Ramadan Ramsey

by Louis Edwards

  When they stepped onto the curb in front of Café du Monde, Ramadan realized he was strong enough to help lift his grandmother the few inches to the sidewalk. The warm river breeze moistened his face, as he blushed with pride. They were a couple as filled with romance as the city itself. Years from now, remembering their final weeks together, Ramadan would think of Mama Joon as his first great love, just as she realized at this moment, with absolute certainty, that he was her last.

  They walked to the top of the levee, where they sat on a bench watching the water and its traffic flow.

  “Mama Joon, did you know you and me, we both say Ah!?” Little-boy grammar was one of the last vestiges of childhood, which he could sense being devoured by time. So he indulged in it as a means of self-preservation. If you could pick your wobbly grandmother up, maybe things were moving too fast. A weak tongue told the world maybe you weren’t quite ready. No one, not even you really, had to know your language was a lie.

  “You and me, Ramadan? Really, son? I didn’t teach you how to read my own damn self and I don’t pay good money for you to go to that fancy school to have you walk around talking like that.”

  “My school is free.”

  “Boy, nothing is free. I pay my taxes, don’t I? And they pay for that magnet school.”

  “Okay, you and I . . . Did you ever notice how we both say Ah!? Whenever we see or hear something special, like a surprise, we go Ah! What’s up with that?”

  “I never noticed,” she said, telling a half-lie.

  “You didn’t?” he asked, doubtful that he was more perceptive than she.

  “Well, I know you do it,” she said.

  “You did it today in church.”

  “I did?”

  “Mmm hmm. While Father was giving his sermon. Look . . .” He pulled out his phone and showed her one of the photographs.

  “Oh, yes! Jesus!” Her head fell back, as she replayed the priest’s words, which had seemed meant especially for her. The body doesn’t last forever. No—that wasn’t it. Not “the body.” He hadn’t been that blunt. What was it? She brought her head down, opened her eyes, and the river jogged her memory. The current state! That’s how he had phrased it. Well, hell, he had been pretty prosaic after all, only now that she was looking at the river flow, his words acquired a bit of poetry. The current state—that’s what didn’t last forever. The current state!

  “Ah!” she said, to concede Ramadan’s point.

  “See—there!” he said. “Just like that! Where does that come from?”

  “I must get it from you.”

  “That’s what I was thinking! But how? You ever heard of something called ‘evolution’?”

  “Boy.”

  “Well, we learned in class that evolution works the other way around. You’re my ancestor, right?”

  She looked at her grandson, who was almost eye to eye with her on the bench. “Hmph. Pretty much.”

  “So then I’m supposed to get stuff from you.”

  “Well . . . Mr. Darwin didn’t know everything. Life is a back-and-forth between people. Just like this conversation we’re having. I’m getting stuff from you and you’re getting stuff from me. I’m saying things to you without even saying them.”

  She had said that because she knew she would never be able to say what she wanted to tell him—about the impermanence of the current state and all. She would have to find another way. “Are you paying attention to me?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “All I know is . . . I never said Ah! before I met you.”

  “You probably did. You just don’t remember.”

  “Nope. Never did.”

  She put her arm around Ramadan and said, “Look at all those boats and ships.”

  “Where do you think they’re going?” he asked. It was his turn to lean into her a little, not for physical support, but for intimacy.

  Thank you, Lord! she thought. He would make it easy for her. “That’s a great question,” she said. “I think they’re going wherever it is they’re supposed to be. Some are coming in . . . and some are going out.”

  Ramadan scanned all of the river within view. “I like the ones going out.”

  “You know what? I do too.” She sighed and said, “Sooner or later, we’ve all gotta go somewhere.”

  “I know. Like after the storm, when we went to Texas.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Let’s go somewhere together!” he said, bouncing up and down once on the bench. “Not the whole city this time—just you and me.”

  She laughed, and they cuddled. Maybe they could take a little trip someplace. The doctor she had finally forced herself to visit the week before last had told her she might have two or three decent months. She thought of Ramadan without her, and powerlessness seized her. There was no way to console from the grave. Or maybe there was—who knew? But you couldn’t count on the long shot that was divine intervention. Surely God had his hands full managing the mounting dead. The living were likely on their own. What were people thinking! She’d have to do for Ramadan what she could now. Compassion made her say, “Okay, let’s go. Just you and me. Before the storm this time.”

  “What storm?”

  She just squeezed him and said, “So where should we go?”

  “Somewhere far, far away. Like Miss Bea said. The other side of the world!”

