Tropic of Night

by Unknown

  He picked me up, stinking sleeping bag and all, and placed me in the bed of a truck parked outside. The truck roared and started. He washed my face with water from a plastic bottle and dribbled some into my mouth. Then black. Then an oatmeal sky, too bright. I was out of the sleeping bag and didn’t stink anymore. I was lying flat, being carried on a stretcher by two squat Asians in brown uniform into a pale blue jet aircraft that smelled of kerosene and hot plastic. The engines made a shrill sigh. My brother’s face, smiling; he stroked my hair from my eyes. A slight sticking pain. More black.

  I rejoined the relatively living in a hospital room, hooked to tubes and monitors. A woman in white came into the room and said something in Japanese, another Altaic language, but one I do not speak. She took my temp and smiled and left. After a few minutes, my brother came into the room.

  I get out of the Buick, enter my apartment, and replace some of the water I have sweated away with a glass of water from the tap. I get my big suction cup, wet it in the sink, and then kneel over the secret place. I pull up the tile and look down.

  My brother took me north, to Yoshioda, in the hills above Sendai. It was spring then, and I could stand on the terrace behind our dojo and watch the paddies turn from black to heartbreaking green, and the slow white surf of the peach and cherry blossoms move up the mountain. Our dojo was a two-story building made of pine and cedar in the country style. My brother had built it for Mr. Omura. Josey had been studying aikido for five years at a big dojo in Tokyo and had heard about Mr. Omura and came to see him and stayed for a year, occupying a string bed in a cubbyhole behind the Omura noodle shop. My brother thought Mr. Omura was the best aikido sensei in the world.

  The rooms at Yoshioda were cedar-paneled three-mat affairs containing only a futon and a chest. It was like living in a cigar box, but very pleasant. I don’t know what arrangement my brother had made with Omura-sensei, but no one bothered me or tried to make me do anything. Stroll around the grounds until you feel at home. I strolled, I looked. After a while, I picked up a broom and started to sweep the dojo. Omura-sensei and the other students would bow and smile when they saw me, and I would bow and smile back. I wore a faded blue short kimono and white drawstring pants and straw sandals.

  After a while I started to help the housekeeper with her tasks. In the evenings I read over my Chenka notes and began drafting my dissertation, or as much of it as I could without access to a library. Kinship and Property in a Siberian Nomad Tribe. Also very restful.

  One day I was wielding my broom in the dojo, and Omura-sensei called me over. Mr. Omite, who was usually Mr. Katanabe’s partner, was out sick. Would I take ukemi with Mr. Katanabe? Taking ukemi means giving the attack and receiving the throw. So I did, and so I became, by easy stages, an aikidoka . I fell easily, and learned to go along, in the true spirit of the art. When I did it wrong, my hands and feet were guided until I did it right. Then I became a regular, without much ceremony; I wore the gi and hakama and learned the katas .

  There is considerable magic in aikido. The little sensei kneels on the mat and four men and a young woman cannot move him. The sensei chuckles, the students heave. It is like pushing on a fire hydrant. Also, since its founder was deep into traditional Japanese religion, there are levels of aikido that your average dojo nut does not encounter, not just the spiritual part, but concerning relations with kami. The spirits. Omura-sensei would occasionally advert to these levels in his little talks, and sometimes I thought he was looking particularly at me when he did so, but I did not rise to the bait. No, I learned the physical side, to move in circles, to control with tiny pushes, to breathe properly, to feel and control the ki. I learned how to decide whether to do nothing, fight, or run away, all useful lessons. I learned enough, as it turned out, to kill a fat, drunken woman, but not enough to not kill her. Thus I am a failure at aikido too. Was it only a fault in technique? No, it was some deficiency in spirit, as Omura-sensei would have gently said. I didn’t care, I couldn’t stand the torture of the girl, I let my ki out of control and my passions ruled, and I am thus doomed to mourn that unfortunate woman every time I look into my daughter’s face.

  I draw out my box from the hole in the floor. It is a twenty-two-inch cube, made of the same gauge aluminum used in the fuselages of airliners, cornered with steel, closed with heavy steel snaps on three sides. It is dented and scarred and covered with the paper scabs of ripped-off stickers. Still visible are the Air France logo and a blue Pan Am globe. I bought it for forty-five hundred CFA in the Petit Marché in Bamako. At one time, it must have held a camera or other valuable equipment for a French film crew; it had a shaped hollow made of fiberglass and foam within it, which I had to remove. My box, my box, I never travel without my box, as Balthazar sings in Amahl and the Night Visitors . My dad made us watch the damned thing every Christmas until we drove him off with our heathenish jibes.

