Homeland and Other Stories (20 page)

Jericha saw that he wanted very much for her to believe it, and say he was right. She knew that was the most important thing. He kept looking at her, the same eyes that spied through the frangipani that day a long time ago while she stood in the garden with Sebastian. She said nothing.

“She won't be harming us,” he said. “Because you are the doctor's child. A good child with no people to look after you.”

She felt the Obeah Man's hand on her shoulder. She felt the skin, the fingers, the blood beating inside.

“Do you understand?”

“Not really.”

The Obeah Man carried the basket across the small clearing and Jericha followed, the mud sucking at her shoes. The sky was a moonless black. The forest closed over them again, and then
drew back, and they were in another open place. She could barely see him bending down to set the basket on the ground. They squatted on their heels, side by side.

“Can you see a tree? This is the silk-cotton tree.”

Jericha stared at the dark shape in the center of the open place. Gradually it became a tree. Under it was a large round shape, a woman. Jericha held her breath.

“Is that the jumby?”

The shape moved, laughed, got up. Benedict laughed too, a little. “That's Maman,” he said.

“Yours?” Jericha was amazed that a grown man could have a mother.

The woman pressed her nose against Benedict's cheek, then came and squatted down with her face very near. Jericha could see the print of her dress, ships and flags. “Look at this girl, she is good!” the woman cried. The voice was warm, like arms around her, and the laugh too. She spoke in patois to Benedict and took some things from the basket, a roll and some salt fish.

“This tree is where you have to put her down,” she said to Jericha. “A jumby can rest well here.” Then she set down a little stool she carried with her, and sat and ate the roll. She watched everything they did, but didn't speak anymore.

“Did anybody ever tell you about this tree?” Benedict asked.

Jericha shook her head.

“The most powerful tree,” he said. “That's all. Every part is poisonous. You see the snake in the branches? That is Gro Maman. She lives there, in the branch.”

“Is it poisonous too?”

“Gro Maman isn't a snake. She's like a man, but stronger. She watches you all the time.”

“Like Jesus?”

“Yes. Like Jesus.”

He lifted an incense burner out of the basket. He lit the
charcoal, blew on it until it glowed orange, then poured the incense over it. Jericha watched; she had longed to do these things altar boys did, but couldn't, of course. The scent stung pleasantly in her nose.

“Follow,” the Obeah Man said. He swung the incense in a circle around himself and Jericha, then slowly circled the tree, singing in patois.

“
Hoc es corpus meum
,” Jericha sang very quietly, and “Anansi he is a spider.” She felt dizzy and wished for a small sip again of cherry brandy. She stepped into the holes in the mud left by the Obeah Man's footsteps.

The tree grew more distinct as they walked: its white trunk was dotted with black, waxy thorns that shone like tiny animal horns. At its base, the trunk flared out in flattened, triangular wings like the sails of ships.

They stopped. “Walk toward the tree,” the Obeah Man commanded. “Stop when I tell you.”

Jericha took one step, then another. Then another.

“Stop!”

She didn't move.

“Stay there. Don't touch any part of the tree. This is a powerful tree.”

The Obeah Man sang again, and Jericha understood some of the words.
Ou save ça ou pede
: You have lost something. Now you will find it at last. She sang quietly,
Dona nobis pacem
.

Light came into the clearing: stars, she thought at first, or silvery pieces of falling cloud, but the light was falling down from the tree into a white carpet that floated just above the ground. It moved like water, slowly. She felt it roll over her feet.

“Something is falling on me,” she said, standing unsteadily.

“Silk cotton,” he told her. “It fell already a long time ago, don't worry. You're just seeing it now.”

“It touched my feet,” she cried out. “You said it was poison.”
The air filled with sounds and slithering shadows that drooped from the branches over her head.

“It won't hurt you. Ask for the favor of Gro Maman. Ask her to forgive us,” the Obeah Man said.

Ants swarmed up out of the ground and covered her shoes and white legs. Jericha choked on childish sounds in her throat, and slapped at the ants stinging her legs. When she touched them they turned to handfuls of black mud. It was only mud.

“I don't care.” She sobbed the words angrily, bent over, rubbing the mud in circles on her legs. “The jumby, or you—I don't care what you did to my father.” She rubbed the mud into her knees and then into her arms and the tears on her face, pressing it into a warm mud skin.

“Shh.” The Obeah Man was beside her.

