Читать книгу Pynter Bender - Jacob Ross - Страница 9
ОглавлениеHE UNCOVERED HIS Uncle Michael in a grip in the room his father had told him not to enter. He also found his mother there.
He didn’t understand why his father should forbid him to enter a room whose door was wide open. He could see, dimly, right through to the furthest wall. Mornings, he stood at the lip of that door-mouth, his head turned sideways, his father’s voice like a staying hand inside his head. But the fingers of light that entered through the cracks in the board wall on the other side kept drawing him back to the gloom inside. However bright the day, the light in there was always yellow. It made burning pathways across the floor, on books and piles of paper, along the red handle of an axe, over the bunched darkness of a broom, and small piles of clothing strewn like debris thrown up on an abandoned shore.
The room had an odour, too, that spread itself throughout his father’s house – the smell of things that had dried too fast to rot.
It took him days. Of tiptoeing and stopping. Of stopping and tiptoeing. Each time a step or two further in, listening to his dozing father’s breathing in the room next door, mapping out the space around him with his eyes, summoning up his courage. It was a while before he noticed the grip in the corner. It was partly concealed beneath a child’s small mattress. A small, deep-brown case, worn and raw at the edges, with bright brass studs at each corner. The three latches at the front were also made of brass, the handle shaped from some white-veined material that had a wondrous glasslike translucency. He laid it gently back against the mattress, wondering how it could have got there. If the sea had swallowed the boat his father’s brother had been travelling on, wouldn’t it have also taken this with it?
There was a small book in there. It was laid on top of the folded clothing, with pages that looked and smelled like paper money. There was a picture of a slim-faced man at the front of it, with large, light-flecked pools of eyes staring out at him, and a mouth that was soft and curved like his Auntie Patty’s.
He’d seen pictures before but never one like this: the paper so smooth and shiny it seemed to preserve something of the darkness and the glow of his uncle’s skin. Those eyes were really watching him, still on him when he reached beyond the little book and began to slowly lift the clothing aside. Things in there were cool to his touch even though his hands were sweating. His thumb was bleeding where he’d pulled on the catch too hard and a splinter had slipped into his flesh.
It was like reaching into a dream. The lining that ran around the box shifted like water beneath his fingers. The shirts were made of fabrics soft as soap suds. The white ones seemed to give off their own glow in the gloom. A razor folded in a soft brown square of leather. Talcum powder in a pouch that smelled like cinnamon, like the ocean, but mostly like the scent that came off the skin of limes.
Further down beneath the razor and the shirts, past the heavy grey trousers, his fingers hit on something hard. He touched its edges and it slid away from him. He could not close his hand around it. Realising what it was, he slipped his hand under and eased it out – another small book, its cover as rough as bark, its pages ragged at the edges as if they had been ripped from something else and put together by absent-minded hands. Nothing in it but small, haphazard markings like a nest of disturbed ants spilling over the edge of every page. Nothing much worth looking at apart from the photo of a boy.
Perhaps it was the smell of the fabric, the sheen of all those things in that dirty time-scratched box, that held him there.
The boy in the photograph was sitting on a step, his head thrown back as if he were in the middle of the most beautiful daydream. The houses and the people around him were bleached almost to a whiteness, but the boy wouldn’t have seen them because his eyes were closed. And as Pynter used to do in his time of blindness, he shut his eyes, rubbing his thumb against the upturned face in the photograph. He found himself slipping into a happy dreaminess, and he knew that this boy, at some time in his uncle’s life, had meant everything to him.
He found his mother in that room too, scribbled over the fat purple-veined leaves that people called the love leaf. Santay had shown it to him – a strange leaf that took root anywhere, even between the covers of a book, and which threw out little plants exactly like itself from the little dents around its edges. They called it love leaf because it fed on air, drank the water from itself and gave life to its children just long enough for their roots to reach the earth. The mother plant could release them only when she dried up and died. Until then, they fed on her and lived. What better love than that?
