He told them about the gros bon ange, about their specific incarnations of it, about his origins in the laboratories of Tulane, and was satisfied to see Downey and Clea exchange worried glances. The hunting knife hung loose in Papa Salvatino’s hand, and his breath was ragged. Simpkins’ Adam’s apple bobbed. They were already nine-tenths convinced of the supernatural, and his account was serving to confirm their belief. He pitched his voice low and menacing to suit the mood created by the creaking timbers of the boat and began - again, to his surprise - to tell them of the world of Moselantja and the purple sun, the world of the gros bon ange. It was, he told them, a world whose every life had its counterpart in this one, joined to each other the way dreams are joined, winds merge and waters flow together; and whose every action also had its counterpart, though these did not always occur simultaneously due to the twisty interface between the worlds. And there were many worlds thus joined. In all of them the Yoalo had made inroads.
‘To become Yoalo one must be gifted with the necessary psychic ability to integrate with the suits of black energy,’ he said. ‘And all here rank high in the cadres, servitors to one or another of the Invisible Ones, the rulers of Moselantja. Legba, Ogoun, Kalfu, Simbi, Damballa, Ghede or Baron Samedi, Erzulie, Aziyan. Men and women grown through much use of power to stand in relation to ordinary men as stone is to clay.’
The story he told did not come to him as invention, but as the memory of a legend ingrained from childhood, and in the manner of Yoalo balladeers - a manner he recalled vividly - he gestured with his right hand to illustrate matters of fact, with his left to embellish and indicate things beyond his knowledge. It was with a left-handed delivery, then, that he had begun to speak of his mission on behalf of the cadre of Ogoun, when Clea broke for the stairs.
‘Where you goin,’ sister?’ Simpkins caught her by the arm.
‘I ain’t havin’ nothin’ to do with this,’ she said, struggling.
‘Me, either,’ said Downey, moving toward the hatch.
‘What the hell’s wrong with you?’ said Papa. ‘You know he ain’t walkin’ away from here.’
‘He’ll come back,’ said Clea, her voice rising to a squeak. ‘He’s already done it once.’
‘In the cadre of Ogoun,’ said Donnell, wondering with half his mind what Jocundra could be doing behind him, ‘there is a song we call “The Song of Returning.” Hear me, for it bears upon this moment.
‘The sad earth breaks and lets me enter.
My dust falls like the ashes of a song
Down the long gray road to heaven.
Yet as do the souls of the fallen gather
And take shape from the smoke of battle,
Casting their frail weights into the fray,
Influencing by a mortal inch
The thrust and parry of their ancient foes,
So will I return to those who wrong me
And bring grave justice as reward.
To those who with honor treat me,
I will return with measured justice,
No more than is their due.
And those who have loved me, a few,
To them as well will I return,
And all those matters that now lie between us
Will then be full renewed.’
Cautiously, walking heel-and-toe so as not to be heard below decks, the Baron sneaked away from the hatch and back to Jocundra, who crouched in the prow.
‘We need a diversion,’ he said, wiping his brow. ‘All four of ‘em’s down there, and both Simpkins and Papa gon’ be packin’ knives. That’s too much for me.’
He looked around, and Jocundra followed suit. Something pink was sticking out from the door of the pilot house: a rag smeared with black paint. She peeked into the door. There was a box of rags against the wall, other rags scattered on the floor.
‘Fire,’ she said. ‘We could start a fire.’
‘I don’t know,’ said the Baron; he considered it. ‘Hell, we ain’t got time to think of nothing better. All right. See that far hatch? That goes down to the hold next to theirs. Here.’ He gave her his cigarette lighter. ‘You tippy-toe down there ‘cause them walls is thin, and you pile them rags against the wall they behind. You be able to hear ‘em talkin.’ Soon as you get ‘em goin’, you gimme a wave and then yell like your butt was on fire.’ He shook his head, dismayed. ‘Damn! I don’t wanna get killed ‘bout no damn green-eyed monkey!’
He took off his jacket and wrapped it around his forearm and pulled a switchblade out of his trousers. ‘What you starin’ at, woman?’ He cast his eyes up to the heavens. ‘They gon’ stick him ‘fore too long. Get your ass in gear!’
