“I’ve been heaven sent,” Mabi said. The softness of his voice did not mute its thunder.
Al-Saffah leaped, aiming for the soft, fleshy part of Mabi’s throat. Mabi rolled to his side, then to the floor, then pinned al-Saffah with a knee to the back, grinding it against al-Saffah’s spine at the base of his neck. He pulled back on al-Saffah’s arms until the bones of his upper arms popped out of the shoulder sockets. Al-Saffah kicked wildly, pummeling Mabi with his heels. Mabi secured al-Saffah’s hands; then, immobilized his legs, and tied his wrists against the small of his back.
“Kill me and you honor me with martyrdom,” al-Saffah said. “In the next world eternal victory will be mine.”
“Be no thousand virgins waiting to fuck you.” With a knife, Mabi cut open al-Saffah’s sleeves. He inserted plastic tubing into al-Saffah’s nose and snaked it down his throat into his stomach, taping it to his neck and arm. He connected a syringe to the plastic tubing and plunged the needle deep into a vein in al-Saffah’s forearm and taped it in place. He turned al-Saffah on to his side so gravity would pull the blood through the tubing. “The prophecy of your name it’s coming true at last.”
Blood from al-Saffah’s veins distended his stomach. He struggled and as he did his heartbeat accelerated, pumping the blood faster, filling his stomach. He felt weak, chilled. His muscles quivered, but the syringe remained in place, drinking his blood with an unslaked thirst. “Why?” he grunted. His breathing was labored. Blood overflowed his stomach and backed up in his gullet, drooling from his mouth.
Mabi held up The New York Times. “I am Falasha.”
Al-Saffah’s lips shivered. He tried to respond, but only spoke gibberish. His eyes began to glaze, the pupils to dilate. He could not focus. “Jew,” he hissed as death froze his face. Still, the blood flowed and his body twitched with the kinetic energy of death. Blood streamed from his mouth and pooled at Mabi’s feet. Death eternally froze al-Saffah’s lips in the shape of the word “Jew.”
Mabi thought again about the children of Wallaca, about the Falashas, about four girls in Birmingham, about Martin and Medgar, about all who had been lynched, known and unknown, about the six million. Leading the Trojans was such a fucking waste. Doing time for killing Bumper Sullivan and trashing Chelsea was such a fucking waste. His time as Mabi had achieved ajal. The Falashas needed him. He needed them. More. He needed them more. Going to Ethiopia, he would atone for burning his own backyard. He would avenge the men, women, children hung upside down from poles like animals, avenge the open wounds where worms were allowed to breed, the broken bones left unset, the mothers and fathers who paid bounties for the corpses of their children. Atone and revenge.
It was written in the book, his book, the only book worth reading.
-3-
Later that night, at the Gulf station at the Charles Street rotary, Mabi filled several five-gallon cans with gasoline. At al-Saffah’s, he built a pyre in the living room–furniture, books, magazines, paper, whatever he could find that would burn. He centered al-Saffah’s body on the top. He put the box of ancient chess pieces on the floor beside the door and phoned Silvy.
“It’s me, Leroy. I needing one last favor. Lay me next to Jim Ed and put Leroy Wallaca on the stone.” He hung up before she could say anything and dialed the Boston Globe.
“City desk. Crocker.”
“You got true confessions on the line, baby.” He heard clicks, beeps. “You’re talking to Leroy Wallaca, who used to be Mabi way back when. I killed Bumper Sullivan and spread his blood ’round Chelsea. Tonight, I, Leroy, offed al-Saffah. Rabbi Esrael. Me. Father Dominic. Me. The Jew houses, churches, grave yards. Me! Me! Me!” He ripped the telephone out of the wall and tossed it on the pyre and chanted
“I ain’t needing
no rainbow sign
’cause tonight I lighting
the fire this time,”
as he doused the room with gasoline, saving some to make a Molotov cocktail. In the kitchen, he snuffed out the pilots in the gas stove and turned on the jets. A calmness he had never before experienced descended on him. He was going to a better place. It was his destiny, his ajal. Saluting the circle of scimitars, he ignited the Molotov cocktail and hurled it on the pyre. The explosion cooked his face and singed his hair. The heat dried his tears while they were still in his eyes. The flames danced as fire consumed the pyre and peeled al-Saffah’s flesh from the bones. As the fire consumed Mabi’s past, laid bare his future, he shouted his name: Leroy Wallaca, Leroy Wallaca, Leroy Wallaca! He opened the door. The air flow sent a column of flames through the ceiling. As he picked up the box of ancient chess pieces, the gas accumulating in the kitchen exploded and hurled a fireball into the star-filled sky, a fireball so high, so bright, night was day. Later, people would say it was as if the sun had risen at midnight.