  I bring the box to the kitchen table and open it. A moldy wood smell emerges, with notes of spice and dust. There is Dolores’s stuff in its envelope on top. I set it aside and extract a cloth bag, like a small haversack. It is richly embroidered in gold and green thread, and the flap is hung with small cowries. I reach inside and pull out a squat covered bowl a little larger in diameter than a dinner plate, made of acacia wood. It is a divining bowl, an opon igede. The lid doubles as a divining tray, an opon Ifa, and is carved to provide a shallow concavity in the center and a raised border about two inches wide around the edge.

  Stop for a minute here. My heart is beating hard, I can feel it knocking in my chest, and there is a fine cold sweat on my lips and forehead and the backs of my hands. Is there any way around this? Pocatello? Waukegan? No. I’ll probably die in any case, but this path looks like the best way to save the little girl. In fact, I don’t know what to do, and there’s no one around to ask, except Ifa. I hate it, this opening to the gods, divination, throwing Ifa as they call it in West Africa; I do, I do, although I recall loving it when I thought it was just an intellectual game?figuring out the silly natives?before it was pressed home to me that it’s real. My husband loved it, too, not divination, which, of course, as a witch he may not do, but the other stuff, the power. And it turns out that, for my sins, I’m very good at it. Uluné was amazed and pleased. Ifa loves me, apparently.

  I lift the lid and set it aside. Inside, the bowl is divided into eight compartments radiating around a central one, which holds an embroidered yellow and green cloth bag. I remove from one of the radial compartments a squat blue glass bottle, corked. Out of it I pour a tiny mound of powdered wood from the irosun tree into the hollow of the divination tray, and spread it evenly across the smooth surface. I take up the yellow-green bag and pour its contents into my hand, seventeen shining palm nuts. I place them in the central compartment, except for one, which I place in front of the divining tray. I sprinkle a little wood dust on it, because it is the head of Eshu, and no one may look on the bare head of a king or god.

  I take from their compartments a little cast bronze irofa, an object about the size and shape of a big fountain pen, with figures of doves on the upper end, and also a small whisk made of cow hair, and lay them on the table. Now the sixteen ikin, smooth, surprisingly heavy, well-grown palm nuts, with the auspicious four eyes in each of them. I hold them in my hands in front of my face and blow spit on them, which is hard because my mouth is as dry as acacia wood, and I say the prayer to wake Ifa. Then I tap on the side of the divining tray with the irofa, and I chant the homage prayer to Ifa, and to Eshu, and to Ogun and to Shango and the whole Yoruba pantheon, which the Olo say is really theirs, plus homages to some particular Olo spiritual entities, tapping with the rhythm I was taught, not forgetting any. Then the prayer in case I have, by accident, forgotten any: one word, one word alone, does not drive the diviner from home, oh, no, one word does not destroy the diviner. So we hope. I take some little time making the surface of the wood dust perfectly smooth with the cow-hair whisk.

  Now I take up the sixteen palm nuts, and toss
them in a continual rattling flow between my two hands, at the same time chanting the homages: to Uluné, my teacher, to my parents, to my other teachers, to the ancestors of my tribe, not hard in my case, a long succession of John, Richard, Matthew, and Peter Doe, and Mary, Elizabeth, Jane, Clare, their daughters. I remember Uluné wouldn’t teach me anything until I had named my ancestors and told what I knew of their stories.

  Back and forth in my hands the shining ikin flow, and I feel the tension building up to the instant when I shall seize a certain handful. I have not done this in a while, so it is like getting back on a horse after a bad fall, or entering the water after a near drowning, and I am trembling, the hair is standing up on the backs of my arms. I feel Somebody is in the room with me, staring at my back, I feel it itching between my shoulder blades, but I must not turn around and look. This Uluné stressed quite strongly when he taught me to divine. It is Eshu standing there, he assured me, Eshu, the guardian of the way to the unseen world, and one does not look Eshu in the face. I empty my mind of everything but my question.

