them two days to prepare, and sat and watched him while he ate.

He held their gifts of food between his fingers and brought them to his mouth as though the pleasure was not just his to have but also theirs.

And during these nights of bright moon and still air, when voices and laughter travelled down the foothills to their yard, riding it seemed on the achingly sweet fragrance of the lady-of-the-night, he repeated the stories of his time in prison.

It was only Peter who did not understand this ritual. Not even when his uncle tried to make him know by almost saying so. By leaving him at home without an explanation, by the quick flushes of irritation that left Peter tearful and ill-tempered, by not having time for him these days. Perhaps the women had spoken to Birdie. Perhaps he'd read their worry all along and was doing something about it now. Pynter wasn't sure.

And then one night Birdie took Peter away. It was close to morning when Birdie returned – a night of lashing rain and the kind of cloth-thick darkness that made it impossible to see ahead – but he did not have Peter with him. Birdie dropped his bag, pulled off his boots, took the cloth that Deeka held out to him and began wiping himself dry. He sat amongst them without a word.

For a while there was silence, only the snoring of the valley, the rain dripping from the trees and the rising babble of the river below.

Elena turned on Birdie with quiet, unblinking eyes. ‘Where my chile?' Her lips were twitching and she was studying his face as if he were a stranger.

Birdie held her eyes, his face gone soft, held her gaze as if his life depended on it. ‘Out there,' he answered. ‘I had to do something.'

A sound escaped Elena – soft, deep-chested – a cross between a chuckle and a cough. She sat on the floor, crossed her legs, her eyes hard and bright as nails on her brother's face.

The whistle of the sugar factory in the south had already released the night shift when Pynter eased himself up on his elbow and muttered at the ceiling, ‘Peter coming.'

They barely recognised him when he got home, mud-soaked and exhausted. Elena reached for him but he rushed past her and threw himself at Birdie. He struck out wildly, blindly at his uncle's face; sobbed and cursed him at the same time. And when Birdie had judged it was enough, he caught Peter's swinging arms and pinned them against his sides.

Tan Cee and Elena exchanged glances, nodded briefly at each other. Patty sneaked a smile at Birdie.

Not long after, Birdie staggered up the hill carrying a log of wood and dropped it near the giant iron platter at the end of the yard. They thought nothing of it until he dragged the log out to the middle of the yard, stripped it of its bark and propped it upright between a couple of stones.

The wood was pink as flesh and gummy to the touch. And where the axe had left its broad tooth marks it seeped a milky fluid. He left it there for a week, covering it with plastic when it rained and placing it in the middle of the yard when the sun came out.

The day he brought his axe to it they observed him under lidded eyes. Watched him move around the wood, his muscles roused and rippling, as if they weren't there. And even from the safety of the house, with the rise and falling of that axe, they all felt exposed.

‘What you makin, Birdie?'

Birdie leaned the axe against his leg, spread his hands at Elena and grinned.

‘A flyin machine.

‘A poor man plane.

‘A thunder maker.

‘A wood bullet with steel boots.

‘God shoe – just one side. De middle one!'

He lifted the axe and tapped the log.

By the following week, the sun had dried the outer surface white and the wood was bleeding no more.

It took a while before they guessed his intention. For it seemed at first that all he wanted from that round, solid piece of wood was a plank. Seemed so much like a waste of effort, since he might have bought or stolen one.

But then one morning he climbed the slopes of the Mardi Gras and came back with a length of guava wood. The following
day he brought home a handful of four-inch nails, a couple of blocks of wood and knelt before the plank.

He left the wheels for last. Two of them were identical, but the third was almost twice as large as the rest. It took another day for the machine to be ready.

By then the news had travelled across the valley, so that by the time he'd fixed the wheels onto the axles, the yard was packed with boys standing at respectful distances examining the machine that Birdie said would fly.

‘Okay,' he said finally, ‘I want de best hill on dis island. Show me de steepest, highest, smoothest, longest hill and I will show y'all how to fly.'

And with hardly a word between them, they left the yard and headed for Man Arthur's Fall.

