Jacob Ross - Pynter Bender

He’d woken one morning and she was there – a woman with a man’s voice. He knew it was a woman because there was more breath around each word, and of course her smell. Men smelled of sweat and earth and meat things. They never smelled of plant things. His body had tensed, his skin flaring with the awareness of her presence. A hand that belonged to no one he knew rested briefly on his shoulder. Then two thumbs pressed hard against his eyes.

‘Leave ’im to me,’ the voice said.

They left him in the room with her and it became a war in which her hands seemed to reach out from anywhere and hurt him. His body was crouched, his nerves all flared and snarling, and whenever he felt her move he struck out in a wide, violent arc. But she was too quick, seemed to be everywhere at the same time. He lashed out until his arms were aching, and then two strong hands were pinning his arms against his sides. He stood there screaming for Tan Cee.

She said her name was Santay. She called him by a name different from his own. Santay lowered him to the floor and told him that she was there to give him back his eyes and that he must stay with her. That meant leaving the yard with her with a bag strapped to his back, guided by her hands at the nape of his neck. It meant going up a long, steep hill that seemed to have no end.

Pynter felt himself rising out of the valley to lighter, chillier air. A low, deep-throated snoring replaced the rustling of the canes, the sound of the World, she told him, the wind mixed up with all the noises and movements that came from down below and bounced against the bowl of the sky above their heads.

If he was to have back his eyes he would have to lie on the floor at nights and listen to the cheeping, whistling, tik-tok-tinkling of the world outside which slipped into his ear and filled his head to overflowing. It meant learning her moods by the way her feet sounded on the floorboards. It meant being fed the flesh of fruits he’d never before tasted, especially when the pain in his eyes curled his fingers in, made talons of his nails that sunk into her arms as she prised the bandage loose and replaced it with a fresh one.

Once, her hand had paused against his face and he could hear her breathing. ‘You’z a real pretty boy,’ she said. ‘You should see yourself one day.’

Those last few words had made it easier for him.

‘Plants,’ she said, ‘carry in their sap, their bark, their roots, their leaves, the answer to every livin sickness in a yooman been. Some know what should be in a person blood and what don’ ought to be in dere. Some unnerstan de skin. Some have knowledge of de eye. Same way y’have heart doctor and eye doctor, y’have plant that carry the exact same unnerstandin. In fact, sometimes a pusson get to thinkin that God make tree and den tree make we.’

She fed him light the way she fed him fruits, slowly and in fragments. She took the bandages off at night and brought him out into the yard. She showed him where the stars were, the dark unsteady rise of trees, the dizzying slope of hills and the patterns they made against the paler sky. She made him watch a full moon rise until his head began to throb.

It was raining when she first took him outside during the day. Through the thick white haze, she stretched out her finger at shapes and places and said their names to him. Mardi Gras Mountain, tall and dark, pushing its head up through the mists way beyond his vision, at whose feet Old Hope River flowed. The cane fields of Old Hope, whose sighs and whisperings he knew so well. The houses were brown pimples against the green of the hillside, his own home hidden behind a tall curtain of glory cedar trees.

They were sitting on a stone above the valley. He was feeding himself on guavas – the glistening white-fleshed type which smelled of a much gentler perfume than the pink-fleshed ones. She pointed down at the canes and showed him gauldins skimming with outstretched wings above the green surf of the canes. He watched them wheel and settle on the topmost branches of the bamboos that fenced the river in, and he remembered something Tan Cee had told him when the skin still covered his eyes and he’d asked her what the world was like.

‘De world is life; and life is de world,’ she told him. ‘S’like dis room, but it so big-an’-wide it ain’t got no wall around it. An’ it carry millions an’ millions an’ millions of other living things inside itself. De world is like dat – an’ dat’s just a little piece of it.’

‘Miss Santay,’ he said, softly, hopefully. ‘I – I don’t want to dead.’

His words swung Santay round to face him. The scarf on her head was a throbbing yellow. It framed a face so dark he could barely see her features. She looked down at him and his heart began to race.

‘My granmodder … Deeka, say I dead soon,’ he explained, looking down on the rain-swept canes, the birds fluttering above them like a host of living lilies. ‘When I reach ten, she say.’

‘If that granmodder of yours have she way, everybody dead soon.’

Santay lowered herself onto her haunches and placed a hand on his shoulder. She felt different from every person who had ever touched him. In all the time he had been with her, he’d never heard her laugh. She moved so silently, as if she did not dare to disturb the air.

‘Listen, sonny, I don’ know what your people make you out to be. Talk reach me that you have to be one of de Old Ones come again – Zed What’s-iz-name again …? On account of the way you born. And lookin at dem eyes o’ yours, I not so sure they wrong. But …’ She got up suddenly, went inside the house and returned with a sheet of plastic and threw it over him. She told him he would spend the day out there and watch the way night came.

When it was too dark to see the valley any more she called him in and made him change his clothes. He was shivering by then – shivering and hungry.

‘Eat,’ she said, placing a plate of fried fish and bread in his hands. She sat on the small table before him, her elbows almost touching his. ‘Now tell me what happm, Osan.’ It was the name that she had given him.

‘Tell you …?’

‘’Bout dis fella you s’pose to be.’

He was surprised she did not know the story. Everybody knew it, even Miss Lizzie. The story was always there, even when no one was telling it, there in his grandmother’s eyes whenever she turned her gaze on him. Perhaps she knew but she wanted to hear it from him.

He chewed the bread and stared at her uncertainly. He swallowed and closed his eyes.

‘My auntie, Tan Cee, say the cane was always there – the cane and us. She say we come with the cane. A pusson got to count a lot of generation back till dem reach Sufferation Time, when we didn belong to weself, because de man who own de cane own de people too.’

He lifted his head in incomprehension. Santay nodded slightly.

‘Had a fella name Zed Bender. He didn feel he belong to nobody, but in truth he belong to a man name Bull Bender. Bull Bender had a lotta dog. He teach dem to hunt people down. He teach dem to rip off de back of deir leg when he catch dem. If is a woman, he bring ’er back. But he never bring back a man.

‘It happm one day Zed Bender decide to run ’way with a girl name Essa. She was pretty an’ he like ’er bad, real bad. He like ’er so bad he wasn’ ’fraid o’ nothing o’ nobody. He run ’way with her. Bull Bender catch ’im – catch ’im …’ He lifted his eyes past Santay, frowned, shook his head and pointed where he thought the purple mass of the Mardi Gras might be. ‘Up dere.’ Cross dere it have a tree. S’big. It got root like wall. Part of it like a lil house. It got a lotta little bird in dere. Dey ain’ got no feather on dem. It don’ smell nice in dere eider. Missa Bull Bender catch dem dere after de dog tear off de back of Zed Bender leg.’