“You know I does fish fah me bread and buttah, Emma Quashie.”
The baby was wrapped in a clean yellow crib blanket. His open eyes were almost slanted, like Collymore’s. Emma held the baby propped in her arms, displaying it like a vendor at the market. “Collymore, what you sayin, mahn? You ain tek you own baby?” The infant had colic; his raw umbilicus, infected, protruded from his gas-inflated stomach like a sausage; he cried throughout the night, throughout the day, and as if on cue, he began crying now, mucus streaming out of his eyes and miniature nostrils. Emma was accustomed to these tribulations of child-rearing, but never had she seen her husband Rupert so short-tempered and disapproving. He didn’t like the time she gave to the church —he thought of the group as a cult of religious fanatics, backward-thinking, and told her so, told her to join a proper Baptist church. Told her, the night she came with the baby, “Here now, how you reach home wit pickaninny of a crazy gyurl! Womahn, you would let dog suck you titty.” For his benefit, Emma quickly discredited the vision of the epiphany that for a moment had bathed the beach in celestial light, but her superstitions were not easily dismissed. The child had survived a divine confrontation. If power were a Barbados lily, its pollen would have dusted the baby’s eternal soul, from his brush against it. If this meant good fortune, she wanted to keep the child at whatever cost, but surely the infant could be cursed with bad luck too. Time would tell her so. Her maternal instinct, however confused and complicitous, made her righteous and bullish. She squared her shoulders, cocked her head at a fierce angle, and raked Collymore with scorn, almost shrieking what she had to say. “Muddah won’t come. Stepmuddah won’t come. I try to help in crisis but who appreciate it! Now de faddah come and him useless, him shiftless, him assified, him a mahn who pay you back on Nebruary mornin, him a contriver and him just one more chupid nigger-buck wit roostah fah brains!”
Collymore had heard too much of this in his life and had learned to be amused by it, though on the sea each day, he rehearsed his revenge against all who had no time for him, a hardworking fisherman, he obliterated their images and their judgments and their lack of respect. With superior mind power and superior muscle power, he conquered their shadows. This Emma Quashie, he knew her from way-back, another hungry, grab-a-bwoy island girl, before she married the Guyanese cop, and take airs. He knew her when she but a girl hung with rags, her new bubbies sore like bee sting, poking carrot up her pee-pee to joke the boys. She saw how he smiled at her, and smirked back at his arrogance, but now that they recognized themselves in each other again, top to bottom, now that that was clear, Collymore set his mouth and became serious.
“When he pull a line, he cy-ahn come by me, eh?”
“Bwoy, you sit in de hot sun too long. Me ain feedin no pickaninny to send by you when he raise up. Step down from my stoop, Collymore.”
“Here now,” he bargained, “you ain tek fish fah you pot?”
Emma Quashie wouldn’t soften her manner, for fear of seeming pleased with this arrangement. “Send a piece each time you reach, nuh?” she said with strict precision. “Each time.” As if she wanted the buyer to verify the quality of his purchase, she held the baby out in front of her, indifferent to the infant’s pathetic bleats, the void of comfort in which he writhed and squirmed. “You wish to hold de child?”
Collymore snorted. “Soon enough,” he said, and so the deal was struck.
In those days, the colonial administration still rotated the members of its police force throughout the West Indies, and Rupert Quashie, from British Guiana, had been assigned a year’s duty to out-of-the-way Cotton on the principle that outsiders, by nature, would never get in too thick with the locals, who were gaining a reputation as interisland smugglers. But Quashie married a Cotton Islander, and gave her two children, both girls. He savored the tranquility of the breezy island, the illusion of its expanse and the snugness of its insularity, after having known only the slums of Georgetown. So much so that when he was scheduled for promotion and transfer to Antigua, and his hard-headed wife announced she wouldn’t live in a country that operated gambling houses —an objection he knew masked her inability to forfeit control over her life —Rupert decided not to argue with her about getting ahead in the world, because now it seemed that getting ahead actually meant going past a good thing. In this small place, his aspirations were not being denied him —he had a family, a house, respect from the community, extra money from being on the take with the contraband runners —and because he had married Emma, and was an outwardly honest and obedient policeman, he was allowed to stay where he was, though his promotion was indefinitely deferred.
