* * *
By Friday the gleam has grown in intensity and spread. White surfaces seem powdered with glitter dust, a passing automobile burns hot, even though the white sky is still clouded over. There is a bare branch that scrapes an insistent finger against a classroom windowpane.
Nelie sits still at her desk, gripping the metal ring on the end of her pencil. One might think her tense attention is for the arithmetic lesson, intent on the blackboard floating before her in its white ether, but it is not. She is waiting.
It comes.
A movement outside the window. She whips her head around, her heart stops, or pounds. It was there, she is sure, the flash of an iridescent wing, silver, blue and purple feathers. She doesn’t know if it is joy or terror she feels.
* * *
Nelie runs toward home, walks, circles, with her book bag hitting at her ankles, through the streets searching every tree and rooftop, every light pole, fence post and patch of sky. She might see a squirrel, a brown or black bird, an alley cat. These are no more than loose leaves or gravel. Her ears hear nothing. She finds nothing.
* * *
Friday changes to Saturday. Someone has filled Nelie’s ears with cotton wool. The shadows and even the light have somehow given over to it, the muffled sounds become an almost soundless world.
* * *
Sunday.
One week is all since the last one, it can’t be. The whole Atlantic has been crossed since then. The cotton wool is a filter, or perhaps it is changing, giving over again to something new. Nelie, the whistle of the tea kettle, a low gust of wind through a pipe, a bicycle bell, the Church bells. The ring of a coin dropped on the stone stair.
Everyone has gone inside the church now.
Nelie has one hand on the iron rail. A wind, her handkerchief, she turns to catch it, it eludes her, she goes after. Something shimmers up ahead in a tree.
The highest branch, bare and black, perched there, the golden claws, silver, blue and purple feathers, the arched neck and the flashing eye. It opens wide its wings, spreads its tail like a fan and leaps.
The high white walls, and the white sky. And the iridescent bird flies higher.
Nelie’s soles ring out against the brick. Faster now. Because maybe, just maybe, she can catch up.
Nine
Mémé
Island of Martinique, French West Indies, c. 1855
Sitting here under this grand old tree, my skirts spread about me in a wheel. The blue cloth carries up the earth in a light red dust and so the earth is part of my cloth. The children come and lay their cheeks against it, now that we’ve had our midday maize, and cast their eyes up at me, waiting for a story.
A hot breeze stirs the long grasses and the broad leaves that shade us. It makes a whistling noise in the high arc of branches and hushes a moment the whirring of the insects. I brush those tender plump cheeks with my rough old fingers. I will tell them of the one-eyed dog and the three-legged cat. The gourd that ate a man and kept him prisoner, until it rolled into the ocean and was broken by a sea-goddess. Of the plantation that grew people, and the cloud boats, the toads that wore clothing, and many other things.
Little Bayard, Carine, Amaud, Abeo, Etienne and Tau. They are among the first children born outside of bondage, but their mamans must still work in the fields, and so they still need Mémé Abeje, and so I go on living.
* * *
I know how old I am. More than eighty threshing seasons. One day so long ago, when I was a little child, Iya brought my brother Adunbi and I a handful of pretty stones and seashells. She had got them while she was at the small bay by the plantation when she and some of the other women were helping to bring in the shrimp and the conch. It must have been the time of Young Monsieur’s wedding party --the conches would have been for that-- because it was rare that any hands be spared from the cane fields.
In the evening by the cooking fire Iya taught us her counting song. She said Adunbi was six threshing seasons and that I was five. Each of our fingers had a name in the song, like the stones and shells. Then she held us in her lap, as she always used to do, and sang. When the fire was out and it was too dark to see, we reached up and touched her face. We felt with our fingers the two grooves on her broad cheeks, each with two shorter grooves springing off to the side. Like the sticks used for threshing grain. The grooves were smooth under our fingers, like mud or wet sand trailed through with a stick, or like the channels of too many tears carved into stone. These were the marks of her people. She was one of the last brought from across the Big Water.
To Adunbi and I, Iya’s face was the most beautiful thing. We scarcely saw her in daylight, so our fingers felt her while we sat with her, her arms wound around us. We soaked up the humming of her voice and her dry-grass smell every night before sleeping.
Adunbi and I collected stones, too. Some were black, some yellow or white. I once found a shell in the dust of the wagon tracks, far from its salt bed of the sea. Under the red dust it was pink and smooth with a blue line in a tight little spiral. Iya made small holes in the ground by the cooking fire and showed us a game with the stones, scooping them up and dropping them round and round, dropping them one by one like single drops of rain.