  “Ramadan—” she cut him off. She hadn’t heard him use that phrase in a long time, but she knew what he meant. That damned Clarissa! She had done this to him. Whatever she had said to the boy in some hissy fit of jealously and greed had put this insidious father fixation in him. Daddy lust! Wasn’t a woman’s passion for a man enough trouble for this world? Did a child really need to become psychologically entangled with a creature as deft at distancing himself from such relations as he was at creating them? Hadn’t Clarissa’s own life taught her anything about the male menace? Menace. There they were: reflected in a word capturing them at their all-too-prevalent worst. Oh, there was no shortage of other incidental descriptors: maniacal, mendacious, malevolent. Clarissa’s violation of the matriarchal code was unforgivable. And now Ramadan was cursed to pine for something as unreliable, mysterious, elusive—invisible—as a man! All because Clarissa wanted things she couldn’t have: Mama Joon’s money; the deed to the house; the affection her mother lavished upon her sister’s son. Oh, but if Clarissa only knew what her own father had thought of her, she might not have been so cavalier about unsettling their mama-centric household. Mama Joon had never been so cruel as to subject Clarissa to Judge Dumas’s harsh conclusion about how her origins had tainted her very existence. (It was in that Valentine’s Day letter—the one he’d signed Love, Manny—a missive as forceful in its repudiation of Clarissa as it was in its glorification of Alicia.) But the proof of his indictment seemed to rest in the apparent darkness of Clarissa’s nature.

  “You know I don’t know where your daddy is,” Mama Joon said.

  “I know,” Ramadan said. “But Aleppo is just six thousand, seven hundred and twenty-two miles from New Orleans.”

  “Aleppo? How do you know that?”

  He held up his iPhone.

  “Hmm . . . Syria. You know, there’s a war going on over there, boy? Did your phone tell you that?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He pouted. “Okay . . . then let’s go as close as we can get to Syria.”

  “And where would that be?”

  “Turkey. It’s right next to Syria.”

  “Turkey? Ha—You say ‘turkey’ to me and I start preheating the oven!”

  “Mama Joon!”

  “Three hundred and fifty degrees . . .”

  “No. Turkey! Like, the Ottoman Empire.”

  “You say ‘ottoman’ to me and I wanna put my feet up!” She leaned back on the bench and stretched her legs straight out. They laughed until she started coughing.

  “But seriously—Istanbul is just six thousand, one hundred and seventy-five miles away!”

  “R
eally? That’ll save us a whole, what, six hundred miles off that Aleppo trip.”

  “Almost—five hundred and forty-seven,” he corrected her. “Your math is not what it used to be.”

  “Oh, no, mister?”

  “I mean, three hundred and fifty degrees to bake a turkey, Mama Joon? I thought three twenty-five was better.”

  “Well, it is—if you got that kinda time.”

  “Right. Three twenty-five takes longer.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I guess it all just depends on how hungry you are.”

  “Everything depends on how hungry you are, Ramadan. Remember that.”

  He looked at her and said, “Okay. I will.”

  “And you are hungry for Turkey,” she said. “Well, we’ll see about all this.”

  “We need passports,” Ramadan said firmly.

  Mama Joon let the mood of metaphor that had settled upon them hold sway. Anything could be something else. The cathedral’s tallest spire was a boy’s future. A country was a holiday feast. A leg rest could conjure the majesty of an empire. She could tell Ramadan what was happening without actually telling him. On some level, he would know. Maybe already knew. The impermanence of the current state. A boat moving downstream, she was one of the ones heading out. She didn’t have time to slow-cook a Butter Ball!

  “I’ll get you your passport, Ramadan,” she said. Then she added with resignation, “I already have mine.”

  * * *

  AS MAMA JOON was in the last phase of going out, Ramadan stood alone beside her hospital bed looking down at her as she slept. He saw no bloody forehead this time, felt no shock that one day she would die. During the six weeks of her decline, he had conceded that certainty. The day was here. No, no blood now. But still, he had ridden her too hard, put too much weight on her, until she had bent over and banged against something harder than glass. And this time she had cracked.

  “I killed you,” he murmured.

  On some level he knew better, but now that he had spoken the words, they rang true. So he said them again. “I killed you.”

  Suddenly Mama Joon’s eyes opened wide, and he jumped back. “Ah!”

  She smiled at his reaction, and with wonder—she was yet alive.

  “If you killed me, then how come I’m still here?” She had no idea what had made him say what he’d said, but he needed consoling. “Come here.”

  As he moved closer, his guilt begin to fade. She always had this effect on him, had always helped him escape his demons. Her embrace had been his refuge, a womb in the world. Now she was straining to open her arms to him, and he took two quick steps and fell onto the bed, sinking, one last time, into what was left of her. She moaned from the impact to her sternum, which, having gone to gristle, practically contoured to the shape of Ramadan’s head. She was full of enough medication that the dull ache from being pillowed in this way was to her just another indication she was really leaving. The laughter she used to feel rippling out of him and into her when she tickled away his fears was sobbing this time. But, as if in testament to all that had ever passed between them, Ramadan’s rhythmic heaving massaged her, placating the last of her pain. Surely she was entering another realm, transforming, because she could feel him, but not his emotion. Twin angels, the morphine and the morphing, were ushering her onward, telling her what to whisper to numb Ramadan’s anguish and aid his transformation.

