Tides From the New Worlds

by Tobias S. Buckell

  “What do you need?” He spoke with traces of what could have been a French accent, or something else. It took a second for George to work through the words.

  “I’m here for a package,” George said. “Mother Jacqueline...”

  The man smiled.

  “Ah, you’re that George?”

  “Yes.”

  George stood at the end of the plank as the Haitian walked back onto the ship. He was back in a few minutes, and handed George a brown, carefully wrapped, parcel. Nothing shifted when George shook it.

  He stood there for a second, searching for something to say, but then he suddenly realized that the tables had been turned, and now he was the one who wasn’t wanted here. He left, shoes clicking across the cobblestones.

  • • •

  In the room over his shop George opened the parcel by the window. Below in the street horses’ feet kicked up a fine scattering of snow. When it settled by the gutters, it was stained brown and muddy with dung.

  The desk in front of him was covered in occasional strands of his hair. He had a small shelf with papers stacked on it, but more importantly, he had his shiny coins and pieces of metal laid out in neat, tiny little rows. George smiled when the light caught their edges and winked at him. Some of the coins had engravings on them, gifts between lovers long passed away. Others had other arcane pieces of attachment to their former owners. Each one told George a little story. The jewelry he sold downstairs meant nothing. Each of the pieces here represented a step closer to a sense of completion.

  He cut the string on the package and pulled the paper away from a warm mahogany box lid. The brass hinges squeaked when he opened it.

  Inside was a letter. The wax seal on it caught George’s full attention; he sat for a moment entranced by it. The faint smell of something vinegary kicked faint memories back from their resting places, and Mama Jaqi’s distant whisper spoke to him from the seal.

  “Hear me, obey me...”

  George sucked in his breath and opened the seal to read his directions. There is a man, the letter read, right now sitting in a tavern fifteen or so miles south of you. You should go and listen to his story...

  There was a name. And the address of the tavern.

  Who is Louis Povaught? George wondered. But he didn’t question the implicit order given. Layers of cold ran down his back, making him shiver. Automatically, without realizing it, he pulled something out and put it in his pocket, then shut the box. As he donned his coat and walked out of the shop to find a carriage he told Ryan, the shop’s assistant, that he would be back ‘later,’ and he should close the shop himself.

  • • •

  Hours later, the sky darkening, George’s cab stopped in front of ‘The Hawser.’ A quick wind batted the wooden sign over the door around. George paid and walked through the door. It was like any other tavern: dim, and it smelled of stale beer and piss. He looked around and fastened his eyes on a Frenchman at the edge of the counter.

  Frenchman, Negro, Northerner, Southerner, English... to George, all humanity seemed more or less the same after he met Mama Jaqi. Yet even now he could feel that he was being nudged towards the Frenchman. This is the man he was supposed to meet. As irrational as it may have seen. George carefully stamped his new shoes clean, leaned over to brush them off with a handkerchief he kept for exactly that purpose, then crossed the tavern to sit by the Frenchman.

  The Frenchman—who would be Louis Povaught, George assumed—sat slouched over. He hardly stirred when George sat next to him. The barkeep caught George’s eye, and George shook his head. When he turned back to look at Louis, the man was already looking back at him.

  Louis, unfortunately, hadn’t spent much time keeping up his appearances. A long russet-colored beard, patchy in some places, grew haphazardly from his cheeks. His bloodshot eyes contained just a hint of green, lost to the steady strain of enthusiastic drinking.

  “I think, not many people walk in here who do not order drink,” he declared. “No?”

  George pulled out his purse and caught the eye of the barkeep. “He’ll have another,” George told the barkeep. George looked down and pulled out paper money, leaving the shiny coins inside.

  “And you,” Louis said. “Why no drink?”

  “It no longer does anything for me,” George explained. He reached his hand in the pocket of his undercoat. Something was there. Like something standing just at the edge of his vision, he could remember picking it up.

  Now George pulled it out. It was a silver chain with a plain cross on the end. He held it between the fingers of his hand and let the cross rest against the countertop.

  “I have something for you, Louis,” George heard himself saying. “Something very important.”

  Louis turned his tangled hair and scraggly beard towards George. The chain seductively winked; George locked his eyes with the entwined chains and followed them down to the rough countertop. Such beautiful things human hands made.

  Louis’ gasp took George’s attention back to the world around the necklace.

  “Is this what I think it is?” Louis asked, reaching tentatively for it. His wrinkled hands shook as they brushed the chain. George did not look down for fear of being entranced again. He did not feel the slightest brush of Louis’ fingernail against his knuckle.

  “What do you think it is?” George asked.

  Louis turned back to the counter.

  “My brother Jean’s necklace,” Louis said. “On the back of this, it should have engraved....” Louis waved his hand about, “J.P. It is there, no?”

  George still didn’t look down.

  “I imagine so.”

  Louis leaned back and laughed.

  “Merde. So far away, so damn far away, and that bitch Jacqueline still has talons. Unlucky? Ha,” he spat. “Do you know my story?”

  “No,” George said. “I do not.”

