by Andy Duncan
Obligations, travel, and illness—“suffering perhaps the digestion,” thank you, Doctor Legros—kept Zora away from the hospital at Gonaives for some weeks. When she finally did return, she walked onto the veranda to see Felicia, as before, standing all alone in the quiet yard, her face toward the high wall. Today Felicia had chosen to stand on the sole visible spot of green grass, a plot of soft imprisoned turf about the diameter of an Easter hat. Zora felt a deep satisfaction upon seeing her, this self-contained, fixed point in her traveler’s life.
To reach the steps, she had to walk past the mad old man in the wheelchair, whose nurse was not in sight today. Despite his sunken cheeks, his matted eyelashes, his patchy tufts of white hair, Zora could see he must have been handsome in his day. She smiled as she approached.
He blinked and spoke in a thoughtful voice. “I will be a Zombie soon,” he said.
That stopped her. “Excuse me?”
“Death came for me many years ago,” said the old man, eyes bright, “and I said, No, not me, take my wife instead. And so I gave her up as a Zombie. That gained me five years, you see. A good bargain. And then, five years later, I gave our oldest son. Then our daughter. Then our youngest. And more loved ones, too, now all Zombies, all. There is no one left. No one but me.” His hands plucked at the coverlet that draped his legs. He peered all around the yard. “I will be a Zombie soon,” he said, and wept.
Shaking her head, Zora descended the steps. Approaching Felicia from behind, as Doctor Legros had said that first day, was always a delicate maneuver. One had to be loud enough to be heard but quiet enough not to panic her.
“Hello, Felicia,” Zora said.
The huddled figure didn’t turn, didn’t budge, and Zora, emboldened by long absence, repeated the name, reached out, touched Felicia’s shoulder with her fingertips. As she made contact, a tingling shiver ran up her arm and down her spine to her feet. Without turning, Felicia emerged from her crouch. She stood up straight, flexed her shoulders, stretched her neck, and spoke.
“Zora, my friend!”
Felicia turned and was not Felicia at all, but a tall, beautiful woman in a brief white gown. Freida registered the look on Zora’s face and laughed.
“Did I not tell you that you would find me? Do you not even know your friend Freida?”
Zora’s breath returned. “I know you,” she retorted, “and I know that was a cruel trick. Where is Felicia? What have you done with her?”
“Whatever do you mean? Felicia was not mine to give you, and she is not mine to take away. No one is owned by anyone.”
“Why is Felicia not in the yard? Is she ill? And why are you here? Are you ill as well?”
Freida sighed. “So many questions. Is this how a book gets written? If Felicia were not ill, silly, she would not have been here in the first place. Besides.” She squared her shoulders. “Why do you care so about this . . . powerless woman? This woman who let some man lead her soul astray, like a starving cat behind an eel-barrel?” She stepped close, the heat of the day coalescing around. “Tell a woman of power your book. Tell me your book,” she murmured. “Tell me of the mule’s funeral, and the rising waters, and the buzzing pear-tree, and young Janie’s secret sigh.”
Zora had two simultaneous thoughts, like a moan and a breath interlaced: Get out of my book! and My God, she’s jealous!
“Why bother?” Zora bit off, flush with anger. “You think you know it by heart already. And besides,” Zora continued, stepping forward, nose to nose, “there are powers other than yours.”
Freida hissed, stepped back as if pattered with stove-grease.
Zora put her nose in the air and said, airily, “I’ll have you know that Felicia is a writer, too.”
Her mouth a thin line, Freida turned and strode toward the hospital, thighs long and taut beneath her gown. Without thought, Zora walked, too, and kept pace.
“If you must know,” Freida said, “your writer friend is now in the care of her family. Her son came for her. Do you find this so remarkable? Perhaps the son should have notified you, hmm?” She winked at Zora. “He is quite a muscular young man, with a taste for older women. Much, much older women. I could show you where he lives. I have been there often. I have been there more than he knows.”
“How dependent you are,” Zora said, “on men.”
As Freida stepped onto the veranda, the old man in the wheelchair cringed and moaned. “Hush, child,” Freida said. She pulled a nurse’s cap from her pocket and tugged it on over her chestnut hair.
