Pynter Bender (12 page)

God take away hi talking voice and gave him something better. God fill hi mouth with song. Used to sing like a girl, a voice so pretty it raised the hairs on a pusson arms. Was the only part of himself he'd passed down through the family, and proof of that fact was that there wasn't a Bender, except one p'raps, who couldn sweeten a pusson ear with song.

Used to have a man in Old Hope name Josiah. Short fella. Hardly talk to nobody. He hate chilren. Hate man too. Hate woman more. Hate turn flesh was what he was. Never laugh in all hi life. Once a week he come. Don't say hello to nobody. Don't look at nobody. He come an' sit in John Seegal yard and ask Columbus to sing for 'im. He sit with hi head point up in the air an' lissen to Columbus sing. And when Columbus finish he get up, put a dollar in Columbus shirt pocket and walk off. No hello; no ba-bye; no thank-yuh. The dog!

Deeka brought her hand up to her headwrap and untied it. The hair fell loose. Now they could barely see her face.

He didn only use to sing, he used to cry too, a big belly-cry. A man swimmin in a whole heap o' misery. Nothing worse than a man trap inside a body he don' know what to do with. You could hear him struggling with himself, raging against all that flesh that wasn' serving him. John Seegal used to leave the yard an' come back next morning cuz he couldn take it.

Santay must ha' heard him from all that way up there. One mornin she come here vex as hell an' tell John Seegal, ‘He want a woman. Dat's what he want.'

‘What make you think he want a woman?' my husban' say.

‘A time does come when every man want something to lose 'imself inside,' she say.

‘Don't have no woman goin to want my brother,' John Seegal tell her. And he damn vex too becuz he don' like the way that woman talk to him.

‘Then show him how,' she say. ‘You a man an' he a man – show 'im how to ease 'imself.' And she walk off.

Lord ha' mercy! I never see a man so upset like my husband. He upset for days. But then time pass an' Columbus didn make dat noise no more. In fact he got so quiet, a pusson used to forget that he was there. The only pusson that didn like de change was Josiah, cuz Columbus didn sing for him no more.

Now, I come to the part I want to tell y'all about. Yuh see, the same happiness that make 'im stop singin used to send 'im up in the bushes above my house whole day,' mongst the nettles, comfortable as you please gathering insect and mumblin to himself. Yunno, holding out hi hand to spider, crickets and whatever else.

One evening he was up there and the sun, after it hide itself away all day, just come out in a big yellow blaze the way it do a lil while ago.

I don' know what make me look up. Mebbe it was something John Seegal was saying to me and he stop sorta sudden. Anyway, I look up and see Columbus up there in the middle of all that sun with a heap o' butterflies flying an' dancing around 'im like a million little candle. An' it bring to mind what long-time people used to say: dat it have a little piece of every yooman soul inside every living thing that crawl or creep or fly. My granny used to say that. She used to say that every one of us got a lil piece of weself inside some creature. A part of we that is not we – like water, like food, like fam'ly. And y'all better don't ask me to explain dat, cuz I jus' tellin y'all what she say.

Is the only part of us that really free, she say. So I figure that if that lil part of Columbus was in a hundred million butterfly 'twas because hi soul did need more light an' air than most of us.

Elena reminded them of the time that she'd taken Peter to the river and he was surrounded by a host of dragonflies. Hers, she said, were ants. She could stand in a nest all day and never get stung by one.

Patty recalled the rain-birds that sang like a Sunday choir on the days Birdie came home, even though he'd gone to jail so often they got fed up with praising his return and went off somewhere to rest for good. That raised a convulsion of laughter from them. Tan Cee's were iguanas – the ones that stood their ground and nodded at her toes like a crowd of wizened old men.

Pynter stirred and turned expectant eyes on them, ‘And mine? What'z mine?'

Deeka reached out and stirred the fire. As if prompted by the gesture, Patty did the same. Coxy, who hardly ever spoke, commented on the moon: how round it was, and white like a plate of rice, which made Tan Cee turn and look at him with deep, expressionless eyes.

