My transmission does a little hesitation and a lurch before it pops into third gear. It’s leaking fluid, too, and is the main thing that dissuades me from packing Luz and my scant trunkful of possessions in the Buick and heading out the next day toward some city picked at random. If Lou Nearing actually spotted me walking down the halls of Jackson pushing a records cart, and if he wants to come after me, say hello, talk about old times, it shouldn’t take him long to find me, and then what? No, more probably he’ll recall that I committed suicide. It was in all the papers. I wonder if Lou is still friendly with him. Maybe they call each other a couple of times a year. Hey, man, funny thing happened, I thought I saw Jane the other day in the hospital. And my husband would remind Lou that I was dead, but at the same time he would be thinking, triumphally, happily (if “happy” is still a word that applies), she’s alive. Because there wasn’t any body, which should have made him a little suspicious in the first place. On the other hand, if I were going to kill myself, for reasons he alone knew, he would have to figure I’d do it in a way that left no body for him to find?and use, in the various ways he must have learned. Immolation by fire. Drowning at sea. I chose a boat explosion and drowning, being a nautical person.
Or maybe Lou’s in with him. Maybe he’s the disciple. Maybe he killed that woman. I can’t think this way, or I’ll go mad. Madder.
Unpleasant times at the office today. Mrs. Waley tells me to push the records cart around again and I refuse to leave the Medical Records Office. Mrs. Waley is vexed. I say that it is the job of the messengers to carry records, and she points to the section of my job description where it says other duties as assigned, and I say that is only true of duties having to do with clerkship. She says in what she imagines is an intimidating voice, are you refusing a direct order, as if we were in the marines, and I put on an air of mulish obstinacy and repeat that I am not going out of the office anymore. As I do so, because I am so frightened of running into Lou Nearing again, I let Crazy Jane peek out from behind my eyes for a few seconds and I see the expression on her face change. She remembers that I am a bat and envisions a scene, maybe even violence, and she backs off, muttering about a written reprimand in my personnel jacket. I will have to bear it.
Later, Lulu and Cleo grab me in the file warrens, mad to know what the fuss was about. I tell them a version of the truth, that I don’t want to wander the halls because there’s a man I’m avoiding, someone who’s annoying me. They stare at me in amazement, and a look passes between them. A man? Dolores?
Later in the car thinking, Yes, drive to some anonymous city. Dayton. Boise. Indianapolis. Get a place to live and a meaningless job moving paper or electrons from one box to another, raise Luz, each day scratch another line on the wall, like the bearded prisoners in cartoons.
There are long shallow steps leading to the day-care center, and on one of these sits Luz in close conversation with a little blonde. She flickers a hand at me as I approach but doesn’t move. Their perfect cheeks are close together, dark as bread crust, pale as milk. I have a moment of faintness. A little unstuck in time for a moment there: I was thinking of my husband’s brown hand moving over my body, how happy I felt there at the beginning. Oh, it was love, true, but it was also a certain self-satisfaction, the world convulsed with the hallucination of race, and little Jane had beat it, gone beyond. I dig my nails into the palms of my hands and summon up a ghastly smile. But they are not watching me.
The blonde is Amanda, the new best friend, the subject of continuous commentary recently, a Talmud in pink sneakers. Luz has been to Amanda’s house, on Trapp Avenue in the good white Grove, the earthly paradise, and desperately does she want Amanda to come to her house. I had not anticipated this, I confess. I thought she would be as I am now, a solitary, the two of us for ourselves and no one else. But no, she is now a regular little kid, the insanity of her first four years has been put out with the trash, and now she wants Barbies and My Little Pony and pals.
