Read Online Pynter Bender by Jacob Ross - Free Book Online

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.
    â€˜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.
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    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 shufflingthe 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