Ceremonies

by T E. D Klein

  The teacher clapped her hands for attention. 'All right, let's review the combinations we learned last time.' For this part of the instruction the class moved onto the polished wooden floor in ranks of four across, following the teacher's moves while a disco beat, louder than before, now rocked the room. The steps were familiar to Carol from her Tuesday-night class and she was good at them; although she would be learning nothing new, she was pleased to be singled out several times for demonstrating the correct form. 'Watch the redhead,' the teacher said more than once; it took Carol a moment to realize the woman meant her. As she danced, twisting her torso and letting her arms swing free, she watched herself reflected in the mirrors on the one side and the glossy blackness of the windows on the other. She liked what she saw.

  With twenty minutes still to go the teacher switched cassettes again, the disco music giving way to a reggae group Carol had never heard before. Once more the volume was raised; the rhythm grew faster and harder to resist.

  'All right, people,' said the teacher, 'it's time for improvisation. Back against the wall in groups of four, and come out when I call you.' Dividing up the class, she motioned for the first group to come forward. Improvising was something Carol had never done before; immediately her pride gave way to nervousness, as if she'd been asked to speak in public on a topic yet to be announced.

  Still, the music was persuasive; she found herself tapping her foot and rocking her hips to the beat while watching the first group of four women take the floor. 'Get in tune with your bodies,' the teacher called, without noticeable effect. 'Don't watch anyone else. Just let your body follow the music, let it come naturally.' Only one of the four was any good, Carol thought, a haughty-looking dark-haired girl who tossed her shoulders and shook her head as if she were actually on some Caribbean beach surrounded by a dozen obliging black men. Carol wondered what she was going to do when her turn came.

  'Next four,' the teacher called, and two women and two of the young men stepped forward, the previous group having retreated back to the mirrored wall. 'Don't watch anyone else, I said,' the teacher cried a little testily at the two men, who seemed to be blithely dancing with one another. 'Close your eyes if you have to.' The four did so, with predictably awkward results.

  A gesture from the teacher indicated that Carol and her group would be next. At the woman's command they moved out onto the floor, Carol, two older women, and the remaining man. 'Close your eyes,' the teacher said, 'and feel the music. Let it move your body.'

  Carol tapped her foot self-consciously, trying to do what the woman had advised; but though she liked the music, it was nonsense to think that it could really move her. It wasn't fair, she told herself; she'd never wanted to be a choreographer.

  It occurred to her, suddenly, that she might do the Mutamentos, the Dance of the Changes she'd practiced two nights ago. It was a slower, more sinuous dance, and didn't really go with the lively black music she was hearing, but it consisted of only nine simple movements, and if she did them in the right rhythm she might be able to fill up the time till the next group was called out.

  Shutting her eyes, she tried to remember. There were two different spins, and a side step and a back step…

  Yes, that was it, she'd got it now; the trick was remembering the odd movement of the hands, and where it came. It felt strange to be doing a folk dance here in class; she wondered if she looked foolish. No doubt the other women would be performing some wildly expressive modern dance routines or some reggae steps they'd picked up. Hoping the teacher didn't think the less of her, she opened her eyes.

  She found herself facing the mirror, the teacher's image reflected in the glass. For some reason the woman looked amazed; she was staring back and forth between Carol and the two other women, her eyes growing progressively wider. Carol sneaked a glance at the others and gasped: they too appeared to be performing the Changes. Their eyes were shut tightly; they looked rapturously happy. The man, eyes also shut, was a little way off, doing disco numbers by himself.

  Carol felt somewhat chagrined; obviously the two women had cheated. They'd opened their eyes while hers had been closed and had copied Carol's steps. Perhaps they meant to mock her; perhaps they hadn't known what else to do.

  Looking back toward the teacher, Carol saw that, if anything, the woman's astonishment had increased – for she was now staring at the man. Carol whirled to look at him. He too was performing the folk dance, keeping time with her and the others, though his eyes, at the moment, remained closed. It isn't fair! Carol thought, suddenly indignant. This was her dance, and the others were imitating it.

