Pynter Bender. Jacob Ross

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СКАЧАТЬ bust their tail. That was bread – that was de fadder an’ modder of all bread. In fact, bread was Birdie salvation. God might forgive him his thiefin ways on account of his talent for baking. And not just bread. Dumplings too. Cornmeal dumplings, plain-flour dumplings, cassava dumplings: dumplings for oil-down and crab stew; for pea soup and fish broth. Or jus’ dumplings stan’-up by itself.

      You bit into one of Birdie’s dumplings and it protested. It stewpsed. It sucked its teeth like an irritable woman. It went ‘chiiks!’ Like it was answering you back or something. Like it asking you what the arse you playin, biting it so hard.

      In fact, a woman could get de measure of a man by the dumplin’ that he make. By de size of it, the toughness and de strength of it, an’ whether it could answer back when you sink your teeth in it. And if a pusson want proof dat Birdie was a real man, dem only had to eat his dumplin’. Just one. In fact, you didn even have to go to all that lovely trouble. All you have to do is ask his woman, Cynty. Cuz soon as Birdie reach from jail, he does go an’ cook she food!

      Woman-talk. Sweet-talk. Bender-talk that sent them up in quakes of laughter and left the children smiling back suspiciously at them.

      Birdie spoke of prison as if it were another country – one with walls too tall to escape over. And why a person goin want to do that anyway? They could break a leg, and if they got away, where they goin to hide on a little island that the sea fence in better than any barbed wire? And that was only if they got that far, because there were dogs – he knew the name of every one of them. Real dogs. Not no bag-a-bone pot-hound like people got in their yard at home, but Rockwylers and Allstations. Them is serious dog! Them could follow a man shadow in the night. No joke! All they need was a little sniff of the bench that fella sit down on a coupla years ago. And they good as got him.

      He told them of troubles they knew nothing about, and of men who’d spent their entire lives behind those old stone walls, who, when let out, were so confused and terrified of all that light and air around them they ran straight back inside. Some spent all their days trying to figure out what they did to be up there.

      There were the bright ones, he told them, put inside for something they might have said that somebody did not like. With their quiet words and educated ways, they changed the men without the wardens noticing. Taught them how to talk up for themselves, how to hold on to an argument. And those who could not take their minds off their women and their children were made to think of things that had never crossed their minds before. Like why cane was so cheap and they couldn’t afford to buy the sugar that was made from it; why the dry season always brought with it so much rage and hardship on an island where the soil they walked on was so rich. So rich, in fact, that if a pusson dropped a needle on the ground it grew into a crowbar.

      The smile left his lips, and his hands grew quiet in his lap. Now the young ones were coming, he told them, children who had no place among big men. Sent there by men who thought they owned the country. Who could not abide the impatience of these young ones who asked more questions and wanted a life that took them further than these narrow acres of bananas and sugar cane. Which was why there were more guns and soldiers now; which was why something had to break. Soon. It didn’t take the edicated men to show him that. He could see it coming.

      Pynter eased his head off Tan Cee’s shoulder.

      ‘An’ you, Missa Birdie, if it so bad in dere, how come you like jail so much?’ He didn’t understand the sudden silence and the look that Deeka shot him.

      Birdie raised his head and laughed, but the furrows on his brows that had not been there before made his face look different.

      ‘You de funny one – not so? You de second-born?’ Birdie said.

      Tan Cee rested an arm across Pynter’s shoulder and drew him in to her. ‘And you the one who name we give ’im.’ She smiled. ‘Hi first name is your middle name. We call ’im Pynter.’

      Tan Cee’s words seemed to take Birdie somewhere else. His face relaxed. His eyes got soft and dreamy.

      ‘I ferget that,’ he said. ‘I ferget that name. S’what happm when you got something and you never use it. Dat remind me,’ he rose up like a small earthquake from the floor, ‘Cynty down dere waiting.’

      That night, curled up on the floor beside Peter, Pynter realised that his uncle had not answered him. His head was a hive of questions he never got to ask – why, especially, was he always thiefin things that were never really useful?

      The last time the police had come for him was after he arrived in the yard with a fridge on his head and a television under his arm, even though the whole world knew that Lower Old Hope didn’t have electricity. And it was a waste, because the chickens made their nest in the fridge and one of the policemen who came to take him went off with the television.

      ‘Peter, you like Birdie?’

      ‘Uncle Birdie,’ Peter hissed.

      ‘Uncle Birdie – you like ’im?’

      ‘Uh-huh. And you?’

      ‘He not well an’ he don’ know it.’

      He felt Peter shifting in the dark. ‘S’not true – Tan Cee tell you so?’

      ‘No, I tell Tan Cee so.’

      ‘Which part of ’im not well?’ Peter said.

      ‘You say s’not true, so I not tellin you.’ He felt his brother moving towards him, felt his breath against his ear.

      ‘Jumbie Boy – you’z a flippin liar.’

      Elena Bender was smiling when she asked Pynter to come and sit with her beneath the plum tree. That was not good. His mother never smiled so early in the day. She picked up a piece of stick and began making patterns in the dust with it. A thin film of sweat had settled among the very fine hairs on her upper lip. She glanced sideways at him, briefly, tried to smile again, but he could see that she was forcing it.

      ‘You goin to your father house from Sunday.’

      ‘My father – Manuel Forsyth?’

      ‘You don’ call ’im Manuel Forsyth; he’s your father.’

      ‘He got another name?’

      ‘Is the same rudeness you bring to your Uncle Birdie yesterday. You see how upset you make him? Peter know what y’all father look like. You don’t think you ought to know him too?’

      He didn’t answer straight away, preferring to follow the flight of a pair of chicken hawks high on the wind above them. Their cries reminded him of bright sharp things – knives and nails and needles.

      ‘He a old man,’ he said. ‘Ten times older’n you. Dat’s what Miss Lizzie say. I not goin nowhere.’

      ‘What else Miss Lizzie say?’ She was looking at him sideways.

      ‘Lots o’ things.’

      ‘Like what?’ She was speaking but her lips were hardly moving.

      A small current of uneasiness ran through him. He turned his head away from her, remembering the evening he returned from the river after Tan Cee had taken him there. During dinner, Patty the Pretty had come to sit with him. She’d asked him what had happened down there СКАЧАТЬ