by Various
“Somebody asked me to go somewhere with them, that’s all.”
“Somebody, huh?” Black Daddy invested huh with deep, wry knowledge. “Everywhere we go, Gianni, all this last season, people keep telling us how they just now bumped into you somewhere around the hills of Sea-john. Always with the same good-looking fella. People can’t remember when they last seen somebody so much in love. All of them say how happy they are to see you doing so much better now, than when you first got back from the wars. But why you never bring your man by here, Gianni? We could make dinner for him; he could meet your mamas-and-papas. Everybody could say hello to each other.”
“I can’t right now, Daddy … I gotta go somewhere.” Gian shimmied from his everyday shirt, bright-dyed and fitted. He drew on his sister’s, loose and white. “But soon, all right? Real soon.”
“You ashamed of us, Gianni? We too poor? You don’t want your fine man seeing what you come from?”
“No!” Gian thumbed loose the knot at his waist. “It ain’t like that.” His wraparound pooled at his ankles. “He’s just like us—nobody high and mighty. Feet on the ground, not nose up in the air.” Nothing like Milord whom he’d served the last decade, in other words. Gian rewrapped his waist and legs with the length of white cotton, expensively well-bleached. As was his wont, he tied off the wraparound girl-style, rather than just folded over, then buckled back on his belt and scabbard. “He’s just a plain ole Johnny from Sea-john, same as us.”
“Well, who his people, then? What hill they live on? Which parish? What the boy name?”
“Black Daddy … …!” Gian exclaimed in exasperation; he swept up the loose flowers he’d laid atop the table.
“We can’t hardly step in the street, but somebody don’t stop us to say they just now seen you, hugged up with some fella we ain’t even met once. Now, all of a sudden, you going to services out of parish. What it feel like, Gianni, is you cutting out the people who love you best.”
“No, no; me and him just been busy, that’s all.” Gian desperately bundled his clothes and things together. “Soon as things get settled some, we’ll all do something nice. I promise.” No slipping out—he must say good-bye properly.
Mama and White Daddy weren’t dumb: of course not. But they were so ashamed of their accents, mostly Black Daddy spoke for them if he was around. And since sturdy rope and a team of horses would never tear them loose from his side, it was no wonder they couldn’t speak Johnny worth spit after a quarter century living in Sea-john. Black Daddy had learned their foreign jabber. Gian sucked his teeth softly, glancing down so his parents wouldn’t see him roll his eyes. He leaned up to kiss Black Daddy’s cheek, and touched Mama’s hand, then White Daddy’s. He fled the house.
After the indoor shadows, the flood of morning light was nearly blinding. Gian turned up a hand to shade his view, squinting down the block. There he was! At the southwest side of the parish temple, in the last patch of semishadow, stood a silhouette well-known by stature, breadth of shoulders, and locks twined to a turban atop the head—waiting right where the eyes sought first. Gian dashed that way.
“You musta been talking to somebody.” Cianco laughed and took the flowers. “But you didn’t need to bring flowers, or wear regalia, either—that’s just the rest of them. It’s something else you gotta do. Now let’s get going: we got nigh on three hundred folk waiting for us.” He looked up suddenly, back down the street. Gian turned.
Three can marry in Sea-john but not two, not six, not any number but three: his parents stood at the doorway of the house, two under hats, and Black Daddy’s hand at his brow against the glare. There wasn’t much you could make out of them at this distance, except who was nearly as tall as Cianco, who as short as Gian, who was man, who woman, who—“I thought you said we were in a hurry.” Gian tried to draw Cianco away, who didn’t budge.
“That’s them, ain’t it? Your mamas-and-papas.”
“Yes.” Gian embraced Cianco’s arm. “But won’t the priests be wondering where we at about now? Can’t keep everybody waiting.”
“They look like real good people, your folks.” Cianco broke into a grin. “I’ma go say hi to them!”
“It ain’t right”—Gian made himself heavy, both hands gripping Cianco’s arm— “making all those people wait!”
Cianco looked at him. “You don’t want me meeting your folks.”
“It’s not that. Really, pop. Just … … next time, all right?” Gian tugged without effect: no one made Cianco do anything, not by force. “We can have us a good visit next time around. Promise.”
