Half the Day Is Night

by Maureen F. Mchugh

  Saint Barbara, she heard that, she thought. Les morts, “the dead.” Bits and pieces, but she didn’t even understand French.

  The prayer finished. People stood with their heads bowed. There was a moment of silence, and then “Ave Maria…” Layte began and the rest of the congregation followed her in the Hail Mary, and then, in Creole, the Our Father. Monotonous drone of recited prayer, as familiar to her as school. They said the Our Father three times and then there was a silence and everyone stood with their heads bowed.

  Mayla wondered what the next prayer would be, maybe the Apostles’ Creed? Voudoun wasn’t anything like she had expected. It was like a storefront church.

  Layte shook a shell rattle and Mayla jumped. The rattle was a gourd covered with cowrie shells laced together and Layte shook it, a sound like a rattlesnake’s tail, and shook it, and shook it and shook it and stopped.

  Silence.

  Everybody clapped and the drums boomed and Layte struck the ground with the rattle. The sound in the little room was intense. In unison: the clap, the drum, the thump of the rattle, one, two, three, pause. One, two, three, pause. One, two, three pause. Like knocking on a door. Bam, bam, bam, breath, bam, bam, bam, breath. Steady and slow, a demanding rhythm, relentless. The tension in the room was building, too. Everyone was waiting, watching the drummers. Or each other. Some people were starting to perspire. The room was warm, because of all the bodies, but not warm enough to get people sweating. One, two, three, and then beat-beat-beat-beat-beat-beat for what, half a minute? And then it stopped. Everybody seemed to wait, listening.

  In the silence she could hear the echo of the drums in her ears, in her pulse.

  Then it started again. One, two, three, pause. She could feel the impact in the bones of her skull. What if her headache came back, here? This was a foolish idea.

  But it didn’t seem to be starting her headache. Light caused her headaches. But the light here didn’t bother her, even though it was just a bare fixture over the altar in a concrete room painted white. Bam, bam, bam, breath, bam, bam, bam, breath. It felt as if the sound drove the air out of her chest and only in the pauses could she breathe. She was clapping, although she couldn’t even hear the sound of her own claps.

  And then it ended.

  What next?

  Everybody stood for a moment and then, as if a plug had been pulled in a sink, people began to drain through the door. Was that it? The loa hadn’t come? She had paid a donation, had she been taken advantage of? “Paul’s employer, she’ll pay money, we can tell her the loa didn’t come and then she’ll go home, anglos don’t know anything.”

  She let herself be towed along, pulled into the front room. The table had been put against the wall, although nobody touched the food. The drummers came out and Layte followed, backing, pouring a thin stream of water on the floor.

  No, it was rum, Mayla could smell it.

  Most people weren’t even paying any attention. A girl was looking for her handkerchief, she had laid it down. Someone produced it. People were chattering, mostly in Creole. How much longer until she should leave?

  The drummers were sitting by the table, setting up as if they might play, but nobody seemed to pay much attention. The door opened and a couple came in. Somebody called, “Ramise!”

  The woman waved.

  A couple of people had little folding stools and they settled them around the walls but everybody else stood around the room. It was only a little after seven-thirty. It had been sort of interesting, but Mayla wasn’t sure she wanted to stay for the party after.

  Then Layte called out and everybody answered again. People turned around. Layte called again, and the chorus answered. (In the space between the answer and the next call, she heard someone talking.) Layte poured rum into a little metal bowl and lit a match and dropped it in. There was a flame, nearly invisible.

  The drums started again, a more complicated rhythm, and some people came away from the wall and started dancing. Simple steps, two steps forward, one stomp. Mayla felt someone tugging on her sleeve, Paul, pulling her.