She gathered the rags, and carrying an armful of them, made her way to the hatch. The stairs creaked alarmingly. Voices sounded through the wall opposite the stair, some raised in anger, but the words were muffled. As she heaped the rags, something scurried off into the corner and she barely restrained an outcry. Holding her breath, not wanting to give herself away in case of another fright, she touched the lighter to the rags. The cloth smoldered, and some of the paint smears flared. She was about to bend down and fan them when, with a crisp, chuckling noise, a line of fire raced straight up the wall and outlined the design of a three-horned man in yellow-red tips of flame. It danced upon the black boards, exuding a foul chemical stink, seeming to taunt her from the spirit world. Terrified, she backed toward the stairs. Two lines of fire burst from the hands of the three-horned man and sped along the adjoining walls, laying a seam across their midpoints, encircling her, then scooted up the railings of the stairs. More fire spread from the central horn of the figure, washing over the ceiling, delineating a pattern of crosshatches and stickmen, weaving a constellation of flame and blackness over her head. Forgetting all about waving to the Baron, she ran up the stairs, shouting the alarm.
Clea brought her knee up into Simpkins’ groin, and he went down squirming, clutching himself. She and Downey clattered up the stairs just as Jocundra shouted. Donnell saw smoke fuming between the boards behind him. He turned back. Papa Salvatino was coming toward him, swinging his knife in a lazy arc, his head swaying with the movement of the blade. Then the hatch cover was thrown aside, light and a thin boil of smoke poured in, and the huge shadow of the Baron hurtled down the stairs. He dropped into a crouch, his own knife at the ready.
‘Get your ass away from him, Papa,’ he said.
Simpkins groaned, struggled to rise, and the Baron kicked him in the side.
Papa did not reply, circling, and in the midst of a step he made a clever lunge and sliced the Baron’s chest with the tip of his knife, drawing a line of blood across his shirt front.
‘Hurry!’ shouted Jocundra from the hatch. ‘It’s spreading!’
Simpkins rolled off the floor, still clutching his groin, and limped up the stairs. Jocundra cried out, but immediately after called again for them to hurry.
Flames began to crackle on the wall behind Donnell, and as he looked, they burst in all directions to trace the image of a woman very like Otille. It might have been a caricature of her, having her serpentine hair, her wry smile: a fiery face floating on the blackness. Donnell got to his feet, weak from Papa’s manipulations; too weak, he thought, to engage Papa physically. He searched around for a stick, any sort of weapon, and finding none, he dug into his pocket and pulled out a handful of coins.
‘Hey, Papa,’ he said, and sailed one of the coins at him. It missed, clinking against the wall. But even the miss caused Papa to lose concentration, and the Baron slashed and touched his hip.
Papa let out a yip and danced away, steadying himself; he cast a vengeful look at Donnell, and as Donnell sailed another coin, he snarled. The Baron nicked his wrist with a second pass and avoided a return swipe.
‘You done lost the flow, Papa,’ chanted the Baron. ‘That iron gettin’ heavy in your hand. Your balls is startin’ to freeze up. You gon’ die, motherfucker!’
Donnell kept throwing the coins, zinging them as hard as he
could, and then - as he threw it, his fingers recognized the bulge of Mr Brisbeau’s lucky piece - the last coin struck Papa near his eye. He clapped his hand to the spot, and in doing so received a cut high on his knife arm. He backed up the stairs, ducking to keep the Baron in view; he half-turned to run, but something swung down from the open hatch and thunked against his head. He toppled into the hold face downward. A board fell across his legs.
‘For God’s sake!’ Jocundra yelled. ‘Hurry!’
As the Baron hustled him up the stairs, Donnell had a final glimpse of the fiery smile floating eerily in the dark, the eyes already absorbed into a wash of flame. Then Jocundra, her face smoke-stained, hauled him toward the rail and onto the dock. The Baron slipped off the mooring line and heaved against the boat with his shoulder, trying to push it out into the current.
‘Gimme a hand, damn it!’ he said. ‘Else this whole place liable to go up!’
All heaving together, they managed to nudge the boat a couple of feet off the dock, and there it sat, too heavy for the sluggish current to move.
Donnell collapsed against a piling, and Jocundra buried her face in his shoulder, holding him, shaking. His mind whirled with remnant threads of the strange story he had told the pets, and he almost wished he had not been interrupted so he could have learned the ending himself. He had been near to death, he realized, yet he had not been afraid, and he was thankful to the possessive arrogance of his inner self for sparing him fear. But now he reacted to the fear and held to Jocundra, exulting in the jolt of her pulse against his arm.
