“Did you come spoiling for a fight?” Clarence asked. “We’re grieving a young man snatched from us before his time, like your son. We don’t have good young men to spare.”
“That’s true, Clarence,” Aidan said. “But did you speak up and defend Sekou or Raven Cooper or Cinnamon against foul-mouthed ignorance?”
Clarence was speechless a second time.
Iris ushered Cinnamon to the casket. “Hard things happen to a person.” She touched Sekou’s cheek and spoke softly. “You lose loved ones or every good thing you worked for. But it isn’t the fates weaving your misery or God mad at you.”
Redwood stepped behind Cinnamon. “Raven Cooper —” she stumbled on her son’s name — “got shot in the head ’cause some fool with a gun was ’bout to cut down innocent folks who loved each other, ’bout to shoot ’em in cold blood, ’cause he couldn’t stand to see their love.” Tears ran down her face. “Raven stepped in the line of fire. His spirit called him to sacrifice. Those two women were his friends.”
Cinnamon gasped. “They said Daddy saved strangers, not friends. He wouldn’t have been anywhere near that faggot bar if he hadn’t been hunting bad-boy Sekou.”
“Raven was a man doing what he believed.” Aidan took hold of Redwood. Grief washed through them, but did not linger. “Love is what you got to do to be free.”
“We all have a generous spirit in us,” Redwood said. “Got to hunt it down, get it working.”
Aidan put a blue velvet pouch around Cinnamon’s neck, filled with herbs, rocks, and secret things. Mojo, a prayer in a bag. He’d given her one before, but she’d lost it. He touched her cheek, drawing a hoodoo sign on her face. “There’s a mystery moving the universe.” He sang as he spoke. “We are part of it, part of what moves the stars, what sends birds flying thousands of miles and keeps rivers winding to the sea, what makes flowers wilt even if we don’t cut them. We are stardust, sharing the mystery of the Milky Way, of birds and storm clouds riding the wind, and to live is a blessing, our precious miracle. Sekou knew the wonder and the terror. We are blessed to have known him, to have loved him, and to still be part of his story.”
“Let the church say amen!” Aunt Becca stood in the front doorway with Opal, whose mouth hung open. “That’s what we need for a memorial service.”
Redwood, Aidan, and Iris squeezed Opal’s hands, stroked her back, and cried her tears, saying, “We know how you feel, losing a son.”
Iris wrapped nine strands of some hairy root around a cloth book. She waved it at the head, heart, and feet of Sekou’s dead dust stand-in and then laid the book among red flowers — more hoodoo spells. “I brought Sekou’s letters to keep you company while he walks the star road home.”
Someone in the back snickered over noble savages and hoodoo Negroes. Clarence?
“You shoulda been a preacher, Aidan.” Uncle Dicky extended his flask.
Aidan pushed it aside gently and clapped Dicky’s back. “I gave up drinking before you were born. I was a mean drunk, fighting everybody and trying to kill my ownself.”
Dicky sputtered, gobs of spit flying from his lips. He bumped a fist against Aidan’s chest. “You’re all right, man.” He staggered away. “He’s all right, ain’t he?”
Somebody whispered, “Redneck cracker.”
“I don’t have no truck with backcountry hoodoo.” Cousin Carol spoke the mob meanness loud, but Cinnamon had her shields up.
“The family is grateful to everybody who has come to pay their respects,” Mr. Johnson closed the casket, “but, you’re running overtime.” He ushered folks out.
“Did Cinnamon call you? Rebecca wouldn’t dare.” Opal glared at Redwood, Aidan, and Iris. She worried the buttons on her one black dress. “How could you show up like this, no warning?”
“You should have called us,” Redwood said.
Becca dragged Cinnamon away, before Opal launched into something nasty.
Generous Spirits
The funeral crowd jostled out the narrow front door to the parking lot. Mr. Johnson stood guard at the wider (and still open) emergency doors. The sun sat low in a saddle between western hills, casting spooky shadows. The homeless man pushed his cart toward departing mourners. Icy fog was waist high and even stinging a few cheeks. Rot and poop in the vacant lot assailed irritated sinuses. Becca plowed through nosy questions and rude glares. Cinnamon hugged her orca knapsack. Inside, The Chronicles throbbed, a steady beating heart next to hers.
“Opal is on a hard road,” Becca said. “Let’s cut her some slack.” She deposited Cinnamon by her car and headed back inside.
