by Tom Poland
He was right. She was beautiful and determined and the fountain of youth coursed through her.
“You knew Tyler would use the basket to find Lorie, didn’t you?”
“I figured she had to be sharp, knowing her daughter like I do. The basket, that was the thing. Sapelo grasses are special. Can’t find them nowhere else. Once she got here, I studied her. And there was no way, I’d tell her Lorie’s real name. Crystal just came to me, maybe because she was selling crystals. Crystal—sounds like a hooker or a stripper doesn’t it? I had to be sure her mom was a good woman, not some bitch. Lorie’s had enough crap already. If her mother had turned out to be mean, evil, or full of spiteful venom, I wasn’t going to let the two get together. Her mother’s all right though.”
“Well you’ve done it now.”
“Done what?”
“You’ve opened the door now. Tyler’s determined to take Lorie home.”
“Can’t happen. Her mother will understand.”
“That’s what you think. She’s relentless.”
“I’ll just bet you anything you want—too bad you don’t have another one of Mitchell’s knives—Tyler will end up staying here with me and the girl.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Lorie’s carrying my baby.”
“That’s even more reason for taking her back to civilization.”
“Not gonna happen. People have been birthing children on Sapleo for a long time. My house is big, big enough for her and the baby. She’s having the baby right here in the treetops like the beautiful little bird she is.”
He was right, of course. Midwives lived in the village. Had to. Coming into the world natural-like on a primitive island sounded better than being incubated in some sterile hospital like chicks destined for the slaughterhouse. Tyler would stay with her daughter and grandchild. I was happy for them both.
“Well, that’s one daughter accounted for,” I said. “Now if we can just do something to help my girl. You really believe in your powers, don’t you?”
“Sure. Your problem is you grew up believing a lot of nonsense. Didn’t you grow up hearing about the tooth fairy?”
“I used to find a dime under my pillow now and then.”
“And the Easter Bunny? Did you believe in it too?”
“Yes, Santa Claus as well, though he was the best by far.”
“What about God? Do you believe in Him?” asked Rikard.
I hesitated. Religion was something I didn’t discuss.
“Tell me,” he said, heavily as if his words held my girl’s fate. “Do you believe in God?”
“I believe in a flawed God. A perfect God wouldn’t send a little baby into the world with no legs.”
“I buy that. But don’t act like this is the first time you’ve questioned things. You’ve done it before … going against the grain, boy, and it’s a dense powerful grain, denser than ironwood. All your life you were taught to believe things no one could prove. Now you want to be sure Old Mullet Man can make your girl rise from her bed. You don’t know the truth anymore … you want some proof. Well, you ain’t alone. Where does fantasy end and truth begin? Do you believe in voodoo?”
“I have faith in you. Yes.”
“Do you have faith in my belief in the world’s natural ways?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I’ve seen you do things no man can do.”
“Good. Do you see yourself as part of nature or are you above it?”
“I came here to escape the city and technology. We think we’re invincible. We move mountains with giant machines. We make clouds drop rain. We dam rivers and make cool air when the land swelters, but there’s a lot we cannot do.
“We can’t control the wind. We can’t stop the tides’ ebb and flow. We can’t bottle sunlight nor can man come close to Methuselah Tree’s dignity. We cannot do a damn thing about the seasons. They come and go as always. Nature controls us. Just go with the flow. That’s the answer. So, yes I consider myself a part of nature, and if you say your voodoo spirits live in rocks, trees, and rivers, so be it. Who am I to dispute it?”
“Amen brother. Talk on. You’re seeing the light. See these hands?” asked Rikard, holding them up to a dark canopy that shut out the stars.
“I see them.”
“The forces of the universe run through these hands. Tonight, at midnight I will summon the high god Bon Dieu to awaken your girl.”
***
We dined, and everyone was happy. The wine flowed, as did the talk. Tyler and Lorie caught up on many things, including the letters Tyler had found, where Lorie had been these many years, and Keith, who was on his way to medical school. I was hopeful. At midnight, we’d try to awaken Brit and the magic gave me something to cling to.