But a few threshing seasons passed. I was taken up to pull weeds in the kitchen garden of the House, and Adunbi to help the older boys with the pigs and also the hens and the other fowl. At first I felt so alone without Adunbi, but soon I found he was not far from me at all. I had only to close my eyes and he was there. I told him so and he said he knew it too.
I knew it when a goose nipped his finger, as well he knew when Marie, who was light-skinned and cooked up in the House, came down the path in a blaze to gather broad beans for supper. She whispered to me as I helped to fill her apron, that Young Monsieur was angry again. Young Madame was still ill from childbirth and that was the reason. Adunbi felt the fear that chilled me at the mention of Monsieur’s name, the fear I felt from Marie. We didn’t yet know why. Neither of us had ever been near enough to him to see even the color of his hair.
Until our last night with Iya. We awoke when his boots shook the ground and he made her go with him out of the sleeping quarters. She hissed to us in our language, Stay here, so fierce we froze. Adunbi held his arms tight around me. We felt her struggle. We felt her defy him. Then a soundless well, his animal rage, and a brilliant pain pierced our child bodies as he took her from us with his knife.
We thought he had killed us too. For some reason we didn’t die.
Some time later in the garden Marie whispered again to me. She said that Old Monsieur had found out and was near mad enough to whip his son. She said he had taken our mother’s worth out of Young Monsieur’s inheritance to pay the debt. I didn’t know what she meant by those words. But I saw her sad eyes on me, sad for me. And I wondered on one word: worth.
* * *
Once I saw a bat come loose from the rafters of a barn. It had the mad sickness and tried to attack the women working there, flying as wild as if it held a hurricane inside, and it was many long minutes before they managed to kill it with their brooms. After Young Monsieur killed our mother my brother had something like this in him. This is the closest way I can tell it. And once I saw a child swept up in a wave and carried under by the current. This is how it was for me.
But for some reason we lived.
* * *
One morning during our sorrow Adunbi woke me before the first light. He said he had dreamt of Iya. He said she floated into the sky, with her arms raised and a long long dress trailing. We went out to see the sky. It was not black now but deep blue. When we looked east we saw the brightest star, the Waking Star. A pale line grew from the edge of the earth and as the other stars faded the Waking Star seemed to burn even brighter. When I saw that this helped to quieten my brother it helped me, too. We knew our mother was there. We looked for her always, and with her sang or hummed her songs.
* * *
Adunbi was good with the animals
, and by the time we were near our twenty years, he was put in charge of the livestock. The animals trusted him, even when they were led to slaughter. It gave him strength to see their thoughts and learn their feelings.
I learned of wild plants from some of the old women. Sometimes I dreamt of the plants, which showed themselves to heal a burn or mend a fever or flesh wound, or to be made into a tea for after childbirth. I found I could recall the dream as I tried to aid someone sick, and sometimes I also asked my mother to show me what to do. Then, between waking and dreaming, I learned more. We touched life like this.
* * *
The people called on me to help the ailing. Or to help babies be born, though I never bore any of my own. Adunbi had a young wife for a while, Olivie. She was sweet and called me Tata because by then we were much older than she, already past our thirty years. She bore one child but did not recover. I gave her the plants to stop her bleeding, the root for reviving her soul, but these things didn’t help. When we saw her spirit was going to rise we brought her outside where she could see the stars. How they glinted in her eyes and shone from her black and feverish limbs. Her teeth bared in something like a smile. That was all. I let Adunbi be alone with her through the rest of the night.
The child was a girl. They gave her to a woman who had milk, and not long afterwards, the two were traded for some cattle, which were put under my brother’s care. We were never able to find out where they’d gone. I feared for Adunbi that that mad bat would return. It didn’t, but his soul became heavy and I believe a part of his spirit began to rise.
I dreamt of the child, my niece. I dreamt of the threshing sticks, and felt that she would one day cross the Big Water, a different one to the north, and do so of her own will. I could do no more than wish her well.
* * *
Season followed season. Old Monsieur passed on and Young Monsieur wasn’t young anymore. He hired a new Foreman, the nephew of his wife or some such relation. He was unsure of himself, and skittish. One day he saw Adunbi and I together in the stable. One of the horses was lame and I had brought a basket of the plants I knew to be of use. The Foreman demanded to know why I was in the stables and what business we two had talking together. He was young, and we had hair already run through with gray. Adunbi said I was his sister and was helping with the horse. It was a mistake for him to say sister, we felt it right away. It made the Foreman yet more suspicious.
