Chains of Time

by R B Woodstone

  I turn to Van Owen. With the wind gone, he has clambered back to his feet. He is perplexed but still unafraid. Where there should be fear, his eyes show only resolve. He is curious, pleased somehow to have found a challenge. He raises the gun to shoulder level and fires. The gunpowder sound pierces my mind like an axe splitting an ancient tree.

  Berantu gasps as the bullet enters his chest, and he drops to his knees. He touches the wound with both hands and then examines them. They are crimson and dripping with his blood and his life, both of which are ebbing away. His breathing is labored. He groans with pain even as he struggles against it. He struggles to one knee and points at Van Owen. In our language, he shouts, “Burn!”

  Van Owen’s eyes suddenly enlarge and focus on his gun. His hand begins to shake. Smoke rises from the handle of the pistol, and Van Owen bellows. He drops his gun and clutches his hand. He turns it over and examines his reddened palm.

  “Black witches,” Van Owen curses. He reaches beneath his jacket for a second pistol. “Don’t be frightened. These savages will fall like any other animals.” He trains the pistol at the weakened Berantu. “Bleed,” he says softly as he fires again, again striking Berantu in the chest.

  Van Owen’s men—the ones who had obeyed Berantu’s command and fled—stop and turn back toward us, bewildered. “After them,” he commands, pointing at my people. “Go after the ones who ran. We’re taking all of them. All of them!”

  Kwame has just begun to understand what has happened, that Van Owen’s weapon has penetrated his father’s skin. He kneels beside Berantu and sees the blood rushing from the wounds. The chieftain trembles. Finally he topples into Kwame’s arms. He stares up at the sky, whispering something that I cannot hear. He breathes in deeply to make one final plea to his son: “Run…take Amara and run…” Then his spirit leaves him and he lies there in Kwame’s arms, motionless, dead.

  “Go,” my father orders me. “I cannot protect you here. Go—both of you!” At his feet, the dirt begins to rise again. It seems to hover in the air like a wall of dust all around him, and then it spreads outward. It is far stronger than the first time and not directed solely at Van Owen. It is a maelstrom of dust churning around all of us. The air hums. The wind makes a deep, crying sound, so loud that it drowns out even the humming. It is the song of the sky when it is angry and threatening and wreaking vengeance upon the land. Leaves rip from their branches, which crack against the wind. Van Owen grabs on to a thick tree trunk to secure his stance. He tries to raise the pistol again. Nearby, I can hear guns firing; Van Owen’s men are herding our people together as if we are animals. The whips are striking, the nets are being thrown, the women—my mother among them—are being led toward the water.

  Sand swirls, blowing everything, blinding everyone except my father, who stands rigid, the eye of the storm. Around him, the air is tranquil. Van Owen hides behind the tree, shielding his eyes, still fighting to raise the pistol. I can already hear my screams echoing across five generations.

  “Kwame,” my father shouts, “your father is dead. Go now. Take Amara and go!”

  Kwame turns to me. I am on the ground, struggling to stand, but the sandstorm has forced me down. I can barely see. Through a wrathful ocean of wind, I will myself to my hands and knees, but instead of moving toward Kwame, I crawl toward my father, waiting for that sound, waiting to catch him. I watch him commanding the air currents, sending them sweeping out over the trees, tearing asunder the earth at his feet. He is so powerful, and yet I know he is still only a man. Kwame is moving toward me when we hear Van Owen speak again. “Bleed,” he cries into the storm. Then his gun fires again. And the wind stops.

  “No, no…,” I am screaming as I shake my father’s lifeless body. I can see the hole through his forehead, the blood streaming from it, his eyes open and pained and yet hollow somehow. I have seen the scene before, lived it already—I should know what comes next—yet I am unable to move. Kwame appears at my side. I don’t see him, though; I feel him there beside me. I long to reach out to him, to take his hand, for I know I will never have this chance again.

  “You see,” Van Owen calls to his men, his gun still smoking, “their barbarian voodoo is nothing. These black witch-doctors bleed and die. They were both too old to fetch a good price anyway.” He is reloading his gun, coming toward us. “But this wench,” he says as he approaches me, “will make a good whore for some lonely master.” I lift my head, and for the first of many times to come, Van Owen and I gaze into each other’s eyes. His mouth seems to drop open slightly, as if he has seen something wondrous. He tilts his hand to one side and smiles. When he finally speaks again, his tone is lecherous. “Or maybe,” he says softly, “I’ll keep her for myself.”