“I don't care what you did,” she said quietly, not wanting to be crying. “The one I miss is my mother.”

“Take this,” he said, and formed Jericha's hands into a cradle around something smooth and cold. “It's a hen's egg. Her Good Friday egg. Take it to Gro Maman.”

The hand on her shoulder moved her toward the tree, gently, and then let her go. With mud in her mouth she looked up into the branches to find her shape, her eyes. She stooped at the base of the tree among its white, thorned wings and laid the egg in a nest of roots. The silk cotton under her feet was a cloud. There were mountains and harbors, women down there loading boats, women and not ants. There were worlds under her feet, and over her head too—when they flew over the Pitons she had forgotten to look up. There is always something over your head and you're never on top or on the bottom either, you're in the center.

On the seat of the truck she sat between Benedict and his
maman
, holding her sharp knees to her chest and crying without tears. She leaned on the bouncing softness of a shoulder, and then there was a soft arm around her, and then a lap. The
incense burner in the basket at their feet made quiet metal sounds.

She awakened when she was lifted out of the truck and carried, along with her bicycle, through the stone gate into the garden.

 

On Easter Sunday Jericha rose before dawn. She stole from her bed through the corridors, her bare feet noiseless on the cool stone, and out into the garden. She untied the rope around Maximilian's neck and chased him from the compound, hitting lightly at the animal's hind legs with a piece of long grass. At the convent gate the goat hesitated only for a second, almost not at all, before it ran surefooted over the iron grate into the jungle.

R
OSE-
J
OHNNY WORE
a man's haircut and terrified little children, although I will never believe that was her intention. For her own part she inspired in us only curiosity. It was our mothers who took this fascination and wrung it, through daily admonitions, into the most irresistible kind of horror. She was like the old wells, covered with ancient rotting boards and overgrown with weeds, that waited behind the barns to swallow us down: our mothers warned us time and again not to go near them, and still were certain that we did.

My own mother was not one of those who had a great deal to say about her, but Walnut Knobs was a small enough town so that a person did not need to be told things directly. When I had my first good look at her, at close range, I was ten years old. I fully understood the importance of the encounter.

What mattered to me at the time, though, was that it was something my sister had not done before me. She was five years older, and as a consequence there was hardly an achievement in my life, nor even an article of clothing, that had not first been Mary Etta's. But, because of the circumstances of my meeting Rose-Johnny, I couldn't tell a living soul about it, and so for nearly a year I carried the secret torment of a great power that
can't be used. My agitation was not relieved but made worse when I told the story to myself, over and over again.

She was not, as we always heard, half man and half woman, something akin to the pagan creatures whose naked torsos are inserted in various shocking ways into parts of animal bodies. In fact, I was astonished by her ordinariness. It is true that she wore Red Wing boots like my father. And also there was something not quite womanly in her face, but maybe any woman's face would look the same with that haircut. Her hair was coal black, cut flat across the top of her round head, so that when she looked down I could see a faint pale spot right on top where the scalp almost surfaced.

But the rest of her looked exactly like anybody's mother in a big flowered dress without a waistline and with two faded spots in front, where her bosom rubbed over the counter when she reached across to make change or wipe away the dust.

People say there is a reason for every important thing that happens. I was sent to the feed store, where I spoke to Rose-Johnny and passed a quarter from my hand into hers, because it was haying time. And because I was small for my age. I was not too small to help with tobacco setting in the spring, in fact I was better at it than Mary Etta, who complained about the stains on her hands, but I was not yet big enough to throw a bale of hay onto the flatbed. It was the time of year when Daddy complained about not having boys. Mama said that at least he oughtn't to bother going into town for the chicken mash that day because Georgeann could do it on her way home from school.

Mama told me to ask Aunt Minnie to please ma'am give me a ride home. “Ask her nice to stop off at Lester Wall's store so you can run in with this quarter and get five pound of laying mash.”

I put the quarter in my pocket, keeping my eye out to make certain Mary Etta understood what I had been asked to do.
Mary Etta had once told me that I was no better than the bugs that suck on potato vines, and that the family was going to starve to death because of my laziness. It was one of the summer days when we were on our knees in the garden picking off bugs and dropping them into cans of coal oil. She couldn't go into town with Aunt Minnie to look at dress patterns until we finished with the potato bugs. What she said, exactly, was that if I couldn't work any harder than that, then she might just as well throw
me
into a can of coal oil. Later she told me she hadn't meant it, but I intended to remember it nonetheless.