  She looked up at Tim, pleading, come with me. Tim followed them into the thick. One-two one. One-two one. Simple. An easy motion. They flowed around the room, around the bowl of burning rum. The dancers rolled their shoulders, a sensuous motion that Mayla couldn’t duplicate. She felt stiff, anglo. A dumb, awkward blanc. Not my culture, she wanted to say. But everybody was looking at the floor, dancing to themselves, hypnotizing themselves with the rhythm. So she tried staring at the dark floor, rolling her shoulders. After a few turns around the room she felt her shoulders loosening up, rolling like the women around her. She looked up and smiled at Tim, who couldn’t isolate the movement and shook his whole chest, but he smiled good-naturedly back at her. Good old Tim, she thought, always ready to go along.

  Maybe it was more her culture than it was someone like Tim’s.

  Her mind kept going and going, her thoughts running like a mouse wheel. What if she could be possessed? What would it be like? It would be great if it were true, if there were loa. She probably couldn’t be possessed if she didn’t believe in them—and there was something strong in this room.

  The drums kept going. Her calves were aching. You probably had to do this a lot to be in shape for it.

  She let the drums propel her around, left-right LEFT, right-left RIGHT. Easy steps, and her mind wandered. Like doing exercise, where there was nothing to occupy her. Maybe that was the major benefit? Just letting her mind go, letting the rhythms take her, tiring her body out and not concentrating. She should empty her mind. She glanced around. Some people seemed to be concentrating, some didn’t. A few were looking around.

  The drums stopped, and everybody looked around. The faces were mostly blank. The drums started again, a different rhythm, a different dance, a kind of step and glide.

  She didn’t like it, she liked what they had been doing before, the shoulder roll thing, and she couldn’t do this glide thing right, but she liked the dancing. The drums were wonderful, calling her, pushing and pulling. She tried to let herself glide into the drum beat and for a moment she thought she had it, if she could just not think she would have it, but she lost it almost right away. She had to sort of think, but she had to just know she was going to do it, and she didn’t know that, she was thinking too much, she had to just go with the drums. Maybe if she came on Fridays after awhile she would be out here and she could just go with the drums—

  The big drum changed rhythm and everybody broke, the drum just went thump thump thump thump thump while the other two drums kept going under and over each other as if the big drum were still playing with them, and everybody took long steps, stride stride stride stride stride, and then the big drum was drumming again and they were all dancing again.

  She felt wild and startled, it seemed like a hallucination, that break, with everybody dancing as though the women had not thrust their hips down, the men thrown their legs out and everybody taken those long strides, like giant steps, take three giant’s steps, Simon says, or really, the big drum says. Listen to the big drum.

  She liked it. She liked it a lot. She liked the dancing. It felt good, heating her muscles up and moving around. She’d be sore tomorrow, but that was okay.

  Around the invisible center, a constant motion, a current of water, her legs were getting tired and then the big drum broke again and in that moment a man stumbled, caught himself and went rigid, falling backwards so that the man behind him, who was just in front and to Mayla’s right, had to catch him. The other dancers strode past. A woman stumbled away as if struck and then her leg seemed to root to the maroon floor and she pitched forward, as if a current had come from the man. People behind Mayla were pushing her forward, so she went on, craning her neck. The man who had stiffened and fallen backwards had been as rigid as someone turned to wood, but now he suddenly jerked left and right, breaking away from the man supporting him. The woman was still pitched forward, another woman holding her arm. She looked te
rrified, her eyes wide. “Merci!” the woman shouted.

  They are having seizures, Mayla thought. It was as if she had caught it from him, or as if the ground had suddenly conducted an electric shock. And then the man, and then the woman, straightened up. The man began to pace in harsh staccato movements, but the woman began dancing. Gliding, dancing, beautiful smooth movements, her face an alien mask.

  The man went over to the table and appraised the food, and then Mayla lost sight of him, swept by the current of dancers. In a moment she could see him through the people again, and she could see he had a roll and was chewing on it. Nobody else was eating, but nobody seemed to find his actions odd.

  Two people standing by the table nodded to him, respectful.

  Then Mayla was swept past him again.

