Beneath Ceaseless Skies #79

by Parks, Richard

  “You asked me to help you. And you want the best stories, right?” Mala asked. Dr. Benjamin gestured for her to take a seat in the story chair in front of him. Mala did so. For the first time since he’d seen her on the wall, the was something uncertain in her.

  “Are you going to turn on your machine?” she asked.

  “I’d like to,” Dr. Benjamin admitted. “But I won’t if you don’t want me to.” That was something he had discovered early on: people thinking they was running the show was a hell of a lot more important than people actually running the show.

  She looked past him at the Story Eater. “Turn it on,” she said.

  Mala sat very still. Most people telling stories waved their hands, slid them over one another. Most of them flicked their eyes around, looking at Dr. Benjamin and then at the tent walls and then at their own lap. Mala just looked at the Story Eater, watching it draw the shape of her words in the soft wax. And she said:

  “When Bethel Ellison was seventeen years old, he married a lady older than himself. When she was eight months gone with her first child, her best friend Annet Davis came to Bethel and confessed to him that the child was not his, belonged to a boy who did odd jobs down in the marina between benders. Bethel’s wife had always loved him, Annet said, and her parents had forbid her to marry him.

  Bethel trusted Annet, but his wife was a fine thing. Prettiest girl in the village by far and he was a young man, just starting out and it was quite a thing for him to have her. That all meant little, of course, if she carried another man’s child in her belly. That was like having a handful of sand. And so Bethel waited.

  A baby, a girl eventually called Nivi, was born easy, especially for a first child. Bethel did not ask to hold her. Instead, he drew the midwife aside. She was a wise woman as well as a midwife, as many are. Bethel explained himself, his doubts, and asked her to divine the truth for him.

  When Nivi was fourteen minutes old, the midwife picked the skin on her new little palm with a silver needle until it bled. She was not concerned with her caterwauling. Blood welled up and the midwife swirled it on her own index finger. She pushed her finger into her mouth and tasted the blood with a thinking, close-faced look. Then she turned to Bethel with her needle in hand.

  Bethel knew even before the midwife began to shake her head.

  When she was gone and the house was quiet and the sun had sunk, he took Nivi’s mother bleeding and sobbing from her childbed. He drowned her in the dark green water where the sea met up with the land. He told everyone she had succumbed to the kind of madness that strikes new mothers, that she’d slipped out of the house like a sleepwalker, that he’d found her himself in the surf the next morning. When he told the story, he thought of a dead boy he’d once pulled from the water. He remembered his cold blue skin and the way he was ragged and swollen, worried at by fish. In that way, he contrived to cry.

  Most believed him. Those who did not had an idea about the baby she’d carried and they knew that those sorts of women generally came to one bad end or another. Mostly, there was the question of the baby, whom Bethel had still not named. No one would blame him, he knew, if he didn’t keep her. He was a man alone and very young still. His house was no place for a little helpless thing.

  He gave her to Parson Clarent, who had taken in others of her kind. There were no secrets for Nivi about where she had come from. But she knew in an unspoken way that she must never come to Bethel, for aid or for information or any sort of familiarity at all. Outside, of course, what was to be considered reasonable between neighbors.

  She saw him as she grew. In the pews on Sunday, down to the shops with the other men. But she had rarely ever spoken more than two words to him. He never re-married. As she grew, she collected the whispers of others, the suspicions that never quite materialized into words.

  And so Nivi looked at Bethel with interest. Was it his hands, his ordinary brown hands, that had pushed her mother’s head down under the water? Had he watched her hair and her skirts floating and the bubbles dying? She didn’t know if she hated him. After all, she had not known her mother. Perhaps spending her childhood with a slut and a cuckold would have been worse than the Parson’s house where the only sounds were catechisms being recited.

  But sometimes when Nivi looked at him, across a street or over the top of a hymnal, she thought he looked sad. Sometimes, Bethel looked back at her and he thought about the soft, liquid sound of her, the shift and stretch he had felt with his head resting easy against his wife’s round belly.”

