Manuel Forsyth, because they were too long and narrow to be a Bender’s.
The water fell in a sudden scalding shower down his shoulders. Its coldness knocked the breath out of him. It stopped his shivering. Tan Cee coated him in the sap of the plants and he felt his skin grow stiff and tight like paper, and then very, very slowly she rinsed the paste off him.
Now he saw that each of the bruises he’d suffered the week before had risen up again, and stood like purple worms against his dark skin, as if they had only retreated to wait for his auntie’s hands to bring them back.
‘Look at ’im,’ she said. ‘He got anyting y’all boy-chile don’t have – dat is those of you who kin have! Hi skin don’t bruise-an’-bleed like everybody own? He different? Yes, he different. Lemme tell y’all what make ’im different: he mine! Dat’s what make ’im different. He mine.’ Her voice had climbed above the bamboos. It was bright and hard like the blade she carried somewhere in her bosom. ‘An’ so help me God, if dis ever happm again, I kill de bitch who cause it.’
She swung her head away and turned to leave, with his clothes still tucked under her arm. He climbed down the stone to follow her.
‘Where you goin?’ Her rage washed over him like cold water. ‘You not leavin here now. You leave here when you ready. Y’hear me!’
He watched the blue flash of her bright headscarf receding as she climbed the hill through the restless netting of the canes. He was left naked on the stone in the middle of the river before the eyes of the women.
Santay was the woman who had given him back his sight. Hers was the first face he’d ever seen, the first lips that had shaped words before his eyes, the first eyes he’d ever looked into with his own.
They hadn’t prepared him for her coming. Santay was Tan Cee’s friend – the woman who lived in a small wooden house above their valley, who spoke to the departed and knew every plant on earth that cured or killed. She knew poisons that could put a man to sleep for good or kill the fire in his loins. Tan Cee told him that. His aunt also told him that men never went to her, only the women. They carried their illnesses, their children and their tiredness to her. And there were those like Tan Cee who, every new moon, travelled to her place, lit a fire in her yard, danced and sang songs which she repeated to him from time to time.
He’d woken one morning and she was there – a woman with a man’s voice. He knew it was a woman because there was more breath around each word, and of course her smell. Men smelled of sweat and earth and meat things. They never smelled of plant things. His body had tensed, his skin flaring with the awareness of her presence. A hand that belonged to no one he knew rested briefly on his shoulder. Then two thumbs pressed hard against his eyes.
‘Leave ’im to me,’ the voice said.
They left him in the room with her and it became a war in which her hands seemed to reach out from anywhere and hurt him. His body was crouched, his nerves all flared and snarling, and whenever he felt her move he struck out in a wide, violent arc. But she was too quick, seemed to be everywhere at the same time. He lashed out until his arms were aching, and then two strong hands were pinning his arms against his sides. He stood there screaming for Tan Cee.
She said her name was Santay. She called him by a name different from his own. Santay lowered him to the floor and told him that she was there to give him back his eyes and that he must stay with her. That meant leaving the yard with her with a bag strapped to his back, guided by her hands at the nape of his neck. It meant going up a long, steep hill that seemed to have no end.
Pynter felt himself rising out of the valley to lighter, chillier air. A low, deep-throated snoring replaced the rustling of the canes, the sound of the World, she told him, the wind mixed up with all the noises and movements that came from down below and bounced against the bowl of the sky above their heads.
If he was to have back his eyes he would have to lie on the floor at nights and listen to the cheeping, whistling, tik-tok-tinkling of the world outside which slipped into his ear and filled his head to overflowing. It meant learning her moods by the way her feet sounded on the floorboards. It meant being fed the flesh of fruits he’d never before tasted, especially when the pain in his eyes curled his fingers in, made talons of his nails that sunk into her arms as she prised the bandage loose and replaced it with a fresh one.
Once, her hand had paused against his face and he could hear her breathing. ‘You’z a real pretty boy,’ she said. ‘You should see yourself one day.’
Those last few words had made it easier for him.
‘Plants,’ she said, ‘carry in their sap, their bark, their roots, their leaves, the answer to every livin sickness in a yooman been. Some know what should be in a person blood and what don’ ought to be in dere. Some unnerstan de skin. Some have knowledge of de eye. Same way y’have heart doctor and eye doctor, y’have plant that carry the exact same unnerstandin. In fact, sometimes a pusson get to thinkin that God make tree and den tree make we.’
She fed him light the way she fed him fruits, slowly and in fragments. She took the bandages off at night and brought him out into the yard. She showed him where the stars were, the dark unsteady rise of trees, the dizzying slope of hills and the patterns they made against the paler sky. She made him watch a full moon rise until his head began to throb.
It was raining when she first took him outside during the day. Through the thick white haze, she stretched out her finger at shapes and places and said their names to him. Mardi Gras Mountain, tall and dark, pushing its head up through the mists way beyond his vision, at whose feet Old Hope River flowed. The cane fields of Old Hope, whose sighs and whisperings he knew so well. The houses were brown pimples against the green of the hillside, his own home hidden behind a tall curtain of glory cedar trees.
They were sitting on a stone above the valley. He was feeding himself on guavas – the glistening white-fleshed type which smelled of a much gentler perfume than the pink-fleshed ones. She pointed down at the canes and showed him gauldins skimming with outstretched wings above the green surf of the canes. He watched them wheel and settle on the topmost branches of the bamboos that fenced the river in, and he remembered something Tan Cee had told him when the skin still covered his eyes and he’d asked her what the world was like.
‘De world is life; and life is de world,’ she told him. ‘S’like dis room, but it so big-an’-wide it ain’t got no wall around it. An’ it carry millions an’ millions an’ millions of other living things inside itself. De world is like dat – an’ dat’s just a little piece of it.’
‘Miss Santay,’ he said, softly, hopefully. ‘I – I don’t want to dead.’
His words swung Santay round to face him. The scarf on her head was a throbbing yellow. It framed a face so dark he could barely see her features. She looked down at him and his heart began to race.
‘My granmodder … Deeka, say I dead soon,’ he explained, looking down on the rain-swept canes, the birds fluttering above them like a host of living lilies. ‘When I reach ten, she say.’
‘If that granmodder of yours have she way, everybody dead soon.’
Santay lowered herself onto her haunches and placed a hand on his shoulder. She felt different from every person who had ever touched him. In all the time he had been with her, he’d never heard her laugh. She moved so silently, as if she did not dare to disturb the air.
‘Listen, sonny, I don’ know what your people make you out to be. Talk reach me that you have to be one of de Old Ones come again – Zed What’s-iz-name again …? On account of the way you born. And lookin at dem eyes o’ yours, I not so sure they wrong. But …’ She got up suddenly, went inside the house and returned with a sheet of plastic and threw it over him. She told him he would spend the day out there and watch the way night came.
When it was too dark to see the valley any more she called him in and made him change his clothes. He was shivering by then – shivering and hungry.
‘Eat,’ she said, placing a plate of fried fish and