  She stepped on the heel of the person in front of her, a woman in white satin. She murmured sorry, although the woman did not look around and could not have heard her.

  She could see the man again, and he was looking at her. Someone came up to him and he turned his head and smiled, let the woman take his hand. Then he gestured, telling her something, his palms flashing pale.

  Think about the dance, not the man. He was all right.

  But she couldn’t get back the feeling. She looked back at the man and he was wearing sunglasses, the shining black glass turned towards her, and she knew he was looking at her even though she couldn’t see his face. Papa Legba.

  Step and glide, step and glide. People possessed by the loa weren’t supposed to remember what had happened afterward. They were supposed to have amnesia for the time of possession. She wondered what was happening to the man, did everybody have hidden personalities that only multiple personalities and the possessed got to use?

  She stepped on the woman’s heel again and embarrassed she found her way out, through the people. From the wall she turned around and caught a glimpse of Tim. He was grimacing and his eyes were closed and he was part of the river. She could see it, even though he was awkward in the dance, he was caught up in whatever the rest of these people felt.

  And she wasn’t.

  “Lady,” a woman touched her arm, speaking loudly to be heard over the drums. “Papa Legba, ask you come.”

  She looked over and the sunglasses were watching her.

  “Papa Legba say come,” the woman—really a girl—said again.

  She followed the girl around the edge of the room.

  The girl did a kind of bob in front of the man with the sunglasses. He touched her head and nodded, a paternal gesture. The he held his hand out for Mayla. She took it, he clasped her hand loosely, his was hot, and she felt a tension in all her body at his touch. The drummers were playing some sort of intricate over and under, filling the air around them with sound she could feel buffeting her.

  The man in the sunglasses beckoned her to follow him in the room with the pillar and the altar, where everything had started. She wondered what she was going to be talking to. How had he known that she had paid a donation, had he been in the room when she saluted with the water jug? Probably. Of course, she was a blanc and she wasn’t wearing white. It was easy to guess she was here for something.

  It was not so loud in the room with the altar. “Girl,” he said and stopped. Paul came around the edges of the crowd.

  The man—or Legba if she was supposed to believe all this—nodded at Paul and spoke in Creole. Paul held out his hand in ritual salutation and braced himself, standing with his feet a little wide as if for a blow. When the loa took his hand he rocked back on his heels a bit, as if a current of electricity had passed through him.

  The power of the loa, she had heard of that. Did the loa pass from the man to Paul? No, the shock didn’t mean that, Paul was still Paul.

  She expected Paul to be deferential, but while he was respectful, somehow he was less unnatural with the loa than he was with her. He wasn’t friendly, the way he was with her, but he was relaxed.

  “Papa Legba asks how you passed the night,” he said. Which was odd, that was how you said good morning in Creole, “Et le nuit?”

  “One gets along,” she said, puzzled.

  “Papa Legba says you do not have such good night vision, but he sees you have glasses,” Paul said.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “In your bag,” Paul said. “He means the sunglasses.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “He says you need to develop your night vision. You need to see in the dark.”

  Fortune-telling talk, vague horoscope kind of things that could relate to anyone. But she couldn’t help it, she could feel tears welling up in her eyes. Sometimes, when people told her nightmares, her eyes would water, she didn’t know why. Ghost stories made her want to cry. She had that now, too much feeling, she didn’t want to see in the dark.

  “Tell him, sunglasses don’t help you see in the dark,” she said.

  Legba grinned yellow uneven teeth before it was translated.

  “He says it will make you practice,” Paul said. “If you can see with the sunglasses, then it will be no problem to see without them.”

  “Girl,” said Legba, “this isn’t your home.”

  “You mean Marincite?” she asked. What did he mean, that she shouldn’t think about trying to get a job with Marincite Corp?

  “You are not a child of Guinee, you don’t belong on the sea. You must find another home.” He had no trouble with English. “It is a good ceremony,” he said, and then something to Paul in Creole. She wished she had studied Creole.

