Pynter Bender Read Online Free

would need to feed a wedding or celebrate a birth, or when, just for the hell of it, one of the women decided to clear out the leaves, fill it with water and toss the children in.
    It was the only thing he ever built, because all his life he had been paid to pull things down. Used to be the person the government called to blow up hills and buildings. Old bridges too; or when, during the rainy season, the face of one of those mountains on the western coast broke off and, on its way down to the sea, flattened every living thing in its wake, including people foolish enough to put their houses there. He was the one they sent for to clear the mess. Once he blew up the house of a man Deeka had worked for as a servant girl for the liberty he’d taken with her.
    No wonder then, that in the eyes of lil children and a lot of foolish wimmen, her husband, John Seegal Bender, was the nearest thing to God, since with a little red box and a coupla pieces of wire, he could make thunder.
    He’d built his house with storms in mind. A kind of ark on thirty legs, it half stood, half leaned against the high mud bank, which was, in turn, reinforced by the roots of a tres-beau mango tree. The posts were cut from campeche wood, chopped down at the end of the dry season, just before the new moon, since the blood-red core was hardest then.
    He’d rebuilt the house in ’51, the year before he ‘walked’. Four years before Hurricane Janet pulled the island apart, lifted most of what people were living in and flung them at the Mardi Gras a thousand feet above them.
    The house had grown since then, in various directions and according to its own fancy, to accommodate the swelling family. Elena added a couple of rooms to the west side with the money that, in Deeka’s words, Manuel Forsyth’s conscience had given her when Peter and Pynter were born. And because the house could not decide in which direction it wanted to lean, different parts leaned different ways.
    They called it home because, although Patty and Tan Cee had their own places, John Seegal’s was the one in which the family always gathered.
    Deeka Bender ruled it with her presence, especially those evenings over dinner when she chose to talk about John Seegal. Theirs had been the greatest love story in the world, she boasted. And whether they wanted t’hear it or not, she was going to tell them. These days they watched her more than listened: for the way her own words changed her, and how the white mass of hair, let loose like an unruly halo round her head, threw back the firelight. How the long brown face, the cheekbones and nose – high-ridged like the place from which she came – was alive once more. They watched and marvelled at the miracle of those fingers, thin and knotted like the branches of sea grapes, becoming supple and young again.
    She was a north-woman, and when a pusson say north-woman they mean a woman with pride. And Deeka Bender was prouder still, becuz she carry the blood of de First People: Carib blood, thick-hair-long-like-lapite blood, high-steppin, tall-walkin blood. And in them days Deeka walked taller than everybody else, no matter how high they was above her.
    â€˜But what God leave for a pretty young girl to do in a lil ole place sittin on the edge of a precipice over de ocean? Eh? Especially when she don’ want to live and dead like everybody else up dere with no accountin fo’ the life she live. And life for a woman in those days could mean just movin out, knowin a lil bit o’ de world, hearin different voices an’ seein whether everybody cry or laugh the same way. It wasn’ askin much, but it mean a lot.
    â€˜It so happm that one day news reach me that Missa John Defoe’s wife want a servant girl,’ Deeka said. ‘Defoe was a big Béké man who own the coconut plantation an’ most other plantation you find round there. Everybody work for Defoe because it don’t have no work