Pynter Bender by Jacob Ross Page B

above the water grass, and called his name.
    â€˜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, watchhim 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,