A thin, elegant woman gets out of a silver Audi and comes over to the girls and me. She has big sunglasses pushed up on her hair, which is beautifully cut and a few shades darker than her daughter’s. She is wearing a fawn suit, and a peach silk blouse. She is something with an airline. The mister is a big-time lawyer. Julia Pettigrew is her name. Amanda runs to her and asks if she can go home with Luz, and Luz does the same to me. Mrs. Pettigrew looks at me kindly, the sort of patronizing look Dolores Tuoey deserves, the look saying of course I don’t mind if my precious goes in your horrible dangerous junker and visits your half-caste kid in your white-trash household, and I am far too liberal, and proud of it, to ever by word or deed imply that there is any objection to the association between our children. And in response I sort of shuffle and begin to shake my head negatively, so that Mrs. Pettigrew rescues me, as I knew she would, by saying, “Girls! Why don’t we go to Cocowalk and get an ice cream!” Cries of delight, the bribe effective, and “I’ll bring her back in a couple of hours.”
A couple of hours, good, that will give me enough time to pack my little box and my ugly clothes, and write a note, please take care of my little girl, and by the time they get there I can be in Vero Beach. The transmission will get me to Jacksonville and then I can take a bus. I can travel faster alone, dumb in the first place to take the kid. The ogga, grasping at the controls.
Later I sit in the car in my driveway listening to it tick. We are both troubled by transmission problems; like my Buick, I can’t get into gear. This happened after I left Marcel, too. It is hard to leave the Chenka. Impossible to find them if they don’t want to be found, but leaving is no simple thing either, especially in the spring, when everything turns to bog. I went with Marcel and a party of Chenka on their semiannual shopping trip to Ust-Sugoy. Kmart has not come to Ust-Sugoy yet, but you can buy salt there and tools and cloth if you have wool to trade. Marcel put me on the weekly boat that runs up the Kolyma River to the roadhead at Seymchan. My eyes slid off his face, there was a repulsion there, where once there had been attraction. He volunteered to leave his work and come with me, but I flatly refused, I think I even got angry with him, accused him of treating me like a child, of wanting to continue his control. Being a good modern girl I had reinterpreted the cosmic evisceration I had just gone through as personal growth! I need my freedom?I actually said that to him. Freedom, the one pathetic virtue of the Americans, that and honesty. I was disappointed in him, I said, being honest. I didn’t cry when the greasy old boat pulled away, but, now that I recall it, he did, the slow embarrassing tears running down his face.
At Seymchan, while one waits for one’s bus, one stays at the exclusive Gulag Hilton, a two-story structure in cracked and rusty concrete, where the rooms are little boxes without TVs, mini-bars, or windows. You get an iron bedstead and a mattress stuffed with felt and vermin and a twenty-watt bulb that turns off all by itself at ten. You can get kvass at the bar, though, and pepper vodka, which I did in some quantity. From Seymchan, it is a two-hundred-mile bus ride through the lovely Commie death camp district to Magadan, stopping for the evening at romantic Myakit. There was a hotel in Myakit, too, but it had burned down while I was in the field, and so we all stayed the night in the bus terminal. My fellow passengers were all Siberians and so the temperature in the cement-block building?maybe ten degrees of frost?did not trouble them. There was a red-hot stove going, and a boiling samovar, and there was ample vodka traveling around in a jolly enough manner.
I fell in with a Yakut family named Turgaliy, a man, his wife, and three children, two girls and a little boy. They had some bread, sausage, and tea, which they kindly shared with me, and I passed on a Bic lighter for Mr. T., and for Mrs. T. an almost-full purse spray of L’Air du Temps (oh, yes, I actually brought it along for my romantic idyll among the Chenka), and push-button ball pens for the kids. They also had a bottle of unbranded local vodka, which stood by me during much of the evening. We drank from little silver cups. I learned some doleful, droning Yakut songs and passed out singing.