Cianco stared and stared. Gian fought not to shuffle and grin like a liar about to be called out—but at last Cianco nodded. He turned and raised a hand in greeting. Far up the block three hands waved back. Then he let his lover nudge him into motion and drag them hustling the other way.
They went downhill and up into the next. “So, Gianni-mi—listen up,” Cianco said. “I’m gonna change and be all strange and different today, but still myself, all right? And if the congregation calls you the hallowed boy, or Summer King’s lover, don’t worry about it. Understand?” Not really, no; but Gian nodded. Cianco led them around back of a temple. “And she’s tough and hard-headed; she always gets her own way. But just for today, the one she chose for Summer King knows better. That’s me.”
She? “Who?” Gian said.
The Most High stood in the street outside the temple; she said, “Drink this. More! Now pass it to your boy.” She snatched the chrysanthemums from Cianco, and made them both gulp from a flask of infused spirits (oh … … the world tipped giddily; Gian hadn’t yet broken the fast) and hustled them the back way into the temple, by a little postern door. “Man, why on earth did you dress your boy like another petitioner?”
Cianco could have exclaimed without injustice, “‘Ain’t nobody told him to dress like that—he put them clothes on!”’ but he said, “My baby’s pretty in white. I like him like this.”
The answer satisfied her. At Gian’s parish temple the Most High was a short elderly woman, too kind if anything—she’d always let him get away with things, including never attending services. Not the boss priestess here! This Most High was another Johnny giant, more robust in middle years than anyone younger. Abrupt and sharp-eyed, she managed to say with one glance, I’m well aware of your foolishness; soon there will be a reckoning.
Inside the temple drawing breath was work, the aromas thickening the air were so bitter, sweet, and noxious. Sage smoked from braziers. The fragrance of flowers commingled and clashed. Up in there reeking was the old standby stench too, savory with death, rusty and wet: a flock of beheaded fowl hung from trussed feet overtop stone deities, knee-deep in slopping tureens. The feathered bouquets wept clotted black drops still. Nausea watered Gian’s mouth … … A hand clasped the back of his neck, rested with affectionate weight, and let go. The touch steadied Gian, on bad footing at the river’s brink. A fossil of memory jostled him in passing, and was borne away on the ruddy current: some soldier facedown, arrow ridden.
Gian looked up. Cianco’s eyes weren’t on him; they admired the temple’s spectacular door of flowers. Often enough his lover had said, “I get so lonely for you, Gianni. Sometimes when you’re right here by me.” And then would come the bulwark of a hand, supportive somewhere on the back of Gian’s body.
The massive doors were thrown wide, yet nothing could be seen of the courtyard fronting the temple. Dozens on dozens of garlands hung in a curtain, blocking the view. The light broke up among flower petals, scattering on the temple floor as dimly luminous confetti, in peacock colors, and toucan.
“Jump, dammit!” The Most High snapped her fingers at the women and sissys attending her. They hustled forward with a crown of marigolds and tiger lilies, a crimson mantle, a green wraparound all stiff with gold brocade, and some fancy sandals of the sort nobility wore in the Kingdom. They stripped and redressed Cianco. With the nimble truant immobilized, and preparations underway, the Most High co
uld now light into him properly. “You got some nerve,” she snapped, “falling up in here late like this.”
“But … …” Cianco blinked, head shaking slowly, and smiled. “… …I ain’t though.” That way he had, that voice, all caramel and languor, could awake such love in hearts, or—“You know me, Aunty: always on time.”—such fury.
She put her finger in his face. “Tu, m’iamas ‘Laltissima’!”
Cianco gently took the hand and softly kissed it. “I’m right on time, Most High.”