Man Arthur's Fall was a ridge that ran between two valleys. It was the place where Old Hope Road briefly lost its footing against the hillside and plunged down towards an old iron bridge that protected vehicles, animals and drunks from falling onto the boulders of the ravine below. It carried the name of the man who had thrown himself down its slope because he owed the estate more money than he could pay back with his labour in a lifetime.

From up there – where the man smell of the ocean reached them; where, ranged against the sky, they could see neither the bridge nor the gully where Arthur Sullivan fell – the road swept down and away from them in a massive, suicidal curve.

Birdie held the thing aloft. The wood was as white as dough now and smelt of a deep and feral musk. And because they did not know what it was, or did exactly, apart from wha t Birdie Bender told them, his power over them was total.

He placed a couple of heavy, flat stones on the plank and made the steering rigid with a length of rope he'd brought along with him. He attached another piece of rope to the rear axle then eased it over the edge of the hill, his muscles straining as if they were about to burst the skin. Then he let it go.

The machine rolled off with a low, impatient rumble, the sound of it seeming to rise from the bowels of the earth. They knew it would not get to the bottom of the hill, but it had a good long stretch of road ahead.

Halfway down, it began chewing up the asphalt, the sound of its metal wheels rising quickly to a wail. And then the machine struck the bank, spun several times in the air and landed on the asphalt with a terrible crash.

Oslo and Arilon ran off after it, their shirt tails trailing behind them like wings. They returned running and placed the machine at Birdie's feet.

One of the boys looked up earnestly into Birdie's face. ‘It can't fly, Missa Birdie.'

‘How you know dat?' Birdie smiled.

‘Cuz it didn,' Oslo said.

Birdie's gold tooth flashed. For the first time he seemed unsure. ‘Didn, yes! Not can't! Now, fellas, y'all see how short that road is. Besides, dat scooter didn have no rider. God shoe got to have a foot to make it run.' He spoke briskly, irritably. ‘Y'all ever see a plane take off? Or a chicken hawk?'

‘It take speed firs'?' Pynter offered.

Birdie lifted a triumphant finger. ‘So! If plane and chicken hawk take speed to fly, what make y'all think it different wid dat scooter dere?'

Birdie placed the tip of his boot under the machine and flipped it over on its back. Turned belly-up to the hot afternoon sky, the metal wheels burned with the brightness of the reflected sun.

‘Speed, fellas,' Birdie chuckled happily, having regained their faith. ‘Dat's what's goin to make y'all fly.'

He wiped his forehead, lifted the scooter, turned to Peter and laid it at his feet. ‘Peter Sweeter, I make it for you,' he said.

Peter stared at him, then at Pynter and then at all the others, and gradually his face softened. Envy travelled like a shot of liquor through the gathering. For a moment it also blinded
Pynter, then just as suddenly he felt relieved. For his brother's pain – which he'd carried in his eyes and in his silence during all that week – had suddenly been lifted.

They knelt before the machine and felt the wood, assessed its weight, its size. They would not forget the way it had charged down the hill, and that instant just before it struck the bank, when the grumble of the wheels became a wail and then a scream. And there, in all its mute and disconcerting newness, it seemed impossible that this bit of wood and metal should do what Birdie had set out to make it do: to take to the air and fly.

If Pynter allowed himself to believe his uncle, it was because he knew that Birdie never lied, not really, not even when he joked. Not even when he'd asked them to tell his mother how badly he'd beaten up Gideon. It wasn't a lie. Hadn't Pynter himself, on looking down on Westerpoint from Glory Cedar Rise, blinded Gideon a thousand times with that catapult he'd made? Birdie must have done the same or worse to Gideon every day in jail.

Besides, there were different ways in which a person could believe something. Like those times he imagined that his kites were messages, which, when he cut them loose, took with them some part of his longing to see the world. Perhaps that was what his uncle meant by flying, since Birdie had also told them on the very first night he sat and talked about the men he'd left in prison that anything that took your mind off pain, anything that made you lose yourself, even for a little while, anything could make you fly.