‘That goddamn Clothilde,’ said the Baron; he was peeling his shirt away from the cut on his chest. ‘Seem like she gon’ have her funeral party after all.’
The way the sternwheeler burned was equally beautiful and monstrous. Lines of flame crisscrossed the walls, touching off patterns buried in the paint, repeating the veve of Mounanchou and Clothilde’s face over and over again, as well as petro designs: knives stuck into hearts, hanged men, beheaded goats. Little trains of fire scooted along the railings, illuminating the gingerbread work and support posts. Torches flared at the corners of the roof. Other flames chased each other in and out of passageways with merry abandon, sparking windowframes and hatch covers, until the entire boat was dressed in mystic configurations and fancywork of yellow-red flames, as though for a carnival. Amid a groaning of timbers, the smokestack cannonaded sparks and fell into the bayou, venting a great hiss, and thus lightened, the boat began to turn in a stately clockwise circle, its fiery designs eroding into the general conflagration. The paint of the hull blistered into black wartlike protuberances, the sky above the raging upper deck was distorted by a transparency of flame, and the sound of the fire was the sound of bones splintering in the mouth of a beast. A horrid reek drifted on the breeze.
The boat was about twenty feet off the dock, the prow pointing almost directly toward them, when Papa Salvatino stumbled out of the hatch, coughing, his trousers smoldering. He staggered along the deck, looked up, and they heard him scream as a blazing section of the upper railing fell away and dropped upon him, closing a burning fist around him and bearing him over the side. Charred boards floated off, and in a moment his head reappeared. He raised his arm. It seemed a carefree gesture, a wave to his friends on shore. The boat, continuing to turn, blocked their view of him, turning and turning, a magician’s black castle spinning through fire to another dimension, and when it had passed over the spot where he had been, the water was empty of flotsam, undisturbed, reflecting a silken blue like a sheet from which all the wrinkles have been removed by the passage of a hand.
Chapter 17
August 18 - September 12, 1987
‘Musta got caught up in the mangrove,’ said the Baron when Papa Salvatino’s body could not be found. ‘Or else,’ he said, and grinned, not in the least distressed, ‘there’s a gator driftin’ out there somewhere’s with a mean case of the shits.’
Otille, however, was not amused. Screams and the noise of breakage were reported from the attic, and the ‘friends’ slunk about the downstairs, fleeing to the cabins at the slightest suspicion of her presence. But to Jocundra’s knowledge, Otille left her rooms only once between the day of Papa’s death and the completion of the veve - a period of more than two weeks - and then it was to oversee the punishment of Clea, Simpkins and Downey. She had them tied to the porch railing of the main house and beaten with bamboo canes, the beating applied by a fat, swarthy man apparently imported especially for the occasion. Clea screeched and sobbed, Downey whimpered and begged, Simpkins - to Jocundra’s surprise - howled like a dog with every stroke. The ‘friends’ huddled together in front of the porch, sullen and fearful, and in the manner of an evil plantation queen, Otille stood cold and aloof in the doorway. Her black mourning dress blended so absolutely with the boards that it seemed to Jocundra her porcelain face and hands were disembodied, inset, the antithesis of the ebony faces and limbs inside.
Without Otille’s demands to contend with, Donnell relaxed and became less withdrawn, though he still would not talk about his thoughts or his days among the pets. But for a time it was as if they were back at Mr Brisbeau’s. They walked and made love and explored the crannies of the house. They were free of pets and ‘friends,’ of everyone except the Baron, who continued to exercise the role of bodyguard. Yet as the veve’s date of completion neared, Donnell grew edgy. ‘What if it doesn’t work?’ he would ask, and she would answer, ‘You believe it’s going to, don’t you?’ He would nod, appear confident for a while, but the question always popped up again. ‘If it doesn’t,’ she suggested, ‘there’s always the project.’ He said he would have to think about that.
Jocundra had visited the construction site often, but because of the swarm of workmen and the veve’s unfinished state, she had gained no real impression of how it would look. And so, on the night Donnell first used it, when she climbed to the top of the last conical hill and gazed down into the depression where it lay, she was taken aback by its appearance. Three tons of copper, seventy feet long and fifty wide, composed of welded strips and mounted on supports a couple of feet high driven into the ground. Surrounding the clearing was a jungly thickness of oaks, many of them dead and vine-shrouded, towered over by a lone cypress; the spot from which Jocundra, Otille and the Baron were to observe was arched over by two epiphyte-laden branches. Floodlights were hung in the trees, angled downward and rippling up the copper surfaces. Bats, dazed by the lights, skimmed low above the veve and thumped into the oak trunks. The ground below it had been bulldozed into a circle of black dirt, and this made the great design seem like a glowing brand poised to sear the earth.