  The four of them, in fact, were moving in unison now, pounding the wood floor with their feet at the same time, spinning at the same time, the others with their eyes shut tight, the huge room echoing to the sound of their feet. It was almost uncanny. She noticed with embarrassment that the bulge in the young man's tights had grown larger, and wondered who in the class had aroused him.

  Just then the teacher stepped forward. 'Did you people rehearse this?' she cried. 'You've got it down pat.' Without giving anyone time to answer, she signaled for the final group to take the floor.

  The other three moved back toward the mirrored wall, but Carol, lagging behind them, found it hard to stop dancing; she was still caught up in the rhythm. Dimly she heard the others talking. 'I just did what the music told me to do,' the young man was explaining to his friends. She noticed in the mirror that the four new women seemed to have picked up the dance merely by watching their predecessors: they too were performing the Changes now, and in the same perfect unison.

  She wanted to speak to them, to ask them how they'd learned the dance so fast, but she was too busy watching her reflection, watching her hips jerk, her head toss, the motions of her hands – when suddenly, with a crack like a gunshot, her image in the mirror splintered into thousands of pieces. There was a crash at her back. She turned to see one of the tall windows shatter and fall. Someone shouted; behind her the crowd was backing away from the shards of broken mirror. Abruptly the four dancers stopped and opened their eyes, staring at one another in confusion. The teacher hurried over to the tape and shut it off.

  'Maybe some kid with a slingshot,' she heard one of the men say.

  'Is it a sniper?' someone cried. Women screamed and retreated toward the doorway. Carol followed, though even as she ran she wondered how a sniper could have done it. It had all happened so quickly… yet it seemed to her that she'd heard the window shatter an instant after the mirror had cracked.

  'I think we'd better call it a night,' the teacher said. The students followed her off the floor and into the locker areas.

  People were still talking excitedly about the incident as Carol dressed and moved toward the doorway. As she left the studio she saw the dance teacher in- conversation with a large black man in janitor's overalls. The two of them were standing at one side of the dance floor, pointing up toward the corner of the room near the ceiling where a complicated spiderweb of tiny cracks covered the heavy masonry. Carol hadn't noticed them before. As she walked past, she heard the man saying, 'We lost a window downstairs too.'

  She paused, nervous again. 'Is there really someone shooting out the windows?'

  The man shook his head. 'Naw, nothin' to worry about, lady. Ain't no sniper out there. The old place is just settlin' a little, that's all.'

  'Oh, what a relief.'

  Nonetheless, she was glad to get away; as she walked down the hall and the echoing stairway, she was sure she heard tiny cracking sounds.

  The night was clear and cool, with a panoply of stars. The others were already on the porch, their faces ruddy in the lamplight, when the Verdocks pulled up in their truck.

  'How is she, Brother Adam?' called Jacob van Meer, seated in his rocker as if it were a throne.

  Verdock shook his head. 'Not so good, I think.' He and Lise came up onto the porch and pulled up chairs. 'We must try to remember her in our prayers tonight. She'll need 'em.'

 
; 'We left Minna with her, to tend her till the morning,' said Lise. She was talking to everyone on the porch but, as was customary, directed her words to Elsi van Meer and the other women. 'Minna's made her comfortable, and she'll see to it the garden's looked after till Hannah's got her strength back.'

  ' If she gets it back.' It was Rupert Lindt, who had joined them that night and was taking up a good portion of the couch.

  'Now, now, Brother Rupert,' said Verdock, 'the Lord looks after those that keep the spirit.'

  The other shrugged. 'Maybe so, but the spirit and the body's got to part some day. I can't say much about Hannah's spirit, but her body's gettin' old.'

  Hannah Kraft was a widow of limited means and solitary habits whose health had been poor for decades, although never so poor as she'd painted it – at least not until now. Now, in her eighties, she seemed to be dying in earnest. The Verdocks had visited her earlier in the evening with their widowed daughter, Minna, and had left Minna there to spend the night with the old woman in the little three-room house off the back road.

  'She takes on something fierce about the weather,' Adam was saying. 'A good thing it's so mild tonight. She told Minna she can't get a wink of sleep anymore, what with the thunder and the rain.'