  Suddenly, the orisha moves my right hand and I clutch at the mass of ikin. I look down. Remaining in my left hand are two nuts. With the middle finger of my right hand I press Ifa, making a single mark on the dust of the divining tray, letting the dark wood show through. I let Ifa do this seven more times, making a single mark when there are two nuts left and a double mark when there is only one, drawing them in two vertical columns of four marks each. With the last mark the divination is over. I no longer feel anyone behind me. It is just an ordinary room again. I realize that for the past ten minutes I have been entirely oblivious to the sounds of the neighborhood, to Jake barking at cars, to Polly’s daughter Shari practicing her piano next door.

  I put the ikin back in their bag. From my box I take a notebook. This is the nontraditional part. Uluné had hundreds of verses memorized and he wanted me to learn them by heart too. I did, but I also recorded and transcribed them into this notebook. They bear some resemblance to the standard Yoruba verses, but most of them are particularly Olo in flavor. I check the figure on the divining board against the 256 possibilities. It is seven upon three, Irosun upon Iwori?Shango upon Eshu in the Ifé tradition the Olo use. I look up the verses and one pops up as the obvious answer. It says:

  He-went-into-the-river-and-killed-the-crocodile was the one who cast Ifa for “Is it profitable to take a caravan to the north?” Ifa says it is foolish to leave the farm before the rains. Witches are coming to carry off the eldest child. She said her strength was no match forevil-doing. Ifa says escape by water. He said seek the son with no father. He said the woman will leave her farm and help. He said the bird with yellow feathers is of use. Four are necessary for the sacrifice: two black pigeons, two white pigeons, and thirty-two cowries.

  I copy it out onto a blank page of the notebook, tear it out, fold it, and place it to one side. Then I dab my finger in the wood powder and make a vertical line with it down my forehead. I carefully scoop up all the remaining wood powder and eat it. It is cool on the tongue, like confectioner’s sugar, and tastes a little like chewing on a pencil. I put away the apparatus and stow it and the other material back in my box and then replace the box in its hide.

  Just in time. I hear a car crunching on the shell drive, slam of car door, little feet on the steps. Luz and Amanda burst in, sweetly spattered with dots of ice cream. Luz wants to show Amanda her room and treasures, pathetic though they are. They go into our shared sleeping chamber. I wonder how long it will take before Luz becomes ashamed of us and the way we live. Not long, I believe, if Mrs. Pettigrew has much to say about it. She has not come in. After five minutes, I go out on the landing. She is sitting in her silver car, looking up at our door and deciding whether to come up and rescue Amanda and have to interact socially with me, or to honk rudely, in either case risking a class injury. She sees me, waves weakly, I rescue her from the horror of me: turnabout is fair play. “I’ll get them,” I cry gaily. In our room, they are giggling like imps and tumbling around in my hammock and falling out of it onto Luz’s mattress below, a normally forbidden game. I roust Amanda out, and then set to making our humble dinner. Spaghetti-O’s, food of the gods, plus nutritious carrot sticks and cucumber slices for Luz, plus chocolate milk; for me, just the crudités and a banana. I am usually sick after having to do with the cosmic powers, but not today.

  But antsy, yes, and Luz picks it up and is antsy, too. So we drive down to Dinner Key to walk on the piers, among the jangling boats, which usually relaxes both of us. Luz prances before me down the gray planking, calling out the types, which I have taught her, at about the same age as I was taught them by my father. Sloop, stinkboat, stinkboat, ketch, sloop, sloop (actually a cutter, baby, see, the mast is stepped farther back to allow the two headsails), stinkboat, yawl (because the mizzenmast is yawl the way back, she says), sloop, ketch, and then she stops, because it is the end of the dock and she has never seen one like this before, but I have. My heart is in my gullet. The verse pops into my mind. Escape by water. If only.

  She is moored stern in, which means her characteristic long, sharp, graceful, pointed transom hangs halfway over the dock. She is painted a rich cerulean blue underneath, with a thin buff stripe dividing this from the deep maroon paint of the gunwales. She is gaff-rigged, of course, with two equal masts and a noble bowsprit. Her name, in gold script on the transom, is Guitar .

  “This is a pinky schooner, dear,” I say, and she says, “It’s blue, not pink.”

  “No, pinky is the name of the kind of schooner it is. Like a sharpie schooner. It has that high, pointed stern. You can use it as a boom crutch, like this one is doing, see, and it’s open underneath so in a blow, the water on deck can drain away, and it shelters the helmsman from following seas. And you can pee into the ocean without getting wet.” I added, “It’s a weatherly boat.”

