by Nicole Seitz
I am suddenly aware of the hideousness of the backs of my legs and turn around quickly. Is it possible he’s standing closer? I swear I can feel his heat. He’s close to sixty now, my age, and I’m hoping that means his eyes aren’t as good as they used to be. Perhaps he can’t see me well, and all my ripples and wrinkles smooth out nicely. Yes, I’m sure that’s it.
“You look tired, Miss Ally. You feelin’ all right?”
“Vesey Washington, never, ever tell a woman she looks tired. You hear me?”
“I didn’t mean no—”
“I am tired. Very tired. My daddy just died. I just came halfway across the world for his funeral and to clean out his old house on the creek, and at the moment, yes, I am exhausted. There’s much to do. Did you see the inside of that place? It’s like a museum. Looks like he’s never moved a thing in the twenty years Mama’s been gone.”
Vesey looks in my eyes and I can tell I’ve frightened him from saying anything at all.
I smile and move closer to him. I lean up on my tiptoes and put my hands on his firm shoulders. I press myself to his stiff chest and breathe in the smell. How long has it been? This man could be Molasses Creek itself, the salt, the pluff mud, the snails on tall grass, the fish jumping in hot sun. With my eyes closed, my mind erases the years and takes me to a cool evening on this very creek. I can hear music playing and see moonlight dancing on his face. I imagine his tender lips on mine . . . then I pull myself together and away from him. I smooth my hair. “It’s good to see you, Vesey. Thank you for being here . . . for Daddy.”
Vesey grabs his hat and backs away. “I’ll be just over there, ’cross the water, if you need me. All you got to do is holler.”
All I have to do is holler.
I nod and he walks away from me, a slow, limber pace that’s carried him surely for six decades. He doesn’t wear shorts. Never has. I do not know how he handles this Lowcountry heat in long pants. There are some things so different about us. The color of our skin. The desires of our souls. I could never have stayed in the same place my whole life and been content with it, yet he is. Or so he seems to be.
I watch as he steps gingerly into his fishing boat. It creaks and rolls with his weight, but he steadies it. Always steady, that’s Vesey. He nods my way and I wave a tiny, pathetic wave as the water parts for him to cross over like Moses, back to his side of the creek. He looks so natural in that old boat. I feel like a fish out of water here. There are so many walls and layers of difference between us, like honey-drenched Greek baklava. We may have known each other as children, but now, what do we really know of one another? We’re as opposite as night and day.
But maybe now we’ll have the time to learn each other all over again. I push the thought away and shake my head. Ally Green, what to do with you? You’re not here for Vesey. You’re here because your daddy is dead.
I walk back into Daddy’s musty house and throw open all the windows as fast as I can. I’ve got to air this place out. I’ve got to let Daddy’s spirit free, let the memories of me when I was a child loose to run around in this place. I am such a different person from who I once was. I think it’s good. No, I can’t think about it at all. I’m tired. Tomorrow will be a new day and I’ll be able to clean this place out and start to make it mine. Daddy wanted me to have this lazy spot on the river . . . why? He knows I don’t like to stay put. Knew it, anyway. But I’ll honor him. I loved him. I still do. I’ll pretend I’ve inherited some exotic place on the Nile and I’ve got to make my way, learn to eat the native food, learn to talk like them, to fit in. Deep down, I know in three months I’ll be done with Charleston, itching to leave again, but for now, I will do this for him. For Daddy.
The rain comes on with thunder and lightning, and a storm suits me fine right now. I think about Daddy, how he lay on this very bed. I can smell him here in this house, on these sheets. I turn out the lights. Strangely, it’s not my father I’m thinking of, but Vesey on the other side of the water, how much distance there is between us. I think of the lines in his face, how I’d love to draw them again. But I can’t. How I wish someone would bring chisel to stone and carve him for my garden so I could look at him and touch him anytime I want. I close my eyes. I am sketching again in my mind, and as my head hits the pillow to sleep in a place I once called home, it’s Vesey’s face I see before me. Vesey. Molasses Creek. My destiny.