But, like his uncle’s markings, his mother’s made no sense to him. He’d seen those lines and curlicues of hers before, from the very first week that Santay sent him home. Peter said she’d always made them. These were different, smaller, packed tightly together, but they had the same loops and curves as those she made on the earth between her feet when she sat alone beneath the grapefruit tree, a stick in her hand, a strip of grass between her teeth, her eyes so far away she wouldn’t have seen him if he’d stood in front of her and waved.
The leaves were dried up now, even their children, because, lodged as they were between the covers of the large brown book, they could not fall to earth. It smelled of earth, the book, dropped carelessly in the corner by the door, its covers riddled with the little tunnels the worms had made through it.
He found nothing else among the pages, just the leaves with those marks he’d always thought his mother made only in the dust.
The days merged into each other like the lines he marked on the steps with the bits of chalk and charcoal he found inside the room. His father rarely left the house. He would sit on the long canvas chair beside the door, muttering to himself over the Bible, solid like a slab of rock on his knees, its pages spread like wings on the altar of his palms.
They hardly talked. Pynter didn’t mind. He had the room to go to.
Over the weeks, Pynter came to know the cracks that ran like little ravines in the flooring of that room, from which he’d extricate buttons, marbles, needles, rusty pins, little bits of coloured glass, a child’s gold earring, three silver coins with birds on them, a small chain of beads that slipped from the crease of his palm in a glittering liquid stream, a tiny copper buckle and bits of fingernail.
Still, he felt that even if he’d entered this room, had explored every part of it with his fingers, it had not really opened up itself to him.
‘Pa, I want to learn to read.’
The old man stopped the spoon before his lips and, without looking up, he said, ‘I been thinkin that you’ll have to soon. I’ll start you off with this.’ He nodded at the Bible.
By the time the man with the white shirt and the stick with the head of a lion came, Pynter had begun to make sense of all his mother’s writing on those leaves. Her words, he realised, were not meant for his father. Not in the way that Uncle Michael’s were meant for the boy in the photograph. She wrote them the way she talked, almost as if she were answering Miss Lizzie and the women in the river. A story which over time he slowly pieced together, ignoring the nudge of hunger in his guts, not hearing his father calling him sometimes as he sat in the gloom shuffling the leaves, sorting and re-sorting them until the words followed each other easily. A strange feeling it was too, rebuilding his and Peter’s history with those dead leaves, one he now knew began long before either of them was born.
When John Seegal walk i use to wish i went with him. i use to wish i didnt have to wait no more for him to come back home. from the time he leave all I find myself doing was just waiting. i used to like Fridays by the river fridays was quiet like you dont have nobody else in the world excepting you and the river water running over stone like it want to tell you something, and the quiet wrap itself nice and safe round you. i use to like that. It feel like if the water was my thoughts running through my head.
One morning i take the washing early. i take the long way down, through the ravine that was a road when rain didnt fall and the bottom get dry.
i come to the place i like to wash because it got a flat stone there. It was big and wide like a bed, like a place you want to sleep on. The top was bleach like a sheet from all the soap that dry on it.
i like to finish wash and leave the clothes to dry so i could watch the water turn white or get dark according to what cloud pass over it. But dat time for no reason at all i get tired of just sitting down dere and I decide to walk down the river. i was talking to myself, or maybe thinking to meself i dont remember now so I didnt notice tie-tongue Sharon and she son a little way ahead of me.
i know her. she cant talk because she tongue was sew down to she mouth. is so she born. People treat her different because of that, but i never. First time i look at her close i see how pretty she is. She got the prettiest teeth anybody ever see and she got eye that look at you as if they watchin from inside a room.
i see how she say things with she face too, if you look in she eye you understand everything she cant say with words. i did always like miss sharon.
