Pynter Bender (13 page)

Now, though, his auntie's voice seemed to match her husband's face exactly. It raised the hairs on his arms because it was so soft, so steady, came so easily out of her.

She'd turned her chin up towards him, the firelight like yellow water dancing on her throat. It hollowed out her eyes and filled in the rest of her face so that she was a different person altogether. And there was a small smile on her lips.

‘So you ain't got no time, then? That what you sayin?'

Coxy didn't answer her.

She lowered her face then, turned her gaze down to the stones. ‘Watch how you walkin, fella. Just watch yuh step.' But Coxy Levid didn't hear her, he was halfway down the hill.

The gradual hardening in his aunt, Tan Cee; the sleepy desperation Patty the Pretty carried; the smell that crept into his nostrils,
reminding him of the odours of the swamplands his grandfather had walked into; the dream he had been having every night for weeks in which he watched the darkening of the Mardi Gras mountain by the shadow of a bird. If he ever said these things, it would prove he was a Jumbie Boy, prove that he was like Santay, the woman who had given him back his eyes and was here now to see him.

The sight of her had raised the hairs on Pynter's arms. Santay walked over to him, reached a hand towards his face.

‘S'awright, Osan,' she had said, ‘you been on my mind.'

His mother went inside the house, came out with a bowl of unshelled peas and began to pick at them. Santay talked of weather, corn and cane, and the new illnesses that Old Hope women had been bringing her. The New Year had something to do with it, she said. Didn they see how it begin? Nice an' bright, like a basin full of promise – her eyes rested briefly on his mother – but when that basin finally tipped over, what did it give them? Politics. But she didn come to talk about no politics, she said. Wasn't that which bring her here. She been sent here by a dream. In her dreams, she said, one of Deeka Bender's daughters was sitting on John Seegal's stone. And on that stone there were birds and watermelons and the daughter's feet were in a puddle of rainwater. Trouble was, the daughter's back was towards her and she couldn't figure out which one of them it was, even if that dream came back to her four nights in a row.

Santay fixed the women with dark, interrogating eyes. A pusson didn't mean to look inside nobody business, but was any of them with child?

His mother's fingers were busy with the bowl of peas that she was picking clean of chaff. Patty the Pretty's hands drifted down towards her stomach. Her eyes grew soft and large and something like a smile spread across her body. ‘Oh God,' Patty muttered softly and sat down on the steps.

Tan Cee muttered something, or perhaps it was her lips that trembled slightly, and Deeka Bender, who'd greeted the woman with a silent, flat-eyed gaze, turned her back on them and walked into the house. They could hear the brushing of her feet against the floorboards.

Yes, the woman said, resting her eyes on Patty. Santay's fingers reached for the knot of her headtie and loosened it. Tan Cee's hand reached out and fingered the flattened plaits and she began to unplait her hair.

Water was woman, Santay said. The child was going to be a girl. And that child ought to bring a lot of light into their days. The birds around the woman's feet told her that.

And one more thing. She shifted her head away from Tan Cee's hand. Call the baby anything but … Her voice trailed off, and there was something new and different in her eyes. Would it be askin too much to add Adiola to the baby's name? It was her name, she said, an old name, one that her mother had passed on to her. Every girl-chile in her family had carried it from time, and though she never used it, she did not want that name to die. Was that askin too much?

Patty shook her head and smiled. The lines around the woman's mouth relaxed. Tan Cee touched Patty's arm. ‘Lordy,' Patty said, and again more softly, ‘Lord ha' mercy, girl – I … '

Patty's chuckle cut across her words like the tinkling of bracelets.

T
HERE WERE THOSE
February evenings when night settled like a sheet over the valley; when the darkness was so thick it felt like something a person could wade into. The air was quiet and chilly, brittle like glass. They could hear the river in the valley below slipping over every pebble. If bad weather was about to break, the suck and surge of waves forcing themselves through the caves along the seashore would reach them as if they were just there, butting against their doorsteps.

Hemmed by the after-dinner fires, with the darkness rising up towards them, it was easy to believe that they were sitting on a raft and what lay below them was a tossing, living ocean licking at their feet.

It was the only time that Deeka Bender talked to them of things that were not about John Seegal. She spoke of the glittering black sand beaches of the north where she came from, of Atlantic breakers as tall as ships, collapsing at the feet of cliffs so high their foam looked like white lacing on a deep-blue dress. It was from the lip of one of those precipices that the pure-blood of her people – the first humans on these islands – had launched themselves and left the earth for good.

She would wonder at the puzzling and unnameable things that traversed the world: roads that ran beneath the earth and carried cars and people; machines that sat on air the way a man would sit on solid earth; buildings so tall a pusson could stand
on one, reach up and stir a cloud. And as the evening folded its skirts around them, her talk returned to Old Hope.

She would tell them of the year the snakes arrived – snakes that didn have no right or reason to spoil a proper New-Years-After-Christmas season. It didn't make no sense. In the season of parched corn and smoked ham, of sorrel and hard-dough bread, and black cakes so packed with fruit and rum a pusson got drunk just from smelling them, it was the last thing that a pusson expected.