His grandmother inspected the smoking end of the stick. It seemed to be an extension of her finger. ‘Well, I don' see none o' yours tonight. Yuh see … '

‘Watch your mouth, woman!' Tan Cee's back was turned towards the fire.

‘Nobody don' know what I was goin to say.'

‘Nobody don' want to know. Cuz whatever it was, it wasn' goin to be good.'

Pynter narrowed his eyes and looked up at the sky. He came to his feet. Tan Cee's voice reached over their heads to him, ‘S'awright, Sugar. Yours will come to you.'

He stepped out into the night.

He didn't know why he returned straight after, except that he'd looked up at the Mardi Gras often enough to know that bad weather always broke. Deeka was bad weather. Tan Cee knew it. His Aunt Patty did too, and her words to him were strange these days. She too had offered to come to sleep beside him because she didn't like what she was feeling.

He saw the way they moved around him like a pair of shadows, always between himself and the larger, darker shadow of his grandmother. If his mother was concerned, she didn't show it. She was sitting by the fire now, her head in the air, working her mouth around a chicken bone. Her eyes were never on him and Deeka. They were on the stranger that she went to every morning.

Patty lifted her chin at him. His eyes paused on her. Light loved her skin. Like now, it gave a glow to her legs and arms and face. Tan Cee didn't notice him; she was staring at her husband.

Pynter crossed the yard and sat on John Seegal's stone.

Deeka hadn't looked at him till then. The words died in her mouth and something in her nature changed. There was a piece of iron near the steps on which they tethered cockerels when they were harassing the hens too much. He'd often combined his efforts with Peter to try to pull it out, but they could never manage to. Deeka did so with a single movement of the hand.

Tan Cee was on her feet from the moment Deeka moved. It was as if she had felt the tremors in her mother and her body had responded. It was more glide than run that brought her in front of him, her arms spread away from her body as if she were preparing to fly.

He'd risen to his feet much as he would after finishing his dinner. He followed Deeka's movement towards him with a kind of interest and when she halted, the iron uplifted in the air, he had somehow placed himself in front of Tan Cee, his gaze on his grandmother's face as if he'd seen something there that he wanted to get closer to.

It was his mother who stopped the hard, dark shape bearing down on him. It was the movement that Deeka saw at the edge of her vision that made her drop the piece of metal piping on the stones and turn round to face her daughter. For Elena had moved her arm just once – in what looked like a casual, absentminded gesture – for the old metal bucket they used for scooping out the ashes of the fireside on mornings. Had just as casually reached into the heart of the fire with the empty bucket and scooped it full of burning coals.

The bucket swung on its handle from her right hand, the smoke swirling up and around her arms and spreading itself about her face so that all they saw from the shoulders up was a smoking, shimmering woman shape.

Something – a sound, a choke, a gurgle – issued from Deeka's throat. Her body seemed to drag her away towards one side of the house. Elena, her eyes still on her mother, convulsed her arm
and the coals poured out of the bucket in a hissing amber gush back into the fire. She sat down again and crossed her legs – her mouth working around the chicken bone she hadn't paused from chewing.

‘Something happm to you in yuh father place. What happm t'you up dere?' Tan Cee was standing over him and breathing hard.

‘Nothing happm, Tan.'

‘Don't lie fo' me, y'hear me? What happm in your fadder place?' She closed her hand around the flesh of his waist and spun him round. He thought she was going to strike him. He did not understand her rage. Couldn't make sense of her questions.

‘You left this yard a different child. What happm to you in Manuel Forsyth place?'

Pynter shook his head, dodging the words she was throwing at him. Elena had come out briefly to take her washing off the stones and gone straight back in. Peter sat on the step, staring at them with a finger in his mouth.

‘That woman – yuh granmodder,' Tan Cee's teeth clamped down on the last word as if it were something she was biting into, ‘she was coming at you last night. And you – you start walkin towards 'er! Dat make sense? Eh? You think your brodder there would do a thing like that? You know anybody apart from foolish you who do chupidness like that? How come you lose your 'fraid? Why? What happm to you up there?'

She was close to shouting now. ‘This,' she said, tightening her hand around his waist, ‘is flesh. Flesh is nothing without feeling. Y'hear me? The less you feel, the less flesh you is. The less flesh you is, the more you 'come the spirit yuh granny say you is. Look at me!'

