by Celina Grace
A BLESSING FROM THE OBEAH MAN
By
Celina Grace
© Celina Grace 2012
“We’re lost.”
“We’re not lost.”
“We are. We’re nearer the north coast than the south. Come on, can’t we just pull over?”
Richard made no reply but yanked the steering wheel, heeling the car over the verge, bumping over the potholes in the road. Vicki bit back a shriek. She was hot, and tired and cross, and they were lost, whatever he said. The car rolled to a stop and for a moment there was just the hum of the hot engine and the insect-filled busyness of the air outside. The sugar cane stretched before them on either side of the lumpy road, lush and green, frondy leaves waving in the constant breeze that blew from the coast.
Richard put a hand up to his sweating forehead.
“Alright,” he said, “we’re lost. Happy?”
Vicki sighed inwardly. They were two steps away from a row, she could just feel it; it was hanging in the air like the heat shimmering up off the road surface. But it was their honeymoon and she wanted everything to be just perfect… she took a deep breath, calmed the acid rage that was gnawing at her breastbone and put a hand on his knee. His thigh was warm and sweaty under her palm.
“Never mind,” she said, “we’ll manage. I thought I saw a sign for Bridgetown back there.”
Richard looked over at her and managed a tiny grin, a ghost of his usual marvellous smile.
“Next time, you bring your driving licence,” he said and began to shift the gears, shunting the hire car round on the road. The heat flooded in the open windows, relentless. Vicki leaned forward, trying to get some air on her lower back. She could feel a slow trickle of sweat running down between her breasts.
The car moved forward, back the way they’d come; the road unscrolling between the high green fences of the sugarcane either side. Vicki sat with her arm out of the window, hot gusts of air beating on her face. She could feel this morning’s careful hair twist unravelling under the onslaught. This is supposed to be Paradise, she thought, thankful her thoughts were hidden behind her big dark glasses. So why do I feel like crying?
She knew why. It was laughable to attribute her mood to any other reason. Richard was being so patient, so careful with her; she knew that and felt a rush of love for him that melted the anger and impatience that she’d felt earlier. It was just that they had no time. She realised she was digging her nails into her palms, just as she had done back in England, and made herself consciously relax her hands. But still, the urgency was there, the worry, the panic; it was okay when we were just living together, and I was thirty two, but now I’m four years older and we’re married and…and what happens if we can’t? If I can’t? And the worst of it, of not being able to say anything, because everyone thought that she didn’t care, that it wasn’t important, that they were happy the way they were…
She was so lost in her own thoughts that she scarcely noticed the car slowing, and Richard’s exclamation of satisfaction. She saw the sign just before it flashed by – Bridgetown, 8 km.
“Well, that’s a relief,” she said, making her tone as light and as happy as she could.
The road they’d turned into looked the same as the one they’d left. After about a mile they went through a village; past the church, the rum shop, the children walking home from school, neat and tidy in their uniforms. Vicki didn’t dare to think of how hot they must be. She waved to the smallest ones and they waved back and she felt again the jab in the pit of her stomach; the endless yearning, the never-ending longing.
The road was narrowing again and getting rougher, the tarmac bumped and blistered, flaking away at the edges like sunburnt skin. Vicki held onto the side of the seat as they drove forward. The car’s momentum dropped as Richard hesitated at a crossroads, then crawled over, towards the blue glint of the Atlantic that they could see on the horizon.
The road got worse and the car bucked like an unruly horse, the bonnet rising and dipping. Richard’s jaw became tense. The houses were petering out here, brick houses and chattel houses alike, spaced at further and further intervals. Soon there were none and they were back amongst the sugar cane fields. They drove on in silence for a while. Vicki wasn’t going to be the one that said it.
The tarmac skin of the road ended and became rocky, white dust that billowed up over the bonnet and into the open windows, settling on their damp skin. After five minutes, Richard pulled the car over to the side of the track.