We heard from Lise, the new girl in the kitchen, that he asked Monsieur if he didn’t wonder if my brother and I had the Evil Eye. Especially that old witch, he said. Lise said she didn’t hear Monsieur make any reply. I wondered if he thought of Iya, or even knew we were her children.
A whole year passed before the Foreman chanced upon me alone. I was crossing a yard near the distillery going toward the quarters and there he was, at the far end, atop a wagon loaded with barrels for making rum. He saw me in an instant and stood stock still. He had a gang of dogs with him, vicious brutes that he could command at will. Suddenly I saw myself as if from a distance. The red dust over my dress, my old head no longer with the face of a child. He gave a yell. The dogs lunged forward with a roar and I was back to where I stood, seeing them coming. I had but one way out and that was to quieten myself, to go wake-dreaming where there was no fear.
What I knew next the dogs were milling around me bewildered, as if their prey had vanished before their eyes. I did not bother to look toward the wagon, but hurried on my way. I knew he would not be a threat to me or us. In fact, I felt he would not be so long for this world. The Rebellions were coming.
That night Adunbi and I played our games of stones by the cooking fire, we hummed our songs, and when we slept we dreamt of laughter. In the dawn She waited for us in her blue veil, and of all things we felt peace.
* * *
In the years of the Rebellions, Adunbi and I were called upon for our skills. We grew stronger with the people, even as we aged; we grew big as trees. We counted the threshing seasons, thirteen more, until late one evening my brother went on without me. His spirit rose and his body was received into the earth.
The people called me Mémé Abeje. Not many lived even half as long as I.
* * *
Well, I can come and go as I please. I often go down to the bay, with my slow step and my walking cane. I go in the cool of evening, to sing and rest. One night I dreamt of my brother as a boy, a boy just becoming a man, with smooth skin and hard white teeth and eyes black as wet stones. My heart marveled at his beauty, and the sharpness of his sight. His young face floated before me, going on all about the animals. The calves that followed him, and how he could not be outsmarted by that mean old nanny goat. He smiled and rolled his eyes at the admiration of this old woman, always his little sister, little Abeje.
* * *
And here I sit now, under this grand old tree. This grand old tree which is also me. I spread a canopy over myself and I sit beneath me, as if I were my own mother. And I just wonder.
Because sometimes even if we had our mothers, we didn’t. And even if we didn’t, we did. And the not having is a loneliness I suppose all children may know, for loneliness makes us feel like a child.
So come, children, let us quieten, and I will tell you the story of how my mother became a star. How she rose up on her wings into the Heavens. Most stars rise and set together in pictures, the Hunter, the Serpent, the Lion and so on, but this star follows her own path. She is the one that we see sometimes in the evening and sometimes meeting the dawn. She is the brightest. The Waking Star, mother of us all.
Acknowledgments
I would like to deeply thank my partners in crime, for their illustrious, intuitive, creative, generous and ruthless skills that led to the creation of this book: Leora J. Hoshall, Teresa Goff, Colleen Frary, Josue Menjivar, and Erika Lunder. Further editorial thanks to Chris O’Connor, Susan Steudel, Louis Jaeckel and Nora Harms.
I would also like to thank David Seath for helping me realize it was time for another project, and Asa and Chris for making it all worth it.
* * *
You guys are the best.
JJ
Victoria 2015
About the Author
Jenny Jaeckel grew up in Northern California, has lived in Mexico, Spain and currently lives in British Columbia with her husband and daughter. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing and a Master of Arts in Hispanic Literatures. She is a certified interpreter and translator, and has taught Spanish at three universities. Her favorite thing to eat is avocados.
For the Love of Meat is Jaeckel’s first collection of short stories and is Book One in the Waking Star Companion Books. She has finished Book Two, a novella called “The Waking Star,” based on the story Mémé from For the Love of Meat. Meanwhile, Jaeckel is working on a forthcoming novel, Book Three in the Waking Star Companion Books, title and publication date to be announced.
#FortheLoveofMeat
@jennyjaeckel
www.jennyjaeckel.com
[email protected]
Also by Jenny Jaeckel
Graphic Novels:
Siberiak: My Cold War Adventure on the River Ob (2014)
Spot 12: Five Months in the Neonatal ICU (October 2016)
Cunero 12: Cinco Meses en la UCI Neonatales (October 2016)
Odd Pieces (Forthcoming 2017)
* * *
Fiction:
For the Love of Meat: Nine Illustrated Stories (2016)
The Waking Star (Forthcoming 2017, a novella)
The End
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