The Family of Max Desir

by Robert Ferro

  In the middle of the night the drums returned, in precise rhythmic repetition, first perceived in my dream but merging into reality, amalgamating with shouts and a sudden surge of sound, as twenty more drums were added and a chorus of voices began a chant of vowels out of order. I turned and saw firelight flickering through the leaves and branches. My tree was less than fifty feet from a clearing I had not seen the night before. At its center the tall scaffold of a bonfire roared like a furnace; thirty or forty men and women danced in a half-circle in front of the fire, their faces and naked bodies covered with white powder or chalk. Now and then a powdery mask peered up and out into the darkness in my direction.

  Abruptly the drums broke loose into a rolling four-quarter rhythm that brought more shouts and a disruption of the half-circle. Certain of the men and women came dancing to the edge of the clearing, where the outlines of the trees and the undersides of leaves flickered like mercury against the blackness. A few young women stood at the edge of the clearing and bucked and swayed as if impaled on something coming out of the dark. The men strutted and preened and shook their genitals, licking their palms and stroking themselves, fucking an imaginary creature that stood before them in the shadows. As I raised up slightly, I saw the adjustment of their faces toward mine. No doubt the firelight was reflected off my skin. But they must also have known I was there, for suddenly I saw a pair of black eyes below me— not three feet away—and then a hand even closer, presenting a small cup of liquid.

  I pulled back in fright and surprise, nearly falling out of the nest, yet the hand remained poised and unmoving, offering the cup. The drums went on, the imaginary fucking continued at the edge of the clearing. The hand held still, presenting the cup, the eyes stared up at me.

  It is the god who must obey. I took the cup and drank. I was helped from the nest and into the clearing, coaxed and touched. I was drawn to the warmth and light of the fire. I felt responsible for the two or three inches of air enveloping my body, as a glow, an aura, a field of light. The drums became a new language of instant comprehension, invoking an involuntary response. Upon or within this response, as if riding the crest of a breaking wave, we glided above the treetops, close enough to see the roosting birds and cats, the serpent’s yellow eyes, the clearing with the fire, myself and the others dancing and carrying on.

  We danced, while the fire burned. Rhythmically, to the drums, everyone coupled. I saw faces behind the chalk; eyes, features, nipples, breasts, organs in flower. Because the god had come they could have it all, not the ritual but the event. Women screamed and bit themselves; men swooned. The god danced from one to the other of us. We fell from heights. I was among the last to fall asleep in the pile.

  I awoke alone in the nest. The clearing was empty, the fire out and cold. I found food hanging in the trees on threads; fruit, cooked birds, a gourd of water. I rested through the day, regarding the blurred pictures that had been painted on my body, removing feathers from my hair. I stood out in the afternoon downpour and washed away the flecks of color and gold. It was as if days had passed.

  The next night I heard the drums again. They beat steadily for a time, then ceased, coming again later from different directions throughout the night At dawn I heard a single drum closer by. Following it for some hours I came to a river; and was about to cross and continue west when an empty canoe drifted slowly by on the current. In the bottom of tne canoe were a paddle and a water-skin. Bits of green stone—jade, emeralds, or glass, I could not tell—and small boughs of white feathers littered the bottom.

  I had come upon the canoe in a long bend in the river, which then again turned west. Toward evening, like the evening, the river expanded. I came to a break in the trees on one bank and saw two young men and a boy cleaning fish at the water’s edge. The boy looked around and saw me but was too surprised or petrified to speak. Then the three of them jumped back and crouched. I glided up to them and stopped.

  No one moved. I took some of the green stones from the canoe bottom and placed them on the bank between us. This astounded them. They looked closely at the stones and began to talk to each other in an excited low babble. I got out of the canoe and approached each of them, lifting their chins to make them look at my eyes. As they had never seen white skin, they had never seen blue eyes and were terrified. They began to shiver, the boy first and then sympathetically, the other two. I petted them and they were quiet. I touched the boy. The nipples were well developed but had never been used in this way. I bathed him and he me; with the other two we bathed each other. They were familiar with the rest and initiated it themselves.

  Canoe and all, I was taken to their settlement, back a distance from the river. The three of them babbled excitedly, telling everyone what had happened, pointing to me and saying my name, which in this case required a knock of the tongue against the palate. Four or five old men came forward. They touched the back of my hand to their foreheads; they knocked their tongues and bowed their heads. I was shown into an empty hut in which a hammock hung from the supports, over a floor covered with banana leaves with the spines removed. I sat down crosslegged against the wall facing the doorway.

  After a period of excitement outside, objects were handed through the doorway—small gourds filled with color and oil, larger ones of water. Two women entered and began to clean and oil my body and plait my hair. When I had been thus primed, a steady stream of people, one by one, was admitted to the hut. Each whispered something to the two women. These two would confer and then paint a picture on my body with their fingers, apparently corresponding to the description of what was wanted, or to a portion of the body if health was involved. I was soon covered with markings—stick figures, circles, diamonds, eyes-of-god. The pictures in the genital area had all run together, as had those over the heart, these two areas being most often touched upon in the requests. When everyone had come and gone the two women put a headdress on me of white palms and feathers, and led me out of the hut and down to the river. All the supplicants had gathered to watch as the pictures were washed off in the water. To them it was as if the skin itself were dissolved in the current, leaving behind a pure colorless soul.