And awoke in my sleeping bag, into which the Turgaliys had stuffed me, at dawn, to find myself in the middle of what appeared to be a nervous breakdown. The tiny little lady in the control room was baffled. The body refused to move. The vital levers and switches had been taken over by an ogga, a sad and frightened spirit, who thought that the best thing to do was to lie here in this cozy sleeping bag, zipped up over the head, until death intervened or the entropic curtain descended upon a universe grown terminally stale. I could see through my eyehole the Turgaliys moving about gathering their things. The children peered in, grinning, clicking their ballpoints like microcastanets. I heard the bus arrive, the worried pleading of the Turgaliys. They shook me, they attempted to uncocoon me, but I rolled into a ball and wept until they left. The bus pulled out, farting gaily. Silence. I had to pee. I staggered to the smelly hole provided, then back to the bag. It’s just the bag I’m in, I said to myself, or rather that is what the ogga said to the tiny little lady, and thought it very witty, a stopper. That’s just the bag I’m in, an old Fred Neil song it appears to know. I was clutching my notebook like a holy relic.
Some days passed. The daily bus pulled in and out. Someone went through my backpack, removing all valuables, then someone else removed the backpack itself. I stopped going to the hole to pee, but there was not much pee to pee anymore, since I had stopped eating and drinking.
Time went by. A shadow fell over my little blowhole. I opened my eye and there was Josiah Mount, my half brother. This was such a shock that for a moment, I regained control. I licked my cracked lips and formed the obvious “What are you doing here?” He said, “Don’t you know that if you stay in the bus station in Myakit long enough, everyone you ever knew in your life will walk by?” Always a kidder, Josey.
Marcel, through some unknown, but probably nonsorcerous, means, had caused an e-mail message to appear in my brother’s office describing my route and suggesting I might be in some serious trouble. My brother immediately chartered an airplane. He can do things like that because he made a remarkable amount of money in the telephone business; he claims to have invented the annoying dinnertime phone call asking if you want to switch your long-distance carrier.
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 Marche 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. Ulune 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 Ulune, 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 Ulune 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 Ulune 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. Ulune 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 Ife 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 crudites 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 captain’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.
It got worse as the night wore on; then we heard a horrible cracking sound, and the Kite seemed to leap forward and down, down, and then, incredibly, stop short, as if it had struck a stone wall. I slid forward in my straps and cracked my head painfully against the bulkhead. Then I seemed to be upside down, hanging from my bonds, looking down at the cabin ceiling, just inches from my face.
We had pitchpoled. The sea anchor had torn loose and we had shot forward, outpacing the waves, plunged our bow into the wave in front, and then, driven by the following wave, the boat had pivoted on her bow and turned over on her back. I can’t remember the rest. There were crashes and rending sounds, the crackle of wood smashing, the scream of tortured metal, and a sharp acid stench. The boat was breaking up. Another heave, we were upright again, and I heard my own voice screaming in my ears. I was beyond terror now, waiting for the water. Beyond this, I have no memory.
Then it was somehow dawn, the motion of the boat was easier, a mere ten-foot corkscrew, and we all untied ourselves and went out on deck. Both masts were gone, snapped off eight feet or so from the deck. The engine had torn loose from its mounts, the prop shaft was twisted, and worst of all, the batteries were smashed. We had no power, and no way to signal or, save by celestial navigation, to find out where we were.
My father seemed delighted with this predicament. At last he was back in the seventeenth century, an era far more true to his spirit than our own. Of course, we always sailed with a complete kit of hand tools, and so, by means of the most backbreaking, hand-ripping work I have ever done, we three cleared away the wreckage, skived and fidded the main boom to the stump of the foremast to make a jury rig, resized and rerigged the foremast gaff and boom to suit a scandalized gaffsail, set up the stays and shrouds for the new mast, shot the sun to determine our location (150 miles NNW of Bermuda) and set sail. I had never seen him happier. I hated him, and grumped about my tasks, and resented that he did not see I hated him. I hated myself more, for being a coward, for deserting God, and hated God for deserting me. I looked at Josey and saw that he knew what had happened to me, and I also knew we would never talk about it to each other or to Dad. Something loved was over, the saddest thing in the world.
He was singing “Flowers of Bermuda” over and over; and we both falsely played along with the merriment, because you would have had to have been a monster like Mom to crush that much boyish happiness, and neither of us was that bad. We even sang along on the chorus:
He was the captain of theNightingale
Twenty-one days from Clyde, in coal
He could smell the flowers of Bermuda in the gale
When he died on the North Rock Shore.