  “Don’t be afraid. It’s going to be all right. You will be big and strong. But remember this, the world is stronger than you are. If you know a storm is coming, leave. Evacuate! Don’t do like I did for the big storm. You and I, we almost lost each other. Don’t you lose yourself.”

  Ramadan, eyes moistening, tried to speak. “I—”

  But she wasn’t in a listening mood; she didn’t have time. “The next time a storm is coming—and believe me a storm is gonna come—you get on the first thing smoking and worry ’bout the rest later, you hear me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Mama Joon is leaving you enough money to go wherever you want to, and then come back when the coast is clear. Or—or never! Or just whenever you good and ready. You hear me, baby?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Oh, and let me tell you, Mr. Ramadan, you are going places! You are going to go places. You understand me?”

  His tears kept coming. Not because he was going anywhere—but because Mama Joon was.

  “You are going to go far. In life. That’s what I mean. Just like Miss Bea said—and when you get to Istanbul, I’ll be there with you.”

  She let out a loud laugh, and he raised his head and stopped crying.

  “What?” he asked, staring into her aura, all that was really left.

  The jokes she had made when they had sat by the river talking about taking a trip together came back to them, and they both said, “Turkey!”

  Their last laugh together subsided quickly. He fluffed her pillows, she closed her eyes, and her head fell back. In her mind, she saw herself, Ramadan, a Thanksgiving banquet, and a great big ottoman in the sky.

  * * *

  IT WAS TOO late now—but something was bothering Mama Joon as she lay dying. Something she had left undone. Something for Ramadan. Something important. And she had done so much to prepare the way forward. Spent hours and hours with him in the kitchen teaching him how to cook, so that he could feed himself when she was gone. Secreted away the money. Willed him the house.

  The attorney managing her affairs would take care of any legal or financial issues that came up. Wilfred Dumas. Yes, Judge Dumas’s son, his one legitimate child. Little Willie knew nothing of his extended family, his half sisters, the dead Alicia and the deadened Clarissa, but Mama Joon had practically raised him, too. After his mother had died when he was eight years old, he had latched on to her. She had been the beneficiary of his need to exercise his motherless muscles. His extreme animalism had fascinated her, so different from Clarissa, who was just a couple of years older than Willie. But his affection, as it grew about her, also had the suppleness of tendrils. Their attachment, while not biological, acquired a botanical quality. His hugs dug into her more deeply, as if he was seeking to reconnect with the very taproot of life itself, searching for the nutrients he needed to survive and to grow. It was Willie who had turned her into a cliché, an “earth mother.” It was Willie who had made her long to nurture a boy of her own—Willie who had tilled her for Ramadan.

  He had taken to calling her “Mama.” Not “June.” Not “Mama Joon.” Just “Mama.” Which, coming out of the mouth of a little white boy, sometimes startled even her. (When she had first shown up, unannounced, at his small but swanky office downtown on Baronne Street a few years ago and was confronted by his receptionist with a heavy dose of “you need an appointment” attitude, Willie had swung in through the front door on his way back from lunch, thrown his arms open to her, and yelled, “Mama!” The rude young woman had gulped and, much to Mama Joon’s satisfaction, spilled the bottle of pink nail polish she’d been dipping into.) Willie was the only person who called her that. The only one she allowed to. She had resisted it at first. But he had been so lonely, and she harbored such guilt about her affair with his father and their betrayal of his actual mother that she had acquiesced. With her family, and anyone else, for that matter, she insisted on the “Joon,” in an attempt to keep herself whole. To be specific, not generic. Not homogenized. To be just “Mama” was a diminishment. But with Willie, it felt like retribution. Every time he called her “Mama,” it felt like she was paying an installment on a debt.

  Yes, Willie had set up everything for Ramadan—both emotionally all those years ago, and now administratively. He had written her will, and notarized it. Ramadan would inherit everything. Everything. Clarissa would technically be his guardian, and in exchange for that, she could live like the queen of her half of the double. Free to reign there for the rest of her pitiable life. But not free to reign over Ramadan.

  “You understand?” she
had asked Willie. “Everything belongs to Ramadan.”

  “I understand.”

  He had made all the financial arrangements, created some kind of a “trust.” She loved the sound of that. And he had gotten Ramadan an American Express card for his living expenses, which Willie would pay off monthly, as needed.

  “Ramadan can use this for anything he wants, anything—and for emergencies.”

  “Yes!” Mama Joon was looking at the stylish green card Willie had placed in her hand. Seeing “Ramadan Ramsey” embossed in the lower left-hand corner and the roman warrior in profile in the middle of the card made her smile.

  “A gladiator,” she said.

  “Yeah, it’s a good logo,” Willie said, organizing some papers for her signature.

  And last month, Willie had gotten Ramadan the passport she had promised him, but that she would not live to see him use. Willie had insisted on getting her one, too—ha! She hadn’t told him how sick she really was. He had assumed she was just planning ahead. If she had been half as diligent about attending to her health as she had become about securing Ramadan’s future, she might have lived another twenty years.