She snatched it back. “A couple hundred people out there waiting. They get one chance, once a year.” The Most High slapped his chest at one and once. “King comes at noon and he’s going at first quarter of the night—”
“Let’s don’t waste no time, then.” Cianco pointed at a hole in the ceiling, falling from which a narrow sunbeam struck a brass plate atop the altar. The endpoint sparkle had crept nearly dead center the plate’s much-etched symbology. (Sweet as nectar to the bees, so were the many splendors of Cianco to the sissys. He was muscled and manful, full of mellow charm—and oh it took the breath away, that print of bird! Gian felt himself in warm fellowship with his sisterly brethren, and so tolerated more foolishness than others might. Even so, one of the Most High’s attendants began to work his nerves with all the fluffing, and tweaking, and smoothing of the lay of Cianco’s mantle and regalia. It was just way too much. Gian muttered with soft vehemence: “All right, you done here”—plucking off those hands in favor of some having a right to that work, his own—“My man got him a sissy for this.” Licked wet, his thumb wiped away crystals left from sleep at the corner of Cianco’s eye.)
The Most High looked from one of them, beauty and virility made flesh, to the other, some other thing, and then back at Cianco. “So this your boy, huh?”
Of course she would have thought Gian born unpainted at first glance. Everyone did. Now he watched her eyes dismiss him into a familiar exile, deciding Gian’s origins must lie not off the hills of Sea-john so much as off the continent itself. His younger brother and sister never suffered such skeptical looks: they were both tall, both born tawny, and nicely browner still after a lifetime of equatorial sun. Proper hair too.
“Yes,” Cianco said, and with no little peck; with tongue, at length, he proved it. “Love me some him!”
“But … is he Johnny, though? Power comes down best for the young, los formozi, for somebody born up here in the hills, Sea-john.”
“You can talk to him, Most High. He standing right here, ain’t he? And he just as beautiful and Johnny as you or me, or anybody.”
Gian’s hair was tied back. With a winkling finger, the Most High loosed some strands for examination. What rufus stuff is this? Her thumb and index worried at the lock. And so lank! She, like most Johnnys, was very tall; nowadays though, with his hair grown long, the monstrous scar some arrowhead had torn across Gian’s scalp could be hidden, never seen by anyone but a lover. But the Most High mussed the monster out. Grimacing, she looked down, and demanded: “What hill? What parish?”
“Born and raised up on Mevilla hill,” Gian said. “Toretta deldio”—he gave her the parish-sign—“represent!” The hills of Sea-john all spoke different dialects, every parish another accent.
She frowned skeptically, but there was no arguing with the evidence of her own ears. Next she asked, “How old are you?”
The wars had weathered him. So a young man came by so many scars, fine lines, and old man’s shadows in his eyes. “Twenty-three,” Gian said. Despite the truth’s implausibility, he spoke with a steady voice because of the hand stroking down his back. It cupped his ass … … and dropped away.
The Most High grunted, the skepticism given voice this time. She snapped fingers at her priestly cronies again. “Y’all bring me La Pablo in here.”
They brought in a tall youth, shirt open, skin glossy as oiled obsidian; he smiled, seeing Cianco, and didn’t see Gian at all. Was this preferred boy good-looking? Halfway cute? Just all right, if you liked that sort of thing?
La Pablo was gorgeous.
A creepy-crawly sensation, hotness too—half a blush and half swarming ants—itched and burned Gian’s face and back, all up and down his arms. Cianco happily scooped the lovely La Pablo close to his left side and, lips upon ear, murmured to him tenderly. If one of the luminaries should condescend, then the homely lover, plain of face, knows damn well to choose some modest number, and then begin counting down the days of love. Beauty seeks after beauty, like goes with like; forever this was the way of things, world without end. Recognizing the moment long dreaded had come, and feeling a fatalist’s relief as much as dizzying humiliation, Gian eased back toward the postern door and ……
…… was caught by Cianco’s free hand, of course: reeled in close under his right arm. “Two!” said the Summer King, grinning at His bounty. He hustled Himself and armfuls out through the door of flowers. In the high noon outside, the Summer King shouted: “Look what I got, y’all!” brandishing His right and left arms. The crowd roared approval.
And well they should adore Him. The Summer King was man no longer but Someone greater. The folk clapped and stomped, hailing Him with joyful noise, the song palpable in its cadent thunder. He put forth radiance outshining the tropical sun at meridian. No one closer in the embrace of that glare, Gian squinted his eyes, a little shaken.