  Yes, it is. Kite was a pinky schooner, nearly eighty years old when my dad bought it and fixed it up. It used to fish out of New Bedford, and you can still smell the cods of yesteryear when you go down in the hold. Or could. Her sails were tanbark canvas, heavy and stiff, but that was Dad for you, no Dacron for Dad. When we were kids, we used to spend spring break in Bermuda. The three of us kids would fly there with Mother, while Dad and one or two of his brothers would sail Kite down and meet us on the island. It was about his only chance to do blue-water sailing. Mother didn’t approve of blue-water sailing, on the principle that he desired it, and thus it had to be stupid.

  But the winter when I turned twelve and my brother was fifteen, my mother was involved in an affair even more squalid than her usual standard, and so, not out of guilt, which as far as I could tell was to her a complete stranger, but maybe attempting to recover some tactical advantage she could use later, agreed to let me and Josey crew the boat with him for the sail down. A great adventure, and it got us away from Mother, but … I suppose we both felt some ambivalence, especially Josey, who had reached that age where one desires that parents be perfectly anonymous and unobtrusive. Jack Doe was neither, but peculiar in the extreme. I think really, he felt he was a throwback to some earlier Doe, a crusty waterman out of a Devon gunkhole. His faith in the church remained the faith of a child, which is supposed to be a good thing, and his tastes remained the tastes of a boy: hot dogs, burgers, ice-cream sodas, tinkering with cars, messing around in small boats. Small children adored him, of course, except his own, although even I adored him for a time.

  The great mystery of his life, for me at least, was why he had married my mother. I mean why he was attracted to her; he married her because she was pregnant with me, something he never mentioned and which Mom never tired of relating to me and whoever else would listen.

  So we set sail, at dawn, up the Sound, the captain at the wheel, singing “Away, Rio,” with the crew writhing in embarrassment. My brother was navigator and Sparks (even at that age he had a genius for electronics) and I was cook, steward, purser, bosun tight, midshipmanite, and crew of the ca
ptain’s gig. We rounded Montauk under cold, spitting rain and set course for the southeast. At that time of year, it is normally a five-and-a-half-day run down to Bermuda, sailing into increasingly finer weather, sun, steady fifteen-knot westerly winds and a long, relaxing beam reach to the island. This year, however, instead of getting better, the weather became nastier. Josey hung by the weather radio, looking increasingly worried as he plotted the movement of a big cyclone racing down from the North Atlantic. Unlike the ocean, my father remained flat calm. We were not afraid, were we? Of a little blow?

  On the fourth day it dawned red in the morning, the sailors took warning, the waves got steeper, the wind increased and backed north. By noon the sea was white all across, and we took in sail, running under double-reefed main and storm jib. By eight that evening, we were in serious trouble, the wind screaming up to a full gale. We took off everything but the storm jib. I gripped the wheel while Josey and my father rigged a chain and drogue, which is when I started to get frightened. When you rig a sea anchor it means that you are about to convert your handy sailboat into a plugged bottle, batten and tie everything down, strip to bare poles, lash yourself into your bunk, and pray that the bottle does not leak because if it does, you are fish food. The wind increased; the jib disappeared, whipped into the howling air with a crack like a shot; Dad heaved the anchor over, hustled us into our bunks, and tied us in with the auto safety belts he always carried aboard. I recall his placid smile, his reassuring voice.

  The waves were by this time the size of two-story houses, which meant that every minute or so the Kite swooped from the roof peak of such a notional house to the ground and back up again, twisting hideously as she did so. We kids retched helplessly. Father sang “Haul Away Me Laddie-Oh,” although the wind was so loud we could hardly hear him. I suppose that is when my girlhood faith began to drain out of me. I recall praying without cease, using every church trick I had learned, Hail Marys, Our Fathers, Glory Bes without number, the Jesus prayer. I in my girlish pride had always thought myself devout, although I suppose my devotion was a way of being with Dad and getting back a little at Mom, and didn’t God know the difference, because now he refused to show. I can recall the knowledge growing in me that there was nothing there, that I was going to die, die, die, and have my face eaten by crabs, and feeling the absolute uncaring emptiness of the physical universe, that if God existed he was somewhere else than in this particular patch of wild ocean, or that if he did care, he cared in a way that would forever be beyond my understanding and useless for even a scrap of comfort. I began to despise my father for getting me into this.