She was standing by the end of the stretch of water in front of me, and the little boy was standing up in the middle of the water with her too. They was naked as they born and she was bathing him. It dont have no words for it. i feel sometimes that is because she cant talk words that she show so much love with them two hand she have. i remember the light too because the sun did find a place through all dem leaf and it fall on them. the little boy was shyning like if fire itself did bathing him. i could hear he voice and hear him laughing to heself sometimes and sometimes answering questions i never hear miss Sharon ask him. she was full with child, contented and full, that is what i remember. Like was them alone in the world and still them wasnt missing nobody. Not like me.
One time she rest her hand on her belly. I see the boy face. I see how perfect and happy he was. Was like if all the question I been asking ever since my father leave get answer right there, all them question I didnt even know I want a answer for. I didnt miss my fadder John Seegal no more.
I know miss Sharon know dat I was there because after a while the two of them was lookin over where I was. I wonder to meself how come they know I there on that stone behind the bush. But then seein as I know she was watching me I get up sort of guilty.
She do the funniest thing when I stand up. She laugh.
I didnt hear her laugh but I know she laugh because she whole body do it. It shift that way and this way like she koodnt keep the funniness inside of she. I didnt want her to hold it in eider because she look nice an pretty laughing like that. I get up from where I was and walk down to her because she call me with she hand and when I reach she look in my face kind of soft and deep. The little boy was pretty like her. He was slim and and smooth like guava wood.
Dat light, is de light I still remember. All dat light around dem and I was in dat light now, like if I did belong dere too.
I know she must have hear me thinking because she take my hand and rest it on she belly like i was touching the whole world with my hand or the reason for the world, or something.
I ask her how I could come like her. what I did mean was how I could be so happy and contented. She look at the boy and she understand and her body laugh. Her face and her hand tell him something dat he tell me afterwards. he say dat she say I have to be a woman first. A woman. Like that word was something that she just hand over to me.
i get impatient with de years. I get sort of fed up waitin to turn woman, sometimes. And a couple of times I try to hurry things up. I start talkin to meself too, bicause all them thoughts was running round inside my head like ants and when I couldn hold dem in, I sort of let dem roll out of me and i write dem down on anything my hand fall on. Is how they begin to think that I gone crazy. Dat my father spirit get tired of that dirty swamp down dere and seein as I was his favrite before Patty come he come back to possess me.
I know you long before you know me. I know you from de time you look down straight at me one morning, when I get up early to go to the pipe for water.
I had my bucket on my head when you reach me and I lift my eye to say Mornin Missa Manuel Forsyth. I tell myself afterwards that I shouldnt do that. I should a keep my head straight but I was remembering what Miss Sharon tell me by the river. Everything I been waitin fo ever since she tell me come back to me.
You didnt look like no old man to me. Wasnt no old fella I see when I look and wasnt what I see afterwards.
I dont know why it had to take three months of getting up early in the morning and saying Good Morning Missa Manuel befo I work meself up enough to tell you what I want. And it wasnt no old fella lookin at me when I ask you first time even if you look at me as if I mad.
I keep asking till I wear you down. After a little time I see you couldnt hide behind your age no more because all thats left was a man looking at a woman.
That was how I come to feel alright again since my father leave, because after that I was going to have something dat bilong to me.
What I never understand …
He could not find the leaf that would have told him what she never understood. Not a whole one, but fragments that, whichever way he placed them, did not fit together …
…dam fool to believe ——
—— crazy l——
——y —— mother and all th——
—— love and ——
—— chilren who is ——.
—— dam fool ——
—— hatin all —— ——nofabitch tha—
How did it end? Was it with love and —— or was it with — — hatin all ——?
Uncle Michael’s words were stranger than his mother’s, colliding in odd and unexpected ways.
moon over your shoulder shadow in my eyes.
Today you looked much older.
Today I made you cry.
Aruba, May 1945
And it was strange that even when he’d forgotten them, it still felt as if they’d left some part of themselves inside his head. Short words, not half as long as his mother’s; sometimes a line running across a page – like a tiny ant-trail against a vast white desert.