TWO
Destiny
Kathmandu, Nepal
Sunila
THERE ARE STORIES OF MY BIRTH IN WHICH A LARGE white bird swooped down close enough to the earth to drop me in a betel nut tree. Sometimes I picture long wings flowing, flapping, and me, carefully wrapped in gold cloth, a descendant of the heavens. Perhaps it was a great egret or eagle with sharp talons. Perhaps the aim was to leave me at a royal palace, but the winged beast was attacked in midair and did only what it could do—it dropped me here.
Amaa tells me my skin was once the color of the tops of the mountains of Nepal. She says I was born of snow and carried in a bird’s beak until swallowed and passed out through the creature, flung into the filth of the streets of Kathmandu.
Buba thinks I’m a curse. He blames me for the squalor we live in, for the stones we must carry and break, but he was born into this life a Dalit. He was cursed at his first breath. He is jealous because I was a master carver of stone at twelve years old and could sit under my umbrella to do my work, while he and the others baked in the hot sun.
My skin is now the color of terra-cotta. I spent days blistered and oozing, the dust of gravel filling my sores. Later I was given an umbrella to work under, chisel in hand. They used to show me what I was to depict in my stones. I am remembering a fat child with wings that come off her back. She was called angel.
There was a book once with pictures of gods and mythical creatures, beings that come from the heavens. I studied the pictures and could not turn away, could barely blink. I drank in the pages with my eyes as if dying of thirst and buried them deep in a well inside me.
My eyes are blue, the color of the sky. To me it is a sign that I am surely from the gods that I carve. Perhaps I, too, am made of stone and the lines I cut, the facial features, the arms and legs of goddesses and angels—perhaps I will cut just the right stone and when I look, I will see myself there—it will be myself I have set free with my chisel.
For the past twenty-five years, I have longed to see the Book of the Gods again. I know where it is kept—in the big office of the cruel man. I have seen him leave a child to suffer the pain of a broken foot from dropping a heavy stone. I have seen him turn away when another has coughed up blood from years of dust. The book may as well have been tossed in the seas, lost forever. In the quarry, they would let me learn as much as they wanted me to know and nothing more. Yet I would dream.
Someday, I would reach this book. I would steal it and study it. I would open the pages and the gods would open my eyes and make me understand the letters and markings that I could not read before. With my eyes wide open I would understand how to return to my true home, to fly on the great white wings again, up into the blue sky and out of the quarry. Out of this life and into the better next.
It is happening to me now.
The man before me is no longer breathing. His face is covered in dust from the gravel and stone that have been tracked into his office year after year. I am glad he is dead. This feeling should scare me, but there is little fear left anymore, only a dream coming true.
How many nights have I lain on the hard ground just outside these walls and dreamed of the day when I would be in this office, not for his cruelty, but to search for the Book of the Gods? I lift my feet and walk around the body. I must work quickly. I lean down and reach for the keys around his waist and fear grips me. What if this is all a trick? What if he isn’t dead at all? He will kill me.
No. He is gone. Look. See how still he is? My hand trembles as I touch the keys. I keep my eyes on his face and then look to the door to be sure no one is coming. I can
hear the children yelling outside and hear the pounding of chisels and hammers on rock. The keys are in hand. I stand, straightening my sari, and move to the cabinet. I try each key, one after the other after the other, my heart racing, and finally, the lock turns. The cabinet opens. My heart spills over and in a flood I see them all—the birds, the gods, the water, the reeds, the man, the woman, my own fate.
I grab the Book of the Gods and stuff it in my cholo. I clutch it to my chest and hurry away from the dead man. He can be cruel no more. He can hold me here no longer. He cannot keep me from my destiny. I rush out of the office and the sky opens up. Rain drenches the back of my head as I struggle to keep the book dry at my chest. It is my only hope, this book.
I push my calloused hands through the tarp and lean into our ragged tent. My mother is there. She is trying to wash a metal cup with the fresh water from the sky.
“Amaa,” I say. She turns to me, years of misery drawn across her face. “He is dead, Amaa. He is finally dead.”
“Your father? Buba?” Her eyes glisten.
“No,” I say. I kneel down on the ground before her and move my face close to hers. “The cruel man, Amaa. The cruel man is dead. We are free. Look.” I pull out the Book of the Gods, and Amaa drops her metal cup in the dust. I dare to smile. “The Book of the Gods,” I whisper. “I have it now. I have dreamed of this day.”
