Pynter Bender (27 page)

T
HE 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 about 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.'

She scooped up the bottles and held one out to him. He shook his head.

Pynter looked her in the eyes. ‘I comin back, not so?'

‘You intend to?' She flicked an irritated wrist at him. ‘I don' know why you askin me! You don' have to go for nobody call Marilon. Nobody sendin you.'

‘I have to go,' he said.

H
E EXPECTED
Miss Maddie to topple over the edge of the veranda any minute soon. Most of her was already over the wall. She was shielding her eyes with both hands. Sounds were coming out of her, rapid and indecipherable. She was pushing her body further and further out.

‘Coño,' she said. ‘No créo … que.'

‘I'm Pynter,' he said.

Her face was even more swollen than he remembered it, her eyes more puffed, and what before had been a hint of grey at her temples was cotton white now.

‘Lord ha' mercy, I see you comin, an' I thought … I thought …'

Pynter offered her a smile.

‘Cucaracha!' she muttered.

‘I come to see Paso,' he said.

‘Coo-nyo! De other one, he same like you?'

‘He name Peter.'

She nodded. ‘He same like you?'

‘He name Peter.'

Miss Maddie swung her head as if he'd slapped her. ‘Peter – he …?'

‘He more like yuh brodder, Gideon, but Peter much-much better lookin.'

‘He not here,' she said. She lifted a hand to touch him, checked herself and dropped it quickly.

‘Blood never lie,' she said. ‘I mistake you fo' my boy.'

Her house looked smaller than he remembered it. The glistening white of the concrete walls had been replaced by the creeping brown of water stains. A fissure ran along the concrete walkway. The yellow walls inside the veranda had been clumsily repainted in places.

There was no trace of his father's house. No sign of the fire that had destroyed it. Weeds grew there now, and tall stems of honeysuckle held together by a riot of nettle vines. She'd planted peppers and sweet potatoes, red cabbages and pum-pum yams.

If he and Peter had children, they would say their father's name to them and tell them who he was. But it would mean little to them, even less to those who came after them. Rememberin was like watchin a pusson walkin a long road, losin them in the distance, disappearin with time. He looked back at Miss Maddie.

‘You,' she said, turning her head to where the house had been, ‘you had de best part of 'im.'

‘Miss Maddie?'

The woman lifted her chin.

‘Gideon, he got anything in common with my – with our father?'

He thought she wasn't going to answer him. She'd turned her head away. ‘Love all yuh chilren same way,' she said. ‘If you can't do dat, is better to pretend.'

She turned and left him there.

Later, he stretched out on the wall of the veranda and watched the night pass. Miss Maddie had stood behind the curtains of her window for a long time looking out at him. She'd brought him a bowl of soup and laid it on the little wooden table in the corner of the veranda. ‘Paso not comin,' she said. ‘Sleep with de window open.' He did not ask her why.

In the night Pynter thought about what she had said to him, that he had got the best part of their father. Those words reminded him of a walk he had taken with Tan Cee once. They'd
come to a cool green place over the ocean, a place that seemed far removed from anywhere he'd ever been, as if they'd stepped into a dream together.

Tan Cee had nudged his arm. But he'd already seen what she was pointing at. There, amidst a small crowd of guineps, stood another tree. It was paler, wider and straighter than the rest, with leaves that shivered at the slightest breath of air. It stood back from the precipice that fell in a wide white plunge all the way down to the bottom of a cliff. The guinep trees were like a huddle of dark-limbed people round it.

‘See?' she had said.

Tan Cee had nudged him closer, and he realised that it was not the tree that she was pointing at but small mounds of stone that stood up from the earth around the trunks like the piled-up heads of children. Here, she said, beneath this tree, on the lip of this precipice, was the place from which their people, the people of the canes, used to launch themselves.

‘An' die?' he had asked.

‘An' fly.'

‘To where?'

‘'Cross dere.' She'd lifted her chin as if the ocean itself was a destination. To that place they had been brought from.

‘A stone for each one that make it – an' I not askin you to believe it.'

If people didn believe that any more, she'd said,' twas because they forget how to believe in things that used to come so easy once.' Twas what happened to chickens, she s'posed: still had their wings, but 'twas long time since they forget how to use them.