 

Aunt Minnie taught the first grade and had a 1951 Dodge. That is how she referred to her car whenever she spoke of it. It was the newest automobile belonging to anyone related to us, although some of the Wilcox cousins had once come down to visit from Knoxville in a Ford they were said to have bought the same year it was made. But I saw that car and did not find it nearly as impressive as Aunt Minnie's, which was white and immense and shone like glass. She paid a boy to polish it every other Saturday.

On the day she took me to Wall's, she waited in the car while I went inside with my fist tight around the quarter. I had never been in the store before, and although I had passed by it many times and knew what could be bought there, I had never imagined what a wonderful combination of warm, sweet smells of mash and animals and seed corn it would contain. The dust lay white and thin on everything like a bridal veil. Rose-Johnny was in the back with a water can, leaning over into one of the chick tubs. The steel rang with the sound of confined baby birds, and a light bulb shining up from inside the tub made her face glow white. Mr. Wall, Rose-Johnny's Pa, was in the front of the store talking to two men about a horse. He didn't notice me as I crept
up to the counter. It was Rose-Johnny who came forward to the cash register.

“And what for you, missy?”

She is exactly like anybody's mama, was all I could think, and I wanted to reach and touch her flowered dress. The two men were looking at me.

“My mama needs five pound of laying mash and here's a quarter for it.” I clicked the coin quickly onto the counter.

“Yes, ma'am.” She smiled at me, but her boots made heavy, tired sounds on the floor. She made her way slowly, like a duck in water, over to the row of wooden bins that stood against the wall. She scooped the mash into a paper bag and weighed it, then shoved the scoop back into the bin. A little cloud of dust rose out of the mash up into the window. I watched her from the counter.

“Don't your mama know she's wasting good money on chicken mash? Any fool chicken will eat corn.” I jumped when the man spoke. It was one of the two, and they were standing so close behind me I would have had to look right straight up to see their faces. Mr. Wall was gone.

“No sir, they need mash,” I said to the man's boots.

“What's that?” It was the taller man doing the talking.

“They need mash,” I said louder. “To lay good sturdy eggs for selling. A little mash mixed in with the corn. Mama says it's got oster shells in it.”

“Is that a fact,” he said. “Did you hear that, Rose-Johnny?” he called out. “This child says you put oster shells in that mash. Is that right?”

When Rose-Johnny came back to the cash register she was mooneyed. She made quick motions with her hands and pushed the bag at me as if she didn't know how to talk.

“Do you catch them osters yourself, Rose-Johnny? Up at
Jackson Crick?” The man was laughing. The other man was quiet.

Rose-Johnny looked all around and up at the ceiling. She scratched at her short hair, fast and hard, like a dog with ticks.

When the two men were gone I stood on my toes and leaned over the counter as far as I could. “Do you catch the osters yourself?”

She hooked her eyes right into mine, the way the bit goes into the mule's mouth and fits just so, one way and no other. Her eyes were the palest blue of any I had ever seen. Then she threw back her head and laughed so hard I could see the wide, flat bottoms of her back teeth, and I wasn't afraid of her.

When I left the store, the two men were still outside. Their boots scuffed on the front-porch floorboards, and the shorter one spoke.

“Child, how much did you pay that woman for the chicken mash?”

“A quarter,” I told him.

He put a quarter in my hand. “You take this here, and go home and tell your daddy something. Tell him not never to send his little girls to Wall's feed store. Tell him to send his boys if he has to, but not his little girls.” His hat was off, and his hair lay back in wet orange strips. A clean line separated the white top of his forehead from the red-burned hide of his face. In this way, it was like my father's face.

“No, sir, I can't tell him, because all my daddy's got is girls.”

“That's George Bowles's child, Bud,” the tall man said. “He's just got the two girls.”

“Then tell him to come for hisself,” Bud said. His eyes had the sun in them, and looked like a pair of new pennies.

Aunt Minnie didn't see the man give me the quarter because she was looking at herself in the sideview mirror of the Dodge.
Aunt Minnie was older than Mama, but everyone mistook her for the younger because of the way she fixed herself up. And, of course, Mama was married. Mama said if Aunt Minnie ever found a man she would act her age.

When I climbed in the car she was pulling gray hairs out of her part. She said it was teaching school that caused them, but early gray ran in my mama's family.

She jumped when I slammed the car door. “All set?”