  Afterward I was led naked through the settlement to dry. The women fanned me with banana leaves, everyone laughing, the men playing long flutes and drums. Night had fallen by the time we returned to the hut. I was given fruit and a drink that tasted like fermented banana milk. I was left alone and slept. When I awoke I was given more of the drink, which kept me in a state of lassitude that was extremely comfortable. Time drifted pleasantly by. Lying in the hammock I was only vaguely aware of what went on about me through the doorway of the hut.

  After two or three days of this, I awoke clearheaded and found the place entirely deserted, every hut empty, every fire cold, the implements gone. It was apparent they had moved on, and that from the hammock I had watched their preparations to leave for hours at a time. I felt a terrible sense of loss and separation; of rejection by the boy, guilt over a great wrong, remorse at having missed or failed at an opportunity that would never occur again, and fear at being left in the middle of the jungle with nothing. In addition, my head and body itched. I was filthy. I had not been out of the hut in days, although it was only now that this idea seemed strange.

  I went to the river to bathe. Such was my discomfort that I ran the last few yards and dove into the water. When I came to the surface it had begun to rain, as it did every afternoon at about that time, but this rain was different and did not stop.

  Suddenly, both banks were lined with people. Everyone danced into the shallows, splashing and beating the water, lifting their faces in the rain and calling out. My expected return to the water thrilled them. Couples bathed. The boy and I stood in the water up to our hips. He poured an oil on the top of my head that lathered into foam and coursed down my body into the river. Everyone was doing this. The river ran white, beaten down by the heavy rain like flour or linen cloth, with only the sound of water, of the rain, the splashing and
laughter. I am the first to kiss here. They had until now nuzzled to show affection, and held hands. The boy tastes like a mild rum, the women of ginger.

  We came out of the river and set off through the jungle. A path was cut where one was needed. The rain had settled into a dripping down from the clattering canopy. No one spoke or made noise. They followed behind in single file, away from the flooding river, deeper into the jungle.

  I remained with them until the rains ended and the river went down. I lived and was treated as a man, but as one who had received the god and might receive him again. The boy and I bathed every day, which they consider a sign of attachment. When I left I was taken farther upriver, to the edge of their domain. The canoe had been painted and filled with gifts and talismans. Had it not been made clear that I must leave, I might have stayed with them, and dwelt there.

  XIII.

  IN THE BEGINNING OF DECEMBER 1979, on what would have been Marie Desir’s seventieth birthday, a memorial was held to dedicate the Finished monument. Similarity to the funeral seemed to be John’s principal intention. Beyond the accidents of fate, in the rituals and patterns of his days and weeks, he dreaded change and took comfort in repetition.

  Max and Nick came in the side door of St Jude’s as Father Bill, again imported for the day, was entering from the wings. Max stopped at a side altar to light a votive candle for his mother, an isolated ritual that happened to overlap with his own beliefs. The top, right-hand flame in the rack was from his father. To the priests and sacristans of St Jude’s this candle had come to be regarded as an eternal flame. Beside the Masses in Marie’s name for the next two years, the substantial donations and daily collection baskets, John would, within the month, be renouncing all his worldly goods to enter a monastery. In the six months since the funeral, prior to which he had not set foot in the place, John had become St Jude’s most interesting and generous parishioner.

  Father Bill opened the book to choose a recipe.

  I think we’ll do the coq au vin today, he said and read it through to himself. He spread his arms wide, turning the palms out, and read from the Bible.

  You start with a firm fresh chicken, cleaned and quartered.

  Max, standing between Nick and Aunt Phoebe, tried to think that his mother was in the back of the nearly empty church, in one of the last pews. He allowed himself to turn and look twice. She was there until he turned.

  Nothing about the Mass pertained to him; a little of it—the short silent parts—to her. His father studied the goings-on, slightly tilting his head like a bird. His silent weeping made Max feel detached.

  Father Bill said, Lord, we ask Your blessing today on Your servant Marie Desir. From across the aisle a woman looked over at John and smiled fractionally and sadly. She took in the family. This would explain him as the new regular, and today’s visiting priest. She and the six or seven other regulars, spaced across the church like cloves in a ham, watched Father Bill’s technique, looking for subtle differences in emphasis, in pacing, the surprising deletions, the added nuance. With neat discretion the priest delivered his short meaningless homily from the altar, rather than slipping into the pulpit, an ornate wooden cube topped with a pointed cone that made it resemble an open beer stein; instead he stepped to one side to address the patchy congregation without a microphone.

  And so it is we see that without much trouble and a little care we can produce a creditable coq au vin, combining the Lord’s directions with the freshest ingredients of life, each at the proper time, in a moderate oven….

  Everyone took Communion, including the regulars who mingled in like obscure family friends. Afterward a short cortege of cars assembled while Father Bill changed his gown. On the highway they were scattered in different lanes in no particular order except that John’s car remained in the lead. Just before entering the gates of the cemetery, Jack cut ahead of Max in his Mercedes, in a manner that caused Nick to snicker and Max to apply the brakes. In the end everyone’s car door slammed more or less at the same time, with clipped percussive reports like a fusillade of pistol shots.

