Pynter Bender Read online

  JACOB ROSS

  Pynter Bender

  For Esau and our father,

  Janine, Jamal, Nichole and Akilah

  For Grenada, and those who will come after….

  Being lost is worth the journey home…

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Book One: Eyes

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Book Two: Hands

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty One

  Book Three: Heart

  Chapter Thirty Two

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Chapter Thirty Four

  Chapter Thirty Five

  Chapter Thirty Six

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  Chapter Thirty Eight

  Chapter Thirty Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty One

  Chapter Forty Two

  Chapter Forty Three

  Chapter Forty Four

  Chapter Forty Five

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  BOOK ONE

  Eyes

  1

  SATURDAY MORNINGS, THE women came down to the river. They were larger than their menfolk. They balanced basins as wide as ships on their heads and their voices carried across the foothills and washed the bright morning air.

  As soon as their babble reached him, Pynter left home, let the slant of the hill carry him down towards the water to watch them wash and talk the day away. He chose a large boulder that overlooked the field of stones around which the water boiled and frothed before disappearing through the dark leaf tunnel of the bamboos overhead. He just sat there, feeding his eyes on the glitter and the green and on the throbbing reds and yellows of their washing spread out on the soap-bleached stones. The glare hurt his eyes. Aunt Tan Cee kept reminding him that he must rest those eyes of his, they were new and delicate, taking in the shapes of things, still making sense of the darkness and the light and all the mixing in between.

  Each woman had her own little acre of stones on which she spread her washing. Up to their knees in water, they beat the clothing against the boulders and flashed their soapy corn husks over them. He’d grouped their names in his head according to the sound of them – Ursula, Petra, Barbara and Clara; Cynty, Lizzie, Tyzie, Shirley. And then there was Miss Elaine, her name all pretty and by itself, just like the way she was.

  Pynter knew them by the stories they told each other and laughed over: the illnesses of their children, the appetites of their menfolk, the little things they wanted for themselves that their men would never give them. He heard them even when their voices dipped; they seemed to bring their heads together, especially when their talking turned to terrible things. Like why pretty Miss Madrone no longer came to the river with them. She carried an illness between her thighs, which her man had brought home to her from the tourist ship he worked on. He was due back in three months and only God knew what he would bring back to her this time. Pynter learned about the child that Sadi Marie’s eleven-year-old daughter was carrying for Sadi Marie’s man, while Sadi was accusing every young bull in Old Hope because she could not make herself believe the truth. And then their voices would go lower still and the women would speak of what a man called Gideon had done to his mother a coupla months before Peter and he were born. Gideon – he’d heard the name before, always said with lowered voices, always with a sideways glance as if he might be there among them listening. Once Deeka, his grandmother, had used that name in the yard and it had paused his mother’s hands over the dishes she was washing, brought a deadness to her face.

  Suddenly the women seemed to notice he was there and they fell silent. Miss Lizzie would not take her eyes off him. Her eyes were dark and shiny like the berries that grew on vines beside the road, berries Aunt Tan Cee said were poison.

  His presence bothered Miss Lizzie. She said so all the time, and loud enough for him to hear. She said so with steady staring eyes, and lips that barely moved. She repeated it so often, the others no longer seemed to hear her: that he, dat ‘Jumbie Boy’, didn have no right just sittin on dat stone an’ watchin people; that he, dat ugly likkle mako-boy, was like a shadow on her shoulder and she hated it.

  He’d grown accustomed to her words the way he had the sandflies that bit into his skin and left little needle points of itching there. He’d put it down to what the women said about her. That her belly was poisoned. That something in there killed the babies she was carrying a coupla months before they born. That she blamed it on the weakness of the men who placed their seed in her, and she would have any woman’s man if she thought his child would survive her insides. Which was why, Miss Dalene said, a pusson was prepared to put up with the natral badness of that woman.

  This morning Miss Lizzie came to the river with an ugly mouthful of words for him. She saw him there and laid her basin down. She moved her lips as if she was about to speak and then, without a word, she turned her head down to her washing. He could sense the heat in her; it came out of her skin like smoke. And soon enough she began tossing words over her shoulders at him.

  ‘What he doing here! What it want ’mongst big people, eh? Why dem don’ go an’ play with devil-chilren like theyself? Eh?’

  It was a river morning, brimming with sunlight, the kind that made everything glitter and vibrate, and above the babble of the water he could hear the leaves of the bamboo shu-shuing like so many people making polite conversation. A shower of dragonflies, little strips of foil, drew his gaze away from her, and when he looked round to her again she’d left her patch of stones and was moving towards him. His heart began to race because she’d never looked so mad before. Miss Elaine called out her name and Miss Lizzie swung her head around, her arm flashing out behind her as if to squash a fly.

  She was breathing hard when she reached him, and all he could feel was her hate, like the sting of the sun on his naked skin. He turned his eyes down to where her feet were in the water, studying the busy weave of light around her ankles. The other women were saying nothing.

