Pynter Bender Read online

  Miss Lizzie’s words came back to him, ‘Ole Man Manuel, s’not s’pose to be.’ Words that invited him to shame. Words that tried to force themselves into him the way his mother and his aunts would pin his arms against his sides, pull his head back and pour medicine down his throat. Old Man Manuel … Peter and he were not supposed to be. Something, something must’ve happen. Something …

  And whatever that something was, it shone like a dark light in their eyes; in the women’s laughter by the river. It was there in the silence of his mother when she pulled him and Peter close to her to inspect their hair or skin. It was there when she combed their hair or bathed them. There in the words they said that Gideon had told her. It was the reason why Gideon had tried to take them away from her before she’d even had them. It was there, always there, in his grandmother’s quiet gaze.

  He felt a movement from his father, more a stirring of the air about him, and then the hand, rough like bark, resting against his right brow. His father’s hand moved down and cupped his chin. Pynter eased himself away.

  ‘You’ll meet Maddie tonight,’ he said, swinging his head slightly at the large white concrete house a little way behind them. ‘Call her Miss Maddie, y’hear me? And when Pearly come to see me, call her Sister Pearl. As for Gideon … ’

  ‘Gideon – he – he come here?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘He my brother too?’

  ‘He my son, you my child. He your brother.’

  Pynter shook his head.

  ‘Whatsimatter?’ The man looked at him concerned.

  ‘Then, den how come …’ His tongue felt heavy on the words.

  ‘How come, what …?’

  ‘How come he try to kill us? Before we even born.’

  As soon as he said it, he knew that something terrible had come out of his mouth. So terrible it froze the shape above him. Made it lower itself before him, reach out solid hands that closed down on his shoulders. He felt the deep ruffle of the bag just before it struck the floorboards. The vibration travelled up his feet and made his heart turn over. Now he felt his father’s breath on his face.

  ‘Who tell you that? Who tell you that!’

  He feared the rage seeping out of that voice. He feared the strength he felt in those fingers.

  ‘Nobody,’ he stammered. ‘Nobody tell me nothing.’

  The fingers released him. ‘You never use them words again, y’hear me, boy. Never lemme hear you say them words.’

  ‘No, Pa.’

  His father stood up then, spoke as if he were addressing something that lay some place far beyond the walls of the house. ‘You call me Pa. I like dat. You must always call me Pa.’

  Pynter nodded, swallowing hard on the soft knot in his throat.

  He never asked his father who he left his rich garden to or why he gave it up as soon as his mother sent him off to live with him. Why so soon after Santay they were so quick to see him off again. Why they had chosen him instead of Peter. Why they would not tell him for how long.

  ‘Is you your father ask for,’ his mother said. But she could not hold his eyes. She couldn’t put words to the other things that her tied-up lips and drifting eyes were concealing from him.

  He never asked his father about the silence which sat like an accusation between Miss Maddie and himself. Why Miss Maddie looked past him the way she did from the very first morning he called out to her, made her leave her porch and cross her lawn to come over and see her lil brother.

  He was not sure she saw him. Her eyes had drifted skywards, over to the Kalivini hills, up to the Mardi Gras and finally down to some point above his head. They passed briefly over their father’s face and settled on the concrete steps on which they were all standing. Small eyes in a face as dark and swollen as blood-pudding.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ she grunted, and waddled back to her porch. He was sure she hadn’t seen him.

  Her son Paso came just when the small pre-dawn birds began to stir the early-morning stillness with their chirping, when the crickets quietened suddenly and altogether, and the silence they left behind got filled in by the humming of the ocean a couple of hills beyond and the whispery shiftings of the canes. He came like the tail end of a dream and seemed to disappear soon after, making Pynter wonder if he had ever been there at all.

  ‘A scamp,’ his father told him, ‘a child of the night, that Paso. I don’t remember what he look like now, becuz I don’ know when last I see him. You never see him in the day.

  ‘Not surprising when a pusson know how and where the boy was born. Maddie picked ’im up in Puerto Rico, see? Take a boat back home when she was big as a full moon. Bring the belly back with her but not the man. She didn make it back to land on time. Had him on the sea. Matter o’ fact,’ the old man slapped his knee and laughed, ‘she had him in the middle of it. Now, a chile that come like that can’t tell nobody which country he from, not so? Cuz he wasn’ born in one. Now that’s between me and you, y’unnerstan?’

  Pynter thought about his father’s words and began laughing too.

  The old man seemed surprised by it. ‘’Mind me of a uncle you had – that laugh.’

  ‘He here?’

  ‘He out there. In the hallway. Just the picture. He not with us no more.’

  ‘He … ’

  ‘Before you born. Sea take him.’ His father passed his hand across his face as if he were washing it with air. ‘Funny fella he was, your uncle. But nice. Dress like a king. Dress in black, only black. We used to call him Parlourman because of the black. Pretty face. Smooth like a star apple. Talk pretty too. Every woman he meet used to want to kill for him; but he never was interested. I could never figure ’im out. He didn have no children either. Sank with a boat between Curaçao an’ Panama.’

  ‘What dead feel like, Pa – it hurt?’