*
It took several hours and multiple alarms to bring the fire under control and another twenty-four hours to extinguish it. Nothing remained but soggy debris and ash, which clung to the rubber boots of the arson squad who sifted through the debris for clues of the fire’s origins. As April turned into May, the sun dried the ash and swirls of wind scattered the gray dust, first around the ’hood, then around Boston. The fire this time was no more.
CHAPTER 16
TUESDAY, APRIL 28, 1981
-1-
At the Tuesday afternoon remand hearing, Judge Gomita, acting on a motion brought by Bonturo and assented to by Maddie, dismissed all charges against Levy. In a statement of political pettifoggery, Mayor Charles Sullivan wasted several hundred words begging the citizens of Boston to let the healing begin.
Boston’s Jewish community would not heal for several generations. Disguising their true feelings in unctuous lip service, they were loath to repeat the mistake made a generation earlier by their German brethren. They closed the spigot of campaign contributions to Mayor Charlie’s Senate campaign. Applications pending before the Boston Redevelopment Authority for major construction projects throughout the city were withdrawn as Jewish developers decided other cities provided a more hospitable environment and a better return on investment. Corporations being wooed to relocate to the greater Boston area sought cities where their Jewish employees would not feel threatened, or worse.
The militants in Boston’s African-American community challenged the authenticity of the recording of Mabi’s confession. To them and their agenda, the evidence of Mabi’s guilt was just another noose of white dollars around the neck of a black man. If the more moderate members of that community harbored the same doubts, they hid them behind platitudes and denunciations of anti-Semitism.
Boston’s Irish community was conflicted, unable to decide who most deserved its opprobrium, a Jew or an African-American. Both, equally, was the final consensus.
In this volcanic heat wave, Boston’s veneer of civility, its patina of liberalism, had melted and its true nature had erupted. It would take a cold wave of ice age duration to still the flames. Well into the twenty-first century they would flicker, flare up, die down but never die out, ever ready for new fuel to reignite the conflagration.
-2-
On Tuesday afternoon, Maddie resigned from Suffolk County Legal Services. Steve Frohling, ever in character, squeezed her too tightly for a good-bye hug, resting his hands on the curve of her ass in what Maddie knew was not a sign of respect and affection. She did not return the hug.
At the Aer Lingus office in Government Center, she bought two tickets to Ireland, one for herself, the other for Michelle Furey, both one way, both open return. Maud O’Donnell consented to meet with them as did the leadership of the IRA to discuss the wording on the plaque it intended to mount on her grand da’s marker identifying him as a hero of the Republic. The future Maddie had deferred for so many years, the past she had avoided, she was now eager to embrace.
-3-
That evening, Maddie joined Rabbi ben Reuben, Moskovitzky, and Levy at services. The streets around the shule were still scarred and Madd
ie knew the scars would never heal. The streets would be rebuilt, glossy new buildings, home to chain stores and fancy retailers and franchises, all intended to create a new Chelsea. For years into the future, descendants of the original community would bring their children to Chelsea and show them where the butcher shop had been, the bookseller, the ritual bath, the tenements where sewing machines once whirred. It was as much a part of the legacy of the Jews of Boston as the Pesach of these hot April days.
After services Maddie accompanied the rabbi, Moskovitzky, and Levy to the rabbi’s home. It was a subdued celebration, not really a celebration, the rabbi said, more like a shiva–a ritual of mourning.