  Kwame does not understand Van Owen’s words, but he senses the evil man’s intentions. He rises, his body tense, and I notice his hands. They are glowing like wood that has burned so hot that it has turned to ember. Light seems to emanate from them, yet his hands do not burn. He is not in pain; he is empowered.

  Until now, everything that has happened today—my cousins, the ceremony, Van Owen’s arrival, my father’s death—I had seen it all in my visions. This thing that Kwame is doing, though, is new. I know what will come later—the plantation, the war, so much death and pain—but I do not know this moment. Why can’t I see it?

  “More witchcraft?” cries Van Owen as he points the pistol toward Kwame.

  Kwame advances toward him, fire crackling from his hands in tiny branches of light. In his eyes, I can see it—Kwame is as surprised as I am. Just as I had never had the visions before today, he has never known this ability of his either. Even as he moves forward, he stares at his hands as if he does not know what to do with them.

  Van Owen fires his gun at Kwame but misses. The gunpowder billows, clouding Van Owen’s eyes. While he is occupied with reloading, I rise and come at him from behind. Kwame runs directly at him, placing his hands on Van Owen’s chest at the same moment that I grasp the slaver’s neck from behind. I squeeze with all of my strength, trying to wring the life from his pale throat. Van Owen’s flesh burns from Kwame’s touch. He tries to scream but my grip keeps his words trapped inside. I focus all of my rage at him—rage for everything he has done already and for everything he will do in all the years to come. I twist my hands tighter around his throat, drawing all the hatred in my heart and directing it at him. His milky, blue skin is cold. Veins on his neck bloat; I can almost feel the blood slowing.

  And then I feel a jolt.

  For a moment, everything is dark again. I am blind, hurtling downward through a tunnel. No, not a tunnel—a cavern, silent, vacant, closing in on me as I traverse its depths. Then a light: two slits closing and opening. I push onward until I can see again—through the two openings—but something is different. The trees, the sand, my father’s body—they are all still there, but the world is dimmer; the horizon is etched with clouds that should not be there. And the world lacks color. Everything is gray or black or white.

  Van Owen moans, but I hear his voice not through my ears but inside my head as if his voice is mine. I feel my hands coiling around his throat, but at the same time I feel the pain of their clenching. I see the smoke emanating from Van Owen’s chest where Kwame is scalding him. I can smell the blistering skin. And I feel the pain of the burns.

  I know what is happening—I am seeing through Van Owen’s eyes as if I am he, as if my thoughts, my senses, my will are all lost inside him. I can hear his thoughts, rancid and warped. I can still feel my own body quivering as I maintain my grip on him, but I am more aware of his body than I am of my own. I can feel his hand still clutching the pistol that he used to murder my father. I focus on that hand, on that pistol, and I force the hand to raise and turn the pistol back toward him. I can sense his awareness of what is happening. He knows I am inside him, inside his mind, taking control of his body. Through his eyes, I look out and see the barrel of his own gun veering back toward his face. I can feel him fighting me, tryi
ng to push me out. His hatred of women is almost as palpable as his hatred of dark-skinned people. The images in his mind—I could never have imagined anything so foul. He wants to whip me, to rend my flesh even as he wants to thrust his body against mine.

  I am drowning in blood; it flows over me, heaving and thick, so thick I can barely wade through it. But I focus on the hand, the hand with the gun. I feel his eyes—mine now—grow wide with fear as I will his finger against the trigger, tighter, ever tighter.

  Kwame is still holding on, too. He curses Van Owen for murdering our fathers. He screams, and lightning crackles from his glowing fingers and pours into Van Owen’s body. The slaver wails, his head snapping back, but so does mine. As one, Van Owen and I cry out. For what seems an interminable moment, the three of us stand there, locked in our embrace—me clutching on from behind, draped around his neck and draped inside his mind, Kwame attacking from the front, driving lightning currents through Van Owen’s body, while gun smoke and sand hover in the air around us.