He lifted his eyes and held hers. They were moist and that surprised him. ‘You have to learn to feel, y'unnerstan? You have to …' Her hand released him.

‘Tan,' he said, a quiet desperation tugging at his heart. She'd placed herself so far away from him it filled him with a kind of panic. He leaned into her. Stared into her face, his eyes following the curve of her forehead, the way the light settled on her cheekbones and her chin, the star-apple darkness of her lips. She did not pull away. She did not move to touch him either. ‘I feel,' he told her quietly. ‘I feel all de time.'

F
ROM THE TIME
Elena destroyed John Seegal's stone, it changed something in Deeka Bender. It was as if her daughter had reached a hand inside of her and crushed a wick. And Pynter honestly could not decide which was worse – the breaking of the slab of granite his grandfather used to sit on, or the memory that Deeka carried now, of her own daughter preparing to kill her.

It was the way she was going to do it, Patty said, the certainty of it too: with a bucket of fire in her hand and a gaze so quiet and so terrible it had crept into Patty's dreams and stayed with her, even in her waking. It was the only thing she remembered afterwards, she said – that, and the fact that Elena did not only stop Deeka Bender hard, she almost stopped her dead.

But what a pusson expect? When you kill a pusson for good reason or no reason, you add their weight to yours. Did he know that? For what remained of your life, you carry that pusson weight with you. To kill a child was worse. You add that child's weight ten times over. Why so?

His auntie reached out a hand as if she were rummaging the air for words. Well, for the woman or man that child would ha' become. For each of the children they would ha' given to the world. For the fact that a yooman been could even think of it, far less lift a hand to do it. So that his mother, Elena, reaching for the fire with which to set alight their mother in order to save him, was not a pretty thing to think about o' talk about, but in a
way 'twas saving his grandmother from a worse and different kind o' death.

His mother's hammering had dragged them out of sleep next morning. She'd brought a pillow out into the yard, had tied a strap of cloth under her stomach and sat on the earth with the slab of granite between her legs. And with her body curved over it as if she were in prayer, she'd taken the hammer and the chisel that John Seegal left behind, and slowly begun to break it.

The sound of her hammering had followed them throughout the day and far into the night, and then close to morning, with only the fluttering yellow of a masantorch to see by. A slow sound, hollow as a heartbeat, that left Deeka Bender curled up on her bed with her hands wrapped around her stomach as if her daughter were chipping away at her insides.

Pynter had lain with his head pressed against the floorboards, staring beyond the ceiling, his mind drifting past the sound to the memory of the old woman bearing down on him, a metal rod held high, her hand beginning to make a hard dark arc towards his head.

He could still see his aunt, Tan Cee, gliding over the stones with her arms spread wide – like the picture of Christ that Patty the Pretty kept above her bedhead – to place herself before him. He remembered the fizzing in his blood, the tightness in his throat that had pushed his body past her. And the calmness that had come over him, just after. And then Deeka halting suddenly, as if she'd collided with a wall of air, her eyes on the smoking bucket in her daughter's hand; her body dragged towards one side of the house by something more terrible than fear. And suddenly that movement of his mother's hand.

The awful thing he saw in Deeka's eyes had placed a question in his mind. It lived in his head every day until Patty the Pretty offered him an answer. She told him it was love.

‘Love?' he said quietly.

There wasn't another word for it, she said. Or if there was, it was too big a word to fit inside a single person's head, which was why it was so simple. The smile was there, as always, on her face.

‘Love.' He'd worked his lips around the word as if to get beneath the sound and taste its meaning.

It was one of his mother's last words in her leaf letters to Pa. She'd written it just once, carefully, properly – scratched along the spine of a desiccated leaf. A fragment. A little island on its own without other words to lean against and give it sense.

Love. He'd heard that same word differently in Eden. That time it came leaping from Miss Petalina's throat, stronger than the thunderings of Missa Geoffrey: a scream that was a sob, that was a sigh, that was a laugh, that was also none of these. It had come out of her so high and bright it made him think of dragonflies taking to the air.