Once his anger at his wife’s impulsiveness subsided, and the mad fires lit by obeah flickered out within her eyes, he saw the hopelessness of the baby’s situation, how grim and unwelcoming his deliverance, and granted the child a home under his roof, and then within his own healthy heart. It was Emma who named the child Cassius, after the priest in her church; it was Emma who nursed and changed him, washed him, then later took him to the markets and every Sunday noon to the one-room church on the hill above town, but it was also Emma who filled his head with a chaotic pantheon of white gods and black ones, of saints that could at any moment turn tyrant, and of an almost-visible underworld about to burst though the doors and windows of the house and fill it with galloping, darting, merciless devils. The river of her fantastic whisperings eroded into the child’s consciousness, as it did with his two sisters, and made the Quashie children famous among their playmates for being easily spooked, with imaginations as fertile as volcanic soil. As for his sisters, they treated Cassius no differently than they did one another, with no more meanness, and no less affection, and he loved them without ever thinking about it, and with no notion of what any mirror would try to tell him, that he was not their brother.
As for Rupert, he was all the god that Cassius wanted, there and not there, occupied by the most vital events in Cotton’s universe. His unpredictable appearances were profound and joyous, to look up from the yard, or from the kitchen table, or from the bed where he slept with his sisters to see the giant that was his father, to be successfully appraised by this power, the nighttime of his stern face dissolved by the waves of radiance that were his smiles, to see how handsomely he wore his fine uniform, how well he suited the justice of its red, the authority of its navy blues, to touch the high black polish of its leather, the glory of its gold buttons and fastenings; and the most unnerving pleasure, to slide near enough to inhale the oiled metal of an absolute and forbidden marvel, the stone-heavy pistol strapped to its triangle of holster. It was the sight of the gun, and the sight of his father with it hung on his hip, that made the boy Cassius believe that the world had a place for its heroes, which was a conclusion he came to in full innocence, without a child’s violent make-believe of the gun shooting or destroying, because Rupert Quashie wished to be a good father and a kind though wide-awake man, and he was. Meanwhile, day after day, Emma matter of factly described a parade of invisible horrors lurking about, indoctrinating the young Cassius to the philosophy of a volatile world, its dangers requiring years to enumerate, wholly vulnerable to catastrophe. It was in this way that she programmed a happy child for the future. And it was only a few months before his fifth birthday that the future showed itself, if only for an afternoon.
Miss Emma was sent word from Cassius’ namesake —servant of God, minister of Jesus, priest of Legba and Erzulie —to come bring the boy to Miss Diedra’s house, for she was fighting against death and needed their support. Emma was not eager to go, and sent a note in care of the driver of the island transport: Tell me, she scrawled, how we can help keep dead from dying, and within an hour, received a message she dreaded in reply: the boy, son of Erzulie M. She called the child in from the yard where he was batting rocks with a stick and dressed him in the Sunday suit handed down to him from a Quashie cousin. Cassius was runty and the suit baggy, the tip of the necktie tucked into the bunched waist of his pants, the socks hot and
the hard shoes like buckets on his feet, but still it thrilled him to be made to look special, the knots combed out of his hair and his cheeks patted with his father’s bay rum, his mother fretting over him like she did his sisters.
His mother cussed at his fidgeting, the parakeet-like energy of his excitement, his unanswerable questions. When she took him by the hand, he made sure their fingers interlocked, and together they walked around the harbor road, Emma tugging him onward when he slowed down to inspect a bug, a flower, a lizard, a grazing horse, an interesting piece of garbage, another child of this flake of paradise, until they came to a sandy yard and a path lined with conch shells that led to the place called Miss Diedra’s, where sunlight faltered at the threshold as they stepped inside.
Emma’s anxiety reared up and the boy sensed it, his grip tightening, sweeping the shuttered dusk of the room with his worried looks. She had only come to this house twice since the night the boy was born, the first soon after to say the baby was well and come fetch it when Miss Diedra was feeling able, the second to pay her respects to the stepmother, dead two years past from a cancer. The hush that surrounded them was the same a sleeper awoke to in the middle of the night, having dreamt of an intruder. Mommi? the boy said, and Emma shook his arm to silence him.
“M’pé,” she called into the shadowy depths of the house, shamed by the tremolo she heard weaken her voice. Foolish girl to come here, she thought, but twice as foolish to be afraid. “Faddah?” She listened but heard nothing. “Is we who you have summoned.”