“Don’t let her take me!” the old man howled. “She’ll make me a Zombie! She will! A Zombie!”
“Oh, pish,” Freida said. She raised one bare foot and used it to push the wheelchair forward a foot or so, revealing a sensible pair of white shoes on the flagstones beneath. These she stepped into as she wheeled the chair around. “Here is your bocor, Miss Hurston. What use have I for a Zombie’s cold hands? Au revoir, Miss Hurston. Zora. I hope you find much to write about in my country . . . however you limit your experiences.”
Zora stood at the foot of the steps, watched her wheel the old man away over the uneven flagstones.
“Erzulie,” Zora said.
The woman stopped. Without turning, she asked, “What name did you call me?”
“I called you a true name, and I’m telling you that if you don’t leave Lucille’s Etienne alone, so the two of them can go to hell in their own way, then I . . . well, then I will forget all about you, and you will never be in my book.”
Freida pealed with laughter. The old man slumped in his chair. The laughter cut off like a radio, and Freida, suddenly grave, looked down. “They do not last any time, do they?” she murmured. With a forefinger, she poked the back of his head. “Poor pretty things.” With a sigh, she faced Zora, gave her a look of frank appraisal, up and down. Then she shrugged. “You are mad,” she said, “but you are fair.” She backed into the door, shoved it open with her behind, and hauled the dead man in after her.
The tap-tap was running late as usual, so Zora, restless, started out on foot. As long as the road kept going downhill and the sun stayed over yonder, she reasoned, she was unlikely to get lost. As she walked through the countryside she sang and picked flowers and worked on her book in the best way she knew to work on a book, in her own head, with no paper and indeed no words, not yet. She enjoyed the caution signs on each curve—“La Route Tue et Blesse,” or, literally, “The Road Kills And Injures.”
She wondered how it felt, to walk naked along a roadside like Felicia Felix-Mentor. She considered trying the experiment when she realized that night had fallen. (And where was the tap-tap, and all the other traffic, and why was the road so narrow?) But once shed, her dress, her shift, her shoes would be a terrible armful. The only efficient way to carry clothes, really, was to wear them. So thinking, she plodded, footsore, around a sharp curve and nearly ran into several dozen hooded figures in red, proceeding in the opposite direction. Several carried torches, all carried drums, and one had a large, mean-looking dog on a rope.
“Who comes?” asked a deep male voice. Zora couldn’t tell which of the hooded figures had spoken, if any.
“Who wants to know?” she asked.
The hoods looked at one another. Without speaking, several reached into their robes. One drew a sword. One drew a machete. The one with the dog drew a pistol, then knelt to murmur into the dog’s ear. With one hand he scratched the dog between the shoulder blades, and with the other he gently stroked its head with the moon-gleaming barrel of the pistol. Zora could hear the thump and rustle of the dog’s tail wagging in the leaves.
“Give us the words of passage,” said the voice, presumably the sword-wielder’s, as he was the one who pointed at Zora for emphasis. “Give them to us, woman, or you will die, and we will feast upon you.”
“She cannot know the words,” said a woman’s voice, “unless she too
has spoken with the dead. Let us eat her.”
Suddenly, as well as she knew anything on the round old world, Zora knew exactly what the words of passage were. Felicia Felix-Mentor had given them to her. Mi haut, mi bas. Half high, half low. She could say them now. But she would not say them. She would believe in Zombies, a little, and in Erzulie, perhaps, a little more. But she would not believe in the Sect Rouge, in blood-oathed societies of men. She walked forward again, of her own free will, and the red-robed figures stood motionless as she passed among them. The dog whimpered. She walked down the hill, hearing nothing behind but a growing chorus of frogs. Around the next bend she saw the distant lights of Port-au-Prince and, much nearer, a tap-tap idling in front of a store. Zora laughed and hung her hat on a caution sign. Between her and the bus, the moonlit road was flecked with tiny frogs, distinguished from bits of gravel and bark only by their leaping, their errands of life. Ah bo bo! She called in her soul to come and see.
Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse
Father Leggett stood on the sidewalk and looked up at the three narrow stories of gray brick that was 207 East Charlton Street. Compared to the other edifices on Lafayette Square—the Colonial Dames fountain, the Low house, the Turner mansion, the cathedral of course—this house was decidedly ordinary, a reminder that even Savannah had buildings that did only what they needed to do, and nothing more.
He looked again at the note the secretary at St. John the Baptist had left on his desk. Wreathed in cigarette smoke, Miss Ingrid fielded dozens of telephone calls in an eight-hour day, none of which were for her, and while she always managed to correctly record addresses and phone numbers on her nicotine-colored note paper, the rest of the message always emerged from her smudged No. 1 pencils as four or five words that seemed relevant at the time but had no apparent grammatical connection, so that reading a stack of Miss Ingrid’s messages back to back gave one a deepening sense of mystery and alarm, like intercepted signal fragments from a trawler during a hurricane. This note read:
OCONNORS
MARY
PRIEST?
CHICKEN!
And then the address. Pressed for more information, Miss Ingrid had shrieked with laughter and said, “Lord, Father, that was two hours ago! Why don’t you ask me an easy one sometime?” The phone rang, and she snatched it up with a wink. “It’s a great day at St. John the Baptist. Ingrid speaking.”
Surely, Father Leggett thought as he trotted up the front steps, I wasn’t expected to bring a chicken?
The bell was inaudible, but the door was opened immediately, by an attractive but austere woman with dark eyebrows. Father Leggett was sure his sidewalk dithering had been patiently observed. “Hello, Father. Please come in. Thank you for coming. I’m Regina O’Connor.”
She ushered him into a surprisingly large, bright living room. Hauling himself up from the settee was a rumpled little man in shirtsleeves and high-waisted pants who moved slowly and painfully, as if he were much larger.
“Welcome, Father. Edward O’Connor, Dixie Realty and Construction.”
“Mr. O’Connor. Mrs. O’Connor. I’m Father Leggett, assistant at St. John for—oh, my goodness, two months now. Still haven’t met half my flock, at least. Bishop keeps me hopping. Pleased to meet you now, though.” You’re babbling, he told himself.
In the act of shaking hands, Mr. O’Connor lurched sideways with a wince, nearly falling. “Sorry, Father. Bit of arthritis in my knee.”
“No need to apologize for the body’s frailties, Mr. O’Connor. Why, we would all be apologizing all the time, like Alphonse and Gaston.” He chuckled as the O’Connors, apparently not readers of the comics supplement, stared at him. “Ahem. I received a message at the church, something involving . . .” The O’Connors didn’t step into the pause to help him. “Involving Mary?”
“We’d like for you to talk to her, Father,” said Mrs. O’Connor. “She’s in the back yard, playing. Please, follow me.”
The back of the house was much shabbier than the front, and the yard was a bare dirt patch bounded on three sides by a high wooden fence of mismatched planks. More brick walls were visible through the gaps. In one corner of the yard was a large chicken coop enclosed by a smaller, more impromptu wire fence, the sort unrolled from a barrel-sized spool at the hardware store and affixed to posts with bent nails. Several dozen chickens roosted, strutted, pecked. Father Leggett’s nose wrinkled automatically. He liked chickens when they were fried, baked or, with dumplings, boiled, but he always disliked chickens at their earlier, pre-kitchen stage, as creatures. He conceded them a role in God’s creation purely for their utility to man. Father Leggett tended to respect things on the basis of their demonstrated intelligence, and on that universal ladder chickens tended to roost rather low. A farmer once told him that hundreds of chickens could drown during a single rainstorm because they kept gawking at the clouds with their beaks open until they filled with water like jugs. Or maybe that was geese. Father Leggett, who grew up in Baltimore, never liked geese, either.
Lying face up and spread-eagled in the dirt of the yard like a little crime victim was a grimy child in denim overalls with bobbed hair and a pursed mouth too small even for her nutlike head, most of which was clenched in a frown that was thunderous even from 20 feet away. She gave no sign of acknowledgment as the three adults approached, Mr. O’Connor slightly dragging his right foot. Did this constitute playing, wondered Father Leggett, who had scarcely more experience with children than with poultry.