That word had also brought to mind one of Uncle Michael's poems, its five lines stacked one on top of the other like the fingers of a hand.

    It made him think of his grandmother, Deeka Bender, standing with her three daughters on the top of Glory Cedar Rise, calling out his grandfather's name as he walked towards the dark waters of the swamps. It tugged at the edges of the sadness he felt on Wednesday nights when his auntie's husband, Coxy Levid, got to his feet, slipped his fingers across his crotch and left her sitting in the yard, staring at her knees.

‘Love?' He angled his head away from Patty, his eyes sliding over to the place where John Seegal's stone used to be. ‘Then – then,
who, who love more, Tan Patty? Somebody prepare to kill fo' you or somebody prepare to dead fo' you?'

She looked at him strangely, her face gone still, her eyes glowing in the evening sun like strips of glass. ‘Which is de better love? That what you mean?'

‘Don' know what I mean,' he said.

Her hand shot out and pulled a leaf. She held it in the flat of her palm in front of him. Her fingers were trembling slightly. ‘This,' she said, slipping her thumb along the surface, ‘is your Aunt Tan Cee, and this …' She flipped the leaf over. Now he could see the darkly veined underside, a deeper green. ‘This is your modder. Same leaf, come from de same tree. Love to kill for, love to dead for – same love.'

She placed a finger against the hollow of his throat, looked into his eyes. ‘That not what you really askin, though. Not so?'

He did not answer her because the word was not enough. It did not explain his mother leaving secretly on mornings to go to the stranger in that place down by the river. It could not explain the rage that slept beneath her skin, which had always been there, like a hole in the middle of the yard that they'd grown so accustomed to they'd learned to step around it without thinking. That sleeping anger made him think of the serpents he used to look up at in Eden, their slow uncoiling, the blind flickering at the air with tongues as bright as flames as they eased their dark lengths towards the lizard or the bird they were about to consume. When they struck, it was always fast and hard and frightening. His grandmother had forgotten this, and look … Look what nearly happm … Forgettin' almos' kill 'er. Which was why he could never tell his mother that he knew the place she went to early mornings. That even if he hadn't met the stranger she went to, he was certain that he wasn't from these parts. That he was slimmer than the men of Old Hope. Could make things with his hands that were just as strange and beautiful as what Patty made from straw and bits of coloured cloth. That when he, Pynter,
looked at her sometimes and felt the stirrings of the stranger's child in her, it reminded him of the sea.

It puzzled him that the other women in the yard could not see these things: how slowly his mother walked these days, how carefully she sat down on her stone now; how she combed her growing hair more often. The way she sang to herself throughout the day, and whistled like a bird. Her skin had changed the way the leaves of a candlebush did over time: smoother, shinier, almost as pretty as Patty's. And from time to time, without thinking, she lifted her hand to touch the little throbbing vein at the base of her throat, which hadn't been there before.

A couple of mornings ago, he'd raised his head to look at her and found her large, quiet eyes settled on his face with the softness of a moth. He also saw the trembling sadness in his mother's face, because now she was dead in Deeka's mind.

Mornings, she made a cup of cocoa, covered it with a saucer and placed it beside his grandmother. It sat on the step till afternoon, curdling at the top as the heat got sucked out of it. At the end of the day, Elena would go to the step, lift the cup and stare at the contents as if she were hoping it would speak to her. Then she would go to the back of the house and tip it into the soil. She hung there a while, looking down at the moisture at her feet before sighing heavily and walking back into the house.

Dinnertimes, she served her mother first, her hand bringing the end of her cotton dress to the enamel of the bowl and polishing it till it threw the flames back at them.

Deeka would not take the outstretched bowl of food. She watched them eat, her body a soft shape against the steps. Then, if she felt like it, she would strip a square of banana leaf from the tree beside the house, bend over the pot and serve herself.

It did not change his mother's gestures. It did not modify the stillness in her eyes, now down-turned all the time, her face fuller than they'd ever seen it, her shoulders lower than she'd ever held them.

She did these same things every day: the cup of steaming cocoa, the brightly polished bowl of food, the tireless, wordless gestures. And when she spoke, she addressed her mother softly, as if she were trying to ease her out of an awful dream.

