Jacob Ross - Pynter Bender

The road is long, the night is deep, I got promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep .

‘Uncle Michael?’

‘Nuh, Merican fella name Robbie Frost – with all the warmth from me, of course.’

He was fingering the little blue book in his shirt pocket. ‘Know any poetry?’

‘Wozzat?’

‘You serious?’

Pynter nodded.

‘You been reading Mikey’s stuff – and …’ He laughed, looked at Pynter closely and laughed again.

‘Jeezas, man! Moon over your shoulder.’

‘Shadow in me eye,’ Pynter cut in. The words had come almost despite himself.

‘You been reading Mikey stuff and you don’ know what it call? Listen to this …’ His fingers slid the little notebook from his shirt. He held it up before him. The way Missa Geoffrey sometimes held Miss Tilina’s face.

In the morning dark

my people walk to the time of clocks whose hands

have spanned so many nights

His voice was as soft as Missa Geoffrey’s too, and it was as if he were talking to himself from a bellyful of sadness.

Paso stopped, looked up. He didn’t smile. Pynter shifted under his stare and before he lost the courage, before it became impossible to say what had been sitting on his heart from the moment his fingers retrieved that strange little book from his uncle’s grip, he turned up his face at Paso.

‘I wan’ to make wuds like dat too, I want … I …’ Something desperate and quiet fluttered in his heart. He turned his head away.

Paso steered him towards the steps and sat him down. ‘That book was the most interesting thing you find in there, not so?’

Pynter nodded.

‘Why?’

‘Don’ know.’

‘I tell you something. Once, it cross my mind to take it. Yunno – copy all of it over to this lil book and make meself believe is mine. I start doing it. But then, that same night, I had a dream. I was walking down some kinda road. Long road. I couldn see the end of it. The more I walk, the more I see road in front of me. When I was close to givin up, I realise I had somebody walking beside me. It wasn’ Michael. It was hi friend, the boy.’ Paso threw a sideways glance at him. ‘Yunno what that young fella was to ’im?’

Pynter shook his head.

‘One day it will come to you. Right now nothing in life ain’t prepare you for that kind of … of awareness. Mebbe you’ll never work it out. Don’ know … Anyway, that fella say something to me that I wake up with in me head. It come like a realisation. I can’t forget it. Now I going to pass it on to you. “Find your own words” – that’s what he say to me. “You done have all of dem inside you; you just got to take dem out and put dem in de order that make your living and your thinking and your feelings make sense.” Y’unnerstan?’

Pynter nodded, even though he wasn’t sure he did.

‘When you try to steal a pusson words, s’like you trying to steal their soul. You want to make words work like that? Then feel with your eye and see with your heart.’ He elbowed Pynter gently. ‘Now tell me, Uncle – what is the colour of my eye?’

Pynter looked at him, a shy sideways glance. ‘Black.’

Paso shook his head, worked his mouth as if he’d just munched on something awful.

‘Nuh! That’s seeing with your eye, not feeling with it. Now feel – turn your mind to all the things the old man must ha’ tell you about me. Talk to me, fella, jus’ … ’

‘Night.’

‘Wha’?’

Pynter smiled, tentatively. ‘De colour of your eye is night.’

‘You sure?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘The colour of yours is water. History too – a lot o’ things looking out at me from dem eyes o’ yours. What’s the taste of cane? Think of your mother, think of all your people down there. What’s the taste of cane?’

Pynter lifted dreamy eyes up at the Mardi Gras. ‘Bitter. Cane is bitter. An’ dat mountain up dere is ah old, old man, quarrellin with God.’

He felt Paso’s eyes on him. ‘Them your words?’

‘Dem my words,’ Pynter told him.

‘Well, dem is words – y’hear me, Uncle?’

They laughed out loud together.

For the second time that day, Pynter watched his nephew walk away. So strange. So different, so, so … bee-yoo-tee-ful.

The next morning Pynter’s sister called him to collect the old man’s breakfast. He came out and took the plate. He noticed an extra helping of sweet potatoes. The food was also warm. He didn’t trust her smile. The rest of her face wasn’t smiling.

‘Gideon stay with y’all a long while,’ she said.

‘Yes, Miss Maddie, with Pa not with me.’

‘First time you meet him?’

‘Yes, Miss Maddie.’

‘He talk about a lot o’ tings?’

‘Fink so.’

‘You think so – you didn’t hear what he say?’

‘Culatral,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Culatral, o’ something like that.’

‘Collateral – the sonuva …’ Her voice retreated into her throat and kept rumbling in there. ‘He say for what?’

‘Say what fo’ what?’

‘Collateral – he say collateral fo’ what?’

‘Don’ know.’

‘Is the land, right?’

‘Which land?’

‘Never mind, you hear de word “land” come from deir mouth?’

‘Who mouth?’

‘Paso say you smart – I wondering which part o’ you he find the smartness, cuz …’ She sucked her teeth and began walking back towards the house.

‘Thanks for de two extra piece o’ fry potato,’ he called after her, remembering his manners.

She stopped short, shook her head and continued walking.

6

WHENEVER GIDEON CAME, Pynter left the house for the gully. Now he knew he shared Eden with two people. They came from the other side of the hill, where a cluster of small, brightly painted houses were huddled beneath a line of corse trees whose branches swept the sky.

They arrived together, the woman holding the front of her dress high above the water grass and crestles. The man was the colour of the mahogany chairs inside his father’s house. His hair rested on his shoulders. The woman stepped onto the boulder so that she was like a giant butterfly above the water grass, and called his name.

‘Geoffrey!’ she said, and the words came out like a bird call, like the beginning of a song.

He called her Petal, sometimes P, or Tilina, and from where he sat in the nest of elephant grass, Pynter gathered that her father’s name was Pastor Greenway, and that Geoffrey herded sheep somewhere in the valley beneath Morne Bijoux. He spoke of his sheep the way the women in the river spoke of their children. He learned that Pastor Greenway would kill Miss Petalina if he knew she ran away to meet Geoffrey here. The fear was there on her face when she arrived, coming off her like the perfume she was wearing.

Pynter always got there before they did. He would listen to the man sing to himself with that heavy bullfrog voice, watch him gather leaves before Miss P arrived. Sometimes he would close his eyes and feel the man’s low thunder vibrate deep inside his head – a rich voice, dark and thick as molasses, bouncing around the gully.

He liked to watch Miss Lina coming across the sprays of light pouring through the undergrowth, falling over her yellow dress, making her look pretty as an okra flower. She would come to rest beside Geoffrey on the nest of leaves he’d made for them both.

Pynter waited until their wrestling was over, until her chirpings had subsided, and Geoffrey’s croakings had grown low. And then he crept away.

Back at the house, with Gideon gone, he would find his father quiet. He knew it was a kind of war between them – a battle in which his father was struggling to hold on to something that Gideon wanted badly. It left the old man sleepy and exhausted. Pynter would reach for the large black book, lower himself on the floor, his toes resting lightly on the old man’s feet, and begin to read for him.