I suppose he would have liked to sail unobtrusively into Hamilton harbor and stroll into the yacht club as if nothing much had happened. My mother, however, had raised the alarm with her characteristic shrill energy, and so, as soon as the weather cleared, the air and sea were crammed with search planes and vessels. We were picked up seventy miles out and, over my father’s ferocious objections, put in tow back to the twentieth century, Hamilton, Government Dock, and my mother. She came running down the pier as we debarked from the coast guard cutter, ran up to my father, and slugged him in the mouth.
The sun sinks behind the city. We leave the lovely boat and walk back up the dock across the long shadows of the masts stretched across our path like bars. I pull a scrap of double-braided line from a waste barrel and I do some knots and string tricks for the amusement of my nondaughter, as my father used to do for me. In a few years, I will teach her to sail her first pram. Or not.
There will be no pram, Guitar is not Kite. Still, we both feel better for this, the healing power of salt water, or memory. We stroll back to the car, I make a turk’s head for her, and in my head comes And sure I could have another made, this in my father’s clear baritone, in the boatshop down in Dover But I would not love the keel they laid Like the one the waves roll over I’ll go to sea no more.p>
Later, getting ready for bed, Luz asks what flaky means and I ask her where she heard the word and she says that in the ice-cream parlor Betty Jean Stote came in with her mommy and Betty Jean Stote’s mommy asked who Amanda’s friend was “and that was me, Muffa, and Amanda’s mommy said who I was and she said my mommy was flaky. Is that like cornflakes?”
“Yes,” I say, and then she tells me she’s going to be in a play at Providence about Noah’s ark and I have to buy her a special clothes thing, but she forgot, but there is a note in her lunch box. I tell her I will look at it later. Then she says, “Amanda and me were playing princesses. I was a Pocahontas princess and Amanda was a fairy princess, because she has golden hair. Am I adopted?”
I swallow hard. “No, baby, you’re not.” Technically the truth. I could swear to it.
“Annie Williams is adopted from Korea. Is my daddy going to come and see us?”
“I don’t think so, baby.”
“Why not?”
“Because he died a long time ago.”
“He got sick and died,” she agreed. “But we could get a new daddy.”
“That’s right, we could.”
“Kids could get new daddies. Beth Weinberg has two new daddies. She’s so dumb. Me and Amanda hate her. Kids could get new mommies, too, couldn’t they? If their mommies get sick and die, or if they turn into witches.”
“Yes,” I say, my spine prickling, but the dreaded questions are not pressed home. She picks up the stack of books at the bedside, arranges them in order, and hands them to me. The first one is Are You My Mother? I read it with real feeling.
She goes out halfway through Goodnight Moon. Back in the kitchen I sit down at the table with my divination, and read through it several times. Ulune was a famous diviner as well as a sorcerer, an unusual combo, actually. It’s a little like baseball pitchers being good hitters, not impossible, but rare. Although Ulune’s clients were all believers, still they could not help but be astounded at the accuracy of his work. Typically, questioners don’t tell the Ifa diviner their questions. Ulune had to select the relevant verse from a number that related to the figure cast, and as far as I could tell he always chose the right one. In the present case, doing it for myself, I knew the question, but still this was a clear bull’s-eye. Okay, I won’t take a caravan to the north, check. It would be foolish to leave the farm right now. Check. Witches are definitely coming to carry off the eldest child, which is me, or maybe Luz, or maybe both of us. Check. My strength is no match for his, no question, check, especially if he is really going to go ahead and do the full okunikua. I get up and check the Providence Church calendar by the refrigerator. I have marked the date when that woman died in Overtown. If he is going for okunikua, I see, he will have to do the second sacrifice and eating in the next two days, or else wait for the dark of the moon again and start over. He won’t want to do that. The he is him. I no longer believe that it might be Lou or some other disciple. It’s him. Suddenly I am weak and weeping and nauseated. I stick my head between my legs until it passes.
