The bile rose as if on cue. She vomited till all that was left was the dry retching that protested against the smoke still in her chest. It took a while for her to realize that the road was empty. The villagers had gone. The shouts and clink of machetes were now coming from up the road, by Miss June’s shop.
A movement at her feet, told her that Merlene and Dahlia were also coming out of their daze. She lifted herself feebly onto her hands to check on them, but all she could see was Streaky, spinning dizzily by her feet. She sat up sharply, her eyes searching through the haze over the road. They were nowhere in sight.
They were not by the burning bar. They were not visible through the barren hedge. Empty. Everywhere was empty. Dahlia and Merlene were nowhere to be seen.
“NO! DAHLIA! NO! Somebody help! Them still inside! Them still in the house!”
She tried to inch closer to the house, but the heat was a wall. The roof collapsed and the flames almost touched the moon with their roaring belch. Something exploded. The sound made her jump backwards. She looked up just in time to catch the spark as it lifted from the house, rising so high into the sky that she had to crane her neck to follow it. It arched delicately over the moon, and then headed back down to earth.
Cold. It registered to Nola how strange that the fire that had just singed her skin could have felt so cold. It froze her cheek. Numbed her entire body so that she fell to the ground. She just lay there in front of the burning house, willing the cold, refreshing fire to swallow her up too.
Then she saw it. A vision of white. It moved swiftly through the smoke, gliding on wings spread wide. It swooped down on her, and covered her in the coolness of its wings. A dew angel! It had come, even before dawn, to rescue them. Wet with its dew, it poured its soothing moisture over Nola’s twitching body, breathing its own breath into her mouth before lifting her out of the smoke.
CHAPTER
23
Nola drifted in and out of the blackness to cool salves being slathered over her body and bitter liquid being dripped down her singed throat. Many times she wandered from the abyss thinking of Merlene and Dahlia, wanting to ask where the dew angel had taken them, but her throat had locked against speech. Sometimes she saw the river, tranquil as the golden light played across its surface. Sometimes Ellie would nod at her over its gleaming ripples, and sometimes it was Delroy’s face that smiled from the banks.
On the day that her eyes finally opened, it was silver light she saw. Her eyes were hazy, but she could tell that the light came from above her head. She blinked to clear her vision, and her sticky lashes sealed shut once again. She tried to lift her fingers to wipe the paste away, but her hand could not budge.
There was a shuffle. Someone was moving! Someone was beside her! Something cool was being dabbed onto her eyes, wiping the paste away. This time, when she opened them, she could see. Blurred, but the image before her was clear enough to make her chest heave with shock.
Mad Aggie! She was in Mad Aggie’s stall!
The wizened face was creased into an anxious frown, but when Nola gave a frightened sob, the sparse brows lifted in warning.
“Shush! No talk! Them come take you wey!” she rasped.
The woman was on her haunches, knees wide apart, like an animal about to pounce on its prey. Nola stared wide-eyed as the witch cocked her eyes and held a finger in the air. Nola listened, hoping to hear another voice to which to scream for help. That’s when she realized that noise screamed all around them – the moan of traffic, the hum of chatter. Life in the village was back to normal.
Nola tried to speak, but produced only a racking cough. Mad Aggie immediately scurried to the corner of the stall and retrieved an enamel cup, then hurried back to gently place the rim at Nola’s lips. Nola gulped, grateful for the wetness on her parched throat, but coughed violently again when the severe bitterness of the liquid registered. However, when the coughing stopped her voice was able to scrape from her throat.
“Dah … lia?” she asked. “Merl … Merl …?”
Something flashed within Mad Aggie’s eyes. But just as quickly as the look had appeared was as quickly as it disappeared. A shutter was pulled, and all trace of emotion vanished from her face.
She flung her arms into the air and stared up at the cobwebbed roof. “The Great Book say, there is earthly bodies, there is heavenly bodies. What sow in dishonour, raise in glory … what sow in weakness, raise in power ….” The arms lowered slowly and the blank gaze focused, once again, on Nola’s frightened eyes. She leaned closer, her bitter breath fanning Nola’s face. “They raise!” she whispered, “They raise in glory and power, right beside the Mighty Father. No more pain, no more tears. No more shunnin’ by them earthly devils!”