  The barkeep finally delivered a mug of beer, the dirty amber fluid spilling over the sides and onto the bar top where it would soak into the wood and add to the dank and musky air. Louis took it with a firm grasp and tipped it back. It took only seconds before the mug contained nothing but slick wetness at the bottom.

  Louis smacked the mug down. “Buy me another, damn you,” he ordered. George tapped the counter, looked at the barkeep, and nodded.

  Stories, George thought, could sometimes be as interesting as something shiny and new. He would indulge Louis, yes, and himself. He handed Louis the necklace.

  “Jean was much the better brother,” Louis said. “I think it broke my father’s heart to hear he died in Haiti. My father locked himself in his study for three days. Did not eat, did not drink. And when he came back out, he put his hand on my shoulder, like this—” Louis draped a heavy arm over George and leaned closer. His breath reeked of beer. “—and he tells me, he tells me, ‘Louis, you must go and take over where you brother has left off.’ That is all he tells me. I never see him again.”

  Louis pulled back away. “And Katrina, my wife, she is very, very sad to see me go away to this island. But I tell her it is good that I take over the business Jean created. I will make for her a better husband. My brother has left me a good legacy. Hmmm. I did good business. I made them all proud. Proud! And you know what,” Louis said, looking down at the necklace, “it was all great until Jean walked into my office three month later. It was unnatural… I’d seen his grave! There were witnesses…”

  “Business was good?” George interrupted Louis. “What did you do?”

  Louis ran a thumb around the rim of his glass.

  “It didn’t cost much. A boat. Provisions. We bought our cargo for guns... and necklaces, or whatever: beads and scrap.” He opened a weathered palm. There was nothing in it.

  “What cargo?” George interrupted. This was the point. It was why Mama Jaqi had sent him.

  “Slaves,” Louis said. “Lots of slaves.”

  “Ah, yes,” George said. Mama Jaqi had been a slave.

  “I made money,�
�� Louis said. “For the first time I wasn’t some peasant in Provencal. I had a house with gardens.” Louis looked at George. “I did good! I gave money to charity. I was a good citizen. I was a good businessman.”

  “I am sure you were,” George said. He felt nothing against Louis. In another life, he would maybe have sympathized with Louis’ arguments. He remembered using some of them once, a long time ago. A brief flash of a memory occurred to him. George had desperately blabbered some of the same things, trying to defend himself to the incensed Mama Jaqi.

  George shook away the ghostlike feel of passion to prod Louis’ story along. “But what a shock seeing your brother must have been.” George was here for the story. He wanted it over quickly. Time was getting on, and George had to open the shop tomorrow. He would have to finish Mama Jaqi’s deed soon.

  “I thought some horrible trick had been played on me,” Louis said. “I had so many questions about what had happened. And all Jean would do was tell me I had to leave. Leave the business. Leave the island. I refused.” Louis made a motion at the bartender for more beer. “I was still in Haiti when it all began. Toussaint... the independence. I lost it all when the blacks ran us all off the island. I slipped away on a small boat to America with nothing. Nothing.” Louis looked at George, and George saw a world of misery swimming in the man’s eyes. “In France, they hear I am dead. I can only think of Katrina remarrying.” He stopped and looked down at George’s arm.

  “What is it?” George asked.

  Louis reached a finger out and pulled back the cuff of George’s sleeve. Underneath, a faint series of scars marked George’s wrist.

  “Jean had those,” Louis said. The barkeep set another mug in front of Louis, and left after George paid for it. “Do me a favor,” Louis said, letting go of George’s sleeve. “One last favor.”

  “If I can,” George said.

  “Let me do this properly, like a real man. Eh? Would you do that?”

  “Yes,” George said.

  Louis took his last long gulp from the mug, then stood up.

  “I will be out in the alley.”

  George watched him stagger out the tavern.

  • • •

  After several minutes George got up and walked out. The distant cold hit him square in the face when he opened the door, and several men around the tables yelled at him to hurry and get out and shut the door.

  In the alley by the tavern, George paused. Louis stepped out of the darkness holding a knife in his left hand, swaying slightly in the wind.

  Neither of them said anything. They circled each other for a few seconds, then Louis stumbled forward and tried to slash at George’s stomach. George stepped away from the crude attempt and grabbed the Frenchman’s wrist. It was his intent to take the knife away, but Louis slipped and fell onto the stones. He fell on his arm, knocking his own knife away, then cracked his head against the corner of a stone.

  Louis didn’t move anymore. He still breathed, though: a slight heaving and the air steaming out from his mouth.

  George crouched and put a knee to Louis’ throat. The steaming breath stopped, leaving the air still and quiet. A long minute passed, then Louis opened an eye. He struggled, kicking a small pool of half-melted snow with his tattered boots. George kept his knee in place.

  When Louis stopped moving George relaxed, but kept the knee in place for another minute.

  The door to the tavern opened, voices carried into the alley. Someone hailed for a cab and the clip-clop of hooves quickened by the tavern. George kept still in the alley’s shadows. When the voices trailed off into the distance George moved again. He checked Louis’ pockets until he found what he wanted: the necklace. He put it back into his own pocket. Then he stood up and walked out of the alley to hail his own cab.