  ‘Whapm, you born without a tongue too? Say something. Talk! You can’t talk?’ She turned towards the others. ‘What kind o’ people make funny chilren so? I hear he come from beast not yooman been. Dat so? Dat’s what your modder get from sleepin wid de Devil, y’hear me?’

  He unfolded his legs from under him, shifted his gaze towards her face, worked his mouth because something hard and choking had caught itself inside his throat and he could not get it out.

  ‘Leave ’im, Lizzie. Is trouble you askin for,’ Miss Elaine said.

  Miss Elaine reminded him of his Aunt Patty – tall and brown and wavering like the bamboos. She had moonshine eyes too, large and shiny white. Miss Elaine had coiled the red dress she was wri
nging around her arms. It ran like a snake from her shoulder, the water was spilling onto her chest.

  Miss Lizzie laughed. ‘My arse! Trouble from who? Dat Bender tribe don’ frighten me. Your ever see yooman been with eye like dat? Look at ’im, black like sin with whiteman eye!’

  Before he realised it, he was running through the canes, the saw-edged leaves cutting at his face and arms and legs. And then he was running home across the field of stones that took him all the way down to that thick green copse of almond trees, Miss Lizzie’s laughter trailing behind him like an accusation.

  Aunt Tan Cee’s hands woke him that night. Most times he chose to sleep on the long wooden bench in the place they called the kitchen which no one ever cooked in. He slept on his back with his eyes wide open, they said. His twin brother, Peter, told him they shone like polished marbles in the lamplight.

  Tan Cee had unbuttoned his shirt without his knowing. She’d brought the lamp down close to his skin. With the other hand, she was passing a warm, damp cloth over his chest and arms and stomach. Pynter looked back at her through slitted eyes. She stroked her thumb across his brow and he felt a warmth seeping into his head.

  ‘Tell me what happm,’ she whispered.

  All he could see were her arms and face framed by the blue headwrap she always wore. The rest of her had melted into the darkness beyond her shoulders.

  ‘Don’ wan’ my eyes no more,’ he said. ‘Wish I never have dem.’

  She eased herself backwards. The lamplight dipped and fluttered and the whole room seemed to teeter with the flames.

  ‘Which you prefer, Sugarboy? If Santay come to take back your eyes, yuh’ll agree to give dem back?’ She lifted the cloth from his stomach and brought her face down close to his. She smelt of plant things – nutmeg oil, and the bay leaves she picked to make him tea. ‘You still got your baby eyes, that’s all. Ever see how baby eyes look? Just like yours – light like a whiteman eye. Time goin come when all dat daytime sun goin darken dem, like how fire darken wood. If whiteman used to born an’ live here, you think he eye not goin to get dark too? Just give it time, Pynto.’ Her fingers traced the welts across his arms and the small gashes on his face. ‘You not goin tell me what happm down dere, not so?’

  She came to her feet as if lifted by some invisible hand behind her. Now her face was a dark full moon above him. ‘Well, Elaine done come an’ tell me.’ She’d pulled her lips back so that he could see her teeth. ‘Come Saturday, you’n me goin down dere together.’ And suddenly she was no longer there, just the scent of nutmeg oil and the throb of her thumb above his eyes.

  The throb was still there when he climbed to the top of Glory Cedar Rise next morning to get nearer to the sun. To turn his face up towards it and outstare it. But the sun was a hot metallic eye that didn’t blink, and so it left a burning ember behind each socket in his head and reduced the green of the world to a charred and shapeless darkness.

  His eyes stared back at him from the glass of the cabinet in his mother’s hallway, the enamel of the cups in there, the flake of mirror above her bedhead, the water in the buckets brought home from the standpipe by the road. From the liquid, broken light of running river water. They stared back at him, pale like a washed-out sky, from behind the red curtains of his lids; were still staring back at him on Saturday, when Tan Cee arrived, placed a hand between his shoulder blades and steered him down towards the river.

  He could hear his naked feet pounding like a heartbeat against the earth and feel the sweat running down the drain of his back. He could smell the danger rising from his aunt as she pushed him along the winding path towards the women.

  He was thrust by his aunt’s hard hand among the swirl of voices: Miss Maisie’s teasing, Miss Lizzie’s laughter, bright and sharp like a blade against a stone. The chorus of chuckling and curses and the quietness that always surrounded Miss Elaine. Miss Elaine – tall and bright-eyed, under the bamboos as usual – another red dress coiled around her elbow as if she’d never left the river.

  Tan Cee left him standing in the water and walked towards the bank. The sun was a hot sheet on his skin, and the swirling cold water numbed his feet. He wanted to call to her, but the tightness in her face stopped him – that and the little knife that appeared in her palm, curved like a fingernail. Miss Lizzie saw it too. Her eyes followed the arc of the tiny blade as his aunt’s arms darted among the shrubbery, slipped through stems, gathering leaves.

