Beyond Molasses Creek

by Nicole Seitz

  I press the phone down into the cradle and darn if I don’t have to press back tears. See what he did to me? Too much to do to stop and think and talk about how I’m feeling! I bend down and pick up a box of magazines in the hallway, and when I lift it back up, a pain shoots down the right side of my rear end like hot lead. It tingles in my knee and lingers and smarts when I move. Dad-gum! I curse under my breath. This can’t be happening. I have too much to do!

  “Kat? Kat!” I do not know why I am calling a cat. What in the world can he do for me? Sure enough, he comes, tail quivering, eyes bright. He rubs his back along my leg, then turns and rubs the other side. “I can’t move,” I tell him. Carefully, I walk into Mama’s bedroom and let the box fall several inches onto the mattress. The pain is radiating down into my right leg. Stupid pinched nerve. This happens to me occasionally when I’m stressed. It’s as if the universe knows I’m stressed and wants to make it just a little harder for me. I scowl up into the ceiling at whoever’s in charge here. I’ve got to get to my purse but it’s in Daddy’s bedroom, a whole fifteen feet away. Might as well be Mars.

  “Kat, can you fetch? Go get my bag. Please? Fetch, boy.” Nothing. He looks at me all cute-like and lifts a paw to lick it.

  After an excruciating five minutes or so, I make it stiff-legged and gritting my teeth to my purse and take two muscle relaxers with no water. They scratch down my throat and stick there, dry lumps. I hold my breath, waiting for them to kick in. Please kick in. I just need a few minutes. I grimace as I plop down on Daddy’s foam pillows that still smell like him—as if he’s still here—moaning and deep-breathing for a good long while until sleep, blessed sleep masks all the pain.

  Bang, bang, bang, bang!

  What the—

  Bang, bang! “H’lo! Anybody in there?”

  Kat jumps off the bed and hides under it. I jerk up, fully awake now, and feel the pain in my hip. My mouth is filled with cotton. “Hold oo-on!” I roll over onto my stomach and slip one leg off, reaching with my toes to the floor. Ow, ow, ow. “Just a minute!” The movers are here? I’m not ready! Look at this place!

  It takes me a good long while to shuffle past the boxes of books and knickknacks on the floor—Daddy’s western rodeo lamp, a stack of his wool sweaters. I open the front door, never checking what I look like, though I must look like I woke from the dead. “Sorry, I—is it really time? I hurt my back.” The movers are two men, one burlier than the other, midthirties, I’d say. They look at my mess unsympathetically and confer with one another. “S’posed to be packed up. You need us to pack for you? We ain’t planned for that. Gone be extra three hundred dollar.”

  I turn and look at the house from their point of view.

  “We got a truck full of stuff we got to unload first. Lemme call the boss.”

  I feel helpless and tears spring to my eyes. Dad-gum hip. Dad-gum sexy Juan Carlos. I was riding a moped through the streets of Bermuda with him when a man hit me from behind at a stop sign in 1978. I’ve had issues with my tailbone, sitting on silly round pillows for half my life because of it. Usually it’s no problem, but the stress, I tell you, it does a number.

  “Miss Ally?” The deep, sultry voice of an angel comes through the kitchen.

  “Vesey, that you?”

  “You all right? I heard banging this way. Come to check on you.”

  “Thank God you’re here. Can you come round and help me with these movers?”

  Vesey lumbers around the house to the front porch and the two men sum him up as he climbs the steps. He’s twice their age and nearly as strong. I see respect in their faces at the sight of his black suspenders. “It’s my back, Vesey. It went out and I haven’t done a thing. Not one thing in here.” I pull the hair on the sides of my head and squeeze.

  “No worries. You go on and unload the truck,” he tells the men with a motion of his hand. “I’ll be ready for you by the time you get it all out.”

  “Vesey, nobody can do that.”

  “Just leave it to me. You wanna lie down?”