“Yes, ma'am,” I said. She put her little purple hat back on her head and slowly pushed the long pin through it. I shuddered as she started up the car.

Aunt Minnie laughed. “Somebody walked over your grave.”

“I don't have a grave,” I said. “I'm not dead.”

“No, you most certainly are not. That's just what they say when a person shivers like that.” She smiled. I liked Aunt Minnie most of the time.

“I don't think they mean your real grave, with you in it,” she said after a minute. “I think it means the place where your grave is going to be someday.”

I thought about this for a while. I tried to picture the place, but could not. Then I thought about the two men outside Wall's store. I asked Aunt Minnie why it was all right for boys to do some things that girls couldn't.

“Oh, there's all kinds of reasons,” she said. “Like what kinds of things, do you mean?”

“Like going into Wall's feed store.”

“Who told you that?”

“Somebody.”

Aunt Minnie didn't say anything.

Then I said, “It's because of Rose-Johnny, isn't it?”

Aunt Minnie raised her chin just a tiny bit. She might have been checking her lipstick in the mirror, or she might have been saying yes.

“Why?” I asked.

“Why what?”

“Why because of Rose-Johnny?”

“I can't tell you that, Georgeann.”

“Why can't you tell me?” I whined. “Tell me.”

The car rumbled over a cattle grate. When we came to the crossing, Aunt Minnie stepped on the brake so hard we both flopped forward. She looked at me. “Georgeann, Rose-Johnny is a Lebanese. That's all I'm going to tell you. You'll understand better when you're older.”

When I got home I put the laying mash in the henhouse. The hens were already roosting high above my head, clucking softly into their feathers and shifting back and forth on their feet. I collected the eggs as I did every day, and took them into the house. I hadn't yet decided what to do about the quarter, and so I held on to it until dinnertime.

Mary Etta was late coming down, and even though she had washed and changed she looked pale as a haunt from helping with the haying all day. She didn't speak and she hardly ate.

“Here, girls, both of you, eat up these potatoes,” Mama said after a while. “There's not but just a little bit left. Something to grow on.”

“I don't need none then,” Mary Etta said. “I've done growed all I'm going to grow.”

“Don't talk back to your mama,” Daddy said.

“I'm not talking back. It's the truth.” Mary Etta looked at Mama. “Well, it is.”

“Eat a little bite, Mary Etta. Just because you're in the same dresses for a year don't mean you're not going to grow no more.”

“I'm as big as you are, Mama.”

“All right then.” Mama scraped the mashed potatoes onto my plate. “I expect now you'll be telling me you don't want to grow no more either,” she said to me.

“No, ma'am, I won't,” I said. But I was distressed, and looked sideways at the pink shirtwaist I had looked forward to inheriting along with the grown-up shape that would have to be worn inside it. Now it appeared that I was condemned to my present clothes and potato-shaped body; keeping these forever seemed to me far more likely than the possibility of having clothes that, like the Wilcox automobile, had never before been owned. I ate my potatoes quietly. Dinner was almost over when Daddy asked if I had remembered to get the laying mash.

“Yes, sir. I put it in the henhouse.” I hesitated. “And here's the quarter back. Mr. Wall gave me the mash for nothing.”

“Why did he do that?” Mama asked.

Mary Etta was staring like the dead. Even her hair looked tired, slumped over the back of her chair like a long black shadow.

“I helped him out,” I said. “Rose-Johnny wasn't there, she was sick, and Mr. Wall said if I would help him clean out the bins and dust the shelves and water the chicks, then it wouldn't cost me for the laying mash.”

“And Aunt Minnie waited while you did all that?”

“She didn't mind,” I said. “She had some magazines to look at.”

It was the first important lie I had told in my life, and I was thrilled with its power. Every member of my family believed I had brought home the laying mash in exchange for honest work.

I was also astonished at how my story, once I had begun it, wouldn't finish. “He wants me to come back and help him again the next time we need something,” I said.

“I don't reckon you let on like we couldn't pay for the mash?” Daddy asked sternly.

“No, sir. I put the quarter right up there on the counter. But he said he needed the help. Rose-Johnny's real sick.”

He looked at me like he knew. Like he had found the hole in the coop where the black snake was getting in. But he just said,
“All right. You can go, if Aunt Minnie don't mind waiting for you.”

“You don't have to say a thing to her about it,” I said. “I can walk home the same as I do every day. Five pound of mash isn't nothing to carry.”

“We'll see,” Mama said.