“This is ridiculous,” he said and turned the engine off.
Vicki was immediately aware of the silence. Above the tick of the cooling car engine, she could hear nothing; no human voices, no crashing waves, no bird song. The dust cloud settled. All around them stretched the sugar cane fields, the stems of the cane swaying gently to and fro in the breeze. Up ahead of them, by the side of the road, was a roadside stall.
“Let’s get a drink, at least,” she said, and opened the car door.
It was so hot. Only at night did the temperature become pleasant; during the day it was punishing. Heat pressed upon you like an invisible wall, thick and heavy and unyielding. Sweat sprang up on Vicki’s upper lip, her nose, the small of her back. Sometimes she felt frantic; it was relentless, like a punishing demon that pursued you and sat on you. The only relief she got was when she was in the sea but there was no chance of that here, they must be miles from the ocean – Atlantic or Caribbean.
She approached the roadside stall, hearing the grit of Richard’s feet on the road as he followed her. As she got closer, she could see it was more of a.. a structure.. a few rickety planks lashed together with a ripped tarpaulin forming the roof. What looked like strings of white beads hung from the edge of the tarpaulin. She got closer and her nose wrinkled as she realised that the beads were actually hanging snake skeletons. There was no one in the structure, just a chalked sign propped up against the front of it that read ‘Bird Man’.
“Hello?” she said tentatively.
Richard came up behind her and stood by her side.
“I thought there weren’t any snakes in Barbados,” he said.
Vicki shrugged.
“Maybe they’re old. Maybe they’re not real.”
“No, they’re real all right. Bit creepy.”
The trade wind continued to blow, flapping the tarpaulin in brisk snaps. Vicki looked about her.
“There’s no one here,” she said. “Let’s go.”
There was a chattel house set back from the road behind the stall, a really decrepit one, the windows lacking glass, the paint long since peeled away. Vicki saw the door opening. A shadow loomed in the doorway and she felt a sudden jab of panic, quickly dispelled as the figure came into view. It was a middle-aged man, tall and thin, bare-foot and with dreadlocks that reached his waist.
“You want help?” he said.
Vicki and Richard looked at each other helplessly. We’re so English, she thought. The man cocked his head on one side and his dreadlocks swayed like seaweed under water.
“You need help from the Obeah Man?”
Richard cleared his throat.
“Yes, we’re – well, we’re lost. We need directions back to Bridgetown.”
The man said nothing for a moment. He looked past Richard to Vicki, his black and shiny eyes pinned to hers.
“That’s not what you want,” he said.
Richard shifted his feet.
“Er –“ he said.
The man took no notice of him. Vicki couldn’t take her eyes off of his; those black irises; the whites yellowed like a curl of old paper.
“What you want?” he said. “I mean, what you really, really want?”
Ric
hard cleared his throat again.
“We want to get –“
The man raised one long, thin finger, its nail curving like the claw of an animal, and Richard fell silent. Vicki turned her head towards him and saw his face had changed; it had sagged into a dumb, mannequin blankness. She felt a moment’s alarm but before she could say anything, the man spoke to her again.
“What do you want, lady?” he said, softly. “You wanting something bad. I can tell. You tell me.”
Vicki looked into his eyes. They weren’t black anymore, but a shifting sea-blue. As she opened her mouth to speak, they went the colour of the sugar cane leaves.
She felt the words rushing up inside her, coming up from nowhere, as if there were someone else inside her controlling her voice.
“I want a baby,” she said.
The man lowered his pointing finger and she felt her ears pop, as if sound had come rushing back to fill a vacuum. She’d been mistaken about his eyes – they were as black as the tar found in sticky little lumps on the beach.
Richard looked at her incredulously. She felt heat come rushing into her face but she said it again.
“We want a baby.”
The man looked at her with his coal-nugget eyes and nodded.
“Obeah Man will help you.”