From the back of the house they heard a man’s baritone voice, hoarse and lilting, choked off by coughing before they could understand what he said. The coughing was like strangulation, then it lessened, punctuated by an ellipsis of wet growls, a rolling of phlegm that became an eerie creak of footsteps passing through the floorboards like the noise of rats. The colorless plastic ribbons dividing the front room from the hallway danced apart to frame the priest of the Church of Christ of the Crossroads, a short and once stout man now bloated by the countless bottles of rum of his grief, the sack of his stomach bouncing nakedly between his sleeveless undershirt and the dungaree trousers that sagged from his hips, meant to be buttoned around the waist of the man he once was, not the man he had become in his years of deceitful marriage to a girl —a child —who had lost her mind; not the man who had inherited a wife by divine plan, the way Satan inherited a doomed soul, and not the man who now worshiped far beyond salvation the most profane treasure, the unchallenged ownership of another’s flesh.
Driven into the priest’s mouth like a wooden peg was the butt of a hand-rolled cigar. It twitched as he chewed and sucked the black juice from it, scrutinizing the woman and the boy with bloodshot eyes sunk into the alcoholic bloat of his face. “It is not I who mek summons,” he wheezed. “Not I. I mek no summons.” He fixed a menacing stare upon Emma until she bowed her head, nodding agreement, and when he turned and receded back down the darkness of the hallway, she pushed the boy ahead of her, through the strips of plastic that licked across his face like a nightmare of tongues, and they followed the verminous sound of the priest’s steps, into the temple of Erzulie Mary. Arrows of feelings were flying at the boy —was this the wolf thing his mother had warned him about? was this the zobop thing? the baka thing? the hairless thing? the serpent thing? the thing that caught you from behind? —it seize you unawares, Emma had threatened —the thing that killed and ate everything? So close now was panic he could hear its lion’s roar, and he began to discover ways to hide within himself. But then the door eased open upon magic, and it was beautiful.
A white forest of tapered candles sputtered on the floor, on the dressing table, along the sills of the shuttered windows, lakes of pearly wax overflowed the upturned jar lids in a glacial flood that layered the floor, the furniture, the walls beneath the windows, which elsewhere were painted sky blue, and moved like water in the golden nervous light, tossing a gallery of pictures on its liquid surface —paintings, postcards, bold drawings made with a stick of charcoal, pages torn from magazines —each one of a lady, some in robes and jewels, some without clothes and others with haloes, some on thrones and some with a breast fed into a baby’s mouth and some with wings like a pelican. There was a wooden pallet on the floor against one wall where the priest sat on a crumpled blanket, gesturing for the woman and boy to sit in the two rickety chairs at the foot of the bed. The boy covered his mouth and nose with his hand, because the room stank, smelling of sour tobacco and a stomach-turning perfume of rotting gardenias; something worse too —a pungent, fishy stench, not quite as bad as shit, not as searing as a dead animal, but nevertheless a sweetly noxious essence that made his head spin while his eyes dilated in wonder, feasting on the dazzling mysteries of the room.
Roots of tree daht shade de crossroads, deep and numerous, the priest commenced the invocation, bending toward the fruit-crate altar to the side of the pallet. En bas de l’eau, in the Creole of the French who had ruled the islands for one hundred years, centuries ago. Two pickle jars were set at opposite ends of the altar, one filled with holy water, the other with crimson flowers. Carefully arranged between the jars was an arc of liquor and wine bottles, each filled to a different volume with a clear or amber liquid, and at the center of these glass pillars stood a foot-high plaster statue of the Virgin Mary, tiny bead necklaces draped around her neck, a small baked-clay lamp of palm oil burning at her feet. To her left, a mound of basil leaves and cinnamon sticks, to her right miniature perfume bottles and pieces of costume jewelry. The priest’s chanting grew lower and lower until he only muttered with closed eyes, and then that stopped too. He uncorked one of the bottles on the altar and swigged from it. The odor of strong rum made a greasy pass through the room. He leaned his head over the oil lamp and through tight lips sprayed a mist of alcohol into its flame, creating a small ball of blue fire between his mouth and the altar. Then, with hands that were supernaturally steady, he lifted the crate of the altar straight into the air, not one of its bottles rocking, to reveal a live rooster, its legs bound with twine, lying on its side. Exposed, the bird percolated calmly, as if it had every intention of being reasonable.