  'Well, Hannah will go on,' said Bethuel Reid, perhaps the closest to her in age. 'I remember – years ago, it was – when she wouldn't let you get a word in edgewise and you couldn't make sense of a single thing she said.'

  They nodded, all of them, but Lise Verdock raised her voice to add, 'She says there's noises pretty nearly every night now. A rumbling, she calls it, like something's moving out there.'

  'Well, sure,' said Bert Steegler, 'it just stands to reason, you stay down by the Neck and you're goin' to hear noises at night.'

  Van Meer looked skeptical. 'Oh, a few frogs, maybe, a whippoorwill or two. And maybe the Fenchel boys up to their usual mischief. But I trust you're not holdin' with all those stories about spirits.'

  'Well, maybe I am, maybe I ain't. All I'm sayin' is, there's holes in those woods, there's underground springs, there's pockets of gas in the swamp… Such things'll make a bit of noise, as I'm sure Brother Rupert remembers.'

  Lindt nodded, pleased to be singled out. He was the youngest man there, and the largest; he had a habit of saying disagreeable things, often in a booming voice, but these people had known him since his boyhood and tolerated his ways. Any time they needed help, they knew they could count on his strong shoulders.

  'I grew up near the Neck,' he said, 'and I know the sounds the swamp can make. But this time I ain't so sure. I've heard the thunder too, and it ain't the same. I think it's a sign. Just like all the snakes we've had this summer.'

  Van Meer paused in his rocking. 'What are you drivin' at?'

  Lindt shifted uneasily in his seat. 'All I'm sayin' is, let's look at what we got. We got us a new influence in the community – a snake in our bosom, so to speak – and I think you all know who I'm talkin' about.'

  'I follow you, all right,' said Adam Verdock, 'but I think you're makin' a mistake. I met the boy too, that day in the store, and I liked him all right. Seems to me he's got a good name, too; it honors the prophet.'

  'Or mocks him,' said Lindt.

  'I asked Sarr about him,' said Bethuel Reid. He drew deeply on his pipe. 'Sarr says he just reads books all day.'

  There was a round of head-shaking. Idleness was sinful when there was land to be worked.

  'Ever see the fellow's hands?' said Lindt. 'Soft as a baby's. Any fool can see he's never done a day's work in his life. Must have a lot of money stuffed in his pockets – like all those city people.'

  Reid nodded, glad he had no pockets of his own. 'Yep. That's their trouble.'

  Steegler nodded too, and grinned with a sidelong glance at Lindt. 'All I know is, he had some young woman out here the other week. He must be doin' more than just readin'.'

  'Well, you know those city folks,' said Lindt. 'They don't believe in marriage anymore.'

  Lindt's thoughts had turned more than once to Carol since he'd first seen her. He himself was married and unhappy; he spent little time with his wife and had come alone tonight.

  'And when they do get married,' he added, 'they don't stay that way for long. Some day, you mark my words, that city's gonna be smote with fire, like the Cities of the Plain.'

  There was a chorus of assent, with several abstentions.

  'Well, I spoke to Sarr about it,' said Verdock. "Tain't as if I didn't try reasonin' with him. I told him -1 said it just ain't proper, takin' a man's money and callin' him a guest. But Sarr, well, when he makes up his mind he's hard to change.'

  'That ain't it,' said van Meer. "Tain't proper to bring someone like that into our little congregation, someone who don't fear the Lord and don't know our ways.'

  'Our Rachel was talkin' about that just the other day,' said his wife. 'She says Amos don't want his children exposed to such people.'

  'I don't think it makes much sense to worry 'bout such things,' said Lise. 'Not now, anyways. All we can do is say our prayers, trust in the Lord, and keep watchful.'

  She waited for the amens, but they were slow in coming.

  Minna walked slowly from the kitchen, carrying a broad wooden tray whose hand-painted rose border had almost entirely peeled away. She ducked her head as she passed beneath the low beam of the doorway.

  'Here we are, Hannah. This'll get you off to sleep quick enough.'

  The old woman was sitting up in bed, her head turned toward the open window in the wall behind her. She didn't look around when Minna entered, and turned only when she felt the tray placed upon her lap, to stare fretfully at the bowl of oatmeal and the cup of steaming milk.

