Read Online Pynter Bender by Jacob Ross - Free Book Online Page B

times I try to hurry things up. I start talkin to meself too, bicause all them thoughts was running round inside my head like ants and when I couldn hold dem in, I sort of let dem roll out of me and i write dem down on anything my hand fall on. Is how they begin to think that I gone crazy. Dat my father spirit get tired of that dirty swamp down dere and seein as I was his favrite before Patty come he come back to possess me .
    I know you long before you know me. I know you from de time you look down straight at me one morning, when I get up early to go to the pipe for water .
    I had my bucket on my head when you reach me and I lift my eye to say Mornin Missa Manuel Forsyth. I tell myself afterwards that I shouldnt do that. I should a keep my head straight but I was remembering what Miss Sharon tell me by the river. Everything I been waitin fo ever since she tell me come back to me .
    You didnt look like no old man to me. Wasnt no old fella I see when I look and wasnt what I see afterwards .
    I dont know why it had to take three months of getting up early in the morning and saying Good Morning Missa Manuel befo I work meself up enough to tell you what I want. And it wasnt no old fella lookin at me when I ask you first time even if you look at me as if I mad .
    I keep asking till I wear you down. After a little time I see you couldnt hide behind your age no more because all thats left was a man looking at a woman .
    That was how I come to feel alright again since my father leave, because after that I was going to have something dat bilong to me .
    What I never understand …
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    He could not find the leaf that would have told him what she never understood. Not a whole one, but fragments that, whichever way he placed them, did not fit together …
    â€¦ dam fool to believe ——
    â€”— crazy l ——
    â€”— y —— mother and all th ——
    â€”— love and ——
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â â€”— chilren who is ——.
    â€”— dam fool ——
    â€”— hatin all ——
                —— nofabitch tha —
    How did it end? Was it with love and —— or was it with — — hatin all ——?
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    Uncle Michael’s words were stranger than his mother’s, colliding in odd and unexpected ways.
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    moon over your shoulder shadow in my eyes .
    Â Â Â 
    Today you looked much older.
    Â Â 
    Today I made you cry.
    Aruba, May 1945
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    And it was strange that even when he’d forgotten them, it still felt as if they’d left some part of themselves inside his head. Short words, not half as long as his mother’s; sometimes a line running across a page – like a tiny ant-trail against a vast white desert.
    Day yawns, cracks the egg of dawn. A coq - soleil’s sopranoing rises and circles a clean sun . 
Panama, August 1947
    Those words did not help him understand why his uncle never wanted children. They were like the doorway that had invited him into this abandoned room. Everything was laid out before his eyes but their messages remained hidden. A darkened room that was as full of stories as the women in the river. Only these were littered in untidy heaps across the dusty floor, and stranger to him than anything he’d ever heard before.
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    It going to be quiet up there , his father had told him, but it was not quiet in his head. He missed the voices of the women in the yard. The foolish and the awful things they talked about and laughed over. He missed his fights with Peter and above all he missed his auntie’s hands.
    Now that the dry season had come, his aunt, Tan Cee, would be down there among those tiny black dots crawling along the green edges of the never-ending fields of sugar cane. Patty the Pretty would