Pynter Bender. Jacob Ross

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      Pynter loved this time of quietness, when the last of the evening light poured into the room and settled like honey on the bed, on the wood of the long canvas chair and on his father’s arms. He loved the feeling of lightness that rose in him when he knew that Gideon would not come again for another week.

      But a shadow had crept into these moments, something his father had been keeping from him and Gideon. It was there in the way the old man avoided signing the papers brought to him each week, how he passed his hands across his face more and more these days. Their father was going blind. Pynter saw it approaching the way night crept down the slopes of the Mardi Gras. He saw it wrap itself around the old man like a caul and settle him back against the canvas chair. He saw how it made his gestures smoother, softer and less certain. How it steadied his head and made his body slow and unsure of the spaces it had been so accustomed to.

      There were times when the old man spoke to Pynter of his days on ships in Panama, his journeying through the forests of Guyana searching for gold in riverbeds and streams, and his time in tunnels that ran like intestines in the belly of the earth. It was down there in one of those mines that he’d walked into a metal rod and damaged his left eye, had lived with that injury most of his life – a small white scar like a tiny worm against the black of his left eye that had suddenly come alive.

      The questions his father asked him now were always the same. What was it like before Miss Santay gave him back his eyes? How did he manage when he needed something and no one was there to help him? How would he have felt if he had had to live his whole life with nothing out there to see? And so Pynter taught the old man not to fear the coming darkness. He told him about his own time of darkness, when, for him, the world was just a roar at first, how he’d come to use the sounds around him, how he’d learnt to recognise the things that touched his skin.

      It was the other way around for him, his father said, for while he was heading into darkness with a clear picture of the world inside his head, Pynter, having just emerged from it, had only light and colour to look forward to.

      ‘Not all of it goin to be pretty,’ his father said. ‘But it can’t have pretty without ugly. It can’t have bright without dark.’

      He was silent for a long time and so still it was as if he’d gone to sleep. When he spoke again, it was with an emotion that Pynter did not recognise.

      ‘One thing I’ll carry in my head to the end of my days is the first time y’all mother bring y’all to me. I didn know she was comin. I was weeding corn. I lift my head and see her walkin through my garden with two bundle in she hand, one on eider side. When she reach, she didn say a word, she just hand y’all over to me. She didn have to say nothin, you see? Was the way she do it. Like she was sayin, “Look, I givin you what’s yours.”’

      He passed his hand across his face.

      ‘Gideon – as far as he concern, my funeral done happm and now is time to hand everyting over to him. Like y’all don’t count. Like y’all come from nowhere. Like somebody pick y’all off a tree. But when the time right, I got a nasty shock for him. Let’s hope that he kin take it.’

       7

      PYNTER COULDN’T FIGURE out how a person’s clothes could remain so smooth and perfectly pleated. It was as if the khaki shirt and trousers of the little man had just been taken still steaming from a hot iron and gently placed on him. He wasn’t walking up the hill – not as normal people did – he tiptoed as if he hated the idea of touching the ground with the soles of his glistening leather shoes. Pynter caught glimpses of his white socks as he lifted his shoes and carefully set them down on the patches of grass that dotted the concrete road. The man carried a little brown case under his arm. It matched his jacket and trousers exactly. In the other hand he swung a beautiful stick with a curved silver top. Despite the heat, he was not sweating.

      ‘Is there a Mister Manuel Forsyth living here?’

      ‘What you want my father for?’

      ‘That’s his place?’ A fat little finger shot out before him.

      Pynter didn’t answer at first, but then asked the man to follow him.

      The man walked across Miss Maddie’s yard and straight into his father’s house. He entered the bedroom as if he visited every day. His father sensed the stranger’s presence as soon as he stepped in.

      ‘Who’s it?’ he grumbled.

      ‘Mister Manuel Forsyth?’

      ‘I is he. Who you and what you want?’

      ‘My name is Jonathan, Mister J. Uriah Bostin, Schools Inspector for the parish of San Andrews – urban and suburban, that is – as well as the, er, outer peripheries.’

      ‘A what?’

      ‘Schools Inspector, Jonathan U. Bostin.’

      The old man’s body relaxed, his face became vacant. ‘I name Manuel. Shake my hand.’

      The man seemed to be thinking over the invitation. He stepped forward quickly and stretched out his right hand. Pynter’s father felt the air and got hold of it, his hand almost swallowing the man’s. He seemed to be examining the man’s wrist with his fingers. The stranger didn’t like it. He made an attempt to get his hand back, his large eyes bulging.

      ‘You short!’ Manuel Forsyth said, letting go. ‘You short-breed people. What you say you name was?’

      ‘J. U. Bostin.’

      ‘Those Bostins from Saint Divine – you one of dem?’

      ‘There is a connection there, I think. I’m here to see you about the boy.’

      ‘What happen, you not sure?’

      ‘Well, er, my father is from there – Saint Divine, I mean.’

      ‘And you?’

      ‘Well, I was born there, er, if you don’t mind, Mister Forsyth, I am very pressed by the СКАЧАТЬ