  I feel Van Owen’s fear. He shrieks, and I feel his hatred for us. I feel his shame at being hurt by two savages. I feel him fighting to wrest control from me, to keep the trigger from pressing all the way down. Then I sense his mind working—forming an idea: to let go, to stop struggling and allow our attacks—mine and Kwame’s—to be used against each other. I try to break away—to pull my mind loose, to relax my grip on his neck—but I am too late. All at once, Van Owen stops struggling and allows me to take complete control of him, and as soon as he does, Kwame’s lightning attack passes through Van Owen and flows into me. And my attack on Van Owen’s mind slips through Van Owen and into Kwame.

  For a moment, Kwame and I are connected as my consciousness is propelled into his. Time hangs suspended as my betrothed and I share an entire world unto ourselves. There is no air, no land, no water surrounding us, no death, no Van Owen. There is only Kwame and Amara. I sense his gentle soul, forced into violence by the most tragic of events. Fury and grief are one in him. I can feel his lack of control over his hands as the lighting spews from them. So I was right then: like me, he did not know that he had this power. Like me, he had heard tales that our fathers possessed strange abilities—abilities that they had used in battle. But unlike me, Kwame knew that they were not merely tales, that the powers were not just myth. His father had told him the origin of the power. I must know it as well, but I cannot explore it now. There is no time. I need to fight. I need to break free. But this joining with Kwame overwhelms me. I feel as if he and I are bound as if by chains. I wonder—if we had truly touched, if our hands had met—would we have been able to merge our power and use it against Van Owen?

  Instead, Kwame’s lightning shrouds me in pain. I cry out and my voice pierces Kwame’s mind, echoing through it, hurting him. We grow weak. We let go of Van Owen and topple to the ground, the gun falling soundlessly on the sand. Faint, I turn my head, trying to get my bearings. Kwame is near me—unconscious but breathing. Van Owen stands over us, swaying. He is dazed, but he steadies his feet and pulls himself upright. He shakes off his stupor, breathing deeply as he stares at his hands, staring as if he has never seen them before. Before I pass out, I hear his voice. It seems louder, fuller somehow, though he is still weak from our struggle.

  “What,” he cries, “have you black witches done to me?”

  Six

  “So, I was talking to Coach Dodge,” began Jerome. He’d been dreading this conversation, but he couldn’t put it off any longer. It needed to happen.

  Regina turned away sharply and gazed out the open passenger side window. Two white police officers were trying to pry a Black homeless man off a grate next to an electric company repair truck. The steam from the grate curled around the man, making it look like he was floating in a cloud. Regina leaned out the window, craning her neck to watch. The homeless man was crying as the cops tugged at his arms. Regina leaned out even farther.

  “Be careful,” Jerome told her as he checked the rearview mirror, but Regina seemed not to hear him. Her eyes were closed.

  The homeless man suddenly lurched to his feet, unnaturally spry. He wiped his eyes, gathered his belongings, and trotted off, waving. The two policemen stared at each other and shrugged.

  Regina pulled herself back into her seat and stared up at her brother. There were tears in her eyes.

  “Why are you crying?” His head shot back and forth from the road to her. “Are you okay?”

  She nodded and smiled as she wiped her sleeve across her face and then lowered her arm to let the wind dry any remaining tears.

  They drove on for a few more blocks, Jerome eyeing her periodically. “Gina…look, I know this is hard to talk about, but we all keep avoiding it.” He swallowed before going on. “About Coach Dodge…he told me he talked to you.”

  She glanced at his hands, and Jerome glanced at them as well. They were so massive that the steering wheel looked like a toy in his grip. Their father had bought the used truck because Jerome was too big to fit comfortably in most vehicles. But, he was too large even in the truck. Every time they passed over a bump, his head bounced against the roof. And he had to hunch over the dashboard in order to see the traffic lights.

  “His wife’s a speech therapist,” Jerome went on. “Maybe she can help you with whatever problem you’re having. Pop doesn’t like when I bring it up, but I see you at school; he doesn’t.” She didn’t react, so he continued. “Gina, I know your grades are really good, but the punks are gonna keep on picking on you. What’s gonna happen once I go off to college next year?”

  Regina opened the glove compartment and withdrew a pad of paper and a pen. She wrote: “Terry will still be here. He’ll watch out for me.” She held up the pad for Jerome.

