Pynter Bender (11 page)

S
CENTS WHICH EVERYONE
else told Pynter weren't there. People shapes that walked with him in darkness. Shuffling feet, like the whisperings of the canes. Presences that touched him softly, like the brush of clothing on the skin. Whimperings that came up from the canes on mornings. Muffled struggles in the houses that he passed at night. Voices. Things he was afraid to speak of because they would call him Jumbie Boy. Like the heaviness that Birdie carried inside himself which the loudest of his thunder-laughter could not hide. Like those early-morning dreams in which his Uncle Michael stood in the middle of the road calling him, a long brown coat flowing down his shoulders like dark water. Like the stirrings of the baby that his mother was now carrying for the man he smelt on her. He could have even told them that this man was foreign to these parts. A stranger who left the smell of nutmeg, sweat and cinnamon on his mother's skin. That th at man would come to their yard one day and may never go away. He knew this by the urgency with which his mother left hours before the others stirred, the tiredness she no longer carried when she returned much later than the rest. The distance of her gaze even when her eyes were on them. He could have told them this weeks before Santay came and said it. But they would have called him Jumbie Boy.

Pynter was also the first to see the five men emerge from the yellow car and walk up the hill to their yard. He pointed them out
to Peter who ran inside and called the women. Deeka waited for them with her hands planted on her hips like the handles of a jug.

‘G'mornin, Miss Dee. Long time no see.'

‘Five years, two months and a coupla days, Chilway,' Deeka said to the man who greeted her. He had a very large stomach and was breathing heavily from the climb. He pushed his right hand towards Deeka, from which she selected just his thumb and shook it briefly.

‘Where's that nice fella who come with you last time?' She did not seem to expect an answer, she just needed something to say while the yard adjusted to their presence.

‘You mean Layto?' the man answered pleasantly.

‘No – de tall one wid de nice smile,' Deeka said.

‘Layto, Miss Dee. He gone back to Kara Isle. Married a woman from dere. Left a lot of other wimmen deprive o' dat sugar smile of his.' He laughed.

‘Nice fella – we can't afford for Birdie to go.' She'd slipped in the last words hastily. They caught the man off-guard. He stared at her as if he'd just been cheated.

‘Wha you say, Miss Dee?'

Deeka offered him a quick, dry smile. ‘Y'hear me first time.'

‘The watchmen bawling murder on Crosshatch estate becuz they losing provision every night, Miss Dee.'

‘What make them think Birdie take dem provision?'

Chilway smiled. ‘One catch sight of 'im, Miss Dee. They threaten to poison every bunch o' banana in sight. And dat,' he looked with mock alarm around the yard, ‘dat can't be good fo' nobody.'

‘Poison don' pick out poor from rich,' Deeka answered drily. ‘Missa watchman might poison hi boss instead. Times rough and Birdie do what Birdie got to do to ease de time.'

‘Times rough fo' everybody, mam.'

‘Den how come roughness don' rough y'all up same way?'

Chilway laughed out loud. ‘Is jus' cool we coolin him off, Miss Dee. Soon as de pressure ease, we send 'im back. Besides,' Chilway lowered his voice and nodded in Peter's direction, ‘I hope you notice we didn't even mention 'im!'

‘If is trouble you want den go ahead an' mention 'im.'

‘No-no-no-no-no! What you take me for?' The man looked genuinely hurt. ‘I never mention 'im. He's a boy, not so? A juvenile who's acting under, er, influence and…' He splayed his fingers as if he were about to count them. ‘Duress – yes – a juvenile acting under duress.'

He dragged a large green handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his neck and throat. He squinted angrily at the sun as if to lodge a protest against the heat. ‘Dat's worth at least ah extra coupla years, Miss Dee. In fact, a malicious magistrate could make dat – lemme see – three or four, or even five.

‘And I not even mentioning all de thiefin yet. So is generous I definitely is today, mam, cuz I not includin influence-an'-duress. What you say, fellas? We not includin influence-an'-duress, right?'

The fellas smiled.

‘Yuh see, Miss Dee – we tryin we best becuz we jus' de servant of all dem law deh. Not so, fellas?'