And 'twas not as if a pusson didn do what they was s'posed to do. They'd greeted the New Year with fresh curtains. They'd laid the floors with sheets of linoleum as bright as flower gardens. They'd stained and polished the mahogany chairs they rarely ever sat on. Had indulged the children with sips of the dark sweet wine smuggled in from Kara Isle, and laughed their heads off as the spirits took hold of the lil ones and threw them about the yard, grinning foolishly at everyone while they fought to reclaim their limbs.

But still them snakes came! The first sign of them in Old Hope was the part of themselves they left behind: shimmering silvery stockings as delicate as a child's communion veil. A pusson found these stockings everywhere: in tight tangles between the grasses, fluttering high on branches where the wind hung them up for all to see. At the door-mouths to their houses.

And 'twas all right to watch those flimsy white stockings blowing everywhere, until a pusson find out which snake they belong to. Crebeaux – those night-dark creatures that most yoomans live a lifetime without seeing, that didn live on trees like any decent-minded snake ought to, but in the twisted arteries of the earth, in the lightless hollows under stones and forest-root, in the dampness of ravines that never felt a direct ray of sun. Snakes that didn crawl but flowed away from them like oil.

And, of course, they started killing them.

But then the girl arrived, if a girl is what she was. She was short and muscled like a man, with a yellow ring around the iris
of each eye, exactly like a bird's. They remembered how she placed herself before the machete-swinging arms of men and would not let them kill these creatures, how she slipped an arm beneath the snakes and guided their heads towards the holes and crevices they came from, the way they flowed along the skin of her arms as if she were pouring them out of herself. And word of her presence in Old Hope had stopped the men from raising their machetes, for she'd spread something far deeper than fear or panic in their hearts.

She'd made them ask themselves: what if 'twas someone somewhere in Old Hope who'd done or dreamed up something awful that had given shape to her? What if she might be some woman living right here 'mongst them and some wicked deed had reshaped her?

You see, Deeka said, there were birds and creatures with wings as wide as sails amongst them. There were Old Hope men, as ancient as the canes, who became balls of living fire in the night, crept through the cracks of houses and sipped the blood from the softest parts of women's thighs. There were cakes a pusson found in the middle of Old Hope Road some time between midnight and no-time. You saw them there, laid out nice as any wedding cake, with icing too-besides. They smelt like cakes; they looked like cakes. But you cut them and drew blood.

There were people who were so fed up of dying, she said, they discarded their bodies like old clothing and took over those of youngsters. And a pusson wouldn't even mention them long-dressed wimmen of the night who waited for drunken, drifting men at crossroads. A fella saw her back first, curved like a spoon, then her hair spilling down her shoulders like dark water. She cooed his name. He followed her. And that jackass would not see her cloven hoof until she raised a leg to kick him down a precipice. In fact, a lotta man who walk when night-time come don't end up overseas. Is precipice they get kick over, which is why you never hear from them again.

And what about the unborn children that the wimmen of these cane valleys refused to bring into this world? You listened hard enough at night, you heard these half-borns whispering against the doorways of all the childless wimmen. And then there were those who had no right to be amongst them, who sneaked their way into the world behind a true-born. But God make it so their time was never long with yoomans.

It was what people said that raised the agitation in Deeka's voice, this shu-shuing, these river-wimmen whisperings, this fly-buzz of ugly words that had attached themselves to the Bender name about children with eyes like flames. Who walked the night when the world outside was quietest. Who needed no light to see by, becuz them eyes carry their own inside-shining. They conversed with ghosts, spoke the language of bats and owls and, according to the talk, knew of things before they happened.

Matter o' fact, those who lived in houses beside the road said they often heard them in the deepest, darkest of all nights. Nights a lil bit like this one, in fact. They hear them whistling – soft an' pretty – like a rain-bird calling down the clouds. And if a pusson brave enough to put one eye against a crack in their house wall, they sometimes saw the white glow of a shirt, but they never heard the footsteps.

Pynter's feet took him down towards the river. In his head he carried Patty's laughter, his mother's hand over the basin of pigeon peas, and the parting words that Santay whispered in his ear.

When she'd finished talking to the women, she'd come over to him. This time he'd allowed her thumbs to pull against his lower lids. His eyes, she said, were getting darker now. Was he eating the things she'd told him to? Was he still partial to fish? Then she'd brought her lips closer to his ear and her voice turned cocoa-dark and soft inside his head. ‘Watch that face o' yours, Osan. It don' know how to lie.'

He knew where he was going; he hadn't worked out why. He did not know what he would say to the stranger his mother met down there. He did not know what he looked like, apart from the print his body had made on the bed of leaves he'd left there. A slim man, heavier than his size suggested, a man who had placed a caul of secrecy over his mother. Who'd brought on a furtiveness in her that he could not understand.

He hadn't been looking. He hadn't followed her. His mother wouldn't believe him when he told her that. He'd been following his eyes.

There was a dark patch of green that began where the cane fields ended. His feet had taken him there because, whatever the time of day, and however bright the sunlight, it never seemed to change.