  ‘Don’ know. Why you ask?’

  ‘Jus’ want to know … ’

  ‘When it come, I s’pose the part of you that know jus’ not around to know no more, y’unnerstan?’ As he touched the boy’s face with the meat of his hand, a chuckle rose from his chest. ‘Even I don’ unnerstan what I jus’ tell you. Come eat some food. I glad you here.’

  Over the steamed yams, sweet potatoes and fried shark that Miss Maddie had covered up and left on the steps for him, his father’s eyes were on him again. This time it was a different look. It seemed impossible that the anger he’d seen there earlier could reside in eyes so soft.

  ‘You talk kind of funny too – like him.’

  ‘Like …?’

  ‘Like your Uncle Michael.’

  He wanted to know more about this odd uncle that the sea had taken. To understand the nature of the quietness that came over his father when he called his name. But all he got was a promise that wasn’t really one, ‘P’raps I’ll get the time to tell you about it one day, if I manage to find de mood.’ Or a statement that was so tied up it took him many fruitless days of trying to unravel it. ‘When a man put hi dog to sleep, then is sleep it have to sleep, y’unnerstan?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, I can’t explain no better.’

  5

  HE UNCOVERED HIS Uncle Michael in a grip in the room his father had told him not to enter. He also found his mother there.

  He didn’t understand why his father should forbid him to enter a room whose door was wide open. He could see, dimly, right through to the furthest wall. Mornings, he stood at the lip of that door-mouth, his head turned sideways, his father’s voice like a staying hand inside his head. But the fingers of light that entered through the cracks in the board wall on the other side kept drawing him back to the gloom inside. However bright the day, the light in there was always yellow. It made burning pathways across the floor, on books and piles of paper, along the red handle of an axe, over the bunched darkness of a broom, and small piles of clothing strewn like debris thrown up on an abandoned shore.

  The room had an odour, too, that spread itself throughout his father’s house – the smell of
things that had dried too fast to rot.

  It took him days. Of tiptoeing and stopping. Of stopping and tiptoeing. Each time a step or two further in, listening to his dozing father’s breathing in the room next door, mapping out the space around him with his eyes, summoning up his courage. It was a while before he noticed the grip in the corner. It was partly concealed beneath a child’s small mattress. A small, deep-brown case, worn and raw at the edges, with bright brass studs at each corner. The three latches at the front were also made of brass, the handle shaped from some white-veined material that had a wondrous glasslike translucency. He laid it gently back against the mattress, wondering how it could have got there. If the sea had swallowed the boat his father’s brother had been travelling on, wouldn’t it have also taken this with it?

  There was a small book in there. It was laid on top of the folded clothing, with pages that looked and smelled like paper money. There was a picture of a slim-faced man at the front of it, with large, light-flecked pools of eyes staring out at him, and a mouth that was soft and curved like his Auntie Patty’s.

  He’d seen pictures before but never one like this: the paper so smooth and shiny it seemed to preserve something of the darkness and the glow of his uncle’s skin. Those eyes were really watching him, still on him when he reached beyond the little book and began to slowly lift the clothing aside. Things in there were cool to his touch even though his hands were sweating. His thumb was bleeding where he’d pulled on the catch too hard and a splinter had slipped into his flesh.

  It was like reaching into a dream. The lining that ran around the box shifted like water beneath his fingers. The shirts were made of fabrics soft as soap suds. The white ones seemed to give off their own glow in the gloom. A razor folded in a soft brown square of leather. Talcum powder in a pouch that smelled like cinnamon, like the ocean, but mostly like the scent that came off the skin of limes.

  Further down beneath the razor and the shirts, past the heavy grey trousers, his fingers hit on something hard. He touched its edges and it slid away from him. He could not close his hand around it. Realising what it was, he slipped his hand under and eased it out – another small book, its cover as rough as bark, its pages ragged at the edges as if they had been ripped from something else and put together by absent-minded hands. Nothing in it but small, haphazard markings like a nest of disturbed ants spilling over the edge of every page. Nothing much worth looking at apart from the photo of a boy.

  Perhaps it was the smell of the fabric, the sheen of all those things in that dirty time-scratched box, that held him there.

  The boy in the photograph was sitting on a step, his head thrown back as if he were in the middle of the most beautiful daydream. The houses and the people around him were bleached almost to a whiteness, but the boy wouldn’t have seen them because his eyes were closed. And as Pynter used to do in his time of blindness, he shut his eyes, rubbing his thumb against the upturned face in the photograph. He found himself slipping into a happy dreaminess, and he knew that this boy, at some time in his uncle’s life, had meant everything to him.

  He found his mother in that room too, scribbled over the fat purple-veined leaves that people called the love leaf. Santay had shown it to him – a strange leaf that took root anywhere, even between the covers of a book, and which threw out little plants exactly like itself from the little dents around its edges. They called it love leaf because it fed on air, drank the water from itself and gave life to its children just long enough for their roots to reach the earth. The mother plant could release them only when she dried up and died. Until then, they fed on her and lived. What better love than that?