“Mary,” said Mrs. O’Connor as her shadow fell across the girl. “This is Father Leggett, from St. John the Baptist. Father Leggett, this is Mary, our best and only. She’s in first grade at St. Vincent’s.”
“Ah, one of Sister Consolata’s charges. How old are you, Mary?”
Still lying in the dirt, Mary thrashed her arms and legs, as if making snow angels, but said nothing. Dust clouds rose.
Her father said: “Mary, don’t be rude. Answer Father’s question.”
“I just did,” said Mary, packing the utterance with at least six syllables. Her voice was surprisingly deep. She did her horizontal jumping jacks again, counting off this time. “One. Two. Three. Five.”
“You skipped four,” Father Leggett said.
“You would, too,” Mary said. “Four was hell.”
“Mary.”
This one word from her mother, recited in a flat tone free of judgment, was enough to make the child scramble to her feet. “I’m sorry Mother and Father and Father and I beg the Lord’s forgiveness.” To Father Leggett’s surprise, she even curtsied in no particular direction—whether to him or to the Lord, he couldn’t tell.
“And well you might, young lady,” Mr. O’Connor began, but Mrs. O’Connor, without even raising her voice, easily drowned him out by saying simultaneously:
“Mary, why don’t you show Father Leggett your chicken?”
“Yes, Mother.” She skipped over to the chicken yard, stood on tiptoe to unlatch the gate, and waded into the squawking riot of beaks and feathers. Father Leggett wondered how she could tell one chicken from all the rest. He caught himself holding his breath, his hands clenched into fists.
“Spirited child,” he said.
“Yes,” said Mrs. O’Connor. Her unexpected smile was dazzling.
Mary re-latched the gate and trotted over with a truly extraordinary chicken beneath one arm. Its feathers stuck out in all directions, as if it had survived a hurricane. It struggled not at all, but seemed content with, or resigned to, Mary’s attentions. The child’s ruddy face showed renewed determination, and her mouth looked ever more like the dent a thumb leaves on a bad tomato.
“What an odd-looking specimen,” said Father Leggett, silently meaning both of them.
“It’s frizzled,” Mary said. “That means its feathers grew in backward. It has a hard old time of it, this one.”
She set the chicke
n down and held up a pudgy, soiled index finger, on which the chicken seemed to focus. Mary stepped one step closer to the chicken, and it took one step backward. She and the chicken took another step, and another, the chicken walking backward as Mary advanced.
“Remarkable,” said Father Leggett. “And what’s your chicken’s name, young lady?”
She flung down a handful of seed and said, “Jesus Christ.”
Father Leggett sucked in a breath. Behind him, Mrs. O’Connor coughed. Father Leggett tugged at his earlobe, an old habit. “What did you say, young lady?”
“Jesus Christ,” she repeated, in the same dispassionate voice. Then she rushed the chicken, which skittered around the yard as Mary chased it, chanting in a singsong, “Jesus Christ Jesus Christ Jesus Christ.”
Father Leggett looked at her parents. Mr. O’Connor arched his eyebrows and shrugged. Mrs. O’ Connor, arms folded, nodded her head once. She looked grimly satisfied. Father Leggett turned back to see chicken and child engaged in a staring contest. The chicken stood, a-quiver; Mary, in a squat, was still.
“Now, Mary,” Father Leggett said. “Why would you go and give a frizzled chicken the name of our Lord and Savior?”
“It’s the best name,” replied Mary, not breaking eye contact with the chicken. “Sister Consolata says the name of Jesus is to be cherished above all others.”
“Well, yes, but—”
The hypnotic bond between child and chicken seemed to break, and Mary began to skip around the yard, raising dust with each stomp of her surprisingly large feet. “And he’s different from all the other chickens, and the other chickens peck him but he never pecks back, and he spends a lot of his time looking up in the air, praying, and in Matthew Jesus says he’s a chicken, and if I get a stomachache or an earache or a sore throat, I come out here and play with him and it gets all better just like the lame man beside the well.”
Father Leggett turned in mute appeal to the child’s parents. Mr. O’Connor cleared his throat.
