by Alan Rodgers
Then somebody told her Santeria was Cuban voodoo, and she didn’t like it so much.
“Your daughter died today,” Mama Estrella said. “Why’re you out drinking? Why aren’t you home, mourning?” Her tone made Emma feel as cheap and dirty as a streetwalker.
Emma shrugged. She knocked back the last of the awful wine in her glass, then refilled it from the bottle the bartender had left for her.
Mama Estrella shook her head and finished off her beer; someone brought her another can before she even asked. She stared at Emma. Emma kept her seat, held her ground. But after a few minutes the taste of the wine began to sour in her throat, and she wanted to cry. She knew the feeling wasn’t Mama Estrella’s doing, even if Mama Estrella was some sort of a voodoo woman. It was nothing but Emma’s own guilt, coming to get her.
“Mama Estrella, my baby died today. She died a little bit at a time for six months, with a tumor that finally got to be the size of a grapefruit growing in her belly, almost looking like a child that was going to kill her before it got born.” She caught her breath. “I want to drink enough that I don’t see her dying like that, at least not tonight.”
Mama Estrella was a lot less belligerent-looking after that. Ten minutes later she took a long drink from her beer and said, “You okay, Emma.” Emma poured herself some more wine, and someone brought Mama Estrella a pitcher of beer, and they sat drinking together, not talking, for a couple of hours.
About three
No one lives long in Harlem without learning when to run, and Emma knew as well as anybody. But she was drunk, too drunk to know she ought to be afraid. Instead of running away she leaned forward and whispered: “What’s that, Mama Estrella? What’re you thinking?”
Mama Estrella sprayed her words a little as she answered. “I just thought: hey, you want your baby back? You miss her? I could make her alive again.” She was even drunker than Emma was. “No, that’s wrong. Not alive. More like . . . you know what a zombie is? A zombie isn’t a little girl, but it’s like one. It moves. It walks. It breathes if you tell it to.” She took another long drink from her beer can. “I can’t make your baby alive,” she said. “But I can make what’s left of her go away more slowly.”
It was a terrible, terrible idea, and even in her grief Emma knew that from the moment Mama Estrella suggested it. But she was drunk, and she was brooding, and the parts of her with prudence and good sense were drowned in grief and wine.
“A zombie. . . ?”
She missed her little girl so bad — she didn’t think. How could she think? Every time she tried to think her head was full of images, like the image of the awful dead-faced men who’d come to wheel Lisa’s body from the room, all cold and businesslike. Emma had wanted to shout at them until they acted like she felt, but she couldn’t find the heart.
She closed her eyes again, and another image came to her — the image of her darling baby Lisa whimpering in pain, and now she saw the awful hemorrhaging rain of blood that burst from Lisa just before she died.
It would’ve been better if she’d died herself, Emma thought. Dead is better than alive if you have to live without your little girl you love beyond all measure.
Mama Estrella offered Emma a handkerchief, and Emma realized she was crying. She didn’t feel like she was crying. She didn’t feel anything but numb, but the tears were there, and when she wiped them away they welled up all over again. She tried to stop, but it was no use. “I love my baby, Mama Estrella,” she said. She tried to say more, but the words wouldn’t come to her.
Mama Estrella looked grim. She nodded, picked up her beer, and poured most of it down her throat. “We go to the hospital,” she said. “Get your Lisa and bring her home.” She stood up. Emma took one last swallow of her wine and got up to follow.
It was hot outside — high in the eighties long after midnight, hot as summer even though it was still early in the spring.
When they got to the hospital service door Mama Estrella told Emma to wait and she’d go in and get Lisa. Emma wanted to say no, no, I’m going home I’m going to mourn my girl in peace, but she lost the words before she could speak them, and where she should have turned and run she stood at the service door shivering despite the heat, wishing she were someplace else, anyplace else at all. . . .
But she wasn’t anywhere else. She was outside that awful hospital, waiting and waiting in the too-quiet night. She raised her head to look up at the sky and saw the full moon, and it looked so wrong. And it was wrong — it shone bright as bone china on star-shot black cloth where most nights the city moon is pale and wan, where the city’s lights diminish the stars in the sky until they vanish in the greyness of the night.
Even the steamy air was silent, as though it knew a secret too terrible to hide.
Twice as Emma waited men came out the door carrying red plastic bags of garbage from the hospital. Once Emma heard a siren, and she thought for a moment that somehow she and Mama Estrella had been found out and that the police were coming for them. But that was silly; there were always sirens sounding in the Harlem night.
After twenty minutes the service door opened again, and it was Mama Estrella carrying poor dead little Lisa with her skin so pale, her eyes so hazy white with death. . . . It was too much.
“You okay, Emma?” Mama Estrella asked. She looked worried.
“I’m fine, Mama Estrella. I’m just fine.” That was a lie, but Emma tried to make it true.
“We need to get to my car,” Mama Estrella said. “We need to go to the graveyard.”
Mama Estrella kept her car in a parking garage around the corner from the San Juan Tavern.
“I thought we were going to take her home,” Emma said.
