Pynter Bender (14 page)

W
HAT 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 the 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.

They married in their own way. Just Coxy and her: he smiling all the time; she gripped stiff with the fear of her father, even if John Seegal would never have found them in that quiet lil bay in the shadow of a cliff that people called The Silent, with the seagulls as their witness and the waves their congregation.

She remembered the light. Remembered the way it came down from the sky and settled on the water: pink, like the inside of a conch shell. Like the colour of church windows. She'd taken his hand in marriage but she never took his name. And it was exactly a year before her secret slipped from her. She said it to her mother and her sisters two days after they stood on Glory Cedar Rise and watched John Seegal walk into the Kalivini swamplands.

Tan Cee said the same things to him every night, her agitation beating against his ear like the flutterings of a moth, and at the end of it, she would lean away from him, preparing herself for those last words she always left him with. She wanted his understanding in advance, for this thing her mind kept turning her towards. This growin, worryin thing that gone and creep inside her head and would not go away because it did not want to. And if, if he could not give her his understanding, at least, she wanted his forgiveness in advance.

A thin skein of drizzle was drifting down the Mardi Gras the morning they saw Pynter rise to his feet. The water had settled on the soft matting of his hair. His skin was glistening like the bark of a June-plum tree. Holy Rain they called it, this God-spray – this feathering of water from the mountain that fanned the sunlight out above their heads, softened the shapes of rocks and trees and left a glow on everything.

They followed his climb up to Glory Cedar Rise, all legs and arms and shifting torso, his slingshot slung around his neck like a rubber noose. They watched until he was no more than a shape against all that sky up there, lifting the Y of his catapult, his left arm flexing and unflexing, his whole body a living arrow with a single barb.

Tan Cee called them up there later. The shudder in her voice was all they needed to send them hurrying after her. Up there they could look down and see everything that lay beyond Old Hope. The wind was strong enough to snatch away a person's voice and fling it down the hillside. Strewn across the carpet of decaying glory cedar leaves – like a scattering of feathered fruits – were birds: hill doves, brown and soft as innocence, johnny birds and pipirits and pikayoos. Ramiers – normally made grey by flight and distance – now glistened like polished slate around their feet. Cattle egrets, so white their wings threw back the light like mirrors, hummingbirds – little scraps of fallen rainbow – and
cee-cee birds and johnny-heads and blackbirds. Each of them knocked out of the sky. Each of them lying on the earth with shattered eyes.

Deeka made a hammock of her skirt and sat amongst the carcasses, shaking her head. Did they know? Did they know that long-time people, her people, used to believe that birds were the eyes of God? Did they know that? Eh?

She turned her gaze up at the glory cedar trees, their dark wind-hardened branches arched by age and time. ‘He must've hear me say it,' she muttered. ‘But I – I don' remember sayin it. I don' … '

She came to her feet and brushed the dead leaves off her dress. She turned towards Elena, taking in her daughter's swelling shape, her eyes gone dull with malice. ‘You won't touch 'im again,' she said. The words bubbled out of Deeka's throat like oil. ‘He come through you; but he never was your child.'

She turned her face up to the trees again, placed a toe against a bird and turned it over with her foot. ‘He vex,' she breathed. ‘He vex to kill.' And then, softly, wonderingly, ‘S'like he know hi time comin soon. So he quarrellin wit' God.'

T
HE CANE-CUTTING
season, the long, hot months they called the Stretch, brought with it the kind of labour that deadened the eyes and numbed the tongue. All Tan Cee's night-time whisperings in Pynter's ear, after his mother's hand had sent him blind again, were sopped away by tiredness.

It was two years since Birdie had left and these were the months they missed him most. They were the months of lowered voices and half-said things, when children tiptoed around the tempers of their parents. Evenings were reduced to grunts and gestures, and that smouldering far-eyed gaze that fixed itself on nothing in particular.

They came home each evening smelling of the heat and straw down there. They would try to wash the day away with bucketfuls of water tipped from high above their heads, scrubbing and scrubbing, but the day would remain with them. It stuck to their breaths and came out in their utterings over dinner. There was Lana's man who was about to walk and, hard as he tried, that long-face dog could not hide it. All a pusson had to do was watch the way he didn laugh with nobody no more. And that new-and-fancy sweetman walk he practising, never mind the crossing and uncrossing of them bow legs of his. As if a pusson didn know that he watchin 'imself in some fancy, freeze-up place in England or America. As if!

And right now in the middle of the Stretch, Pinny found herself with child. And her trouble was the trouble of every woman
who ever worked the canes – to lift the heavy bundles above her head and hand them to the loaders as if the baby was not there. There was no other way to do it, no easier way to carry cane. It would mean that in a coupla weeks, it really wouldn be there no more. Or she could make the choice that was hardly one at all: leave the canes, live on less or nuffing, and let the baby live. And did they notice that that McKinley foreman fella was makin eyes at Myna's girl-chile, who body only just begin to say things that she herself don' unnerstan? They must keep their eyes on her as often as the work allowed. But like all them years before, however close they kept to her, McKinley was sure to find some way. Knowing she didn have no father or brother or uncle there to make him feel the hard part of a machete. Knowing that as long as this valley shifted under the weight of cane and he counted their money every week, he would get away with murder.