Sundays were worse. His mother's hands were restless from the time she woke. For she'd been washing and braiding Deeka's hair since she was a girl. The task had fallen to her, they said, for reasons no one cared to remember. And anyway, it wasn't that which mattered now. What mattered was that after all these years, grooming her mother's hair had become more than habit. It had become a knowledge that had settled in her body. For Elena understood her mother's head of hair far better than she did her own. Her fingers had pulled at the very first strands of grey there. Deeka had blamed her in part for it, pointing to the time she'd brought her ‘belly' home and would not name the father. And with the passing of the years, the rest of Deeka's hair had whitened beneath Elena's fingers.

Come Sundays, without Deeka's bony shoulders against her stomach, without the small pressure of her mother's head against her chest, it left Elena Bender with a hollowness and empty gestures. Her hands still did the things they'd always done on Sundays: the same slow downward strokes, the straightening and the parting; the plaiting and the oiling; the raising of the shine with coconut oil mixed with cinnamon grass and mint. Come Sundays, his mother's hands had nothing solid to hold on to.

Pynter had seen this before: the way his father in his blindness would reach for his Bible, or turn his eyes towards something he expected to see. He remembered in his own self the way he sometimes turned his ear towards a voice, or leaned his head away from it, the better to know its owner – forgetting that he possessed eyes.

The body remembered things the head had long forgotten. He knew that now. The body felt things it did not even know it did. Like his mother's inside-crying; like her fingers combing the empty air before her. Like what not grooming his grandmother's
hair reminded them of now: that they carried another blood. First People blood. The blood of strangers who'd once resided on the small blue hills above the Kalivini Sea; who used to live on fish and leaves and fruits; and whose voices, Deeka told them once, still carried across the sleepy waters of lagoons. They'd left nothing of themselves behind apart from the pieces of patterned clay he sometimes found lying at the edges of the sea. That and the length and glow of his grandmother's plaited hair.

Evenings, they looked down at their plates or found their eyes wandering across the silence towards the soft dark question mark that was Deeka's shape against the steps. Not expectant, not even sorrowful or upset, just wondering what a pusson was s'posed to do after dinner done. Deeka Bender's voice had filled in all their after-dinner silences from as far back as their minds could take them; and further still if they 'lowed themselves to think about it.

Make it worse, in the silence that she'd left them with, something secretive and wordless had crept in and taken over. Or maybe it had always been there; but now there was nothing else to turn a pusson mind away from it: that tense, uneasy thing between his aunt, Tan Cee, and her husband, Coxy Levid, which lived at the back of every word they said to each other, especially on Wednesday nights.

These evenings, his auntie no longer brought her hands down to the hem of her dress to pull at the threads that weren't there when her husband told her he was walking. She did not shift her eyes beyond him and flick her tongue across her lips to moisten them. Instead, she would stir, look up at him and raise her voice loud enough for all to hear her.

‘People buildin houses in de night?'

The first time she spoke that way, her words had stopped the cigarette halfway to her husband's mouth.

He didn't turn to look at her, but even from his end of the yard, Pynter felt the rush of anger in the man. It never reached his face though. It never got that far. He was looking down at her
and smiling. And the words he spoke slipped through the small gap that his smile made.

‘P'raps in the place where dis man going, people do,' he said.

He'd closed his lips down on the cigarette and turned to leave. But her voice came at him again, steady and soft and stroking. ‘Ain't got no night-time where you going, then?'

Patty's hands left her knees and began tugging at her ear lobes. His mother reached for a stick and poked it into the fire. She pulled it back and turned the burning tip towards her face. Held it there a while, meditating on the living amber at the tip. Then she tossed the whole thing back into the fire.

‘How far you goin dis time, den?' Tan Cee coaxed.

‘S'far as man foot take him.'

‘And how far'z dat?'

The frown lines on his face got deeper. There was a glitter in his eyes. It sent Pynter's mind back to that night when those eyes had looked into his face. When the long brown fingers now stroking the red box of Phoenix cigarettes had closed around his throat; had pinned his back against a tree and made him know how easy killing was.