  “Think you could just help me over to that chair?” Vesey takes my arm and I limp to the living room. He is a gentleman escort and I am a crippled slug, nowhere close to being ready for the ball. He smells of motor oil and fresh-cut grass. He lowers me down slow and steady into the chair, even pulls the reclining lever down so the back flattens out.

  “I don’t know how to thank you,” I say. I’m a beached whale, legs straight out, head swimming.

  “I had two daughters go off on their own, and a son . . . well, I know moving. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that.”

  “You mean, just another thing you know.” He studies my face to see if I’m upset or freaking out, but I smile at him reassuringly and lay my head back. I’m getting sleepy again. But Vesey’s here. Good ol’ . . . He’ll take care of everything. Everything’s gonna be just . . .

  FOUR

  Monsoon Season

  Kathmandu, Nepal

  Sunila

  IT IS DONE. I CANNOT CHANGE THINGS NOW. I CANNOT go back home. I am so far away from home.

  I have the handle of a rainbow-colored umbrella in my hands, slippery and wet. It is hard to hold on. It is monsoon season in Kathmandu and the umbrella that once covered my head from the sun now shelters me from the rain. It’s been raining for six days and already a river flows around my feet. I step into the road and struggle to keep standing. I slowly make my way across, looking to see an old woman in the window of a crumbling building, a chicken there in her windowsill.

  At the sight of it, my stomach rumbles. I haven’t eaten since yesterday, since I set out on this journey.

  I am thirty-seven or thirty-eight now, I am not sure. Amaa and Buba never talked about my birthday, for they didn’t know when it was. They found me, abandoned near the quarry on a rock before monsoon season. But every year, my father would complain that with me in his presence, disaster had befallen them. In our little one-room hovel, Amaa would tell him that I was the only reason we were not all dead. Yet. She would say it as the tarp on our tent blew in the wind and the white dust of stone covered her dark hands and feet and swirled up into the air like an angry spirit. “We are alive because of her,” she would tell him. Then she’d touch my arm, my untouchable arm, and beg me to get back to work. “The rains will come soon,” she would say, “and then there is no work for any of us.”

  A gust of wind blows the rain under my umbrella and plasters my cholo to my body. I touch beneath my arm and make sure it’s still there, my treasure, my way to a better life. The book is still there, unharmed and dry. I think of the man, the look on his face as he lay there, no longer able to harm me or anyone else. No more threats, no more debts, no more violence.

  I am a Dalit. I am an outcaste in Nepal. Dalit people are discriminated against and often treated badly. A Dalit woman is lower than a Dalit man. Amaa is too shy to look someone in the eye. She is not worthy, she says, so she does not speak up. Yet I am bolder. I learned to beg when I was a child and learned that I would not eat unless I opened my mouth to speak.

  Once, many years ago, when I was begging food from a café, a man sat watching me. He said I would not have to beg if I went with him across the border to India. He told me that he could promise a marriage to a very prominent man and I would never have to work another day of my life.

  I was very close to saying yes, I would go with him. What young girl would not want a better life? I had worked with stone since before I could remember. And my mother and father? I asked him. What would become of them?

  “Look at your eyes,” the man had said to me, his own eyes dancing. “I see much light in there. Your eyes, your blue eyes . . . The lord Buddha had blue eyes. You must be descended from the heavens,” he whispered. “You should not be here, having to beg for food. Come with me. You’ll see. You will be rich and send home money for your parents to live. You will save them from this life. They will never have to work another day. Trust me. I know this man. He is good and handsome
. I promise, I will take you to him.”

  Although I was thirteen, I was an untouchable. Upper-caste people would sprinkle purified water on themselves if I touched them. I would get screamed at if my shadow fell across a high-caste person. Many Dalit women were raped and stripped in public. Some murdered. Some burned. I had seen these things with my own eyes. I had not escaped all of them. I could not read or write, so the promise of marriage to a wealthy man was beyond my dreams. My heart stirred as the man in the café reached out and handed me eight hundred rupees. It was more than I had ever seen. My hand shook. “Wouldn’t you like to be able to buy food whenever you want it? Are you hungry now? Hmmm?”