After dinner, we went into the island dark to the edge of Rikard’s sanctuary where the slaves had dug away the earth. Between two ancient mounds of earth, Rikard built a pyre of dried grass, branches, and logs. The flames of a bonfire vaulted into the night.
“Now y’all sit still. Don’t say a word. I need to concentrate. Give me the agents.”
I handed Rikard the cell phone, bloodstained swatches, hair, Teddy bear, and vial of urine. He reached into his pocket and withdrew a red candle. Leaning into the fire, he lit the candle and wedged it between the Teddy bear’s legs.
“Now before I start, let me explain a big difference between Western medicine and voodoo. Modern medicine makes a big deal out of isolating the patient. Keeps ’em alone ’cept for visiting hours. Over there,” he said, sweeping his arm toward Africa, “when someone’s sick hundreds gather for a healing ceremony. The people know everything about the sick person. They care. They’re there for the afflicted and just the fact they’re there comforts the ill. Imagine a hundred people dancing, chanting to drums, going into trances to heal you. They know we’re all in this together. Modern medicine likes secrecy, throws jargon at you, keeps you in the dark. Voodoo ain’t like that.”
Rikard went over to the moat encircling his sanctuary and got down on his belly. He lay there as still as death before plunging his hand into the water. He came up with a squirming bullfrog.
“Bon Dieu needs sustenance … a small sacrifice. He works hard, stays hungry. This little manje—nothing but a snack—will please him.”
Using Mitchell’s knife, he decapitated the frog and threw the head and body into the fire where its amphibian blood sizzled. The body and head cooked and a sweet smell filled the night air.
“All right. Say nothing.”
Rikard fixed his gaze on the candle. His eyes widened reflecting twin flames. Holding the vial of urine unto the candle, he chanted in surprisingly good English.
“I see the great fire. I see my people. I see midnight’s blackness. I hear the fire crackling. I hear the singing insects. I hear the great breathing of the living world. I feel the fibers of my muscles contracting and expanding. I feel my bones and muscles touching, working, preparing to move me through my journey. I feel sparks running through my nerves and arcing across my brain.
“High god, Bon Dieu, we praise you. We see you as the supreme power. We offer you a sacrifice. Bon Dieu, you know there are no accidents in this life. You know the universe is all one. Everything affects everything. Everything has a reason. Nature knows it. You know it. We all serve as parts of one. We mirror each other’s souls. We move within the sacred cycle connecting the living and the dead.
“High god, Bon Dieu, we need to bring a loved one back from the sleep world. Here Bon Dieu is her beloved Teddy bear she long slept with. She sleeps with it no more, Bon Dieu. She sleeps with sickness. She lies in the city hooked to tubes and wires. Bon Dieu, you know that ain’t right. We need to bring Brit Watts from her trance. We know your powers, believe in you, and pay reverence to you.”
Rikard reached into his pocket and pulled a bag out. He sprinkled the bag’s contents over the fire and millions of sparkles floated toward heaven.
“B
on Dieu, here is the cursed phone,” which he held into the flames. “Bon Dieu, you know that trance is walking beyond, being possessed, walking beyond us, being taken over, being swallowed up. Being within, completely. Bon Dieu, you float within the trance world and know its secret passages. Bon Dieu I ask you. Cut a passage to the awakening,” he said cutting a slit into the abdomen of her Teddy bear where he put a lock of her hair in and sprinkled it with cayenne pepper. He held Ann’s phone over the candle, then burned the corners of both fabric swatches. Then he threw sea salt into the fire and cobalt flames danced within the orange and yellow conflagration swirling up from the logs.
“Bon Dieu, I honor the girl’s essence,” he said picking up the vial again. He opened it and wet his finger, making a cross upon his forehead.
“Bon Dieu, this girl’s life must run free like a river, a river of light not darkness. Release her life force.”
“Awaken her.”