Mama Estrella shook her head. She didn’t say a word.
Among the Saint Francois Mountains
Of Southeastern Missouri
August 1938
When the sky was quiet the Lady who some people call the goddess who repented closed the Eye and sealed it shut. Then she set it back into its place above the great wide river, and looked on it, examining her handiwork.
When she looked on it she had a vision that chilled her to the bone.
She saw a vision of the world, the Eye, and Hell; she saw hateful ardors growing in the breasts of innocents, and breeding everywhere inside the hearts of men and women.
Our Lady of Sorrows cried when she saw that vision. She cried because the people are dear to her, and precious — but she did not turn away from it. She knew she didn’t dare.
When the vision was done she shuddered and sobbed and ran to the arms of the great King, partly for comfort, partly for succor, and partly too because he and his fate were terrible keys to the vision.
She found him in his Mansion high upon the Mountain, sitting in his study where a roaring fire burned inside the great black stove. She found the Right and Left hands of the Lord, Dismas and Gestas, in his study with him, offering their counsel.
The Lady ignored them. She went to the King and shed her tears upon his shoulder until her heart could cry no more. Then she said, “I had a vision, King — a terrible terrible vision.”
The King held her close, and rubbed her softly near the spine. “I saw a glimmer of it too,” he said. “Your sorrow reflected on the jewel.”
The jewel he meant was a tiny simulacrum of the Eye of the World that hung from a leather cord around his neck. The Lady gave that to him not long before he died; he never removed it under any circumstance.
“I saw my handiwork undone,” she said. “I saw the Eye would break three times. Once now when I have sealed it;
once again when that seal wears away. I saw a way to remake it then — but the only way will cost the world its soul. And even then the binding will not hold! I saw you and yours, everything that we hold dear, cast into the deep pit of oblivion. And no matter how that price was paid, the Eye still broke again. The world will fall into corruption, and then when no one can stand tall enough to stop it, damnation falls onto the world, unstoppably.”
The King, the Lady, and the good Hands of the Lord stood quiet after that for the longest time, mourning against the destiny that lay before them.
“If I’m going in the pit, I’ll go there unafraid. But I won’t go without a fight. Is there any hope? Is there nothing we can do to fight the dark?” the King asked at last.
The Lady shook her head. “Nothing. No hope at all! No matter how we rail against the darkness, it will consume us.”
And then it got quiet again. Until at last the Left Hand of the Lord spoke to them unbidden:
“You’re wrong,” he said. “There’s always hope, no matter how it may grow faint.”
The Lady arched an eyebrow; the King turned to face the Left Hand of the Lord, put a hand upon his shoulder, and spoke to him demandingly. “Tell me,” the great King said. “Tell me what you see.”
“Hope is a thing,” the Left Hand said, “that grows in the hearts of the faithful as they struggle to survive. No matter how they suffer it never abandons them.”
The great King laughed. “That’s an easy moral,” he said. “But I never seen a man come to good depending on rules without arrangements. Be forthright for me — tell me what to do.”
The Right Hand of the Lord shook his head. “The Lord helps those who help themselves,” he said. “Salvation is a thing that comes from the heart. No machination we could give you could ever salve the Eye.”
“Then what do you mean?” the Lady asked. “Riddles aren’t salvation, either.”
The Left Hand of the Lord sighed impatiently. “Look at the world,” he said. “Look into your hearts. Know the history and the mystery that’s gone before you, and make salvation where you find it. There isn’t any other way.”
And then the Hands were gone, disappeared as thoroughly as though they’d never sat beside the King.
When the air was still again the Lady said, “They always talk in riddles. I can make no sense of them.”
The great King nodded. “I can’t either,” he said. “But I’m going to try.”
With that he opened the door to the black iron stove, and fed three good hickory logs into the fire. Took his Hammer from its place beside the book case, and tuned it, adjusting the pegs that were made from bits of his own bones.
And then he played, long and loud and hard to charm a prophecy from the roaring fire. The prophecy it gave him wasn’t hope, exactly, and in most respects it made him grievously sad. But no matter how grim the news it gave him, it also gave a possibility, a shadow of a hope that grew out of the ashes like a free-bird come to season.
And no matter what it cost him, the great King took that vision to his heart. And faced the doom it made for him.
Spanish Harlem
The Present
Emma took Lisa’s body from Mama Estrella and carried it to the garage. She cradled it in her arms so carefully, so lovingly — in her imagination the corpse was Lisa, alive and sleeping soundly, her beautiful delicate head resting on Emma’s shoulder. When they reached Mama Estrella’s car Emma stretched dead Lisa across the back seat and lingered above her for the longest while, savoring the sight of her. After a moment she stooped, kissed the dead girl’s forehead, squeezed her cold limp hand.
Closed the back door, got in the front passenger seat, and watched Mama Estrella ease the car out of its parking space, out of the garage, onto the city street. She kept thinking of all the beer, and how drunk Mama Estrella had to be, but there was no sign of drunkenness in her driving. Just the opposite, in fact: she handled the car with a sureness most sober people can’t manage when they’re navigating Harlem.
