Pynter Bender. Jacob Ross
bread following him.
He emerged into a bright, harsh day from the cocoa plantation near Cross Gap Junction a couple of miles away. And it was from there that he started greeting people.
Tan Cee heard him first about a quarter of a mile out on the road. Somebody must have set him off laughing. Her head cocked up like a chicken’s and suddenly she was squealing, ‘Birdie! Birdie!’, running down the hill towards the road with the tub of washing spilt all over the ground and Coxy’s trousers trailing in the dirt behind her.
‘That sister o’ mine crazy,’ Elena laughed, but she too was dancing on the steps.
Birdie brought Tan Cee back up the hill kicking and choking with laughter in between her pleas for him to put her down. He was holding her high above his head and tickling her at the same time.
They collapsed in the yard together and before he knew it they were all over him. Patty arrived running and simply dumped herself on them. Elena almost took a flying leap from the steps and trusted Birdie’s body to take care of the rest. Tan Cee was somewhere between them. They pinched him, they bit him, they kicked him, they dug and squirmed their fingers in his ribs, which brought out thunder-rolls of laughter from him and set the whole yard laughing too. For Birdie’s was the kind of laughter that was in itself a joke.
He rolled them off eventually and they sat in the dirt and stared at him, the giant they saw once in every few years. They reached out their hands and brushed the bits of grass and dust from his beard, wiped the sweat off his forehead with their hands. Tan Cee straightened the collar of the khaki shirt they’d just crushed while Patty and Elena rested their elbows on his shoulders. He got to his feet, bringing them all up together with him, like a tree might move with all its branches, and now that the children could see his full size they were open-mouthed.
If Birdie had been born after his father’s passing, they would have said he was John Seegal born again, and he had the same effect on Deeka. She was sweeping up the fallen flowers of the grapefruit tree when she heard his laughter. The sound of him had frozen her. She hadn’t moved from under the grapefruit tree, still held the broom in her hand in mid-swing.
She didn’t say a thing when he got up, eased the three women aside and turned around to face her with a grin as wide as a beach.
Birdie lifted his mother off the ground and held her, broom and all, as one would do a child. The smile gone now, he looked down at her face and rumbled softly, ‘Ma!’
Everything was in that single word, all the time and distance there had been between them. Deeka dropped the broom. She reached up and looped her arms around his neck.
‘Put me down,’ she ordered.
He held her for a while longer then carefully let her down among the stones, passing his hands through his hair, his beard, then his hair again.
‘When you goin back?’ she asked.
‘I goin straight this time, Ma. No more jail for me.’
‘Until you break in somebody house again and clean it out? I try to straighten you out from small, but this son o’ mine born crooked. Come lemme feed you some proper food, you thief!’
His laughter filled the house till evening. He ate everything they placed before him, and when he finished he kicked the heavy boots off his feet, reached for the canvas bag that hadn’t left his shoulder, even when his sisters were wrestling with him, and pulled out several loaves of bread.
It was what they had been waiting for: Birdie’s prison bread. Pynter and his brother knew more about his bread than they did about their uncle himself. It was the taste of Birdie’s bread they talked about when they were really missing him. It was a way of talking about his strength too, for the secret to his making the best bread on the island – and a pusson won’ be surprised if it was de best bread in de world, Elena told them – lay in the power of those hands. She’d said those last words the way a preacher in church would say them. Only she didn’t get an amen at the end but a loud ‘Uh-huh!’ from Tan Cee.
Those hands – they kneaded dough so tight a pusson could hang it on a branch and swing on it and it won’t stretch loose an’ make dem fall an’ 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