Day yawns, cracks the egg of dawn. A coq-soleil’s sopranoing rises and circles a clean sun. Panama, August 1947
Those words did not help him understand why his uncle never wanted children. They were like the doorway that had invited him into this abandoned room. Everything was laid out before his eyes but their messages remained hidden. A darkened room that was as full of stories as the women in the river. Only these were littered in untidy heaps across the dusty floor, and stranger to him than anything he’d ever heard before.
It going to be quiet up there, his father had told him, but it was not quiet in his head. He missed the voices of the women in the yard. The foolish and the awful things they talked about and laughed over. He missed his fights with Peter and above all he missed his auntie’s hands.
Now that the dry season had come, his aunt, Tan Cee, would be down there among those tiny black dots crawling along the green edges of the never-ending fields of sugar cane. Patty the Pretty would be home because Leroy had taken her out of cane. They would no doubt be doing what his grandmother said his youngest aunt always did when Leroy was around: trying for a child.
He never wondered what that meant. It was some kind of magic between adults that involved hiding themselves away and, if he were to judge by what he saw from Patty, looking very sleepy and smiling all the time.
Tan Cee would be down there with the men, swinging her machete at the roots of the cane, his mother just behind her, gathering them in bundles, tying them and lifting them over her head onto the tractors that looked like big yellow beetles from where he stood. Home was just a walk away, but from here it seemed as if it would take an entire lifetime to reach them.
He wondered if Birdie was with them, then he remembered Tan Cee saying that Birdie only ever sweated over bread.
It was quiet up here. The quietness stretched beyond the house. At the back of it, the land ran wild for miles, all the way past the hellish quarry-land of Gaul through to Morne Bijoux on the other side of the ridge of hills that separated them from the rest of the world. Afternoons, when the heat of the day pushed the old man into a deep sleep, he left the room and retreated into the bushes, making his own little pathways among the borbook and black sage.
There was a long, narrow ravine that went down to a tall wall of plants with bright blossoms. His first few visits there, he couldn’t figure out why everything seemed to be either in fruit or flowering when everything else around was dry. He had gone closer, to examine those heavy deep-scented flowers, when he felt himself falling. He landed in a tangle of wist vines, was shaken but not hurt. Sat there while his eyes adjusted to the thick green light.
He was in a gully that he would never have known existed had he not fallen through the bush that covered it like a roof. The earth was dark with dampness, though it hadn’t rained for weeks. It was cool here too, like the riverbank. There were the same darkish odours of growth and fermentation.
He began picking his way through the tangle. This place puzzled him. The earth was covered with guavas. They hung thickly from the branches above his head. A slight brush of his fingers and they fell into his hands. Wherever there were guavas there were serpents. Santay had told him about the reddish ones that grew long and fat and wrapped themselves in tight knots around the branches. And sure enough he saw them, untying themselves, their heads stretched out towards him, their tongues flickering like small flames in their mouths. He made a hammock of his shirt, selected the fruits he wanted and left there quickly. Later, in the dimming light of the late evening, he sat on the steps and broke open the fruit, tasted each one tentatively before stuffing himself full.
He came back to that place often, because he could find food there. He found crayfish canes and water lemons further down the gully, and a little walk beyond that, sapodillas and star apples. Everything was growing there in that long green tunnel of light and leaves, a secret place that only he, the birds, the millipedes and serpents knew about. He called it Eden.
It was during one of his visits there that Gideon came. When Pynter returned to his father’s house, he heard a new voice pitched high and fast. It sounded like an argument. His father’s rumblings were soft and subdued against the other. Miss Maddie was bending over a pepper plant on the side of the house, a can of water in her hand. His father was lying back on the canvas chair. A man in a pressed blue shirt sat on a chair he had taken from the living room. His legs were close together and he was leaning forward slightly. There were papers on the bed.