  He had been present earlier in the week for the actual installation of the monument. Since then the gardeners from Hillcrest had resodded and landscaped the plot. The pristine gray stone, glowing at the edges like soap, was flanked by two conical evergreens, and surrounded by small trees and bushes. Circling the bright green sod, a line of flowering mums of various colors had been set in the ground that morning and would be dead from the cold by evening. This square of vivid color was set against an insipid winter background of receding mazelike hedges and graves, beneath a blank, cottony sky into which blackbirds disappeared like pebbles in milk. The plot stood out sharply, looking not completely real, as if transported that moment from another climate or season. At its vivid center the urn held anemones, white daisies, stephanotis and baby’s breath—crisp, tiny dots of color put in only a moment before by a florist who lingered nearby out of respect. The weak winter sun cast shadows through the skeletal trees, like nets that flickered and fell from their faces and the face of the monument, and then returned, like reversed firelight. Max, Robin, John, Penny and Jack stood with Father Bill on the circle of fresh sod, trimmed and installed like carpet a few days earlier; Nick, Pat, Tom, Mary Kay and the nine grandchildren, Aunt Phoebe, Greta and her husband and their two grown children all stood along the side. Father Bill, the magenta piping of his scapular a thread of neon hanging from his neck, mentioned Marie’s immortal soul. A few phrases later he referred to Purgatory in general terms, not as an insinuation but as a universal possibility. The soul was a thing, now in another place that was comfortable to it or not comfortable. In either case their prayers for it would be beneficial. Max was tempted, even conditioned, to pursue this idea. If he could think their prayers might help his mother to change rooms, even to change hotels, at the resort of Death, from something cramped and overheated, to the accommodations she must surely deserve—which he imagined as the big white romantic rooms in Flying Down to Rio—it obscured the question of whether her soul had made the transition in the first place. It obscured even the more basic question of the soul’s existence. Where was he prepared to begin?

  With his own soul. He felt sure he had one. His spirit; this lived inside him. It inhabited him. It knew more about him than he knew during the day. It knew everything in his dreams. It was all his functions, memory, imagination. It was fear, love, and all the emotions. It was the total of these faculties and more, which he himself could never have calculated. It was itself a place, a point from which everything within him was knowable, from which all was visible and clear; a point in the middle, perhaps in the pituitary, or the superchiasmatic nucleus of the hypothalamus, a point equidistant from one and all, including the dimensions. The part about immortality meant only that time had nothing to do with it, nor space, except to say that if a spirit lived within him, like the caretaker of a big empty house, and did not move about, but stayed somewhere in the attic, then what happened if the place burned down? What happened if the house was blown up in an instant? Could the spirit be caught by surprise? This perhaps was a ghost.

  In the case of his uncle Dan the spirit had fled the burning house and then, through a miraculous technique, the flames had been extinguished and the house saved. The spirit had thus been fooled, tricked into leaving. Where was it now? Roosting perhaps in an apple tree outside Philadelphia, waiting in the intensive care unit of Temple University Hospital, or standing patiently beside Dan’s body in a nursing home on Long Island.

  And at this moment where but there with them, her family, should Marie’s spirit be, if her spirit was? To see the new monument, to show it to Mrs Koenig down the line; where else but there with them?

  PENNY DID CHRISTMAS. NO ONE WANTED to have it in Hillcrest, not even John. Robin had done Thanksgiving, so it was Penny’s turn. Everyone gave John items of monastic interest or utility; it was considered a difficult shopping assignment, the most difficult in years. What to give the man who h
as everything, but who is soon, in any case, going to give it all away? He received books, underwear and socks, sweaters against the mountain cold, a reading lamp, towels—the things you give to a student or convict. Gone it seemed were the days of solid gold rings and mink paw jackets. Christmas dinner was exactly as Marie would have prepared it. The logistics of serving such a complicated meal to twenty people, however, which she had done alone for forty years, now seemed staggering. Penny’s table, being the old dining room table from Indian River, and therefore more than a replica, gave him something of a shock of recognition. They crowded around it in the same way and Max experienced a particular feeling—one he remembered having every time they had sat like this in the past—at this table, with the same cloth, food and flowers. It was the feeling that despite the crush, elbow to elbow, he felt an overpowering sense of someone missing. Before now he had thought this someone was himself. He still didn’t feel completely present, but now it was for different reasons; and he thought the others must feel it too, one way or another, because of Marie. Only the table was the same, everything else was different.

  The food once served was delicious, to everyone’s great relief, because it meant something remained of Marie. Later they sang songs and Jack played the guitar, which he strummed like a ukulele. “Red Roses for a Blue Lady” had always been Marie’s request in this situation, and Max hoped they would not sing it now; but they did and it seemed not to matter. John stayed in the room but with a pained expression on his face and not singing. “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue” constituted another difficult moment. Although Marie’s eyes were hazel, this had always been a reference to her and was usually the signal for John to start dancing with her.