‘I certainly hope this works,’ said Otille without emotion. She still wore her mourning dress for Papa, and Jocundra believed her grief was real. A cold, ritual grief, but deeply felt all the same. Beside her, the Baron settled a video camera on his shoulder.
‘Good luck,’ Jocundra whispered, hugging Donnell.
‘The worse that can happen is that I fall off,’ he said. He tried a smile but it didn’t fit. Then he gave her another hug and went down the hill. He looked insignificant against the mass of copper, his jeans and shirt ridiculously modern in conjunction with its archaic pattern. She had the feeling it might suddenly uncoil, revealing itself to have been a copper serpent all along, and swallow him up, and she crossed her fingers behind her back, wishing she could come closer to a prayer than a child’s charm, that like her mother she could find comfort at the feet of an idol, or that like Donnell she could shape her faith into the twists and turns of the veve.
If even he could.
What if it didn’t work?
Shortly after he began walking atop the veve, a wind kicked up. Jocundra had been expecting it, but Otille became flustered. She darted her head from side to side as if hearing dread whispers, and she picked at the folds of her skirt. She started to say something to Jocundra, but instead took a deep breath and thinned her mouth. The Baron glued his eye to the viewfinde
r, unmindful of the wind, which now was circling the perimeter of the clearing, moving sluggishly, its passage evident by the lifting of branches and shivering leaves. Each circuit lasted for a slow count of ten. Strands of Otille’s hair plastered against her cheek like whip marks every time the wind blew past; she stared open-mouthed, and Jocundra gave her a reassuring smile, then wondered how she could be so reassuring. A burst of static charges crackled along her neck, the hair of her forearms prickled. The air was chilling rapidly, and despite the humidity, her skin felt parched. With every few revolutions, the force of the wind increased appreciably. Hanks of gray moss were ripped from the branches, leaf storms whirled up, and the wind began to pour over the hilltop, its howl oscillating faster and faster, around and around.
Yet through all this Donnell’s clothes hung limp, and he had done nothing more than walk.
The Baron staggered and nearly fell, overbalanced by the camera. Otille helped to brace him, but only for a moment. Then she screamed as the top branch of the largest oak tore loose and sailed away. Jocundra scrambled down into the lee of the hill and peered out over the edge. Donnell was standing on a central junction of the veve, swaying; his hands waved above his head in languid gestures, the gestures of a pagan priest entreating his god. And she remembered the films she had seen of possession rites, the celebrants’ feet rooted, their arms waving in these same ecstatic gestures. Otille came crawling down, clutching at her. But Jocundra drew back in fright. Otille’s hair was rising into Medusa coils over her head, twisting and snapping. Out of reflex, Jocundra touched her own hair. It eeled away from her fingers. Her blouse belled, as did her jeans, repelled by the fire accumulating on her skin. Otille pointed toward the veve, her face pleading some question. Jocundra followed her point, and this time, as her own scream shattered in her throat unheard, she had no thought of offering reassurance.
Movement, Donnell soon discovered, was the key to operating the veve. The magnetic fields of the copper were blurs of opaque white light, clouds of it, hovering, vanishing, fading into view; they drifted away from his hands whenever he tried to manipulate them. He walked along, trying this and that to no avail, and then realized he had been walking the course directed by the movements of the bacteria. He could feel them more discreetly than ever, more strongly, a warm trickling inside his head. He continued to walk, following a trail inward, and from every junction of the veve but one - and that one, he saw, was to be his destination - a strand of white fire rose, forming into a webwork building up and up around him, a towerlike structure. High above, the milky spectre of the geomagnetic field winked in and out across the sky, and he understood that the complicated flows of the web and his own path were in harmony with it, adapting to its changes. His customary weakness ebbed and he walked faster, causing the structure of the fields to rise higher and become more complex. His new strength acted as a drug, and his thoughts were subsumed by the play of his muscles, the rush of his blood. The fields were singing to him, a reedy insect chorus filling his ears, and he came to know his path as a shaman’s dance, an emblem etched upon the floor of the universe by an act both of will and physicality. Then the movements of the bacteria ceased, and he stopped dead center of his predestined junction.
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