The fellas nodded.

By then Birdie had come out. The big boots he'd arrived in from prison were unlaced, their canvas tongues hanging out as if they too found the heat insupportable. ‘What y'all want?' he grumbled.

‘C'mon, Big Bird. I wan' to make dis quiet.' Chilway's voice had hardened.

‘What de hell y'all come here for?'

‘Gwone, boy!' Deeka shouted. She seemed angry now, impatient for him to leave.

‘I not goin nowhere!'

‘Yuh better go an' put on some decent clothes! Cuz you not leavin my yard like dat.'

‘I not!'

‘Gwone, boy!'

‘I not no boy. I'z a big man an' I not…'

‘Birdie, yuh do what dem warders say befo' dey influencean'-duress y'arse in jail, y'hear me?'

For a moment Birdie stood on the steps glaring at the men. Deeka was the only one who looked at him directly with that same still-water detachment she had greeted him with when he first arrived from jail. Birdie turned abruptly and slammed the door. The house quaked under his weight. They heard the table slam against the partition inside, chairs rattling, something heavy hitting the floor. When he came out he was dressed in the khaki shirt with the faded number below the breast pocket and the cotton trousers Tan Cee had given him. He had even combed his hair.

Chilway rested his hand on Birdie's shoulder. ‘Look at you,' he said. ‘Big man like you! You think we like to come here and embarrass weself like dis?'

Birdie blew his nose into his sleeve and wiped his eyes.

One of the men rested his hand on Birdie's, tentatively. ‘We didn bring de van,' he told him softly. ‘Nobody will hardly know we come to take the Bird.'

Peter began to cry. He wept as if he needed air. Shut his eyes while he stood there gasping. Patty was wiping her eyes and Tan Cee had turned her back on them.

They'd stuffed Birdie's bag with fruits and what remained of the delicacies they'd prepared for him. The wardens gave them time to get to Glory Cedar Rise, and from there they waved and shouted at the yellow car until it disappeared.

Pynter turned to Deeka Bender. ‘How long he gone for dis time?'

Her head averted slightly, the words seemed to drop out of the corner of her mouth. ‘Not as long as de last.'

It occurred to Pynter that she'd been waiting all her life – waiting not just for John Seegal, but also for Birdie. Not like Miss Cynty, who at least filled her life with something in between while Birdie was away. Deeka existed like the dry season, many unbroken years of it, holding on for a man who came as scarce as rain, and another who would never return to her. And then he thought of Miss Lizzie quarrelling with life itself for the child they said she would never have, Patty the Pretty always trying, Miss Maddie holding on each night for Paso, Tan Cee watching Coxy Levid walk away from her every Wednesday night. Perhaps that was what all women did – wait.

‘Desert!' he mumbled, which was all his grandmother heard, which touched, barely, on what was turning in his mind. But she'd caught enough of his tone to sense his meaning and it made her turn those too-steady, too-dark eyes on him.

Hers was one of the few faces that could frighten him, for it carried so openly his condemnation, as though every time she looked at him she was passing sentence. Which was why he often felt he hated her. He was sure she knew this, because she rarely said a word to him, and sometimes when she thought he was not looking, she licked her finger and made the sign of the cross above his head.

‘Watch out, you!' she said.

‘S'what I always do,' he replied, his tone like hers exactly, intense and murderous.

For the rest of the day his grandmother stalked him with her eyes.

It lasted months – that quiet, dark-eyed gaze. That surreptitious crossing of the hands above his head. That shadowy prowl around him. Tan Cee had taken to sleeping in the hallway beside him. She told him it was because she had to edicate him about the ways of the high-falutin, low-fartin school he'd just won a scholarship to in San Andrews. Still, she spent hours talking into
his ear about the kinds of food he must never eat from anyone's hands, especially his grandmother's, and why his granny was the way she was with him.

In that time of Pynter sheltering from his grandmother's malice, and the yard trying not to remember Birdie, the Mardi Gras gave them special days near the closing of the year when the yam shoots eased themselves out of the earth and the purple-yellow blossoms of pigeon peas gave way to tiny hairy pods that would replace the meat Old Hope wouldn't have during the months to come.