They talked as if it were their fault; as if it were for them to find the answer to this botheration they'd been carrying all their lives. And this year there was more trouble. They hadn't realised it then, but it had started with the man who came to them a couple of years before, dressed in brightly polished leather shoes and a nicely ironed shirt. He'd arrived in a jeep and given them a different way to plant the canes. He wanted them to place the rows much closer than it made sense to do. He'd lost his temper when they told him what this meant: more borer worms, more of the skin-eating cow-itch plants making beds of themselves in there. And certainly more of the useless love vines that looked like flames and fed on the sap of canes. He didn't even allow them time to mention the trouble they would have cutting through the tangle.

They'd planted more sugar cane on less soil. And with the land they were left with, they were told to cut more roads. Later in the year, when the plants were shoulder-high, the truck with chemicals came to kill the borer worms and the flaming yellow vines. But it was when the green machines with wheels that turned like mills arrived at the start of the cutting season that
they understood the reason for those roads. They replaced the men. They spat out the canes in mutilated heaps behind them. Now everyone was struggling to keep up with the thundering machines, while the men stood by and watched them kill off in half an hour the job it took them all of a day to do. The machines cut, a few men trimmed, the women packed and lifted. McKinley argued it was less work. At the end of each week, he looked at the heaps, turned his eyes up at the sky, guessed the exact amount of sugar that must be lost given the heat of the sun that day, the amount of rain that didn't fall and whatever else his mood or mind came up with. Then he cut their pay accordingly.

Pynter looked up from his dinner one evening, uncrossed his legs and glanced over at Peter. His brother was humming to himself while eating. ‘Tomorrow,' Pynter said, ‘you come to Top Hill wiv me?'

Peter threw a sideways glance at him. ‘Fuh what?'

‘When you come, I show you.'

‘S'awright.'

‘S'awright, no; or s'awright, yes – which one?'

‘It depend.' His brother licked his fingers and resumed his humming.

Peter was as their father had said he would be: broader hands and a fuller body, with muscles that had already begun to fill his shoulders.

‘Depend on what?' Pynter felt the irritation rising in his throat. He swallowed hard on it.

During all these evenings of the women returning home, preparing dinner and handing them their plates, he'd been wanting something different from his brother. He wanted to offer him a feeling – an emotion that nobody in the world apart from their nephew, Paso, had been able to put the proper words to. He wanted to let him have that portion of the ache and desperation that was due him. To have Peter also put his hand around this thing his teacher told him in his school above the ocean.

Pynter slipped his hand behind him, unstuck the handle of his slingshot from his waist and dropped it at his brother's feet. ‘You come wiv me, I give you this.'

Night was already settling like a fine coating of dust on the furthest slopes, but here where they stood on the summit of Top Hill, the last of the evening sun still left daubs of honey on leaves and bark and branches. They could see the foothills, and the villages encircling the hillside, and, below them, the greying emptiness that had replaced the canes.

He pointed out to Peter all the places his brother already knew. Told him also what it was like beneath the gatherings of trees that hugged the hollows in the hillsides like the bunched hairs of an armpit; the overhangs of rocks and the far, fragmented patches of grey where the coconuts rose like tall upstanding brooms and swept the sky. He kept talking because he wanted to keep his brother distracted until the foreman's whistle came.

The sound reached across the valley like a stricken bird-cry and released their people. It turned his brother's gaze down towards the valley. Pynter fell silent, his eyes on Peter's face.

His brother brought his finger to his mouth. The catapult hung loosely in his other hand. Pynter pointed at the long meandering line that began spilling onto the white dust road – a wavering thread of stick shapes, thin as drought, with the dying sun glancing off the angles of their limbs like blades.

‘Show me our modder,' he said to Peter. Pynter paused a while, then pitched his voice more urgently at Peter. ‘Show me Tan Cee.'

His brother was leaning further forward and away from him. His eyes narrowed down to slits.

‘Show me Deeka,' Pynter said.

Peter looked up. He shook his head. ‘I can't make them out, Pynto,' he said, his voice stuck somewhere between bewilderment and panic. ‘I can't.' He passed his arm across his face.

Pynter told his brother what he remembered of Paso's words – ‘In the evenin dark, my people walk to the time of clocks, whose hands have spanned so many years … ' – and how those words had changed the way he looked at cane. Spoilt it in a way.

Their nephew must have seen this, he said. He must have stood on one of these hills and looked down on the fermenting valley and watched that long grey line of men and women dragging their shadows behind them like an extra weight, with the dust of the old cane road frothing around their feet.

Paso had to have watched the way night gathered around them, seen the darker mounds of canes piled high behind them, stretching all the way down to the darkness that was the sea.