She'd shrugged. It didn matter, though. ‘What matter is, we the ones got left behind. Mebbe we the ones who 'fraid to fly. P'raps we didn wan' to go back to face de ones who hand us over.'

She'd turned towards the tree. What was certain was that hands had planted that tree there, shimmering and silver even in
this leaf gloom. They had no name for it and it was the only one like it they knew. Old, she said, older than memory. Old as the people who brought the root with them. P'raps it was a tiny bit of root that got tangled in a woman's hair. Or it might have been the seed of some fruit that had slept in the bowels of a child. Maybe it was a special parting gift from someone, since it was the kind of tree you noticed even in the night. It guided you to itself, even when there was no wind. And it was true that in this quiet, windless day, he could hear it, in an endless conversation with itself.

He'd stepped back into the day with her, bleary-eyed and dazed. They'd looked past the cane belt up towards the foothills. Old Hope was no more than a gap between the rising hills, blue with distance. And he'd realised for the first time that a stranger to this island might lift their eyes up to those hills and never know that anybody lived there.

‘Your modder, the others – dey give you tings you goin forget,' she'd said. ‘I give you someting dat can't leave you.' She said it quietly, fiercely. Was distracted, for a moment, by the flight of a pair of birds making slow circles over the tiny island just offshore.

‘Storm bird,' she said.

‘Albatross,' he said.

‘That the right name?' She'd shaped the word with her lips.

‘Uh-huh.'

Tan Cee had looked at him. ‘What make de difference, Pynto? Wiv you an' Peto? What make you get to go to dat high-falutin school an' Peter never get to come wiv you?'

‘Was a mistake,' he said. ‘A mistake dat y'all make. My father, when he left working in hi garden, he went home for good. The man I meet was not de man his chilren know. De man I meet was tired. He had enough of livin. An' all of de time I spend with 'im, my fadder was jus' waitin to die. S'like you standin here waitin to cross dat lil stretch of water to dat lil island over there.
I was de one y'all send to help 'im make de crossing. Cuz thaa'z the place I come from, not so?' Cross dere? Little as I was, I was s'pose to know dat place. To ease hi passage towards it. And yunno, Tan, I help 'im. An' he pay me back. He used to tell me, he wan' to teach me every useful thing he know. He try. Even after Bostin come and force 'im to send me to school, he try. Dat's why…'

‘You carry dat inside you all dis time?' she'd said.

‘All the time,' he'd said.

The nasal tones of Miss Maddie and Paso's fretful mumblings woke Pynter early the next morning. The door to the veranda flung open.

‘You didn bring 'im inside?' he shouted.

‘He didn wan' to come inside,' Miss Maddie said.

Paso held him in a quick, tight embrace. ‘You had me soo worried, Uncle. Thought I was goin crazy. I see you got de word.'

‘Windy tell me,' Pynter said. ‘S'how I know you awright.'

‘I couldn give 'er a time. Jus' had to pass the word for you to meet me here.' Paso leaned suddenly into him. ‘I hear about de flippin foolishness you wan' to do, and you can't.'

‘Jus' tell me how to get dere. Walk me through the place.'

‘You not goin nowhere.'

‘Who goin stop me? You?'

‘You might be me uncle, but I much older'n you – y'unnerstan?'

‘I still yuh uncle, though. Tell me how to get there.'

Their argument brought Miss Maddie hurrying out to them. They were pointing their fingers in each other's face and talking in hot, rapid spurts. Her head moved with the wagging of their fingers.

‘Crica!' she said, and went back inside.

Pynter finally got what he wanted out of Paso. There was a house above the Carenage in San Andrews, Paso said. He had
people there, almost as close as family. Better than family in some cases. There was another house much further south in the Drylands, a relative of theirs that Pynter didn't know. Paso listed the things that Pynter should look for in order to get to those places easily. Whatever happened, he said, and depending on where he was, Pynter should head for one of those houses.

‘You still write pretty words?' Pynter said.

‘No time,' Paso said.

‘How come?'

‘This, all this…' Paso waved at the air outside. ‘Word reach me that you save a fella from burnin last Guy Fawkes Night. You into savin fellas?'

‘You would ha' let 'im burn?'

His nephew straightened up. Even in the early-morning gloom, Pynter felt Paso's irritation.