“Yes,” says Amaa. “It has come. I have always known this day would come.” Her face turns still as stone, and I watch her chest to be sure she is still breathing.
THREE
The Elephant
and the Great White Bird
Mount Pleasant
Ally
I WAKE UP GASPING FOR AIR. WHERE AM I?
I once woke up in Ghana beneath a mosquito net, looked down by my feet, and found myself face-to-face with the sobering eyes of a king cobra. I didn’t breathe for a full sixty seconds until it slithered away from the cot and some natives chopped its head off outside my door. I startle at the memory, not sure where I am. It’s a hazard of traveling so much. You’re never quite sure where you’ve laid your head.
I open my eyes in the dim light and smell the dampness of Daddy’s house, the mustiness of his carpet. I remember now. He’s gone. I look to the foot of the bed and see yellow eyes staring back at me. My heart lurches, but it’s only Katmandu, or Kat, as I call him, Daddy’s beloved Maine Coon. I’ve never seen anyone so babied in all my life. Daddy would have done well to have a grandchild to hold and to raise up, but life stole that joy away from us, didn’t it? I’ve got to breathe. Breathe, Ally.
I’ve had that dream again.
For thirtysomething years I’ve had the same dream—of an elephant and a great white bird. Now, I know there are no elephants in the Lowcountry of South Carolina, but I have seen them in my travels. And in this dream, there’s this big gray elephant on a riverbank, wanting to cross over. The water is not wide or deep but the fella just stands there, unable to, something holding it back.
Another elephant comes on the other side and tries to pull the first one over by wrapping trunks. But as much as the one pulls, the other one pulls harder, and a great tug-of-war commences. Back and forth it goes, on and on and on. A war of wills. It saddens me to watch it, the two of them getting nowhere.
And then there is this great white bird that flies down and lands on the back of the first elephant. With this bird on his back, somehow the elephant is different. He doesn’t feel the need to pull back anymore. Against his nature, he allows himself to be pulled for the first time and, lo and behold, crosses over that river.
The strangest thing is how that white bird sits so calmly on the elephant’s back, not flapping its wings or pecking or pestering it at all. Instead, it is majestic in its great white stillness, and just by being there somehow soothes the animal, coaxes it silently to the other side.
I wonder what that means. Probably means you’ve lost it, Al.
What time is it, anyway? Kat hops up on the bed and walks across my legs, purring. He’s excited or agitated, fuzzy tail flicking. He comes all the way up to my face and, standing on my chest, sniffs me. His eyes are huge with a squiggly green line going all the way around his pupils. One should never be this close to a cat this large.
“Okay,” I say, sitting up. “You hungry? That it?” He jumps down off the bed and prances toward the kitchen. Spoiled cat. But he misses his daddy. “I miss him too, you know. I miss him too.”
Morning comes in on the breeze through the window screens, and the dingy yellow curtains my mother hung thirty years ago blow and flutter. How strange to be back in this house without them here. I can still feel my parents everywhere, in the curtains, in the old tin can that holds coffee grounds, in the vinyl covering the kitchen floor.
I make my coffee and drink it black from an old mug I brought my parents from Istanbul when I was twentysomething. It was my father’s favorite, and it’s covered with a web of brown lines after nearly forty years of use, no doubt harboring all sorts of bacteria. I hold it to my nose and breathe in the deep rich coffee. When one travels, one gets used to not using cream or sugar because these are luxuries hard to come by. Plus, I like my coffee dark, strong, and potent . . . like my men.
I can feel my father’s hand where mine is now. With my eyes closed, I pretend to be him for a moment, or maybe I do become him, I’m not sure. I open my eyes and head out for the dock where the water is clear and calm like glass. I imagine Daddy did this very thing.
There are white birds flying toward the sun, over my head and behind the gray wood-sided house. The sun highlights the green tips of trees across the waterway, the green tips of marsh grass, the green tip of Vesey’s tin roof. I sit Indian-style at the end of the dock and sip my coffee while the breeze carries my hair around my shoulders and the warm sun heats my back.