And he too must have let this enter him and settle there; must have lived this quiet desperation, this helplessness that was so much like the way he, Pynter, used to feel when he watched their father fumbling about him for all the familiar things that he could no longer see.

‘Dat's why I goin to burn it, Peter,' he told his brother softly. ‘Everything. S'why I goin to kill cane. For good. Don' know when. But before I dead I do it.'

Peter must have told Patty about his decision to set fire to Old Hope, because she had her eyes on him.

Evenings, he returned from school, spread his books out on the floor and began murmuring over the pages. He would lift his head from time to time and glimpse his youngest aunt hovering at the edges of his vision. She never looked straight at him, always seemed to be studying a cloud or something when he raised his eyes at her. It bothered him, this sly-eyed shyness, this not-watching-while-you-saw-everything expression on her face, and he felt a lift of relief when she walked into the house one Friday and lowered herself beside him.

She looked down at his book, slipped a sideways glance at him and smiled. She didn't touch his face or tug at his ear lobes or call
him Sugarboy this time. Just sat there shifting her large eyes from the pages to his face and back again. He eased himself up from his elbows. She rested a hand on him, a gentle staying touch.

‘What you reading?' she said.

He tried to figure out a fast way to tell her, realised he couldn't, shrugged and said, ‘Don' fink you'll unnerstan.'

She rose to her feet, paused briefly at the doorway and walked away. And all he could think of afterwards was that quick last glance of hers. That dark-eyed flash of hurt.

She missed dinner that evening. She had never done that before. Leroy came, nodded at no one in particular and took away some food. She didn't come the next day either.

Patty's absence left a scooped-out hole in the yard – a hollowness that entered him and settled in his stomach. He found he couldn't clear his mind of the little smile that had briefly creased her face.

He noticed something different about the women's conversations. They no longer spoke about their time down in the valley. Words came from them in fragments, like half-formed thoughts; got picked up by the others; were left aside and returned to later. Short sentences, partly said, never finished by the one who started talking. As if they were helping each other remember things they thought they'd long forgotten.

But with the passing evenings and Patty's space still vacant, he eventually worked out the pattern of their talk, and marvelled. It was a kind of weaving. It was what Patty did with bits of thread and cloth: words and thoughts, and little bits of meaning they looped around each other, the way they plaited hair.

They were remembering a child whose name they did not mention. Her mother had carried her not nine but ten months and a half. Her mother was not worried, it had happened in the family before. And when that baby came, they saw that her limbs were longer than any other in the family. Her ear lobes were darker than the children who had come before her and she did not cry. She did not talk either, not for eighteen months. And
the first word they ever heard from her was ‘nice'. As if she was noticing the world for the first time and found favour with it.

It took her just as long to walk. When she rose to her feet, people looked on her and thought of things that flowed: bamboo, vines and rivers. Her father regretted the name he'd given her, always said that he should have called her Grace, because of the way she walked and the way that girl-chile changed him.

He carried her everywhere. A man rough as the stones he'd worked in all his life would stop to notice flowers, to fondle the smoothness of a pebble, the patterns on a leaf or tree trunk. Like she was teaching him another way – a better way to be.

He carved little things for her – animals and human shapes that looked like people they knew. He taught himself to braid her hair. He would've killed the man, or dog, or insect that dared to upset her. She brought a sweetness on this rough-hewn man, a softness he did not know he possessed. A gentleness that surprised him.

All this meant she did not go to the lil infant school on Senna Hill, to recite all dem multiplyin tables-an'-chairs, an' alphabeticals like his children who came before her. He did not want the world to touch her, didn't want her stained. Sometimes too much love don't feel like love. Sometimes too much love is prison. And if – if … a pusson didn …

Pynter left his unfinished bowl of food beside his stone. He could still hear their murmurings when his feet hit the asphalt road. He would walk tonight. He wanted to walk. He would take the old cane road along the river and go towards the sea. He would sit on one of the hills above the bay and think about their secrets: all the things they never said, which stared out at him from the back of their eyes. All the things they held back about John Seegal. And why, why when he thought he was so close to understanding it; when he thought he saw the answer right there in front of him, he could never close his hands around it. Why it was so difficult to grab hold of the thing that really made his grandfather walk.

Patty was still on his mind when he started hiding the dollar his mother gave him every morning, in the little nest he'd made for his slingshot beneath the house. He left home early and walked the eight miles to and from his school above the ocean. Walking gave him time to think about Patty, and the woman teacher who had stepped into their class the year before, dropped her black leather bag on the floor beside her desk and begun talking about mirrors. She'd heard about their mother's little mirrors that they brought to school and rested on the floor, she said, so that women teachers could walk over without knowing, which was why she'd decided to wear trousers. It made better sense than causing irrecoverable injury to the little fool stupid enough to try it. She'd paused and offered the class a twisted little smile. And by the way, she was not there to educate anybody. She was getting paid to teach. If they didn't understand the difference, they had no reason to be sitting there in front of her.