  Dr. Benjamin stared at Mala, letting the Eater’s needle run around and around, drawing nothing in the yellow wax. Unthinking fingers reached into his pocket, brought out a red and white hard candy in crinkly cello-paper. He popped it into his mouth and sucked thoughtfully.

  “How do you know that story, Miss?” he asked Mala.

  Mala hesitated. “I... like stories. I’m a good reader.”

  “But, I mean, did he tell you those things? He couldn’t have, could he?”

  Mala gestured towards the spinning Eater. It broke Dr. Benjamin out of his spell and he dashed for the machine, shutting it off all a fumble-fingers.

  “Would you like more?” Mala asked him. “I can get you more.”

  Dr. Benjamin rested his hand on top of the Eater, like it was a little child that needed his comforting.

  “Yes, I’d like that very much.”

  * * *

  The last time the mean-mouthed boys chased Mala, she was thirteen. She hadn’t started her bleed yet, but she had the look of a young woman already. She was tall, like Marco, and she had a round bottom like her Mama had. If she wasn’t Mala, the boys might have chased her in a different sort of way.

  The Ferris boy was running after her—that whole family was trash, washed in like scrum from the sea. He called out “hiiii-ya!” and smacked the heads off flowers with a stick as he went. He only got Mala because he jumped her from the low branch of a tree.

  “What now, Spazzy?” he sneered, holding her arms down and driving his elbows into her ribcage.

  Mala didn’t give him no words, just snarled and kicked at him. First, he set to fighting her, laughing and forcing her into the dirt with his knees and all the sharp points of him. Then, as Mala watched, something funny moved over his face.

  He moved his knee along Mala’s leg, high up on her thigh. He face looked strange; scared, even. Like he was the one being held down.

  And this is what Mala learned:

  The Ferris boy’s father was a mean drunk. He couldn’t keep a position on a boat; he messed around with the wives of men who were at sea. He never had a kind word or a soft touch for his wife or any of his three boys.

  “I am your father,” he used to tell the Ferris boy, who was the oldest boy. “I’m owed.”

  The Ferris boy did a man’s work around the place. He chopped wood and repaired the cottage in winter. He tore his hands and bent his back down at the docks, picking up odd jobs for small sums, all to pay back that bottomless debt he owed just for being born.

  “Don’t go out in the Midsummer night,” his mother told him every year. “Mama Lavalie walks and she’s taking folks to fill out her court.”

  “Don’t go out in the Midsummer night,” she reminded him when he was ten. She said it with a rich purple bruise on the side of her face; a little crusting of blood left over because it hurt too much to wipe away. The Ferris boy looked at the table set with mealy bread, thin soup, all that was left to them.

  He worked so hard, almost wore through his little bones. He raised more money that week than he’d seen in his whole life. It was like a kind of dying, handing it over to the man who imported the fancy liquor.

  Yellow whiskey, the color of amber beads like ladies on the mainland wore. A whole bottle of it. He gave it to his father and said it was to repay him. Already in his cups, the man could only nod. It was just what he knew himself to deserve. The Ferris boy looked at him and he’d never hated a thing so much.

&nbs
p; The Ferris boy left his father reclining on the lawn, with the glass bottle crooked in his arm, held more tenderly than he’d ever held his own babies. The Ferris boy locked the windows and the doors. He sat up all night.

  When the pounding came, the shouting, the cursing and the screaming, the Ferris boy sat and waited. His mother woke up and sat beside him. She didn’t make no moves for the door. She brought him a blanket for his shoulders and wrapped it around him like he was still a child.

  The boy never saw his father again. The Ferrises ate better after that.

  While Mala was learning this, the Ferris boy was crushing her with his chest, pushing against her and making strange little noises in the back of his throat. But he’d been dumb and thrown his stick away where Mala could reach for it. One end, broken carelessly off a tree, came to a mean point.