Sorrel hung like drops of blood from the stems of plants that looked as if they'd soaked up all the pain the earth had ever borne. The blossoming corns stirred their hair in little winds with the fussiness of foreign women, and a new chill came off the ocean and crept along the valley floor at nights, leaving drifting skeins of mist and a heavy sprinkling of dew in the mornings.

This was the time when the mountain reminded them that it was there, had always been, and that this valley in which the canes they worked in grew and thrived was as much a part of itself as the crown of mist that swirled around its head. It sent rain down its slopes like drunken marching armies and made Old Hope a dripping, tapping, drumming water orchestra. The canes were silent then, their whisperings replaced by the growling of the little river below, grown fat and fast and muscular from the water it was feeding on.

And amidst all that wetness the first wonder arrived. It came like a present, like something the night had created and left in the yard for them, so that first thing in the morning it drew their eyes to it. A gloria lily. A flower-flame. Large as the head of a child and impossibly round, it stood among the stones, the raindrops hanging off its petals like jewellery; the flesh of its stem the colour and sheen of ivory. It had been sleeping in the darkness all year long and now the late November rains had called it out.

The women leaned out of their windows, their eyes on their children. They would observe the ones that backed away from all that beauty and those that moved towards it with quiet, wide-eyed wonder. One or two would stoop and run a finger up the stem, hesitating only when they reached the bright cold flame. Another might even become tearful. And always, always there would be one among the little crowd whose hand reached out and broke it from the earth. There would be no irritation when that happened, no anger at the killing of a thing so beautiful and strange, since something just as precious would have come out of it – a glimpse into the deeper natures of their children.

And anyway, if the gloria lily did survive the children, it would live only for a day; would begin to die before their eyes by early evening.

This, Deeka Bender reminded them, was the time of little miracles, the time they called the halfway season. It was when Elena ‘took up' Manuel Forsyth's twins (and she wasn' saying dat 'twas a proper thing to do). Fact was, strange things happened to a young pusson's feelings, so parents with part-grown girls and mannish lil boys had to be specially watchful because babies appeared from nowhere.

And true enough, in these flat grey days when it was easy to believe that they would never see a purple sky again, little miracles happened. A tiny slit in the clouds opened up one morning like the parting of a pair of lips. The light came down thin and sharp like a blade, tapering out just wide enough to hit a single flowering tree at the foot of the Mardi Gras. A shout from someone somewhere brought them out into their yards to stand there staring at the burning immortelle that made the hillside look as if it had just sprouted a wound.

It happened again later in the evening with night already hemming the foothills: another parting of the heavy dam of clouds. A different light this time. Syrupy and glowing, it settled on the high and slender branches of a dandacayo tree, turning it
all metal – a living, shimmering thing against the darkness of the hillside.

‘It have hope in that,' Tan Cee said, lowering her chin on Pynter's head. ‘It have a lotta hope in that.'

It turned Deeka Bender's mind to John Seegal's only brother, the one her children never got to meet – Columbus of the misshapen head and big soft eyes.

He was larger than Birdie, she told them, and still growing when she came to Old Hope. Had the shoulders of a giant but couldn't shift a stone because his hands would not allow it. He was not meant to be born that way, but made so by the hands of a young English doctor who didn't know what he was doing.

She could see him now: that heavy walk of his. A forest tree on two legs. Columbus never stop growing. Never got accustomed to the body he born in. A lil boy, that's what he was, a lil boy struggling to free himself of all that flesh that held him down.

Talked as he walked too! Heavy and slow and not-so-certain. A pusson listen to him speak and 'twas easy to believe that all he did was mumble to himself.

But same way that light come through and hit that tree, God left a lot of light in him. A lotta light becuz nobody could pick a petal off a flower as gentle as Columbus. Nobody 'ceptin he would think of holding a living insect up against the light to make everybody see the colours they never thought it had. He could thread a needle without looking, pick a mosquito off a pusson eyelash. Big as he was, he had hands and eyes for things almost too small to see and touch.