  The women turned their heads back down to their washing, their large round shoulders hunched against the day. In the midst of all of them, Miss Lizzie seemed alone, her unblinking eyes fixed on his auntie’s face. Pynter turned towards the women and shivered. The silence among them was dense and tight and terrible.

  Returning from the bank, his auntie walked through the water towards him. She dropped the herbs on a stone beside his feet, tossed a handful of water on them and bent down to crush them with the heel of her palm. The plants surrendered their odours, which prickled like needles in his nostrils. And when the herbs had been mixed into a green and oozing paste, Tan Cee reached out and dragged him towards her. He was aware of her hands at his armpits, of his feet leaving the water, his body being lifted onto a tall stone so that all of the river lay before him, and all of the eyes of the women.

  She dragged his shirt from his shoulders, slipped his short trousers past his knees, and now he was naked, and he wasn’t embarrassed or afraid.

  Pynter stood there with her propping him up, still shivering in the heat, looking down at himself as if his body no longer belonged to him: his small penis dark and curved like a bean-pod; his stomach round and tight and smooth; his navel a tiny hill which his grandmother said had anchored him so stubbornly to his mother that when they’d severed it, it had almost killed her. And his feet, which his mother said had to have come from his father, Manuel Forsyth, because they were too long and narrow to be a Bender’s.

  The water fell in a sudden scalding shower down his shoulders. Its coldness knocked the breath out of him. It stopped his shivering. Tan Cee coated him in the sap of the plants and he felt his skin grow stiff and tight like paper, and then very, very slowly she rinsed the paste off him.

  Now he saw that each of the bruises he’d suffered the week before had risen up again, and stood like purple worms against his dark skin, as if they had only retreated to wait for his auntie’s hands to bring them back.

  ‘Look at ’im,’ she said. ‘He got anyting y’all boy-chile don’t have – dat is those of you who kin have! Hi skin don’t bruise-an’-bleed like everybody own? He different? Yes, he different. Lemme tell y’all what make ’im different: he mine! Dat’s what make ’im different. He mine.’ Her voice had climbed above the bamboos. It was bright and hard like the blade she carried somewhere in her bosom. ‘An’ so help me God, if dis ever happm again, I kill de bitch who cause it.’

  She swung her head away and turned to leave, with his clothes still tucked under her arm. He climbed down the stone to follow her.

  ‘Where you goin?’ Her rage washed over him like cold water. ‘You not leavin here now. You leave here when you ready. Y’hear me!’

  He watched the blue flash of her bright headscarf receding as she climbed the hill through the restless netting of the canes. He was left naked on the stone in the middle of the river before the eyes of the women.

  Santay was the woman who had given him back his sight. Hers was the first face he’d ever seen, the first lips that had shaped words before his eyes, the first eyes he’d ever looked into with his own.

  They hadn’t prepared him for her coming. Santay was Tan Cee’s friend – the woman who lived in a small wooden house above their valley, who spoke to the departed and knew every plant on earth that cured or killed. She knew poisons that could put a man to sleep for good or kill the fire in his loins. Tan Cee told him that. His aunt also told him that men never went to her, only the women. They carried their illnesses, their children and their tiredness to her. And there were those like Tan
Cee who, every new moon, travelled to her place, lit a fire in her yard, danced and sang songs which she repeated to him from time to time.

  He’d woken one morning and she was there – a woman with a man’s voice. He knew it was a woman because there was more breath around each word, and of course her smell. Men smelled of sweat and earth and meat things. They never smelled of plant things. His body had tensed, his skin flaring with the awareness of her presence. A hand that belonged to no one he knew rested briefly on his shoulder. Then two thumbs pressed hard against his eyes.

  ‘Leave ’im to me,’ the voice said.

  They left him in the room with her and it became a war in which her hands seemed to reach out from anywhere and hurt him. His body was crouched, his nerves all flared and snarling, and whenever he felt her move he struck out in a wide, violent arc. But she was too quick, seemed to be everywhere at the same time. He lashed out until his arms were aching, and then two strong hands were pinning his arms against his sides. He stood there screaming for Tan Cee.

  She said her name was Santay. She called him by a name different from his own. Santay lowered him to the floor and told him that she was there to give him back his eyes and that he must stay with her. That meant leaving the yard with her with a bag strapped to his back, guided by her hands at the nape of his neck. It meant going up a long, steep hill that seemed to have no end.

  Pynter felt himself rising out of the valley to lighter, chillier air. A low, deep-throated snoring replaced the rustling of the canes, the sound of the World, she told him, the wind mixed up with all the noises and movements that came from down below and bounced against the bowl of the sky above their heads.

  If he was to have back his eyes he would have to lie on the floor at nights and listen to the cheeping, whistling, tik-tok-tinkling of the world outside which slipped into his ear and filled his head to overflowing. It meant learning her moods by the way her feet sounded on the floorboards. It meant being fed the flesh of fruits he’d never before tasted, especially when the pain in his eyes curled his fingers in, made talons of his nails that sunk into her arms as she prised the bandage loose and replaced it with a fresh one.