Pynter Bender (19 page)

‘What he say?' Deeka's face could have been cut out of the stones that packed the yard.

Pynter looked at the man and a quiver ran through him. For despite the rum-reddened eyes, the dry white lips, the tired, ash-grey face that seemed to have been charred to the bone by illness, the brain that lived under the cotton-white head of hair was as active as live coals.

‘He say he wastin time wiv all dis ole-talk,' Pynter said.

Chilway's head jerked sideways at him. He rested the radio on his lap and grinned.

‘Ah! A lil epistemologist. Secondary?'

Deeka nodded, her eyes on the man's hand.

The pleats on Chilway's forehead deepened. He was leaning forward now, his hand adjusting his glasses. ‘Birdie never tell me 'bout this one. He yours?'

‘He ours. He was here last time you come. He grow. We call 'im Pynto. He got Birdie second name. He de first in de family. First in Ole Hope.' She opened her palms at Chilway. ‘And the way he goin, yunno … '

‘I know,' Chilway cut in. ‘The rest round here will follow after him. He show them that is possible. Now, Miss Dee.' The man's eyes were holding Deeka's and the expression on his face was strange. A hardness resided in his eyes now. His voice had also changed. ‘Gimme one good reason why I shouldn keep my finger on dis switch an' put my mouth to it. Make me unnerstan why me – big man like me – who been doin this job fo' thirty years, who never lose a man, why I should spoil my name for Birdie.'

The words had issued from the corners of his mouth – flat, emptied of the humour he had greeted them with when he arrived.

Deeka cleared her throat. Her hand drifted in the direction of her daughters. ‘We, we the cane, Missa Chilway. We take the heat. Y'unnerstan? Dey,' she gestured at Pynter, ‘de children, dey what come out of it. Of us. They the rum, the sugar, the …' Deeka shook her head, as if to clear it of some pain. ‘We bring dem in de worl'; we not s'posed to see them go before we go. Else, what sense it make in livin – in livin like we live? Tell me, Missa Chilway, then what's de use o' cane?'

A tear slipped down her face. She turned her back and cleared it.

Chilway rose to his feet, the little machine still in his hand, still turned on, the crackly voices coming from it. He flicked the switch. The machine died. Peter eased his back off the plum tree and began humming to himself.

Morning had just begun to streak the peaks of the Mardi Gras. It hadn't reached them yet. Wouldn't for another half-hour or so.

Deeka fed them fried fish and bread and cups of scalding cocoa. Pynter went off and returned with a shirtful of water lemons, and guavas whose flesh the five men sniffed and marvelled at.

And Patty, only for that morning, became the dream she knew that Chilway always wished for: she brought his plate to him, she poured his cup of cocoa, brushed the breadcrumbs off his shirt,
and when he finished eating she brought him the water to wash his hands, and poured. The man looked up at her, his face gone soft and vulnerable as a boy's, and said in a low, unsteady voice, ‘What's the opposite of death, Miss Pretty?'

‘Life,' she told him, smiling.

He shook his head. ‘Everybody get it wrong,' he said. ‘The whole world get it wrong. The opposite of death is beauty.'

Then, as if he'd just been reminded of something, he looked across at Pynter. ‘And you, Missa Secondary? What you say?'

Pynter had been allowing his mind to drift along the top of the island, the high inscrutable places of wind and silence that looked down on the villages. He'd been thinking about a name that had been said to him which was supposed to mean something. He blinked at the man and shrugged. ‘Ain't got no opposite,' he said, ‘jus' … '

‘Just?'

‘Difference.'

The man rested his elbows on his knees and leaned forward. The frown lines deepened on his forehead. ‘And how you work that out, young fella?'

Pynter lifted his shoulders again. He felt his mother's eyes on him, glanced at her and caught her quick cautioning gaze. He sensed the sudden wariness in the women too. He felt his mouth go dry.

‘Talk to me, young fella,' Chilway said, his voice gone whispery and impatient.

Pynter was suddenly afraid too – that whatever he might say now, this man who was looking at him so steadily, so strangely, might find something in his words that would send his hand reaching for his radio.

Pynter licked his lips. ‘Stone blunt; knife sharp. You – you kill somefing wiv a stone, or you kill it wiv a knife – same – same intention, same result. Ain't – ain't got no opposite.'

Chilway nodded. ‘Just difference.' He split a guava and scooped out the soft flesh with a thumb. He held it up before him then placed it in his mouth. ‘How old you say you was?'

‘I didn say how old I was.'

‘He twelve,' Elena said, her voice strident with a warning for him and an apology for the man.

Chilway smiled at her. ‘They teach you that in Secondary?'

Pynter shook his head. ‘S'what I think, Missa Chilway. And – and if it got a opposite to death, is not no life.'

‘Is?'

‘Knowin.'

‘Knowing?'

‘Uh-huh.'

‘Don' know what wrong wiv 'im,' Elena cut in, her voice pitched even higher. ‘Dis – dis boooy!'

‘Yuh miss the point,' Chilway told her sharply, irritably. ‘And that mean,' he held a rigid finger up at her, ‘you miss the problem. Cuz Missa Secondary here jus' show you whaaz frightening this whole country right now, and why they want all of 'em in jail.' The man jabbed a finger at his head. ‘The mind they got belong to them, and they don' give a damn who know it.'