Nola closed her eyes and allowed the witch’s riddles to unravel within the haze of her mind. Tears sprung from her lashes, even though her body was as dry as chip.
Right beside the Mighty Father! The dew angel had come too late!
They’d made the choice. They’d chosen to stay together, while she’d chosen to run like the traitorous coward that she was! A blaze of glory! Just like Dahlia had said. Nola envied their crisp, charred bodies.
Her eyes flew open at the loud scoff beside her. She’d forgotten where she was for an instant. She stared frantically at the face above her, but to her surprise it was not anger she saw. The gaze was actually soft as the turbaned head bent closer, wafting the nutty, bitter smell of breath over Nola like a musty blanket.
“The Great Book say, the last enemy we have to destroy is death. No more enemy after that!” She whispered, as if imparting another sacred secret within the midst of a crowd.
They had conquered death, all of them—Granny Pat’s newborn Lilly, Grampy, Ellie, Merlene and Dahlia, now all heavenly bodies along with the dew angels. What the witch didn’t know was that it wasn’t the conquering of death that had made Nola weep, it was the conquering of life.
Suddenly, another scuffle above Nola’s head made her give a startled jump. She craned her stiffened neck to see who else had been in the shack with them.
This time, a sob did manage to escape her throat. It was Streaky! The sight brought such a jolt of painful memory that laughter burst from Nola alongside the tears.
Mad Aggie scoffed again, but her face remained blank. It was a sound that sounded something like ‘ffsshh’, which, in the days to follow, Nola would come to decipher as ‘foolishness’. The woman dug into the wrapping of fabric around her chest and removed a piece of red-checked cotton, dabbing it across Nola’s wet cheeks. She ffsshed again when Nola flinched sharply.
Nola’s face felt as if someone had suddenly rammed a million needles deep into the skin. Then she remembered—the spark, sailing from the pink house like a farewell. She remembered standing there, mesmerized by the beauty, remembered watching with awe as it had turned in the sky, then headed, of all places in the wide expanse of land, for her face.
She panted with agony, both from the memory and the wakening throb on her face. Her deep breaths sent the witch scurrying again, across the shack to grab a plastic vial. With deft hands, the woman lifted Nola’s head and poured the entire contents of the vial down her throat. Nola tried to wring her head away from the grasp, but the wiry hands held it so firmly that she had no choice but to sputter, till every drop was either down her throat or streaming along with the tears down her cheeks.
Mad Aggie chuckled. “Good, good! Make you good again. See? You strong! Try fight Aggie! When you come, can’t even move your little finger! But God say, ‘Daughter Aggie, I not ready for that chile up here yet, lot more for her to do down there. You take that chile and fix her so she can finish down there!’”
The potion fanned out in Nola’s belly. Long, burning fingers, tearing through her insides.
It was evening when she opened her eyes again. Panic ripped through her as she focused on the strip of dull orange sky. She’d fallen asleep at Dahlia and missed washing the pots! She tried to get up, but her legs were heavy.
Someone had tied them to the ground!
Then she remembered, and the memory jolted her like a punch to her gut. All that blood … Dear Ellie … And Dahlia and Merlene within those flames!
The shack was empty. Not even Streaky was there. Just the pile of old cloth, and in the far corner the gauze that covered the enamel mugs and vials. A large pile of wild bush and dusty yams lay beside it, a few flies taking turns to pitch onto the exposed flesh of the yams. She really was in Mad Aggie’s shack. The world had turned upside down, and dropped her at the bottom of Macca Hill.
A slight movement above her leg suddenly caught her eye. Sweet Jesus … a rat, easily the size of a mongoose! It was climbing down the post with its eyes focused on the spot where Nola’s toes had slipped from beneath the covering. Nola squealed and wiggled her toes, but the rat remained undaunted. It pounced, and as numb as her legs were, the heavy weight of the rodent registered. She screamed again as it scrambled towards her feet, and just when she felt she would pass out from fright, it suddenly stopped moving.