Priestesses stood round enormous drums beating the invocation. White-clad and chanting, the congregation held all manner of flowers. Most had come with wreaths of bright wild flowers and pretty weeds. The poorest held branches broken from magnolia trees, or jacaranda. A few folk held singular blooms, a rare lily or strange orchid, for which they must have foraged the bush, or nurtured in home gardens, against this very day. All had come with their best. The stout daughters of the richest family propped up between them a huge folly of flowers, bear-shaped and sized. Father and a younger sibling lay at their feet shivering on pallets, given to drinks and brows wiped dry by two mothers.
The people were crammed along the walls of the sacred compound, to clear a space before the door of flowers. In that dusty clearing awaited the throne. It was a huge stool of carven hardwood, shiny black from age and oiled care.
“Atuandicy, Pablihno,” said the Summer King, when they’d reached the stool. He put the pretty boy standing at the stool’s left side. Gian moved toward the right, but oh no, he’d got it wrong again. Taking seat upon His throne, the Summer King dragged Gian down upon one thigh. Big and smaller man fit their seats just fine, one a full foot taller and half again as heavy as the other; the stool, immense.
The drumbeat changed and folk quieted. “Who first?” called the Summer King. His voice, sonorous and rumbling just a moment ago, now eerily rang out as tenor, a bell tone.
A girlchild, four years old, stepped into the dusty amphitheater from the encircling throngs. While approaching the throne, she cast back frightened looks to a woman, two men, and three older children who nodded, flapped their hands, and smiled encouragement of the girl’s every reluctant step forward. She was called “Patri,” for with that name the family urged her on. And they cried, “Go on, baby. Keep going.” In her hand, she bore the flowering bough of a flame-of-the-forest tree, with blossoms red as mango pits, orange as that fruit. And full of fish, the jowls of some pelican rising from a sea dive might bulge too, as immensely as did this child’s, goitered or scrofulous.
“Put that there, little mama,” said the Summer King. The girl stooped to lay her flowering branch at La Pablo’s feet. “Now come here,” He said; the girl stepped just between the sprawled knees. He set a hand on her shoulder (the other palming the small of Gian’s back). To the crowd He said, “Bring down some power, y’all,” and the people began to sing; but quieted when He lifted His hand. “Oh, no, mamita. I need sure ’nough strength for this.” The Summer King shook His head sadly. “The flowers are good, but why didn’t you bring me some rum?”
The child stared, mouth ajar, knowing His q
uestion was owed some answer but not knowing what. Her eyes shone, and lips trembled. From along the walls her mamas-and-papas, sisters and brother cried pardon for their family’s poverty.
A cripple was leaning on his crutch at the edge of the crowd: to him, the Summer King called, “Can’t grow back that foot of yours, pa!”
Calling back, “No?” the old man said, “How come? Summer King could do anything, I thought.”
“Man, you been coming ever since that shark bit you. Every year the Summer King say the same damn thing: ain’t no growing back hands, feet, or nothing like that. What’s gone is gone. You been knowing it!”
“Yeah, well.” The old man scratched his beard, rooting in the grizzled scruff. “Man can hope, cain’t he? But, Summer King, not nothing? Can’t maybe grow me half a foot? Then, see, I could come back next year and get—”
“No,” said the Summer King. “It ain’t no half feet, either. So why don’t you just give that rum you holding to this little girl right here.”
The freckled old man, redbone, whitened with rage. Selfish spleen contorted his face, but as he looked at the pickney, inflamed eggs bloating her underchin, his sneer fell away. “Yeah.” He made a sheepish face, ducking his chin. “You right, you right.” The old man held out his gourd.
The child looked to the Summer King; He said, “Go ’head, little mama,” and she fetched the rum back to Him.
The Summer King unstoppered and drank. His body always blazed with more than ordinary heat—such that after making love, after caresses, after the whispers, on sweltering nights Gian needed to roll to the farthest edge of the long pillow for relief and sleep. Now those inner flames surged, and the flesh where Gian sat warmed up hot; sweat beaded his brow and sluiced down his back. The Summer King tossed the emptied gourd aside, and cupped the child’s cheek in His hand. She cried out, thin and high. Her body seized and shook. The little girl crumpled into the dust when He let her go. “Patrízia,” shouted one of her papas, who ran from the crowd.