In a stand of weed trees, Lexy Wood, Sekou’s nineteen-year-old boyfriend, yelled at a woman in a coat with a furry hood. Seeing Cinnamon, Lexy raced off, as if cops were after him for dealing love to minors. She never told anybody about him and Sekou doing it in the laundry room behind the clanking dryer when Sekou was supposed to be babysitting. Lexy was grinning and gasping underneath Sekou like they were on the Big Dipper roller coaster at Kennywood Park, coming ’round the bend and plunging into a ravine. Opal would be ripped if she knew what Cinnamon had seen, but it wasn’t sin. It was as good as Sekou’s glistening eyes and Lexy shouting, “Wheee Lord!”
Lexy probably knew all about that night in the bar, about the two ladies loving one another — Daddy’s friends, friends he took a bullet for. A wild man had come gunning for love. How weird was that? Had there been a trial, or did the gunman get away? Nobody told Cinnamon anything but lies. Almost thirteen, yet everybody treated her like the baby. Her knapsack tumbled into the dust. The homeless man grazed her thigh with his cart. She gripped the handlebar and broke a nasty fall.
“Twilight upsetting your heart spirit?” The man smelled like dog breath and old running shoes, his last shower an ancient memory. He wore a slimy coat made of this and that held together by safety pins and electrician’s tape. Scars crisscrossed his face; shifty eyes wouldn’t settle. Cinnamon hunted down her generous spirit and nodded thanks at him. He offered a broken-tooth grin and pointed at a speck under a distant streetlight — Lexy. “That boy was fond of your brother.”
“Sekou called him Dr. Bug-Man. They had a big blowout two weeks ago. Lexy wanted to take Sekou to see Daddy at the nursing home.” Cinnamon halted. “I’m talking too much.”
“I got Lexy to listen at the emergency door. A fine service today for Mr. Sekou Wannamaker.” The homeless man had a strange accent, foreign and down home. “Love is what you got to do all right.” He took a carved stool from his cart and set a velvet donut on the hard wood. “I been waiting for love to come on back in style.” He sat down, setting out a sign : Veteran, jacked up in the war. You got peace. Can you please help me? He was maybe twenty-five, no hint of beard, no Viet Nam edge to his eyes.
Mr. Johnson stomped up. “What I tell you about harassing mourners?”
“He ain’t hurting nobody,” Cinnamon said.
“I will call the police. Don’t push me.” Mr. Johnson talked over her. “Move on!”
“I’m not trespassing.” The man shook his cup at mourners dashing for their cars.
Mr. Johnson kicked the stool. Wooden animals snarled and clawed. He yelped and clutched a ripped cuff. “What the?” He retreated inside. “Jail will be your own fault.”
Cinnamon bent down to inspect the stool. The wild beasts were still, but warm to the touch and fragrant, a hot house jungle scent.
The homeless man winked crusty eyes. “By the time the cops get around to answering Mr. Johnson’s call, even a broken old soul like me, with a bad butt and crooked feet, could be long gone.”
“Can we give him some money?” Cinnamon said to her approaching family.
“No. Don’t encourage him.” Opal grabbed Cinnamon and thrust the killer whale knapsack at her. “You’d lose your face if it wasn’t plastered to your skull.”
“I knew where it was every second!” Cinnamon snatched the orca.
Aidan offered two twenty-dollar bills. The homeless man folded
each into a tight square and stowed them in the mouth of a leopard in the stool bottom.
“That belongs in a museum.” Opal wrinkled her nose and pulled Cinnamon away into prickly weeds. “He probably scams more money in a day than Clarence.”
“I doubt that,” Iris said. “Clarence hits up desperate rich people.”
“I appreciate your sacrifice.” The homeless man stashed the stool. “Spirits we recognize always come to our aid. Blessings on you as you fit grief in your good hearts.” He pushed the cart away. His right leg didn’t want to go the same direction as his left.
“Becca and her boyfriend drove different cars here,” Opal said to the elders. “He’ll drive you all wherever you want to go.” Becca’s boyfriend waved from his car.
“They’re staying with us,” Cinnamon said. “Right?”
“We ain’t driving back to Massachusetts.” Redwood crossed her arms over her chest. “You got to put up with us for one night.”