The chattel house was filled with thick, intense heat, and it was dark, the open window frames covered with cloth, the door shut tight. They sat on the dirt floor, facing the Obeah Man. Vicki flicked her eyes sideways, taking in the sagging sofa at the back of the room, the heap of old rags in the corner. There was a cage against the wall where a pair of white roosters rustled and flapped. Another movement caught her eye and she saw, shockingly, a monkey hunched in a dank corner. She caught the glint of dim daylight from a metal chain around its ankle that its long, prehensile fingers picked at. It saw her looking and drew its lips back from its teeth, chattering at her.
Vicki felt oddly dreamlike, her vision wavering. She’d walked into the house in a daze, unable to believe what she’d said, what was happening. I must have heat stroke, she thought, to say something like that, to be here in this house – but still she sat on the hard dirt floor and stared through the darkness at the black eyes of the Obeah Man. Richard sat next to her and she could feel his disbelief and anger radiating outwards, buffeting her arm. He must really love me to do this, she thought.
The man sat down opposite them. His legs folded up under his chin like the legs of a grasshopper. He held out a small, white cylinder to Richard.
“Smoke.”
Richard blustered, holding up one hand.
“No, thanks. I don’t –“
“Go on,” hissed Vicki.
He threw her an annoyed glance. Then, she could see it happening, the shrug of his shoulders, the mental oh fuck it that brought down a blankness to his face. He reached out for the joint, brought it to his lips and sucked down the curling, pungent smoke.
He offered it to Vicki but the Obeah Man shook his head.
“She don’t want that,” he said, and Vicki tensed for Richard’s explosion as this man’s presumption, but he said nothing. After a while, his head fell forward and she saw his shoulders sag. She turned her head towards him.
“Richard?” she said, tentatively. His head lolled and she thought his eyes were closed. He didn’t answer her. Smoke rose in a curling grey tendril from the joint still smouldering in his hand.
There was a squawk from the corner and the Obeah Man brought out one of the roosters. It struggled against his hands, white feathers drifting towards the floor. He brought it before Vicki and gripped it between his knees. Before she could say anything, there was a dim glint of light from the knife that had suddenly appeared in his hand and in one swift movement, he’d removed the rooster’s head.
She was too startled to gasp. The blood pattered into a carved wooden bowl on the floor while the rooster’s wings flapped frantically for a few moments, the movement gradually slowing as the flow of blood lessened. She could feel her own heart beating with quick, painful thuds.
The Obeah Man gave the body of the bird a final, business like shake, and then threw the limp bundle of feathers into a corner. He passed his hand over the top of the bowl. Vicki saw the steam rising from the quivering pool of blood inside it and felt a bubble of nausea rise in her chest.
He held the bowl to her lips.
“No,” she said. “I can’t.”
“If you want what you really want,” said the Obeah Man, “you drink this. You understand? You got to really want it. You don’t want it, you wait for your husband to wake up and you get out of here. Can’t do anything to you that you don’t want. You got that?”
Vicki nodded. She found it suddenly hard to get her breath – she pressed a hand to her diaphragm.
“Can’t get anything unless you really want it,” said the Obeah Man. “So, question is, how much you want it? How much?”
Vicki took a deep breath.
“This much,” she said and, gripping the bowl with her teeth, swallowed its contents in one quick movement.
The coppery taste of the blood in her mouth made her gag but she fought it, swallowing it all down. She could feel it hit her stomach. She took a deep shaky breath and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
“That’s good,” said the Obeah Man.
Vicki tried to breath deeply. The smoke in the room began to waver and writhe and she was sure the room was becoming smaller. She felt a jab of panic. Patterns began to reel and spin before her eyes and, it was true, the walls were closing in on her… She cried out and the walls rushed towards her and she gasped and sank backwards, falling downwards. She was falling through the floor, sinking into the dirt that felt as soft as a pillow. It parted beneath her back, welcoming her into darkness. There was a slow steady throbbing, a beat that echoed the thud of her heart. She lost all sense of herself; all sense of herself as Vicki. She was just existing, an entity hanging in the blackness of the void. She looked down and saw the dim shine of her skin, a pallid white glow in the darkness. Where had her clothes gone? She wondered briefly and then forgot about it.