The stranger turned and saw him, looked at him as if he knew him. His eyes paused on his face, then dropped to his naked feet. They stayed there a while before travelling back up to his face again. Pynter was suddenly aware that he hadn’t washed his hands. Hadn’t poured water on his feet and cleaned them in the grass outside. He felt an urge to go outside and do it.
‘So you the one they call Half Pint?’ The man was showing him his teeth. His face was strange. It was long like his father’s but thinner, with all the bones showing through. His eyes were round and bright like polished marbles and when he spoke, his lips hardly moved.
‘Pynter,’ his father said, ‘dis is Gideon, your brother.’
Gideon closed his mouth as suddenly as he’d opened it to show his teeth. He turned back to face the old man. ‘So, how you gettin on, Ole Fella?’
‘Don’t “Ole Fella” me, I your father. Pynter?’
‘Pa?’
‘Say hello to your brother, Gideon.’
Gideon threw a quick sideways glance at him. ‘I met the boy already.’
‘Gideon hardly come to look for me,’ his father said. ‘The more money he make, the longer he stay away.’
Gideon protested, his stammery voice rising and falling quickly. His father chuckled. Soon Pynter was not hearing them. He stood at the doorway, his shoulder pressed against the side of it, watching the face they said his mother feared more than any other in the world, following with his eyes the hands that had almost taken Peter and him away from her. Gideon was still wearing his grey felt hat. It looked new. Everything about him looked new, even his pale blue shirt and shiny brown leather shoes.
Gideon turned his head and saw him staring. He glanced at their father, who was busy with figuring out the exact value of the farmland he’d stopped working in the far end of Old Hope. When Gideon turned back to Pynter it was with a look that reminded him of Deeka, like that time she pushed him off the top of her steps and Tan Cee came so close to striking her.
He retreated into the living room and sat on the chair closest to the bedroom door. He didn’t know what was making Gideon talk so low and rapidly, but occasionally he heard the old man chuckle, and just once Manuel Forsyth’s voice rose sharp and clear: ‘You can’t make a fool of me, Gideon. I still got my senses. I not signing anything, specially now that I can’t see too clear what I going be signing.’
Miss Maddie was still out there shuffling around the house. She was nearer the back now, uprooting grass or something. With Gideon here and Miss Maddie at the back, things made a little more sense to him. This dusty wooden house suffused with its deep and sweetish odours of wood-rot and neglect was theirs. Gideon, Miss Maddie, Sister Pearly and Eileen-in-America wouldn’t have minded the shadows in the corners, the very faint odour of Canadian Healing Oil, the smell of bay leaves and black sage that grew on the windward side of the house. It was their feet that had smoothed the wooden floor. The walls had thrown their voices back at them. His father’s house would never be his and Peter’s the way it had been for them.
His mind must have taken him a far way off. Miss Maddie was no longer moving around the house. He got up and went to the bedroom door. ‘Pa tired,’ he said. ‘Dat’s why he not answerin you no more.’
That sudden sideways glance again. The expression was still there when Gideon laughed. ‘’Kay, Pops. I see you again soon.’
Gideon stood up, took out a roll of money and peeled off two brown notes and three green ones. He shoved them in his father’s hand.
‘Thirty-five dollars. All I have. Come, walk me to the door, Quarter Bottle.’
‘My name is Pynter.’
‘What’s the other one call?’
‘Peter. He your brother too.’
Gideon’s hands were stuffed inside his pockets. Keys jangled.
He pulled them out. ‘How you know dat, uh?’
‘Everybody know dat,’ Pynter told him flatly.
Gideon brought his face down close to Pynter’s. ‘Look here, Half Eights.’
‘Pynter!’
‘Okay, Pinky! Either I lookin at a miracle or you and whatever-his-name-is is the fastest one anybody ever pull on my old man and get away with it. Jeez! And believe me dat is a miracle, cuz he never was nobody fool. I don’ see no part of us in you.’