  Mala stabbed him deep in the thigh. “Don’t you ever touch me again,” she said, standing over him while he screamed. “None of you. None of you touch me.” Mala brandished the stick to show she meant business. “I can tell them what you did.”

  Those boys never did chase Mala again and, from then on, she read fewer books and watched her classmates instead.

  * * *

  On her way home from Dr. Benjamin’s tents, Mala took the long way through town. She walked through the fruit stands and fish vendors and she spread out her hands and her fingers, just a little bit, not so much that you’d notice.

  When she got home, Naomi asked her what she’d done that day and Mala said: “Nothing.”

  * * *

  Mala filled six wax wheels by herself. She ruled the tent, coming the morning and not leaving until the dark of the night. And she talked the whole time, only stopping every once in a while to sip a little of the water or the clear liquor that Dr. Benjamin offered her.

  She uncovered her neighbors, all their little sins and triumphs. She delighted in secrets, in sacreds, and Dr. Benjamin delighted in her. When she spoke, Mala lit up like a candle in a windstorm; she flickered and bent and danced and seemed to inhabit all the shapes of her stories. Mala, she was a thing to see.

  But our island is a small one. Filling all day, every day with stories... sooner or later, Mala was going to run out. Dr. Benjamin could see she’d started to slack her pace. The stories she picked now were less bitter and less vibrant. Mala herself didn’t seem so struck by them. She was reaching the end of her supply, and that scared the Doctor.

  “Mala,” he said once. It was night, the usual time that Mala would be leaving. “Would you sit next to me?” Dr. Benjamin pulled a chair over by his own. He’d been partaking of some of that clear liquor of his and that was the only way he’d gotten up the nerve to talk to her like that.

  Mala looked at him for a long minute, because she wasn’t in the habit of being hasty about much of anything. And then she circled round the table and sat next to him.

  Dr. Benjamin looked at his hands. “Mala,” he said, “do you like living here on the island?”

  Mala was confused by the question because she wasn’t real sure she liked living at all. It was just what she did. But Dr. Benjamin didn’t seem to care that she didn’t have no answer for him.

  “Do you think... do you think you would like to live on the mainland? I could take you there. To the cities. There would be so many opportunities for someone with your gift.”

  “Gift,” Mala repeated, like a magic spell. They were silent together for a moment. Dr. Benjamin drank.

  “There are a lot of stories in the cities, aren’t there?” Mala’s books had all suggested that that was the case.

  Dr. Benjamin smiled at her. He spread his hands expansively, and when he brought them back down again, they rested on her shoulders. “Mala, in the cities, there are so many stories that you couldn’t tell them all even if you talked all day, every day until the end of your life.”

  That was the first time Dr. Benjamin ever saw Mala smile.

  Dr. Benjamin smiled too, but nervously, like an apology. “Can I ask you something?” he whispered. Mala inclined her head. Dr. Benjamin laughed in that way that folk do when nothing is funny. “Could you... could you tell my story?”

  Mala leaned forward. She looked seriously at Dr. Benjamin. He was not very old. She imagined his life in the city had been good and unexciting. But Mala was curious; Mala was always curious.

  When she kissed him, he tasted cold and sweet. Peppermint, like his candies. She bet he tasted like that all the time. Maybe everyone in the cities did?

  This is what Mala said:

  “Once, you had a sister. She was much younger than you and you took care of her.

  Your parents went away for a living. You and your sister used to run through the stone courtyard and pretend to be pirates. You had nannies and you had maids. But your sister had no one to play pirate with, except you. Even after you were too old for those kinds of game.

  One summer, your parents came home for weeks at a time. It was the longest you’d been with them in your whole life. They took you to the beach and you walked behind your sister in the waves and untangled green ribbons of kelp from in and out of her ankles. She had never seen the ocean before and she didn’t even notice you, following along behind and making her safe.