As soon as the words left Rikard’s lips, he fell over and his body moved in fits, shakes, and jerks. Ecstasy covered his face. And then he slept. The fire crackled and we sat waiting for the priest to awaken.
When he did, he seemed a changed man, shocked, less confident. He regained his feet and walked over to me. His trembling hands reached for my face, where he held it between quivering fingers.
“Bon Dieu, her father needs her to awaken. Awaken her.”
He grimaced and fell away, rolling on the ground.
“No, no. You must let him know. I understand. I do. Yes. Bon Dieu you are all-knowing. All-knowing.”
Rikard fell asleep again, perilously close to the fire. Lorie and Tyler were holding hands. I got up to move to him, but Lorie made a sign and shook her head, “No.” She counted backwards from five …
“Four, three, two, one … wake up,” she shouted.
Rikard rolled over, moaning. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. He had the look of a drunk awakened before the drunkenness passes.
“Something is wrong. Bon Dieu said I waste his time.”
“What do you mean,” I said.
“I don’t know. Nothing like this has ever happened.”
“Is Brit still in a trance?”
“Bon Dieu keeps things in his world. Either she’s awake or she’s dead,” and having delivered this news, he turned and vanished into the dark toward the area where slaves had dug away the earth so many years ago. Heavy disappointment crushed me and I didn’t know what to make of any of this.
We went up into the canopy to sleep amid the nightlife and its swelling chorus of bedtime songs. Tyler and I stayed in a massive room with a four-poster bed complete with canopy and netting. She was ecstatic, though I could tell my failure to know anymore about Britt than before checked her ecstasy.
“I’m going to be a grandmother.”
“Yes. You sure don’t look like a grandmother to be. You and Lorie look more like twins. You really do.”
“Well, it looks like a family is coming together again. But you … I worry for you. I don’t know what to make of what we just witnessed, but I know one thing.”
“What’s that?” I said.
“I adore you.”
“I adore you, too. I hope Rikard will try again. We still have the ingredients, agents, or whatever they are. I just can’t talk about it right now but tell me something. How’d you know the salt would preserve Hines’s tattoo?”
“You should know. You grew up on a farm too. In the old days, you either smoked meat or packed it in salt. Either way, it lasts a long time.”
“Why didn’t you tell me the truth about this?”
“Cutting a man’s skin from his thing and packing it in salt isn’t exactly what you tell a man you’re attracted too, now is it?”
She had a point, all right.
Tomorrow I would check on the dog and make sure Mal’s money was safe. Tyler, I was sure, would stay with Lorie. Then, after going to camp, Rikard and I would try to find Mal.
Tyler and I slept in a canopy beneath a canopy amid the nightlife and its swelling chorus of bedtime songs but sleep didn’t come for a long, long time.
Toward dawn, a chopping-air noise east, somewhere near the Atlantic, awakened me.
Rikard knocked on the door. “Slater, get moving. Something’s up.”
I dressed, then kissed Tyler, who was lay there in that twilight zone between awake and asleep.
“What’s going on?” she said in a voice heavy with sleep.
“A helicopter just flew by. Rikard and I have to go to camp to check on the dog … the money, too,” I whispered. “I’m not sure when, but we’ll come back,” I said, heading for the door.
“Wait, take this with you,” she said. “You may need it.”
She handed me her .38.
“It’s loaded.” She reached into her jeans, in a crumpled heap at the end of the bed, and handed me ten bullets.
“Take these too.”
“Thanks,” I said, “once we hit open water, the chopper will spot us. I sure hope it’s friendly.”
Rikard had the coffee ready and each of us filled a thermos. We dropped the rope ladder into the morning.
“What’s with the chopper?” I asked.
“Now and then one flies over, but this one’s low, crisscrossing back and forth. Searching for something … maybe you … maybe me.”
“What about the women? Will they be all right?”
“Lorie knows the drill. That platform with the telescope—”
“—I saw it coming in.”
“What you didn’t see is a light machine gun we got up there camouflaged—a US M249. It fires .30 caliber rounds. We’ got an AK-47 in the house and a few others here and there. If the wrong people come at her, she’ll cut ’em down and the gators will chew ’em up.”