Perhaps I should call the police. Hello, 911? Yes, I’m calling to report a murder that’s going to happen two days from now. The murderer is going to kill and eviscerate another pregnant woman. Who’s the murderer? My husband. He’s actually an African witch. That’s right. He’s doing it to accumulate power in his magical body, his fana. Should I spell that? Oh, if he gets it done he’ll be the witchcraft equivalent of a small thermonuclear bomb. Nobody’s done it in the longest time?it’s against the rules. All the Olo sorcerers agreed not to do it, like the test-ban treaty. Yes, that’s O-L-O. Am I crazy? Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I am. Thank you. Bye!
No, focus, Jane! No time for hysterics. I stop myself from shaking, and when I can drink tea without it sloshing out of the mug, I do so, and sit again at the table. You fear something, you adopt a host of ritual behaviors to keep it away, and when it comes you’re both more frightened than you imagined you could ever be and at the same time curiously calmer. It’s here, you have to deal with it. I have to stop him, and Ifa has given me the means, if I can just figure it all out.
A son with no fathers. A woman from a farm. A yellow bird. Thank you, Ifa. I have no idea what you’re talking about. Allies, maybe. You have to wait for magical allies to come to you. You can keep your eyes open, of course, but you can’t put an ad in the paper or treat it like a treasure hunt. Much of Olo sorcery consists of keeping your eyes open and waiting. I mean really open.
I can do the sacrifices tomorrow. Or … maybe I’m not reading this right. Does the “four are necessary” mean I have to wait until I’ve contacted the son, the farm woman, and the bird, making four with me? Or does it refer to the two pairs of birds? Then what about the cowries? And the escape by water? But I have to stop him, I can’t just escape. What’s that about? Was it really a sign that I was impelled to go down to Dinner Key and there find a boat that could have been the sister of the boat in which I faked my suicide, the Kite, my father’s pride and joy?
It’s too much right now. Dolores is too tired to cope. Maybe it’s time to lay her to rest. I would have to get another job. Work up my resume. I can hand, reef, and steer a sailboat by compass or stars. I can ride a horse. I can shoot a pistol, a rifle, a shotgun. I can butcher a deer, a duck, a fish. I can tie flies, fix cars. I know the alphabet cold. I can speak French, and get by in Yakut, Yoruba, Bambara, and Olo. I can do ethnographic research in library and field. I can do the fifth, fourth, and third kyu in aikido. I can do a few tricks of legerdemain with coins and little balls. I can detect magical emanations and perform some elementary sorcerous acts. I can foretell the future. Print up five hundred copies and mail it out.
Stripped for sleep, swinging in my hammock, I think, oh, my, Jane, back in the soup again. One good thing about Miami: if my excursion with Ifa lit up the m’doli, it’s unlikely that it stood out enough against the sort of continuous fireworks you get in this town. Eshu probably has a major substation dedicated to carrying messages to and from the Miami-Dade Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area.
And once again, I have to deal with the mystery of belief. I’m a scientist. I have a pretty good idea about what underlies the technology of sorcery, and it’s perfectly explicable in standard scientific terms. But Eshu and Ifa aren’t, not quite, even if you buy Roger Penrose’s notion that consciousness is at least in part a quantum phenomenon and partakes of a universe in which time’s arrow doesn’t always point in the same direction and precognition is as ordinary as changing an electromagnetic field from positive to negative.
That Marcel! At nearly every speech, someone would stand up and say, in a confused or a hostile voice, something like, “I don’t understand, professor. Are you implying that these spirits consulted by your sorcerers are real?” And Marcel would say, “Sir (or Madam), I say to you that I am a professor of anthropology, an empiricist, a materialist, a scientist, moreover a French scientist, the heir, if I may say so, of Descartes and Buffon, a member of the French Academy, and if you ask me if I believe in these spirits, of course I must tell you that I do not.” Here a marvelously timed pause, and then in a lower voice, “But they’re there.” Jane would miss him like crazy, were she alive.