  She died in the ocean, drank it and sank. That’s what your parents and the doctors told you afterwards. She was a little girl, she could barely swim. There was nothing mysterious about it. But you could remember hands. Green, cold hands. They took your sister and you reached out for her but they were so much stronger than you were.

  Sometimes, in the summer nights, you drag your hand down the sheets of your bed and remember the feeling of their fingers breaking your grip and pushing you away.

  The doctors told you to forget. Your parents told you to forget. They were going to send you to be cured. They were going to take you away from the house and the courtyard and all the small things that were left of her in the world. And so you learned to forget.

  You still spent your summers on the sea.

  The hands took her underneath for a princess. You thought they would want her for a princess. You could not remember if they ate human folk. But she was such a pretty little girl. How could they not want her? How could they not give her a crown and worship her? So you floated. Disconnected from her, you went up and up and up and rested on the top of the water.

  And in that moment, before your parents found you and pulled you back to shore, you relished it. That cool weightless ease of no one hanging on your hand. Later, you would wonder if you had called them with your wish so secret that you did not even tell it to yourself.

  “They taught you to forget. Do you remember now?” Mala looked steady into Dr. Benjamin’s stricken face.

  Dr. Benjamin tasted salt. Too much, he leaned over the side of his chair and spat out on to the wooden floor. A streaked white pile landed there, salt warm and half-melted from the heat of his mouth. He could feel the tumbling grit of the few remaining grains on his tongue and in his teeth.

  “I remember,” he said. So much salt and he thirsted from it.

  * * *

  Before Mala was born, Naomi didn’t paint. She used to draw in the little paper books her daddy would bring her back from the world, but painting wasn’t something she ever saw a woman do. After Mala, all sorts of things suddenly seemed possible, and she was already an odd duck as far as the rest of us were concerned. So while another woman might have spent her evenings knitting or sewing or reading, if there was books to be had, Naomi sat at her kitchen table and spread the white sheets of her sketches all around her.

  Mala sat on the floor beside her and traced the grooves between the soft white boards. “Baby, do you think we should plant poppies alongside the house this year?” Naomi asked her girl. She did not expect an answer because that sort of thing wasn’t of no concern to Mala, but we do all like to hear a human voice, even if it’s our own.

  Mala shrugged her shoulders. “I won’t be here when they bloom.”


  Naomi laid down her sketch. Her charcoal pencil rolled in among the curls of her papers. “What?”

  Mala tucked her pinky nail into the dark little crack between boards. “I’m going to go away,” Mala said. Naomi shook her head without words, her mouth worked all useless. “The stories here....” Mala struggled to explain, “they’re... dead now. He put them in his machine. I need to find new ones.”

  “Mala,” Naomi made her voice low and reasonable, “you can’t leave. You don’t know how to take care of yourself. People will hurt you.”

  Mala just stared, thinking about those boys who chased her. Hurting was everywhere.

  Naomi’s voice rose, her eyes got bright, like black stones washed in with the tide and glistening. “Mala, you need me. I’m your mother, no one else is going to care for you.”

  “There’s nothing here anymore,” said Mala.

  “I’m here.” Naomi choked a little on the words. She could feel her heart beating hard in her throat and her chest, it was like panic, it was like fighting. If Mala had apologized, or reached out for her mother’s hand, she might have soothed some torn up thing inside Naomi. But that wasn’t in Mala’s nature. Instead she just looked at her mother with that flat stare, like she was looking through her. That look of hers that always said there wasn’t anything to see.

  “You’re not even a person!” Naomi screamed it; she stalked into the kitchen and opened one of the wooden cupboards so hard it made a slam-crash noise against the other cabinets. She threw a glass vial at Mala, stopped up on one end with cork. It hit the floor in front of her and the stopper tumbled out. White grains spilled out, some landed on the floorboards, some on Mala’s skin. “That’s all you are.” Naomi was shaking, Naomi was white. Naomi held on to herself with both arms.