A pregnant woman manning a machine-gun. I could see her, cradling an AK-47 rifle across her soon-to-swell belly. Like her mother, a man killer in more ways than one.
Rikard fired up the Evinrude, and we headed out. I knew he would stop to blindfold me, but we kept moving.
“Aren’t you going to blindfold me?”
“I need your eyes. We got visitors somewhere. I’ll have to trust you.”
We made it through the barricade and locked it, though the tide was going out and no one could soon go inland anyway. Once I thought I heard a helicopter approaching, though the wind buffeting my ears made hearing difficult. Then too it could have been Rikard’s Evinrude echoing off mud banks.
Had anyone seen us, they would have seen two heads floating over the grass for we sat just below the Spartina flanking us. Two heads cresting the marsh, we entered the channel and headed for camp.
The morning sun beat down without mercy. The cool spell had left and the island’s equatorial ways were returning. We rode saying nothing, absorbed in our own thoughts. I recalled everything that had transpired to bring me here. My promotion, my wife’s accident, and Murphy’s assignment. I looked out across the marshes. Sapelo was, indeed, a beautiful place. Then Cameron’s words came to me. “Well, if you need to escape the city—any city—Sapelo is the place to go. Hell, you’re escaping the continent even. But remember you’re going from one extreme to another. It’s a wild place where survival of the fittest is the supreme rule.”
For a long time, we backtracked through the estuary toward camp, turning through the creeks and skimming past mudflats. I couldn’t help but notice how the richness of life—intent on survival and nothing more—lived at its own collective expense. It didn’t need kidneys; it needed everything and it wasted nothing.
When we pulled into view of the dunes near camp, Oleander was pushing a four-wheeled cart up to the pass, my shovel over his shoulder. Hearing us, he left the cart, and walked down to the channel. We put ashore.
“Oleander, what are you doing with my shovel?”
“What am I doing with your shovel? I was on my way to the south bank to gather oysters when I stopped by to visit.”
I moved toward the pass in
the dunes, but Oleander stopped me.
“You must know something.”
“What,” I asked.
“A sad thing. Your fierce dog is dead. I was about to bury it.”
“What?” A pang of sadness overtook me. We walked into camp past three strange depressions perfectly spaced in the sand. Voodoo lay headless on the sand where he had been tied. A large pool of blood stained the gentle slope of the dune.
“The poor old fellow,” I said. “Just when things were good for him, someone kills him. Who’d do such a thing?”
“Who’d do such a thing? I would suppose poachers did it,” said Oleander.
Rikard came over.
“Blame this on me. I coulda let you bring him but I was afraid all them gators would freak him out. And to be sure, I think they’d a gone for him no matter how much whistling I did. They love dogs.”
“This old fellow didn’t deserve this,” I said, picking up Tyler’s walking stick. Both sticks had been snapped in half. Both tents had been ransacked. My notes and clothes were scattered everywhere. Tyler’s underwear lay about the sand and our boxes of supplies and food had been rifled. My tent was intact but had it been moved?
The solar shower lay on the sand, empty. The canoe was fine; no one had bothered to sabotage it. A profusion of footprints, some bare, some booted, covered the sand around our tents.
Rikard cursed. “Some son-of-a-bitches worked you over good. Had to be this morning. And those holes in the sand back there, that’s where the helicopter landed.”
Rikard bent over tracing the outline of a boot with his knifepoint.
“The edge of these footprints are still crisp. Had to be first light. These bastards were hoping to catch you asleep.”
“Well, at least they didn’t rip my tent apart,” I said. The cursed cell phone Tyler wanted was still in her tent. The protective amulet must have been good for something. I took it and walked over to Rikard.
“How’d you put this on Tyler’s tent without leaving footprints?”
“My osprey placed it there.”
“A fish hawk?”
“Yes. Right after my porpoises spotted you with Jackson, I told Lorie her mom was on the island.”