  There was another man in the café that day who had been watching the conversation between me and the well-dressed man. He beckoned for me and, reluctantly, I went to his side. I was begging, after all, and thought perhaps he had something for me.

  “Do you know that man?” he asked me, pointing with his chin.

  I lied and said he was my cousin. It was easy to lie. My dreams were bigger than the truth.

  “I know this man,” he said. “He takes young Nepali girls from their families, promising them work and marriage in India. It is what he promised you, no?”

  My heart grew still.

  “And then he takes them across the border where they are sold into brothels. They become sex slaves and never get out. They are there until they die miserable deaths.”

  I took a step back, looking behind me for the man, but he was gone.

  “If you follow a man like this one, you will be sold into a terrible life. You will have no money. You will have no future. Is this what you want?”

  I wanted to tell him that I had no money. That I had no future. That I would never be able to leave the life I was living in the stone quarry, but my throat had no moisture. I swallowed hard. The man offered to get me a drink, and I tried to refuse, but he told the waiter I would be joining him. I found my voice and said, “I would rather die than sit with you.”

  I was stunned. Nothing like this had ever been uttered from my lips, but this man had stolen my dreams from me. I had watched them grow up before my eyes like green sprouts beneath granite, and in an instant, he had trampled upon them, turning them into dust.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” I scowled at him.

  “I do,” he said. Then he pushed a small piece of paper toward me on the tabletop. It had letters on it, and I tried to look away, but I couldn’t help myself. I picked it up.

  I studied it for a while, feeling the weight of it in my calloused hands. “My name is Davidson Monroe,” he said. “Mr. Monroe. I’m an American. I work at the US Embassy. That’s what it says there on that card. It has my address at the embassy and my telephone number.” His voice grew softer. “You are very pretty . . . What is your name?” No one ever called me by my name except Amaa. I didn’t want to tell him my name, but I longed to hear someone tell me I was pretty again. I had never heard these words.

  “Sunila,” I muttered.

  “Sunila,” the man repeated. “You must watch out for men like the one you met today. They are looking at you and seeing money in their eyes. You must trust me in this. I have seen what happens to pretty poor girls like you in Nepal.”

  I looked at the card and then back at Mr. Monroe.

  “Namaste,” he said to me.

  “Namaste,” I replied, which means I honor the light I see within you. Then I walked away, shaking from hunger, shaking from anger. I never saw Mr. Monroe again, though I did have several more offers of work and marriage from men like the one I’d met in the café that day. Surely I would have gone had I not had Mr. Monroe’s warning still in my head. I never knew things could be worse than they are in the stone quarry, where children pound stone for gravel, breathe dust, and get sick, and mothers and fathers must work sixteen hours every day, and no one has the chance to learn to read or write, no chance to get out of debt. Out of the quarry, I always thought things must be better somewhere else, perhaps just beyond the border, over the Himalayas, but Mr. Monroe created in me that day a fear of the lies that men will tell. It has kept me working in this place for more than thirty years. It has held me captive. Or safe. I am not sure which.

  But now, now, I am traveling under cover of rain and umbrella to make my way to the US Embassy. I am going to find that Mr. Monroe. I am going to tell him what I believe I have in my possession. That I have found a book that holds the key to my freedom.

  After all this time I’m not quite sure what this means, freedom.

  I pass the temple but do not dare go in to pray. I am untouchable and therefore unclean. I would be thrown out or worse, even under this new government. Things have not changed for me. For people like me.

  May he still be alive. May Mr. Monroe still work at the US Embassy. May he be able to read the words that I cannot read but that I know hold secrets to my past and to my future. I say my prayers silently as I trudge on by the temple in the river around my ankles that was once a street of Kathmandu.