‘Me neither!’ Pynter said, and he turned to run back in, but Gideon’s hand had closed around his collar. He could have cried out, let his father know, but he didn’t want to. He spun round, stared into the man’s face, putting the weight of all the memories of all the things the women by the river had said behind his words. ‘I don’ like you, Gideon. I never like you since before I born. An’ long as I live, I never goin to like you.’
Gideon stiffened. Pynter thought he was about to hit him. But something in Pynter had changed from the night when Coxy had pinned his back against a tree and looked into his eyes. He would never let a man lay his hands on him again. He closed his fingers around Gideon’s wrist and had twisted his shoulders to sink his teeth into his arm when a voice came suddenly between them, ‘Let the little fella go, Gidiot.’
Gideon stepped back. Pynter turned his head to see a young man leaning against the house. He had both hands in his pockets and his legs were crossed. His eyes were like Miss Elaine’s – large and wide and bright. There was no collar on his white shirt. A small book with a blue cover peeked out of one of his pockets.
‘What the hell you want?’ Gideon squeezed the words out through his teeth.
‘Pick on somebody your size – you flippin thug.’
‘Lissen, Mister Pretty Pants – watch your … ’
The young man’s movement cut Gideon’s words short. He’d pushed himself off the wall so quickly, so unexpectedly, that Pynter felt his heart flip over.
Gideon stepped closer. ‘You try anything, I give what you got coming to you.’
‘Not from you. For sure. And don’t forget, you beating up a child and threatening me in my mother yard.’
The man mumbled something under his breath and turned to leave.
Paso smiled. ‘Say what you thinking, Big Fella.’
‘You and your mother won’ like it.’
Paso curled a beckoning finger at Pynter. ‘Come this side,’ he said. He was looking at Gideon sideways. ‘That’s bad blood there. Sour blood.’
‘At least I’m a man.’
‘You say that again, I make you sorry.’
Their voices had drawn Miss Maddie out onto the porch. Gideon saw her, straightened up and strolled out of the yard.
The youth stared down at Pynter, smiling. ‘First time you meet that dog?’
Pynter nodded.
‘Don’t go near ’im. He’ll bite anything that move. When he come, jus’ give ’im space.’ He stepped back, playfully almost, as if he were dancing. ‘So you my mother brother? I hear a lot ’bout y’all. People round here talk!’ He thumbed his mother’s house. ‘Call me Paso, and you – you Paul – no, Peter. Not so?’
‘I Pynter. Peter home.’
Paso reached for his hand and shook it. ‘So how I must call you – Uncle?’
‘Pynter.’
‘Pynter, okay – nuh, I think I’ll stick with Uncle. It got a certain, uhm, ring, nuh resonance to it. See you around, Big Fella.’
He winked and strolled away. Pynter watched him walk towards the porch, watched him until he stepped behind his mother and seemed miraculously to be swallowed up by her bulk.
Later in the evening, when dusk had just begun to sprinkle the foothills with that creeping ash that would thicken into night, Paso appeared again, this time with Manuel Forsyth’s food. He had changed his trousers but not his shirt.
‘Still there, Uncle?’
Pynter nodded. He’d spent most of the afternoon waiting to catch a glimpse of Paso again.
Paso placed the plate on the step beside his foot. ‘I tell the Madre to put a little extra in for you – not just this time, but every time. You been inside that lil room yet?’
The question caught him unawares. Paso dropped questions the way a person threw a punch when the other was least expecting it.
‘Which room?’ Pynter asked.
‘The dark one.’ He winked.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Find what I find in there?’
Pynter turned his head and shrugged. Paso laughed.
‘Take me a coupla days and a bottle of the Madre cooking oil to grease them hinges. The Old Fella used to keep it locked. He shouldn ha’ tell me not to go in there. S’like an open invitation, s’far as I concern. I leave it open so he could know I was in there. He never close it back.’
‘Where you go to every night-time?’
The smile left his nephew’s face, but only briefly. In less than a heartbeat it returned. ‘Wherever night-time want me. Ever hear this one?
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.