“Opal!” Clarence spun his BMW wheels through a sharp turn and threw gravel at their shins. “Call me if you need anything.” Opal looked at her feet. “Don’t make us the ogres.” Clarence flailed and banged the horn. He sucked blood spurting from a knuckle and sighed. “What I mean is… Let me help you, Sis.”
“You’re doing plenty.” Opal waved him on without mentioning the funeral bill. “I’ll call you if I can think of something.”
Reluctantly he drove on. Opal wasn’t going to call him, and he knew it.
“Clarence remind me of Brother George,” Redwood said. “A fire-breathing dragon, making folk tremble, but burning up his insides too.”
Cinnamon never considered how a dragon felt inside, or Clarence either. “I want to ride with Miz Redwood, Granddaddy, and Aunt Iris,” she yelled. “Please!”
“Your brother’s up in there, dead. Hush that noise. Have some respect.” Opal pulled out a cigarette and struck a match. It sputtered.
“Please,” Cinnamon whispered and bent her head.
“Fine,” Opal said. “Watch out,” she told Becca’s boyfriend. The old folks stood serenely by his car, ancient angels, fog curling over their heads. “You think butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths, but they’re the wild bunch and,” she wagged a finger at Cinnamon, “space is the place for this one.”
The woman in the hooded coat, who’d been fussing with Lexy, tapped Opal’s shoulder. “Do you have a minute?”
Opal turned and froze. “What?” She lit the cigarette.
The woman pulled her hood down. It was Star Deer, one of Daddy’s best friends from before. Energetic and lean, she had a warrior’s ferocity and a dancer’s grace, even standing still. Star was Cherokee, one of the noble savages who worked Clarence’s nerves. “I didn’t come to fight.”
“What you come at all for?” Smoked curled from Opal’s lips.
“Sekou and I were friends.” Star was godmother to Cinnamon and Sekou.
“The funeral’s over. You paid your respects. Bye.” Opal pushed past Star and escaped into Becca’s car.
Cinnamon glared at Opal. “Sorry about Mom wigging out.”
Star’s face softened, and she hugged Cinnamon. “Grieving, nobody has to be nice. I’ll call her later.” Star murmured a greeting to the elders, pulled her hood up, and strode into the fog.
Becca’s boyfriend drove a big Toyota wagon with plenty of leg and butt room. He opened the doors. “Are you as old as they say? Sorry, if that’s not a polite question.”
“I was born when dirt was invented,” Iris said. “Sis and Crazy Coop are older still.”
“I’ll Crazy Coop you!” Aidan squeezed Iris’s nose.
“They’re stage people,” Cinnamon said as they settled in: Iris up front with Kevin — she asked his name right off — and Cinnamon between her grandparents. “They’ve traveled everywhere, doing plays, writing books, making movies. I’m going to be an actress too. The theatre keeps you young,”
“More power to you.” Kevin tipped his roughrider hat. “Becca says you’re an Indian medicine man, I mean, uhm, Native American.”
“Medicine man? I don’t know ’bout that.” Aidan smiled at this black cowboy man. “My father was Seminole; my mother come over from Ireland.” Not a plain ole Georgia cracker like Clarence always said. Aidan worked his jaws and lips without speaking. He looked tired and feeble — lost in another time.
Reaching over Cinnamon, Redwood squeezed his arm and said, “Miss O’Casey was running and Big Thunder was mourning loved ones dead too soon. They found each other on an island in the grassy water of the Okefenokee, where swamp currents rock the land and carry some of your sorrows away. Grieving —”
“I hate funerals,” Cinnamon declared. “I’m not going to another one.”
“I guess we’ll have to hang on a while longer, see you through,” Redwood said.
Iris nodded. “We’ve been saving ourselves, hoarding strength for you.”
“Nobody better die anytime soon,” Cinnamon said to Aidan, so it was clear.
He perked up. “We can wrassle that boneyard baron a little longer then.”
Kevin honked at mourners blocking the exit. “Seatbelts fastened?” He headed out.
Cinnamon wrestled The Chronicles from her knapsack, then lost her nerve.
“What you holding to your heart there?” Redwood said.
“The Earth Chronicles of an alien Wanderer.” Cinnamon held it up. “Sekou gave it to me before he…died.” She opened to the second chapter. The pages glowed. “See?”
Aidan squinted. “Print’s too tiny for my old eyes.” He ran his fingers across bright images. “That’s a handsome drawing though.”