It was much further than he thought and when he arrived it was cool and strange. The trees laid their shadows along the riverbank the way the women spread their clothing on the river stones. He'd found himself standing at the mouth of a long leaf cavern through which the river slowed then slipped like a snake entering its hole.

It was not like Eden. Here the light made him think of smoke, not water. The earth was softer too, and darker. The riverbank yielded to his weight as if to ease him down into itself. And the oddest of all things, he could smell the sea as if it were right at his feet.

He'd stood for a long time at the mouth of that river tunnel, expecting something but not knowing exactly what. Finally, beneath the tick-ticking of dry leaves, the shifting of the branches above his head, the sighing of the water at his feet, he heard then saw what moved about him: crabs – blue as fallen fragments of sky, their finned legs flat and white like those that lived beside the sea. He watched them slip sideways into the water and swim away like fish. Flat-tailed iguanas nodded at him from branches. The silver backs of fish – long and sleek as conger eels – ghosted past his eyes. Flies bright as sparks were settling on
his naked arms and nibbling at his skin; and crayfish, large and transparent as the glasses in his mother's cabinet, drifted along the edges of the water.

It had taken him a long time just standing on the soft mud bank to work it out. That in this little forest, so far away from the shoreline, the sea was also present. That it had crept into these animals and changed them, the way yeast did Uncle Birdie's bread. The way his mother's secret child was changing her.

It suddenly came to him that this land, this valley, this place he was born in, carried more secrets than all the washerwomen in all the rivers in the world. And he found himself laughing – at what he did not know. He stood on the water's edge and shouted down the long leaf gloom, shouted Birdie's name and then his Uncle Michael's. He said everything he wanted to say to Deeka Bender, including what a bad-minded, wicked so-an'-so she was. He called John Seegal Bender a son-a-va-biiitch and liked the sound of it so much he said it eight more times. And still he wasn't satisfied, so he told John Seegal what a foolish fool he was to walk, and lose 'imself in swamp mud, and leave his wimmen with so much don'-know-what-dey-want-to-do confusion. He'd cackled at the dark ahead of him and stuck his tongue out at Old Hope, danced and stomped on the riverbank and dared the soft, wet mud to suck him in. Then he'd called his father's name and felt himself go quiet.

He was tired when he left, and so pleased with the puzzle that place had left him with he decided that he would take it to Peter just to watch his brother's face go funny-an'-twist-up when he told him that the sea was not just water, the sea was also soil.

He'd taken the shorter walk back home through the bamboo forest. It was one of those days when the bamboos talked amongst themselves, sounding as if they were grumbling to each other. And it was there, just above the river, at the far end of the high leaf houses the bamboo made, that he found the little room.

The stranger wasn't there but he'd left his smell of cinnamon and cloves and the print of his body on the leaves where he slept.
The traces of his mother were there too – not love leaves this time but the yellow vines that did not grow on soil but tied themselves around the canes and suckled on their sap. She'd made her curlicues and scratches almost like the signatures that he and Peter had left on her stomach. Against the trunk of a bamboo, just where he thought the man would place his head to sleep, was a string of beads. They were spotted black in places, like little ladybirds. He'd picked them up and brought them to his nostrils, and knew at once that the hands of the man had made them.

His mother was standing over the fire when he returned. She lifted her head to say something to him, but her lips froze over the words. Her eyes were on the chain of ladybirds around his neck.

He expected her to come at him straight away. He did not expect the quiet turning back towards her cooking, the casual sideways glances thrown at him from time to time; the gradual hardening of her movements with the pot spoon. It didn't look like anger; it did not look like any emotion that he knew.

He was oiling the wheels of Peter's scooter when her shadow fell over him. He hadn't heard her coming. His head was still turned down, his hand spinning the metal wheels, when he felt her hand brush his collar. When he looked up, the beads were in her fist and she was staring hard into his face.

He stood up, wiped the grease on his trousers and faced her. Something in her eyes retreated briefly; but then she leaned in suddenly towards him.

‘You! You! What wrong with you?' It came out as a whisper. Like a secret they were sharing.

‘Not me,' he said, his voice tight and urgent, and strange to his own ears. The thing that had stuffed his throat all morning, that had sent him down to the river to that leafy room, that had made him place the string of beads around his neck, seemed suddenly
to free itself. He stepped back from her; looked over to Patty, sleepy-eyed and smiling, with her chin on Leroy's shoulder. ‘Look,' he said, ‘look what you gone and done.'

He looked into her eyes and held her gaze, did it because Tan Cee always told him that to hold an adult's gaze like that was downright freshness. He curled his lips around the words, and what came out of him was more air than sound. ‘Who you tink you foolin, eh?'

He felt her movement before she struck him, felt his head go dizzy, but he did not drop his gaze. She hit him again, and because he did not move, because he did not run away from her like Tan Cee told him he was s'posed to, the flat of her hand exploded against his face again.

His mother was breathing hard. She was staring at her hands now, and shaking her head as if she'd just discovered them. And when she lifted her eyes, her mouth was working around words that did not come. She dropped the beads. She said something. She called his name. Called his name again. Reached out an open hand towards him. He stepped back. Kept stepping back from her. And when he could step back no further, he turned around and ran.