He was breathing heavily. The rum had loosened his jaw and from time to time he lifted his shoulders and dropped them as if he were trying to shake off the drunkenness.

‘Times change, Miss Dee. The job turning into something different. Things gone upside down. Everything.' He looked at the radio in his hand. ‘I wish everybody had one o' these so I could talk in it just once and make them understand that. Used to be a time when they send me for a fella like Birdie. I'll take two or three of my men with me. If I know him well, if he is a regular, I'll go alone. I remind him that if he take a farmer goat and cook oil-down with it, without that farmer consent, is tantamount to theft, no matter how much his children starving. So he should expect me to come for him. He unnerstan that. His woman
might start bawlin becuz life just got a lil harder for her and the children that he leave her with. I bring him in whole. A coupla years later he come back out in one piece. Okay, not all the time. I not a perfect man and some o' them does try me patience so I have to bus' dem arse. A coupla blows with this,' he pointed at his baton, ‘is enough to turn them into angels. Is not the same as picking up a coupla schoolchilren and telling them they guilty of dissent and dissatisfaction. It don't have no – no,' he looked angrily about him, ‘no elegance in that. I can't hold that up in front of a magistrate and say, “Your Honour, take a look at the quantity and the size of dissatisfaction this young fella here commit and see for yourself what a criminal he is.”'

For a moment Patty's fingering of her earrings arrested him.

‘You give a man a gun, is not just a weapon that you hand him. You give him permission to find out how it work. One day he goin to use it on somebody, if only to make it do what it s'posed to do. Is the only way he know that is really what they say it is. Is the only way he know that is for real, y'unnerstan? The trouble is it got a kind of man who never satisfy with one time. He do it over and over again. He don't need no provocation. S'like he need reminding all the time what killing really feel like. That's Sylus, Miss Dee. That's the fella you shame yesterday. He'll come again, when y'all not even looking. He done it before.'

He wagged a chin at Peter first and then at Pynter. ‘Watch out for y'all children. Is the children that they after.'

One of his men reached down and helped him to his feet.

Chilway stood at the edge of the yard looking about him as if he'd forgotten what he'd come for. He cocked a finger at Deeka.

‘I hope you never have to ask yuhself if saving Birdie was worth all the trouble he left y'all with.'

They watched the fellas help him down the path.

S
IX MONTHS AFTER
Birdie left, they climbed the foothills to watch the tractors leave – a slow, juddering procession of dirty steel, trundling eastwards towards the cleft between the hills that marked the beginning of the Drylands. They did not return home until evening, not until the thundering far off in the distance died completely and the smell of trees and the river replaced the fetor of machine oil.

The tractors had left a sloping expanse of wasted straw behind them and the smell of exposed soil. They'd taken what remained of the dry season with them also, for the furnace of the valley cooled soon after, and now Old Hopers were turning up their heads to the softer skies of another halfway season.

This was their time, Tan Cee said, these days of quiet air, and light as brittle and pure as glass, when the moisture that the hills released was cool on the skin, when bananas bloomed momentously – the curved head of their single, elongated flower straining to lick the earth like giant scarlet tongues. And silk-cotton trees buried deep inside the climbing forests floated fertility messages on the wind – tiny seeds wrapped in bolls of cotton that were so thin and light it was like catching bits of solid air.

If Deeka noticed this change, she did not show it. From the night that Birdie left them, she'd been searching for signs of his arrival somewhere. She studied the spiralling fall of leaves, the flutterings of the perishing moths inside the lampshade, the
unsteady flight of seagulls – as if there ought to be some meaning in the rapid scribblings of their wings on the winds that drove them inland.

She hardly ate. She hoped aloud that Birdie had escaped to a country where he at least understood the language, which o' course meant Englan' o' America.

Just when Pynter thought there would be no end to this grumbling, sour-faced vigil, the evening came when he watched his grandmother follow the flight of a single cattle egret that lifted itself from the gloom of the valley floor. It rose fast and steady, in a dazzling arc, like a streak of light against the smoke green of the hillside. It looped high and hard, seemed to hit a sudden wind up there above their heads, then it began descending in a dizzying whorl towards them. Deeka brought the palms of her hands together. She held them before her, her body pushed forward in a nervous, aching prayer. The bird settled like a fluttering fragment of tissue on the tres-beau mango tree above the house.

His grandmother spread her arms and smiled. ‘Birdie awright,' she said. ‘Leasways, I feel so now.'

Pynter turned towards his scooter, smiling, because his mother and his aunts had already begun to remember Birdie differently.

Evenings, Patty became Chilway, while Tan Cee and Elena took turns pretending to be Deeka. And because it sweetened the jokes a lot more, Peter walked and talked like Birdie. And it did not matter what his grandmother said or did to kill the fun, they made a fool of Birdie over dinner and laughed about his chupidness.

Now, with Deeka's mind at ease, Patty remembered aloud the time when Birdie stole a whiteman's dog and Chilway came for him. Patty high-stepped to the middle of the yard, her bowl of soup cradled under one arm. She pulled down the sides of her mouth, half-closed one eye, dropped her shoulders and leaned her head like Chilway.

‘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.'

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 looked 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.