  But, like his uncle’s markings, his mother’s made no sense to him. He’d seen those lines and curlicues of hers before, from the very first week that Santay sent him home. Peter said she’d always made them. These were different, smaller, packed tightly together, but they had the same loops and curves as those she made on the earth between her feet when she sat alone beneath the grapefruit tree, a stick in her hand, a strip of grass between her teeth, her eyes so far away she wouldn’t have seen him if he’d stood in front of her and waved.

  The leaves were dried up now, even their children, because, lodged as they were between the covers of the large brown book, they could not fall to earth. It smelled of earth, the book, dropped carelessly in the corner by the door, its covers riddled with the little tunnels the worms had made through it.

  He found nothing else among the pages, just the leaves with those marks he’d always thought his mother made only in the dust.

  The days merged into each other like the lines he marked on the steps with the bits of chalk and charcoal he found inside the room. His father rarely left the house. He would sit on the long canvas chair beside the door, muttering to himself over the Bible, solid like a slab of rock on his knees, its pages spread like wings on the altar of his palms.

  They hardly talked. Pynter didn’t mind. He had the room to go to.

  Over the weeks, Pynter came to know the cracks that ran like little ravines in the flooring of that room, from which he’d extricate buttons, marbles, needles, rusty pins, little bits of coloured glass, a child’s gold earring, three silver coins with birds on them, a small chain of beads that slipped from the crease of his palm in a glittering liquid stream, a tiny copper buckle and bits of fingernail.

  Still, he felt that even if he’d entered this room, had explored every part of it with his fingers, it had not really opened up itself to him.

  ‘Pa, I want to learn to read.’

  The old man stopped the spoon before his lips and, without looking up, he said, ‘I been thinkin that you’ll have to soon. I’ll start you off with this.’ He nodded at the Bible.

  By the time the man with the white shirt and the stick with the head of a lion came, Pynter had begun to make sense of all his mother’s writing on those leaves. Her words, he realised, were not meant for his father. Not in the way that Uncle Michael’s were meant for the boy in the photograph. She wrote them the way she talked, almost as if she were answering Miss Lizzie and the women in the river. A story which over time he slowly pieced together, ignoring the nudge of hunger in his guts, not hearing his father calling him sometimes as he sat in the gloom shuffling the leaves, sorting and re-sorting them until the words followed each other easily. A strange feeling it was too, rebuilding his and Peter’s history with those dead leaves, one he now knew began long before either of them was born.

  When John Seegal walk i use to wish i went with him. i use to wish i didnt have to wait no more for him to come back home. from the time he leave all I find myself doing was just waiting. i used to like Fridays by the river fridays was quiet like you dont have nobody else in the world excepting you and the river water running over stone like it want to tell you something, and the quiet wrap itself nice and safe round you. i use to like that. It feel like if the water was my thoughts running through my head.

  One morning i take the washing early. i take the long way down, through the ravine that was a road when rain didnt fall and the bottom get dry.

  i come to the place i like to wash because it got a flat stone there. It was big and wide like a bed, like a place you want to sleep on. The top was bleach like a sheet from all the soap that dry on it.

  i like to finish wash and leave the clothes to dry so i could watch the water turn white or get dark according to what cloud pass over it. But dat time for no reason at all i get tired of just sitting down dere and I decide to walk down the river. i was talking to myself, or maybe thinking to meself i dont remember now so I didnt notice tie-tongue Sharon and she son a little way ahead of me.

  i know her. she cant talk because she tongue was sew down to she mouth. is so she born. People treat her different because of that, but i never. First time i look at her close i see how pretty she is. She got the prettiest teeth anybody ever see and she got eye that look at you as if they watchin from inside a room.

  i see how she say things wit
h she face too, if you look in she eye you understand everything she cant say with words. i did always like miss sharon.

  She was standing by the end of the stretch of water in front of me, and the little boy was standing up in the middle of the water with her too. They was naked as they born and she was bathing him. It dont have no words for it. i feel sometimes that is because she cant talk words that she show so much love with them two hand she have. i remember the light too because the sun did find a place through all dem leaf and it fall on them. the little boy was shyning like if fire itself did bathing him. i could hear he voice and hear him laughing to heself sometimes and sometimes answering questions i never hear miss Sharon ask him. she was full with child, contented and full, that is what i remember. Like was them alone in the world and still them wasnt missing nobody. Not like me.

  One time she rest her hand on her belly. I see the boy face. I see how perfect and happy he was. Was like if all the question I been asking ever since my father leave get answer right there, all them question I didnt even know I want a answer for. I didnt miss my fadder John Seegal no more.

  I know miss Sharon know dat I was there because after a while the two of them was lookin over where I was. I wonder to meself how come they know I there on that stone behind the bush. But then seein as I know she was watching me I get up sort of guilty.

  She do the funniest thing when I stand up. She laugh.

  I didnt hear her laugh but I know she laugh because she whole body do it. It shift that way and this way like she koodnt keep the funniness inside of she. I didnt want her to hold it in eider because she look nice an pretty laughing like that. I get up from where I was and walk down to her because she call me with she hand and when I reach she look in my face kind of soft and deep. The little boy was pretty like her. He was slim and and smooth like guava wood.