  FIVE

  Make Yourself at Home

  Mount Pleasant

  Ally

  SOMETHING WONDERFUL FLOWS AROUND ME, A RICH, roasted, savory smell that rouses me from a deep sleep. I wonder if I’m in Africa, or maybe New Orleans again. Smells like spices, tomatoes . . . gumbo? I open my eyes and rub them to be sure I’m really awake and not dreaming. I am still lying in Daddy’s moss-green La-Z-Boy, but the chair seems to have been planted in some other living room, like maybe a tornado plucked my recliner, spun me around, and landed me in Oz. I see Kat, sitting in the windowsill. He looks just as confused as I am.

  Daddy is gone. Every bit of him, the old TV with bunny ears, the bureau beneath the windows with pictures of me when I was a girl, the boxes of books and magazines, the faded rug my mother made with her own two hands. It’s all gone. Instead I see pieces of me, my travels, my world. The television is a flat-screen type, not yet up on the wall, but leaning against it. The coffee table is a round brass one with intricate carvings of Ganesha, the Indian elephant god. A colorful rug I brought back from Guatemala covers the brown carpet and a large Greek lamp shaped like Nike stands beside me, her wings pointed toward the kitchen. I feel as if I stepped into some foreign bazaar. I can almost smell the spices of Kandahar. But no, I really do think it’s gumbo.

  “Vesey?” I call to him, but only hear the breeze coming in the windows, the far-off call of a crow. I cannot believe that he did all this for me while I slept like an invalid. Vesey did this. How did he pay the men? Where did he send Daddy’s things? Did I tell him I wanted it all sent back to the warehouse in Georgia till I can handle it later? My mind is foggy. My hip still aches, but the pain is a little further away now. Just a few days probably and I’ll be back to new.

  I grab the lever and grit my teeth as the seat pulls me back up to sitting. A piece of paper ripped from Daddy’s old prescription tablet falls to my lap. My hand trembles as I turn it to the fading light in the window. I’d know that scribble anywhere, right there below the Rx and the symbol of a mortar and pestle. I can hardly believe it but I’m reading a note from my dearly departed father. For a moment I imagine it’s him in the kitchen, cooking up a storm like old times. This dying thing has all been a cruel joke. He’ll pop out and yell something like Surprise! Some play to get me home.

  Make yourself at home, it reads.

  I press the paper to my chest and hold my breath. The pain inside could rip me apart, but I won’t let it. I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth slowly until it subsides. Did Daddy leave this for me? No, it’s impossible. I don’t ever remember him writing me anything. I’ve sent him postcards from the Orient Express, from Bali, from Australia, but never a word back. For a second I wonder if Vesey wrote this note. Would he do that? My head feels groggy, and I have to get up. I’ll get through this pain; I just need to clear my head.

  I open my mouth and mean to call for Vesey again, but what comes out is,
“Daddy?”

  It sounds so ridiculous, a grown woman calling out for her dead father. The fan whirs above me; a flock of geese flies, honking, toward the sunset outside my window. Part of me expects him to answer me back. The other part of me knows it will never happen. I swallow and head to the kitchen on tender feet for a glass of water. When I get there, my hand involuntarily crumples the note and my knees go weak.

  There he is, wrapped in white steam. My father is standing at the old stove, one hand holding the lid of the blue crab pot, the other stirring something with a long wooden spoon.

  “Daddy?” I hold myself up on the edge of the door frame and he turns around as if in slow motion. “Da—”

  “Miss Ally, you all right? Don’t look good.” As soon as he sets the spoon down and comes toward me, I know it’s Vesey. I know it, but I swear, my father was there. He was. I guess I need to lay off the muscle relaxers. I feel like I’m losing it.

  “Can you sit down?”

  “I don’t want to sit.” It sounds childish and I shouldn’t snap. I feel so out of control. “I’m sorry, I just . . .” I look around the room. Daddy’s crab pot is there, but the old Krups coffeemaker is gone. It’s been replaced by my fire-red Cuisinart. The old wooden table and chairs have been changed into a carved set of mahogany I picked up in England, an antique from an old castle. The table has claw feet. It barely fits in the room.