Jacob Ross - Pynter Bender

His father pointed at the back room first – a lightless doorway that stood gaping like a toothless mouth, and from which came a warm and unexpected breath – the odour of musty, nameless things. ‘Don’t go in there,’ he said, without offering a reason. ‘And leave this place alone,’ he added, turning to the living room.

He’d said ‘this place’ as if the living room did not belong to the house. It had been abandoned to spiders and dust mites. A mahogany table, on whose surface he drew finger faces and curlicues, stood in the middle of it. The matching chairs were arranged around it strangely, as if the people who had been sitting there had suddenly got up and, without looking back, had left the room for good. Two brownish photographs hung in the gloomiest corner of the room. The smaller one was just the head of a young man, his hair cropped short, staring directly out at them. In the other, a man sat on a beautiful chair with a gaze that was direct and grave. A still-faced woman rested a gloved hand on his arm. Four children, a boy and three girls, were arranged around them like flowers in a vase.

His father gave him their names the moment he stepped through the doorway: Maddie, a sour-faced child, knock-kneed and resentful even then. To the left of her, Eileen – beautiful and dreamy. His father’s voice had gone dreamy too. Eileen left the island soon’z she was old enough to travel. Never look back. Pearly was the youngest – too young then to know that she had to sit still to get a proper picture, which was why her face was no more than a smudge.

He left Gideon for last. Gideon was the only boy. ‘Apart from y’all, of course. Gideon build bridges for the government.

‘Gideon fifty next year. Pearly forty-seven. Eileen,’ he smiled, ‘she thirty-five next month.’

For a while Pynter felt that the man had forgotten he was there. The bag he’d taken off the donkey was still hanging from his shoulder. His eyes were on the photograph. A stillness had come over his face.

‘Time pass. Time pass too fast, son. Time does pass too fast.’ His voice had grown thick and slow. There was a sadness there that made Pynter turn his eyes up at the heavy shape against the backlight of the doorway.

Once, this shape had been no more than a sound. A voice. It used to stop his hands from whatever they were doing. His father’s voice – different from the voices of all the men he’d ever heard. And now that he could see him, it was the only voice that fitted the face to which it belonged. A large face, brown like burnt ginger, not smiling, not strict, not young, not old. A face that shifted easily, like shadow over water.

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.