“Can I read it to you?” They’d understand — the hard words for sure. Iris had given Sekou his first three dictionaries, Random House, Merriam Webster, and Cambridge University. Being hoodoo conjurers, they might even understand underneath the words. “It’s a good story.”
Redwood pulled the book to her nose. “Dahomey, 1892? Historical fiction?”
“Science fiction too,” Cinnamon said.
“We got time,” Iris said. “Traffic’s backed up across the bridge to the Parkway.”
“Really?” Kevin stuck his head out the window. Red lights glowed to infinity.
“Iris put her mind to it, she can see things the rest of us don’t,” Aidan said.
“Uh huh.” Kevin drew his head back in, spooked.
Redwood laughed. “Isn’t this road always jammed up?”
“Well, yeah,” Kevin said. “It’s the only way, unless —”
“You want to take the bridge to nowhere,” his four passengers said in unison.
Kevin grinned. “The wild crew, huh?”
“Read, honeybunch,” Aidan said. “It’ll do my heart good to hear a story.”
“It will?” Cinnamon said.
“Stories are medicine too,” the elders said in three-part harmony.
Kevin studied each one of them in turn. “Ain’t that the truth.”
Thankful for the traffic jam, Cinnamon started back at the beginning of The Chronicles and read right on to new pages.
CHRONICLES 3: Word Dance
The morning after taking refuge in a spirit cave, Kehinde woke uncertain. Her heart played a troubled beat; her breath caught on jagged emotions. She walked in circles, avoiding me. The past haunted her steps; the future was mist. What is a warrior without war? A woman without a family? Bandit, traitor, slave? Being a stillpoint for my journey meant nothing to her yet. I wanted to tell her: Wanderers value experience above all; without it we are a map of static. To know a world is to drop into its soil, water, and atmosphere, and risk everything to become a citizen of history.
Ignorant, untested, reckless, I ran ahead into the bright horizon. Kehinde followed me as I stalked hyenas, spied on villagers and soldiers, dug up anthills, and awakened sleeping pythons. She stood guard as I teased angry rebels, ruthless French liberators, and danced in a thunderstorm, daring the lightning to twist my spirit
into a better form. One evening, she talked elephants out of ripping up the tree I climbed. A grandmother stroked her cheek before lumbering off.
“Why? Why harass an elephant?” Kehinde fumed at me. “We are lucky. These aren’t elephants I shot at!”
In awe of her elephant talk, I shook my head.
“My brother found a baby elephant once, lost and tangled in thick roots. She was bigger than he was and yowling. A grandmother elephant trumpeted a distant reply. Lions had caught the scent and sound of despair. My brother was just one spear. He called for me to join the rescue. I resisted. Why risk our lives to save an elephant? Lions need to eat. Let them eat someone else, he said. This one is my friend. So I stood guard, shouting, waving his spear at hungry lionesses while he cut roots to free fat, clumsy legs. I thought we were about to die on lion teeth. But grandmother elephants thundered in, routed the lionesses, then charged us. The ground shook. They halted, toe to toe with my brother and me, waving their trunks. The baby wrapped her trunk around his waist. He cut the last root. The baby touched my cheek then ran under her mother.” Kehinde stroked her face. “The elephants escorted us past hungry lions. I still hear their voices in my bones.” Kehinde circled me, poking muscles, noting reflexes. “So like intrepid Taiwo come back to me.”
“Taiwo?” I struggled to mimic her sounds.
“Taiwo.” She pointed to my face. “A true name calls you to yourself.”
“Taiwo.” The first word my mouth mastered I took as a name.
After the elephants, more words came, but days disappeared. Or perhaps I lost them. Arrogance and joy are potent drugs. Seeking Somso and eluding Béhanzin and rebel slaves, Kehinde appeased my hunger for experience. In the chaos of war, many fields lay fallow. Once beautiful villages were deserted. We avoided cities, hunted in forests and rivers, and took what we needed from farmers. They were confused by an ahosi strutting into their compounds as if Dahomey’s glory times had returned. They averted their eyes as we helped ourselves to mangos, peanuts, and yams. We were never greedy. Kehinde left metal or seashells as payment. No one had news of Somso. This displeased and relieved Kehinde. She wanted to find Somso but feared finding her too.
Will Do Magic for Small Change Page 4