‘Tillock was your friend, not so? And that other lil one…'

‘Jordan, he wasn' no other lil one. He was a fella big as me.'

‘You didn't have Tillock and him in mind when you save dat fella, not so? Well…' Paso pushed his back against the wall, shooting his legs out at the same time. ‘Next time keep both of dem in mind, okay?'

Pynter turned to Paso. ‘I tell you what I work out,' he said. ‘To kill a pusson, you have to make dem different. You have to change dem in yuh mind; yuh need to make dem less dan you. You have to feel you have de right. You feel you have de right?'

‘If de reason big enough.'

‘An' who decide de reason big enough? Not anodder pusson?'

Pynter slipped his hand along the waist of his trousers. He pulled out a small book and tossed it in Paso's lap. ‘Page seventy-four. Wilfred Owen. English fella. Dey say h'was de greatest war poet ever live. In 1917, he join a war. Read what happm
inside
of 'im befo' dat same war kill 'im.' Pynter stood up. ‘S'matter o' fact, I contend dat dat same war kill Missa Wilfred Owen twice. Keep de book, Paso. An' tell yuh modder thanks fo' me.'
Miss Maddie's house stood on the northern end of the ridge that ended at Glory Cedar Rise.

It was a steady climb up through the gardens of pigeon peas and sweet potatoes. Further on, through the brushland of sage and borbook, the soil coarsened under Pynter's feet, then became a trail of slipping gravel until he reached the small settlement above Old Hope they called Top Hill. He was less than half a mile from home, and yet the world was different here. The little wooden houses were as frail and brightly painted as kites. They seemed, in fact, to be held up by the winds that forever pushed against them, leaning into the blasts that came straight off the ocean.

The people up here were different too. They rarely came down to the valley. He felt comfortable under the children's dark-eyed scrutiny which took in everything and gave nothing away. As he walked along the track, they did not give him way, not even the youngest. To get past, he had to step around them and yet they took no offence when his shoulders pushed against theirs. In fact, standing as they were in this high mid-morning wind, their heads tilted at the ocean and their clothing flapping like boneless wings around their bodies, they seemed to be contemplating flight.

These were the true hill people of Old Hope, born and brought up in the middle of this skimming ocean wind. It had flattened their stomachs and lengthened their limbs and left them with that dreamy, far-eyed gaze. At least that was Deeka's way of explaining it.

Just when he was about to leave them, he heard the thud of naked heels behind him.

Pynter looked over his shoulder and saw a child – slim and long-limbed like the others, her hair piled up on her head like tufts of cus-cus grass – hurrying after him.

‘Where you from?' she said.

‘Down there,' he said, pointing past the trees to where he thought his home was.

She shook her head. She did not believe him.

‘You been away?'

‘Not been, I goin.'

‘You don' look like Down-Dere people.'

‘What Down-Dere people look like?'

‘Not like you,' she said.

‘How I look, den?'

She shrugged. ‘Not like dem.'

Someone behind her called a name, a woman's voice, soft to his ears and musical. The child lifted a shoulder in acknowledgement.

She looked up at him. She'd tensed her forehead into a faint pleat. ‘I ask too much question, not so?'

‘That's what they tell you?' he said.

She shook her head. ‘Nuh, dat's what I know. Don' know how else a pusson s'pose to unnerstan tings.' She'd become fretful and slightly restless. ‘When you go away, you comin back?'

‘Don' know,' he said. ‘Don' know if I wan' to.'

Lil Miss Iona was smiling when she turned back to him. ‘My brodder Glendo goin make a kite fo' me dis evenin,' she said. She turned and left him abruptly for the others. Halfway there, she lifted an arm and waved. ‘When you come next time, I show you how to fly it.'

As soon as Patty saw him coming she came down her steps and pushed a finger in his face. Who the hell did he think he was to put so much worry in people head. And playing smart man wiv it too-besides, by coming to her place, knowing she was the one who could not stop him. But he shouldn fool himself, if she wasn' as big-an'-clumsy as she was right now, she would do to him the self-same things that were playing on Elena's mind.

She would stop him: she would break a leg of his, or hit him so hard he would go right back to sleep and she wouldn give a damn if he don' wake up this time, or if it mean they had to carry him on their backs for the rest of their lives.