A stick, its sharpened point piercing through the creature’s neck and out again through the underbelly, had been rammed with unerring accuracy from above the counter.
“Hah! See that? Make good soup, good for lungs! Make you breathe clear and strong. Aggie skin rattie later. Make good soup to clear smoke-black out your lungs!”
If Nola had had the energy, she would have vomited right there and then. The witch, obviously tickled by the expression on Nola’s face, cackled loudly. She continued chuckling and mumbling to herself as she took a pile of bush from beneath her arm and added it to the pile on the floor. She turned and gave Nola a curious stare.
“Your sistah come,” she eventually said. “She say she come back later when you wake.”
Nola couldn’t describe the sound that came from her own throat. A gurgle? A sob? A snort?
The witch ffsshhed and turned back to the bush. “She come plenty, all those days you was sleepin’.” She kept her back to Nola as she spoke. “Cry plenty! Aggie have to get bringle with her and tell her, No more cryin’ in this place! No more bawlin’ to stop that chile from healin’!”
“Lou … Louisa … come here?… To see me? In this … place?” The witch turned to give her another long stare, but did not answer. Eventually she gathered her skirt between her legs and turned back to the bush. She selected two stalks from the pile and pulled the leaves off, dropping them into the bowl with the rat. Then she picked up a plastic bottle and studied the amber contents above her head for a while. She eventually pulled off the cap she held it to her nose and took a long sniff before pouring the contents onto the rat.
Nola watched with no reaction, with not one sickening jerk of her belly. Nothing else mattered but that Louisa had come for her. If Louisa knew that she was there, then Mama and Papa knew too, and if Louisa had come for her, that meant that she was forgiven.
Her heart soared. Maybe Papa would tell her how sorry he was. Maybe he would explain that he only meant to frighten them, and now he was beside himself with grief.
“Mama … Papa … them come too? ” She whispered at the witch’s back.
Mad Aggie did not pause in her labour. She was now tying some of the bush into bundles with strips of cloth, while other bunches she threw into a black scandal bag. Nola was about to repeat the question when the witch swirled around and held up a warning finger. Nola’s mouth snapped shut.
“Blessed are you!” she hissed, “Blessed are you when they persecute you and say all kind o’ evil against you because o’ me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven!” Her eyes blazed for an instant, then she blinked and turned to look out the doorway. “When your sistah come, you talk with her! You talk to your sistah and ask her if madda and fadda come.”
CHAPTER
24
Louisa never came the next day, nor the day after that, nor even the day after that.
As the days passed, the hope inside Nola fizzled away. But even as the hope inside her died, the strength of her body returned. Each day, Mad Aggie forced her to do something more, and by the fifth day of waking from the dark sleep, Nola was sitting up for several hours without her lungs flapping like a deflated balloon. Each morning, the witch cotched her against the wall beneath the counter and brought fresh river water for her to wash her face, and chewstick to freshen her mouth. She was wrapped in fresh cloth, the ends tied in a huge knot behind her back, her breasts bound as flat as bulla cakes. At first, Nola had resisted, thinking the fabric held within it the rotting carcasses of rats and lizards, but to her surprise, the cloth the woman had pulled from a box under the counter smelled of blue soap and sweet river water.
So Nola was wiped every day from head to toe, the burns on her hands, feet and face slathered with thick paste. She eventually got used to the witch chanting loudly about ‘the enemy’ over the raised scars on her shoulders and back.
Truth be told, it wasn’t so bad, her existence in the shack. The witch’s constant ramblings about God and the prowling ‘enemy’ were a distraction from the sadness that sat like a boulder on her chest. It was just as Grampy used to say—the mind had the power to change any situation from bad to good. “Suppose you was in a wide open field,” he would say, “and somebody stuff you under a box and sit down on top of it so that you can’t get out? You best believe you goin’ kick and scream with all your might, and beg them to let you out! But, Little Bird, suppose you in that same field, and the person tell you that a wild dog lookin’ to bite you, and the only place you goin’ be safe was under that same box? You best believe you goin’ stay happy crouch up under there for as long as it take for that dog to leave! Same field, same box—but the MIND, Little Bird, the mind is what different—feelin’ trapped in one instance, safe in the other.”