“Bwoy, come. Move dis cock aside.”
Without a change of tone, the priest repeated himself before the boy, glancing at Emma Quashie for approval, went and dragged the fowl out from under the crate, and remained watching, mesmerized, as the priest set the altar back in place, as cleanly as if the crate and its array of objects were a solid piece, only the liquid in each bottle canting gently. The priest Cassius then took a cloth pouch of cornmeal, and on the floor between his gnarled feet and the boy’s shoes, tapped out the yellow powder in the design of a valentine heart, then a second sifting of lines that pierced the heart with a gold-dust sword.
“Stahnd in it,” the priest barked, nodding at the paralyzed boy to step within the pinched and pointed shape of the heart. “Stahnd in it,” he said, his gruff voice echoing in the room, “Stahnd in it and meet Erzulie,” he said a final time, then took the boy by the belt of his pants and dragged him forward. “Sistah, come,” he commanded Emma, and as the boy heard the scrape of her chair, her lips spilling a torrent of prayer, heard the man tell her to remove his coat and tie and shirt, felt her fingers picking and tugging at him, felt the fetid heat of the air on his upper body —Hold him now —felt his mother’s fingernails press painfully into his shoulders, saw the silver serpent of the machete strike and the bird flutter headless in the priest’s right hand, disgorging its blood from the hose of its neck, saw the priest sprinkle red drops into the flame of the oil lamp and then felt the sweaty fatness of the priest’s hand lock over the insignificance of his own tiny wrist and turn his right palm upward, felt how he was made to cup the sticky life of the chicken in his hand, felt how the priest swabbed the ever-lessening flow up and down his small arm, making its length slick with blood, as he heard and felt these inexplicable acts, it was then the boy became aware of the sinister presence in the bed behind hi
m, heard what he had been too enchanted to notice before now, the faint labor of weary lungs, as if the air was being nibbled and not breathed; a rustling of fabric no more distinct than the velvety flight of a bat, and now —but he wasn’t sure if this was a noise he made himself or not —a whimpering, a rhythmic trickle of fear. Then the trickle turned into a cold rain and he began to quiver, telling himself, Don’t look! Don’t look! as he felt the tears of his mother, hotter than blood, carving down the back of his neck.
“Face me, look aht me!” The priest took the boy’s chin and wrenched the tiny head up straight, the child’s eyes wide open like a doll’s, round and inanimate. “You must reach in and pull Erzulie Mary from you muddah. You must reach in and remove de loa from you muddah, or she will die!”
Don’t look! he pleaded with himself. The thing that caught you from behind! the red-eyed baka thing! the big dog thing!
Emma Quashie was a tree in the wind, swaying above him in a storm. “Oh Gaawd,” the wind moaned, “No ... no. No ... no.”
Lumbering to his feet, the priest crossed to the bed, throwing back the sheets, and prepared the inert body of the girl for the ritual, the purifying rite that had been delivered to him in his cane-sodden dreams. He made Emma Quashie turn the little boy toward his true mother and escort him to the side of the bed, and Emma hummed in a gale force of misery, turning her eyes away from the blasphemous sight of the naked skeletal creature she had known as the girl Miss Diedra, the stick legs banked open and emanating rancidness, but she obeyed the priest in the powerlessness that was ancient and human, to ease the tremors of her own mortality, and held firmly to the shoulders of the unseeing boy while the priest grasped the child’s hand, lubricated with the blood of sacrifice, rounding the fingers into a snake’s blunt head which he guided up through the narrowing channel of Miss Diedra’s thighs until the tips felt the scratch of a strange fluted kiss, and he made the boy lean forward onto the mattress and press, his hand nuzzling deeper and deeper into the yielding lips. The room was a squall of light, teardrops of fire raining upward from the candlespouts, the undersea women of the walls immaculate and secure amid this stormy luminescence; they allowed the boy to run to them, and shielded his face from harm. He pushed into the dry toothless mouth that constricted like the elastic cuff of a pajama sleeve. His hand burst through the ring of throat into the silk center of a warm cloud, not an unpleasant sensation, while the rubber mouth of the cuff inched up his forearm to suck at his elbow. A cat climbed onto the bed to sing with his mother Emma. The child felt sleepy from the bath of clouds where his arm rested, and felt the desire to immerse himself.
Swimming in the Volcano Page 25