  Legba paid no more attention to her, it was as if she had vanished. He walked away, taking another piece of bread off the table and then passing unerringly through the crowd of dancers until he found Paul’s sister, the houngoun. He talked to her for a moment. Then he shook himself, kind of shook his shoulders, and then was shaken as if by some terrible spasm, and fell, limp. People grabbed him, held him like a puppet by the arms, and he was all elbows and joints. They pulled him to a chair, and sat him down and took off the sunglasses. Layte folded them into a pocket of her dress.

  The man raised his head, his face slack as if exhausted, and looked around, blinking. He raised his hand to his chest and rubbed it slowly, not as if it ached, but as if to reassure himself.

  “What is a child of Guinee?” Mayla asked Paul.

  “We are all children of Guinee, anybody who listens to the loa,” he said.

  “Why did Legba say I’m not a child of Guinee?”

  “Maybe because you have not been initiated?” Paul said. But he didn’t sound as if he believed it.

  “He told me to go home. Maybe I should leave.”

  She half expected Paul to shake his head, but he just dropped his eyes, his face blank. “I will take you home,” he said.

  Something changed in the dancing, something in the rhythm. Not the drums, but something. She thought it was a possession, and she craned to see, but all she could see was that people had stopped. People didn’t stop for possessions.

  It was a possession, a middle-aged woman standing in the middle of the room. She stood with her shoulders back. Mayla didn’t know any female loa except Erzulie, loa of love. Was this woman Erzulie? It was hard to see around people.

  Mayla could see Layte come out on the floor and talk with the woman. The woman’s voice was deeper than Mayla expected, almost male sounding, although maybe that was the air mixture in Marincite. The woman shifted and there were people in the way again, and then the woman had sunglasses on. Mayla was pretty sure that Erzulie didn’t wear sunglasses. Legba? The woman was different from the man, when he’d been Legba, but maybe that was just the personality of the person coming through. It wasn’t supposed to.

  Paul sucked on his lower lip.

  “Who is it?” Mayla asked.

  “I don’t know,” Paul said.

  Whoever it was was demanding something.

  “I think it’s Carrefour,” Paul said.

  Carrefour? The sorcerer? “Why is he
here?”

  Paul shrugged.

  Not for her, she hoped.

  “I’ll take you home,” Paul said. “Wait, and I’ll get your friend.”

  “What will happen?” Mayla asked.

  “My sister will take care of him,” Paul said. “Don’t worry. He is just powerful right now.”

  * * *

  By rights, Mayla thought, a company with a name like Robit ought to have been in robotics, but of course it wasn’t. It did some sort of solar cells.

  The deal was this, MaTE needed to buy itself from its parent company, Marincite Corp. To raise the money, it was going to buy another company and then borrow against that company. The company they were going to buy was called Robit. It was something of a financial shell game, but it was all legal.

  She was working with Owen Cleary of MaTE. He had been Danny Tumipamba’s assistant. She told him her banker joke. God was thinking of expanding heaven so he was checking out real estate. He found a great patch of land, sunny, elysian, wonderful, and was surprised to run into the devil who was thinking of purchasing the same piece of land.

  God said to the devil, “You can’t be serious, there’s nothing devilish about this place, if you brought people here they wouldn’t be suffering the torments of the damned.”

  The devil shrugged. “It would take a lot of work, I don’t know if it’s worth the time and the financing. I’ll have to think about it.”

  God said, “Aren’t you worried about it being gone before you decide?”

  The devil looked at God and laughed. “Like you’ve got any bankers?”

  Owen laughed politely.

  To buy Robit, they needed to get more stock on the market. So they bought what stock was available, and that made the price go up.

  She waited for the big investors—the pension plans and the mutual funds—to read the upswing and start to release shares to the market. MaTE had to buy enough of Robit to make the price go up about five points. A lot of the stock was in trust portfolios—pension plans, money markets. If the stock went up, the software that controlled the buying and selling for the trust would release a little into the market.