Is Vesey awake? Maybe he’s already had his coffee. Or maybe he doesn’t need any coffee. Needs nothing but the promise of a new day to get him up out of bed, probably before sunrise. He’s something else. Natural. I try to be like that. I try to sit here and be one with nature, one with the universe, but truth be told, I still feel like an outsider. I always have. I set my coffee to the side and stretch my legs, stretch the stiffness of sleeping in Daddy’s old lumpy bed out of my joints. I work myself through some yoga poses, and by the time I hit downward dog, I feel self-conscious, the exact opposite of what yoga is supposed to be doing for me. Suppose Vesey is watching from his window.
I remember sitting on this very dock when I was a little girl, hanging my bare feet over the edge into the cool water. I would look to the right and see the creek winding through marsh grass. It would call me, the water would. It would tell me there was adventure to be found if I would just follow it around the bend. Vesey would come over to my side of the river in his fishing boat, and the two of us would head out in the morning air and catch fish for our mothers to fry. Vesey would clean the fish for me, and I would wait patiently on my dock for him to come back and deliver it. He was an expert at cleaning fish. Actually, he was an expert at anything he tried to do, as if he was born already having some foreknowledge. We were good friends as children go, but to be honest, his parents and mine never encouraged us to play, certainly not at each other’s houses. Back then, in the late 1950s and ’60s, we were still taboo, the two of us together—a black boy and a white girl. We didn’t know it, or if we did, we didn’t care. We must have sensed something though, because we carried on mostly in secret.
I pick up my mug from Istanbul and hold it up to Vesey’s house. Then I make my way back indoors to shower. I have a big day ahead of me. Today the movers come. It’s out with the old and in with the new. If I’m going to be here for a while, the least I can do is make it feel more like my turf and less like Daddy’s. I don’t think Daddy would mind my removing his clutter. He always said, “You can’t take it with you,” and he was right. It’s all stacked up in boxes and drawers and nowhere close to where Daddy is now.
By lunchtime, I have made it through his closet and Mama’s. They had separate rooms for as long as I can remember. Daddy snored and Mama liked her beauty rest, and it just seemed normal to me that married people would sleep in different rooms. Could be one of the reasons my marriage to Ronnie didn’t work out. We had different ideas of what normal was. And anyway, we never should have been married. We were much better friends. We still are. Being friends with your ex-husband? Well, I guess it goes right along with the normalcy of separate bedrooms.
Ronnie calls me every day of his life, though we’ve been divorced for sixteen years. How one person has that much to say, I do not know. How he finds me all over the world, I do not know either. It’s like he has some tracking device on me. Oh, his wife, Marlene? She loves me too. In fact, she calls me almost as much as he does. Go figure. I think she loves the fact that there’s someone out there who knows him as well as she does and will listen to whatever stupid thing he’s done lately. Like putting a down payment on a new tractor with his bingo prize money. They could have used that money for almost anything, savings, groceries, but no, he’s wanted a stupid tractor as long as I’ve known him. Always wanted to plant roots and grow something, as if he could ever grow anything in that Georgia red clay. Ridiculous.
The phone rings, and I stumble over stacks of old Time magazines and National Geographics in the hallway to find it, yellowed, by Daddy’s favorite La-Z-Boy chair. The old chair is the color of moss and faded on the side closest to the window.
“Hello? Oh, hey, Ronnie. Yeah, it’s going all right. I’ve got the movers coming this afternoon. Yeah. No, I’m not getting emotional, I’m just cleaning up. I’m approaching this like any levelheaded person would do. I don’t have time to get sentimental; they’ll be here in two hours.” I sit down on the arm of Daddy’s chair. “Because I planned it that way, Ronnie. If I gave myself more time, I might get all weepy and I don’t want to do that, all right? Yes. I promise I’m fine. How’s your tractor, anyway? No, I’m not being smarty, I’m just asking.” I wrap the telephone cord around my finger and stare out the window at the creek. “Hmm. That long, huh? You do realize Marlene could’ve gotten that new sewing machine she wanted. She would have been a lot happier right now and you might have some curtains in your dining room. Okay, I’ll lay off, but . . . yep. All right, honey. Uh-huh. Listen, Ronnie, they’ll be here before I know it and I have so much to do . . . Okay? All right. Talk later.”