So that was what Nola told herself as she lay on the sidewalk within the pungent shack.
Soon she found that she began to look forward to the witch’s boisterous company. She took pleasure in watching the woman’s nimble fingers sort through her bush, and in being able to recognize some of the branches that she picked out—dogblood, serese, sour sop, even the miserable cow itch vine that most villagers avoided like the plague. The ruddy scent of bush always filled the shack like a third inhabitant, but by the end of the week Nola had become so used to it that it lost its offensive grate against her nostrils.
Nola learned to accommodate herself to the strictures of the shack, to speak in whispers and to limit her movements in the day. Mad Aggie had warned her that the villagers thought she was a ‘bad, bad gal’, and if they found her, they would send her to the home where all bad gals were sent.
The most uncomfortable aspect of the shack was the use of the ‘bathroom’—the old paint can that Mad Aggie brought to her each time she shyly indicated her need. The witch would hold her by her shoulders above the can, ffsshhing encouragingly, then she would disappear with the waste.
She began to help Mad Aggie with her bush sorting and tying, listening in silence as the witch rambled about doctors being disciples of the enemy, taking people’s money and making them addicted to man-made drugs that weakened the body. More people sick, more money in doctor pocket!
And it truly seemed that most of the village believed this too. In secret, Mad Aggie was the provider of antidotes for complaints ranging from failing eyesight, to women’s ‘bleeding’ problems, to swollen veins. At nights, Mad Aggie went from ‘witch’, to ‘Madda’, disappearing through the doorway with her pail of ‘medicines’ as if she were just one more wedge of the thick darkness beyond.
On the night that Louisa finally came to the shack, she found Nola sitting up beneath the counter, picking caterpillars from sour sop leaves and listening intently as Aggie listed out the names of the bushes before them—Neem, Chigganit, Man to Man, Rat Ears. Even with the stench of the wild bush sitting thickly within the shack, Nola smelled her sister before she saw her.
Louisa was pale and gaunt. Nola’s heart lurched
when she noted the deep stoop of her shoulders. Oh God, she look just like Mama! Nola could not speak. A lump had risen from her chest and wedged itself into her throat. Seeing Louisa was making every scab on her body sting with awakening, as if the fire had resurrected itself inside her.
Louisa stared back, as if she, too, were seeing a ghost. Then slowly she stooped to touch Nola’s cheek, running her fingers over the raw skin that Mad Aggie had left unbandaged that day. Nola saw the tremble of her sister’s bottom lip, then the deep, sad frown. She turned away from Louisa’s hand, suddenly aware of the hideous sight she must have made.
Aggie had been watching them silently from the corner, but she suddenly gave a ffsshh, grabbed a jar of the black liquid she’d brewed that morning and disappeared through the doorway.
Louisa hesitantly took Nola’s hand, staring at the cracking scabs.
“Nola … I so sorry. I never know all this would happen.” She shook her head slowly, her eyes swimming beneath a fresh pool of tears. “I thought you would just go and tell them goodbye and it would be all over.”
Nola stared at Louisa’s trembling lips and a sudden, horrible thought freed her voice from beneath the lump.
“Louisa, them never …? Pastor never hit you for freein’ me?”
Louisa gave a soft, bitter laugh. “No! No! No matter how I tell them that is me who let you out, them never believe me. Them think I was just tryin’ to protect you. Pastor say that is the spirits put Miss Terry in a deep sleep and take you outta the house. Him say your spirits was stronger than any him ever see in him life.”
Nola sighed with relief. Better she stay in their bad books than Louisa enter them. She could never live with herself knowing that she’d put a stoop in Mama’s shoulders, and Louisa’s as well.
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