Maddie did not feel comfortable. These men had seen her at her worst; yet, they accepted her with grace and a generosity of spirit.
“Schnapps?” The rabbi filled four shot glasses half way. “L’chaim. To life.”
Maddie marveled at this man who could offer a toast to life after all he had lived through. She felt something she had not felt in years, a simple elemental feeling she had not enjoyed since the last time she nursed Elizabeth on the morning of her death. She felt good, not guilty, about being alive. She felt good, not guilty, about being Irish. She felt good, not guilty, about being her grand da’s granddaughter. Now, when she visited the cemetery to place flowers on Elizabeth’s grave, on the graves of her ma and da, she would still cry; but she would also offer the Rabbi’s toast, L’chaim. To life.
Slowly, day by day, Maddie’s hair began to grow back. By the time she and Michelle Furey left for Ireland, she was more beautiful than ever.
EPILOGUE
-1-
Monday, May 17, 2004
In Trish Sullivan’s living room, in the presence of immediate family both in corpus and in spiritus, Trish, acting under the authority of a one-day license issued by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, officiated at the marriage of Maddie Devlin and Michelle Furey. After Trish pronounced them married, she asked what surname they wished to adopt. Maddie said Furey-Devlin and Michelle said Devlin-Furey so they flipped a coin which, miraculously, landed on its edge. When everyone stopped laughing, they kissed with the love only newlyweds share as their families, both in corpus and in spiritus, cheered.
“Who carries who over the threshold?” Charlie Sullivan asked.
“Neither,” Maddie said.
“We’re too old for that,” Michelle added.
Boston’s newspapers refused to publish their wedding announcement.
-2-
Thursday, October 9, 2008
The image of the two tombstones lingered in the mind of Leroy Wallaca, Jr. as he, his wife Miranda, his mother Silvy Thomas, his grandparents Cealy Thomas and Hannah and Gideon Wallaca, and his Uncle Badger Thomas walked toward the gates of Nigger Heaven. It was a warm, sunny October afternoon and Nigger Heaven was as overgrown with weeds as ever. Miranda pushed a stroller carrying Leroy Wallaca, III. It was Yom Kippur, after the Sabbath the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. Hannah insisted they visit Leroy’s and Jim Ed’s graves that day. The leaves on the maple trees bordering the footpath were tinged with hints of yellow and scarlet. Birds darted from branch to branch, chirping in the autumnal air. Squirrels scampered from tree to tree, playing rather than gathering food for the winter.
“I don’t remember Indian summer lasting so long,” Silvy said.
Age had rounded Silvy’s cheeks and swollen her feet so she could only wear oversized slippers. On her good days, she used a cane; on this day, a walker. Her stomach bulged under her loose-fitting dress. Her eyes were puffy.
“As God’s in His heaven,” Cealy said, “first frost will come soon enough.”
As they approached Nigger Heaven, the dates on the tombstones receded deeper into the past, headstones of people who never saw the twentieth century, the nineteenth, some the eighteenth, headstones carved with images of cherubic angels or laughing death heads, headstones where the ‘s’ looked like an ‘f’, headstones from the time when more people died before the age of ten than after the age of fifty.
At Jim Ed’s and Leroy’s graves, Silvy asked Hannah to say some words, and Hannah did, the same words she said every visit, the same words she had said years earlier when the Trojans flanked Jim Ed’s grave and an empty coffin was lowered into the earth. When Hannah finished, Silvy said, as she always did, how nice a prayer it was, and they bowed their heads in silence.
Now, as they passed through Nigger Heaven and approached the rusted iron fence that separated the dead from the living, Silvy asked her mother, “How can you be thinking of frost on a day like this?” As she spoke, a gust of wind blew some trash against her legs.
“It’s in the air,” Cealy said. “Always is.”