  • • •

  The snow got worse towards the harbor and his shop. The horses pulling the cab snorted and slowed down, and the whole vehicle would shift and slide with wind gusts. George sat looking out at the barren, wintry landscape. It was cold and distant, like his own mechanical feelings. He could hear occasional snatches of the driver whistling Amazing Grace to himself and the horses.

  Mama Jaqi had done well. George felt nothing but a compulsion for her bidding. Obey... no horror about what he had just done. Just a dry, crusty satisfaction.

  When he got out George paid the driver. He took the creaky back steps up. He lit several candles and sat in his study for a while, still fully dressed. Eventually he put his fingers to the candle in front of him and watched the edges turn from white, to red, to brown, and then to a blistered black. The burnt flesh smelled more like incense than cooked flesh.

  He pulled them away.

  Tomorrow they would be whole again.

  George pulled the silver necklace out with his good hand. He set it on the shelf, next to all the other pieces of flashy trinkets. Another story ended, another decoration on his shelf.

  How many more would it take, George wondered, before Mama Jaqi freed him? How many lives did she deem a worthy trade for the long suffering she knew as her life? Or for the horrors of George’s own terrible past? George didn’t know. She’d taken that ability away from him. In this distant reincarnation of himself, George knew that any human, passionate response he could muster would be wrong.

  Even his old feelings would have been wrong.

  Long after the candles burned out George sat, waiting.

  Death’s Dreadlocks

  I don’t remember where I first encountered the folk tale of Death’s dreadlocks, but I was fairly young and still living in Grenada, if my memory serves right. The tale stuck in my mind for a significant portion of my life, a part of the African heritage still passed around parts of the Caribbean to this day, along with the Anancy tales. When Nalo told me she was putting together a new anthology, I set out to modernize the tale, paying close attention to the cadence and rhythm of the story. It really reads best when read aloud, and there was a strange feeling of passing something on when I wrote it that made me feel more like a storyteller than I ever had before.

  Sometimes, late into the dead night, Old Ma takes the long locks of my hair and massages them between her callused yellowed palms. Such fine dreadlocks, she tells me. Such fine young shoulders they rest on.

  But some of the old people are scared of dreads, she whispers into my ears. Don’t mind them.

  And I know why.

  There was an old, very old, bush tale about the shadowy man some called Death. He was a fat giant who lived deep in the forest, teeth stinky with the smell of rotted flesh. In all of time he had never brushed his hair, and the knotted locks grew out into the underbrush for people to find.

  It was a good story.

  When I was young, out of the corner of my eye, sometimes I could see the long root of a tree, and just past it, I would just see the edge of a long creeping dreadlock. I would avoid that space.

  Once I got older, and times became hard, I saw more and more dreadlocks that sat right out in the open of the land. Old Ma’s gift, and curse, to me.

  And that is how I know why the few old ones left look at me with a strange eye.

  • • •

  Times, the old men said, were getting hard.

  Really, we replied, mockingly. They were easy before?

  Old Ma lifted us up and away from the old men, their wrinkled faces host to patient flies immune to leathery handed swats, and she told us to ‘hush.’

  Outside the bush the dust came and hung over the camps. And the wheels of Toyota mini-trucks with Kalichnikovs welded to their beds and our brothers manning the wicked heavy guns with wide grins, the wheels of these vans kicked up even more dust.

  Ho Kuabi, we shouted.

  Hey little brothers, he yelled.

  Good day, Mouwanat, we shouted.

  Mouwanat ignored us, sitting with his new friends around a barrel with AK-47’s spilling over the side. They spit in the dust and spoke of grown up things.

  That is the way it i
s with older brothers.

  • • •

  On the way home we passed the relief tent, dusty red cross on the side almost ready to lose itself in the gray fold flapping in the wind.

  One of the workers, a pretty but very white lady with a red nose asked us if we know about the Lord Our God. Many of the relief workers had little pieces of paper with pictures waiting in their pockets. I’d even read one once with Old Ma, and we’d giggled and giggled. Who else but a white man would believe in a God born in the east, describe his looks in their holy writings as if he were an Arab, and then paint him as if he was what one of the older relief men called a hippy?

  And apparently old white men don’t even like ‘hippys,’ Old Ma told us. Why would these men both love and hate their God so? I wondered.

  Anyway, the relief workers didn’t understand. Old Ma and us would never insult any God by believing in just one God, because that would leave all the other Gods out. So like most other times, we thanked the worker for her interest in our souls, but pointed out that our own souls where really our own business, and none of hers. Which I think, offended her, but no less than her own words offended us.

  When we left with the rice Old Ma said, well, at least they don’t kill us for saying no anymore.

  I’d laughed, thinking she was being funny. Then I remembered Old Ma was… very old. Maybe she remembered different times. I swallowed. Did they really used to kill people to accept their God? Would their God even accept such souls?

  Would you even want to spend time with a God that such people worshipped?

  I shuddered.

  Old Ma, I asked. Were times better, back then?