  A cool breeze blew through the window, bearing the smell of damp earth and summer leaves and almost masking the odor of sickness and decay that hung about the room. Insects wandered up and down the screen. Minna heard the night sounds of the forest, the sound of things calling to each other, the chant of the crickets and frogs.

  Scowling, the old woman tried a mouthful of the oatmeal and took a sip of the warm milk. Suddenly she slammed the mug down and shook her head.

  'No,' she said, waving away the food, 'I can't get to sleep! If it ain't one thing, 'tis another. First there's the thunder, it made my head ache – and now this! Tis too damned quiet.'

  Minna smiled stiffly. 'Quiet? With all that commotion out there? You just listen to those crickets for a spell and have yourself some o' that milk – there's honey in it – and you'll be sleepin' like a baby in no time.'

  'Hmph,' grumbled the woman. 'More like the dead!'

  She took a few more swallows of milk, then set the cup back down and turned around on the bed to stare once more out the window.

  'Watch out that don't fall now,' called Minna, pointing to the tray balanced precariously on the old woman's lap. Ducking through the doorway, she went into the kitchen.

  There were plates to wash. The little house had no running water, and Minna took the bucket that hung by the washstand and walked outside, down the front path to the pump. She gave the pump handle a few vigorous strokes, her arm strong as a man's. Above her a shooting star streaked across the sky.

  From the house came the crash of falling crockery. I knew it, Minna thought, cursing herself as she hurried toward the bedroom.

  Fragments of the shattered bowl gleamed amid a pool of oatmeal. The cup lay overturned on the rug. Minna noticed these things before she saw the woman twisted half off the bed – her mouth stretched wide, eyes bulging, hands clutched stiffly to her throat. From the gaping mouth came the last spasmodic moments of her death rattle.

  Minna was a strong girl and had seen death at close hand before. She did not scream. She jerked the woman by the shoulders, shook her, slapped the dead white face, listened for a heartbeat. There was none.

  'Dear Lord,' she whispered, 'take the soul of Sister Hannah to Thine everlastin' mercy. Amen.'

  Methodically she laid the body straight
upon the bed, pulled the blankets up over the face, and bent to clean up the shards of crockery, the spilled oatmeal and milk. Only then did she scream -when, lifting the overturned cup, she saw what had lain curled beneath it: the tiny white shape, thin as the finger of a child, coiling and uncoiling on the rug.

  Three A.M. The building is asleep. Outside, in the darkness, a chilly rain drums against the pavement. A streetlamp on the corner makes oily reflections in a puddle. Lampposts in the distance are obscured by mist.

  The lobby is deserted, the light dim. Barefoot, dressed in baggy shirt and pants and clutching his little bag of tools, he tiptoes down the stairway to the basement. The corridor winds before him like a maze, its turnings illuminated by bulbs in metal cages, its ceiling just a foot above his head, as if pressed down by the weight of the building. From somewhere comes the hum of huge machines.

  His teeth are out; his mouth hangs slack. The concrete floor is cold beneath his feet. He hurries past the steel-grey doors of the laundry room, the storeroom, the room where the superintendent keeps his mops and pails. Here it is at last, a battered metal door marked No Admittance. Impatiently he slips a strand of wire into the lock and gives it a twist. The door swings open.

  The room is dark; from the darkness comes the hum of a machine, louder than before. Reaching inside, he switches on the light. Beneath him, down a flight of iron steps, stands the furnace.

  It is huge. It fills the room like a monstrous metal tree, a vast tangle of pipes arching from its central core and spreading like branches across the ceiling.

  Shutting the door behind him, he rushes down the steps and crouches like a supplicant before it, emptying his tool bag on the floor. A screwdriver tumbles out, then a wrench, then a pair of thick asbestos gloves.

  It takes him but a minute to remove the boiler plate midway up the side. Within, the gas burns a bright and steady blue, and the roaring it makes is like a waterfall. The flame is not high now – in summertime the furnace only heats the building's water – but its force is still intense; as he lays aside the metal plate, his face is scorched by blasts of burning air. In the firelight, the black streaks on his skin look like a sunburst.