Silvy kicked at the trash and Barack Obama and Joe Biden Palin smiled at her from a campaign poster. Someone had blackened their front teeth and crayoned Hitler-style mustaches under their noses. A spider crawled across Obama’s cheek, stopped for a second on Biden’s right eye, then scurried into the grass at the edge of the cemetery. Silvy folded the poster, her hands shaking too much to square the corners of the creases, and placed it in the basket hanging from the railing of her walker. As the four of them continued past the headstones, past the hedges, past the shrubs and birds and squirrels, out of Nigger Heaven into Nigger Hell, the spider, hungry to snare its dinner, weaved its web in the tall grass beside an ancient and anonymous grave while, in his stroller, Leroy III shook his baby rattle and scared the songbirds from the trees.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In the past 40 to 50 years there have been a number of academic studies which argue that Black English is neither a non-standard form of English nor a dialect spoken primarily by African-Americans, but rather a unique language with its own grammatical structure and its own vocabulary. In crafting the dialogue spoken by the African-American characters, I relied upon two of these studies: Geneva Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin – The Language of Black America, Wayne State University Press (1986); Geneva Smitherman, Black Talk, Houghton Mifflin (1994, 2000).
With respect to the Falashas, I am indebted to Louis Rapoport, The Lost Jews: Last of the Ethiopian Falashas, Stein and Day (1980) as well as ‘Fact Sheets’ issued by the Ethiopian Jewry Committee of the Jewish Community Council of Metropolitan Boston (1982) Additional information may be found by searching the Index of The New York Times.
The prayer that Hannah Wallaca recites over her son’s grave is the Mourner’s Kaddish, the traditional Jewish prayer for the remembrance of the dead. It is based on an English translation in common use in Reform Jewish congregations in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Central Conference of American Rabbis, Gates of Prayer (1975)
The Vietnam war generated a great deal of slang and jargon much of which was created by the troops on the ground in country. There are numerous websites devoted to this slang and jargon. Another fertile source is Karl Marlantes, Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War, Atlantic Monthly Press (2010). This material proved invaluable in crafting the letter Roadkill sent to the Wallacas regarding Jim Ed’s death in Vietnam.
The song that Silvy sings when Mabi views his imagined funeral procession is All My Trials, a traditional American folk song that became popular during the folk revival of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Like many traditional American folk songs, its origins are murky at best. According to The Joan Baez Songbook, Ryerson Music Publishers (1964), it is an American Southern gospel song that predates the Civil War. It has also been argued that some of the phrases in the lyrics can be found on a 1798 English gravestone. The lyrics sung by Silvy were adapted from the Joan Baez recording.
I am indebted to three individuals whose keen editorial eyes enabled me to see things I would have otherwise missed. While I did not always agree with them and did not adopt all of their suggestions, their input greatly improved The Fire This Time and my gratitude to them is unbounded. Thank you, Pamela Painter, Beverly Swerling, and Ted Gilley.
Lastly, I greatly benefited from the encouragement and moral
support I received over the years from Albert J. Gowan for my writing in general and this novel in particular. I deeply regret Al did not live to share this moment with me.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Liss, a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, a nominee for the storySouth Million Writers Award, and a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Prize sponsored by University of Georgia Press, the St. Lawrence Book Award sponsored by Black Lawrence Press, and the Bakeless Prize sponsored by Breadloaf Writers’ Conference and Middlebury College, has published more than 50 short stories. He has received numerous awards and other forms of recognition for individual short stories including The Florida Review Editor’s Award for Fiction; .James Still Prize for Short Fiction sponsored by Wind; Midnight Sun Award for Fiction sponsored by Permafrost; Third prize in the Arthur Edelstein Prize for Short Fiction; Finalist for the Raymond Carver Award for Short Fiction sponsored by Carve Magazine; and Honorable Mention in the New Letters Literary Award for Fiction and the Glimmer Train June, 2014 Fiction Open. Liss has also been published in The Saturday Evening Post, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, The South Dakota Review, The South Carolina Review, Dogwood, The Worcester Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal. He earned a BA from Amherst College, Amherst, MA; a JD from Columbia University School of Law, New York, NY; and an MFA from Emerson College, Boston, MA. He was the recipient of a Grant-in-Aid in Literature from the St. Botolph Club Foundation, Boston, MA where he leads a workshop in writing fiction.
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