There was something pulling at her, tugging at her hair. She brushed at it, brushed against fur and a long fingered hand that was pulling at her, pulling, tweaking…
It was the monkey. Its prehensile fingers were tangled in her hair, pinching her face.
“You have to get out,” it said. It had a high, clear voice; a voice like a young child’s.
Vicki looked into its brown eyes and saw the truth.
“Get out and keep running,” said the monkey.
She got to the door quickly and stumbled from the veranda. Five steps and she was in amongst the sugar cane; the rank, sweet smell all around her, the thin green leaves slashing at her unprotected white skin. She ran, gasping; falling once to go to her knees in the damp black soil, running fast, her breasts hurting, her breath coming short and fast. The sugar cane stretched on in endless green rows. Above her she could hear the faint whistle of a giant set of wings, the whomp, whomp, whomp of gargantuan feathers scything through the hot air. She ran on, endlessly, as the air darkened around her and a gigantic shadow fell upon the fields, tracking her. As she ran, her breath sobbing in and out of her lungs, she could see herself as if from above, a tiny bobbing white doll. She heard the cease of the wing beats and the terrifying sound, the gradual whistling, as whatever was in the sky folded its wings and dropped, slicing through the air, zeroing in on her. She screamed as she ran but it was too late, too late; she felt a immense jolt to her body and a piercing pain as talons gripped her shoulders from behind and a sharp beak plunged forward, impaling her from the top of her spine downwards, pain and heat radiating outwards from the moment of impact, the agony and the ecstasy too much for her to do much more than scream, even as she fell forward into the earth…
There were white cotton sheets beneath her cheek. Vicki opened her eyes and stared blearily as the swaying image in her view resolved its
elf into their hotel room. She heard Richard groan beside her and at the same time, became aware of a sharp stinging pain in her shoulders.
She sat up slowly, holding her ringing head in her hands. Her back was on fire. She tried to look back but winced at the thud it brought to her temples. Her fingers felt something sharp and she pulled at it, grimacing at the tug it gave to her hair. It was a black feather. She stared at it, turning it over in her unsteady hands.
“My God,” said Richard. He was also struggling to sit up. “How much did we drink last night?”
Vicki didn’t answer him. She dropped the feather on the floor and staggered across to the window. She looked out onto the usual view from their hotel room, out into another glorious, blue-skied, sunny day. Their hire car was parked down in the car park, just as normal. She blinked. Had she dreamed the whole thing?
In the bathroom, she caught sight of her shoulders in the mirrored wall and nearly screamed. They were scored all over with thin red lines and blood had dried in a dark crust along each one. Her inner thighs were sticky too. She tried to remember what had happened, to place the events into a coherent sequence, but the memories she still retained were growing ragged, flying away from her when she tried to fit them into place. She shook her head, ignoring the pulse of her headache, and climbed under the torrent of gushing hot water.
There was pain. There was agonising pain, flooding her belly, her back, a giant fist squeezing her relentlessly. Vicki groaned. She was squatting on the ground, on the dirt floor of the chattel house, and something was emerging from between her legs, a dark shape growing outwards from her as she puffed and heaved and shouted. Blood pooled on the floor beneath her as a fresh onslaught of pain gripped her around the waist. She threw her head back, her throat sore from moaning, and then looked down at what was emerging from the depths of her. Monstrous, deformed, an atrocity of misshapen limbs and smashed features, one black and shiny eye staring up at her from the blood smeared ruins… dark feathery stubs poked from the slimy skin, and the gaping mouth opened as if it would reach upward to destroy what had birthed it. Vicki found it in her to scream one last time…