She drove quickly, too — twenty minutes after they’d left the garage they were out in Brooklyn, driving through the cemetery’s broken gate, past great grandiose monuments that crowded one another in columns without order, like unearthly soldiers run riot. They cast long shadows underneath the full-bright moon.
Emma knew those shadows hid the worst sins in the world.
She didn’t like that place, not one damn bit. She didn’t like bringing her precious little girl into it, either. There are things, Emma thought, that even a dead child ought never have to see — and maybe she was right. But by the time Mama Estrella’s five-year-old Escort rolled into that cemetery, Lisa had seen worse things already.
And worse things still lay ahead of her.
Mama Estrella drove half a mile through the cemetery’s twisting access roads, and then pulled over in front of a stand of trees. “Are there others coming, Mama Estrella? Don’t you need a lot of people to have a ceremony?”
Mama Estrella scowled. She shook her head and lifted a beer from a bag on the floor of the car, opened the can and took a long pull out of it.
“You wait here until I call you, Emma,” she said. She got out of the car, lifted Lisa from the back, and carried her away.
After a while Emma noticed that Mama Estrella had started a fire on top of someone’s grave. She made noise, too — music, almost. Chanting, banging, shuffling her feet like a bluesman keeping time. There were other sounds, too, sounds that weren’t music or even counterpoint. Emma recognized those noises, but she couldn’t remember what they were, no matter how she tried. Then she heard the sound of an infant screaming, and she couldn’t help herself anymore — she got out of the car and ran toward the fire.
By the time Emma got to the grave, it looked like Mama Estrella was already finished.
When she saw Emma she got annoyed. “You shouldn’t be here,” she said, scowling.
“I thought I heard a baby screaming,” Emma told her.
She stepped away from Lisa for a moment, looking for something on the ground by the fire, and Emma got a look at her daughter. Lisa wasn’t breathing, but her eyes were open, and as Emma looked at her she blinked.
Emma’s heart lurched.
Lisa. Alive.
She could see Lisa was all empty inside, like a shell pretending to be a little girl, but even so Emma wanted to cry or pray or sing or something, anything. She ran to Lisa, grabbed hold of her and sang into her dead cold ear. “Lisa, Lisa, my darling baby Lisa.” When her lips touched Lisa’s ear it felt like butchered meat, but all the same she cried wet tears of joy.
As she cried her tears fell onto Lisa’s face, into her eyes. And after a moment Lisa reached up to wrap her arms around Emma, and she said “Mama,” in a voice that sounded like dry paper brushing against itself.
Emma heard Mama Estrella gasp behind her, and looked up to see her standing over the fire, trembling. “Something’s inside her,” Mama Estrella said.
Emma shook her head. “Nothing’s inside Lisa but Lisa.” Emma was sure. A mother knew these things. “She’s just as alive as she always was.”
Mama Estrella scowled. “She shouldn’t be alive at all,” she said. “It isn’t good, a soul alive in a dead body.” She frowned. “Her soul could die forever, Emma.”
“What do you mean?”
“It isn’t right,” Mama Estrella said. “We need to put her back to rest.”
Emma felt herself flush. “You’re not going to touch my baby, Mama Estrella. I don’t know what you’re thinking, but you’re not going to touch my baby.”
“Emma —”
Emma pulled her daughter away. “Damn you, woman!” she said. “Damn you straight to hell!”
Mama Estrella gaped at her. Emma thought she was going to say something, or do something, or — something. But sh
e didn’t. She didn’t say a word, in fact. Didn’t so much as move a muscle.
After a moment Emma took Lisa’s hand. “Come on, child,” she said, and she led Lisa out of the graveyard, out through Brooklyn, back toward Harlem and their home. It was a long, long way — longer than Emma would’ve imagined back in the cemetery when she’d walked away from Mama Estrella and her car. Lisa never complained about the distance, but a mile after they’d left the cemetery Emma began to worry about her walking that far in nothing but her bare feet, and she took the girl in her arms. After that she carried Lisa most of the way to Fulton Street, where Emma hailed a livery to drive them home.
When they got home, Emma put Lisa to bed, even though she didn’t seem tired. It was long past her bedtime, and God knew it was necessary to at least keep up the pretense that life was normal.
Twenty minutes after that, she went to bed herself.
Marlin, Texas
November 1948
Blind Willie Johnson died ten years after Robert Johnson broke the Eye of the World. He died of pneumonia quietly and humble in the same Marlin Texas hovel where his mother had borne him. When he was gone his wife called on the men from the burying ground to take him and put him in the soil.
For three days he rested still as stone in the Texas dirt, dead as any deadman waiting for the Second Coming.
And then Peetie Wheatstraw came for him.
He paid the gravemen good money to dig with shovels — hard, slow, careful work that lasted hours where the backhoe could have dragged the coffin up in the time it would have took to soften up a wad of chaw.
Peetie Wheatstraw had good reason to be careful.
When the gravediggers’ shovels scraped Blind Willie’s coffin, Peetie Wheatstraw made them stop, change tools, and clear the remainder with garden spades.