  “Terry?” he sighed, scratching his forehead. “Terry can’t even watch out for himself.” He thought about the lunchroom—Akins and his girlfriend. He’d heard that the argument started because the girlfriend had picked on Regina. “If I hadn’t been in the lunchroom today, what do you think would have happened?”

  Regina scribbled a response and smiled as she flashed the pad at her brother: “You wouldn’t have gotten lunch.” She laughed without making a sound, her shoulders bouncing up and down like a cartoon animal’s.

  Jerome fought to keep a straight face, but he finally gave up and laughed out loud. “Yeah, all right. It’s funny. You make me laugh. You’re always making me laugh. But you can’t go through life writing notes on a pad. Whatever it is that’s keeping you from talking, we have to deal with it.”

  “Why?” she wrote back.

  “Because you’re not…” He had almost said mute, but he despised that word, which he had heard students whisper about her. “You used to talk. A lot. And there was nothing wrong with your voice. It’s not like you sounded weird or you stuttered or something. Hell, you were the youngest kid in your class, and you still skipped a grade! But then you just stopped talking. And I just…I just don’t get it…and I want to help… I…”

  Jerome’s voice trailed off. Reluctantly, he found himself thinking of the day that she’d stopped speaking. He could still remember the sound of her scream—pain and fear mingled together. He’d raced upstairs and found her crying, kneeling over Terry, shaking him as he lay crumpled on the floor, passed out but with his eyes open and staring upward without any expression.

  “What happened?” Jerome had demanded, dropping beside Terry and checking that his brother was breathing. Terry was breathing; he was alive, but Regina was so odd, just staring at Terry, saying nothing. Then Terry woke, dazed, explaining—unconvincingly—that he must have slipped and fallen.

  Two years had passed, and no sound had crossed Regina's lips since.

  “I don’t get it,” Jerome repeated to her in the truck. “You’re not…mute.”

  “Well, I can’t talk,” Regina wrote on the pad. She turned to a fresh page and continued. “So maybe I AM MUTE NOW.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “
Terry believes me,” she wrote, underlining Terry’s name and pointing to it as Jerome read it.

  As he stopped at a red light, Jerome turned to the window to hide his annoyed expression. A hansom cab crossed in front of them at the intersection. The horse looked too old, too weak to be pulling the hefty carriage and the two men who rode in it. They were young Black men who looked more like gang members than coach drivers. One of the men pointed at Jerome and snarled his lip as if to say, What are you looking at? They seemed familiar to him. Jerome was certain he’d seen one of them before, perhaps with Warren. He thought of the money he’d passed through the fence earlier. That’s the last time, he promised himself. The last time.

  It wasn’t until he was parking the car in their driveway that he spoke again. “You used to sing, too,” he told Regina. “I used to love when you’d sing.” But she was already unbuckling her seatbelt, already opening the car door and turning to wave goodbye.

  “Hey,” he called after her as she shut the door, “what time is Terry working till?”

  She held up seven fingers and walked toward the front door of the dilapidated two-story townhouse. As she turned the key, Jerome gazed upward to watch the cracked aluminum siding sway in the wind. In a moment, Regina would race upstairs to their grandmother’s room, just as she did every day when she arrived home.

  He glanced up at Willa’s window, wondering what the two women of the household did in all those hours they spent secluded in that room. Sometimes he listened outside the closed bedroom door, but he rarely heard even a sound except for Willa’s piano. If he stood there too long, though, Willa would usually announce with a lilt: "Regina, open the door. Let your brother in."

  He usually did go in then, just for a few minutes. Willa was good to him. She would ask him to tell her everything that had happened at school or at practice. She was interested and loving and gentle. He always assumed she must be lonely up in her room all day, but she seemed complacent somehow. The room got sunlight and had a private bathroom. There was a telephone beside her bed, but Jerome had never heard her use it. There were books but no television set and no visitors except for her grandchildren. Since she could barely walk and hadn’t left the room in years, there was little chance of her making any new acquaintances. He’d tried to encourage any change in her habits—a class at the church, a drive, anything. “Grandma,” he would say, “I can put you in the wheelchair and take you for a walk around the neighborhood…”