- - -
After a few days, I found that I could walk without stumbling, and keep solid food down. Mom sent me back to school. I walked there in the early morning, crunching through the soft gravel road. A recent storm had left the island’s ground soggy and the air clear and moist. The road I took was parallel to the beach; between trees I caught glimpses of the shining ocean, and off in the distant, a greenish blur that was the coast of Georgia. A few black dots chugged and puffed in the middle of that expanse of water: the ferries to our island. I veered off the path, heading for wilder country. Soon I was nearing the top of a hill.
Spring was starting. I splashed through black puddles, thinking of the story of the Tar Baby.
It would be horrible to be stuck like that, in the ooze, but it would also be fun. I found that flowers, with my new sight, glowed even in the bright sunlight. They didn’t have auras; their radiance was contained within.
At the top of the hill, I came upon a small, brown hare sitting up on its hind legs, its nose twitching, in front of a bluebell. At once I was enveloped by an overpowering fragrance. The cloy of sweetness, the moist of earth, the clear of water all rushed at me, making me drunk. The blue of the flower was more, somehow. Violet embers, stroke of pollen—I sat down, dizzy. I found that I knew everything about the hare. Its home, hidden deep within a briar patch, constantly evading foxes. I knew the story told by clay, mud, and tar. I closed my eyes, trying to distance myself from our brotherhood, the rabbit and I.
When the nausea subsided, I opened my eyes cautiously. He was gone. But I wasn’t alone. I saw an old woman staring at me intently. Her hair was long pearl gray, and contained in two braids. Her skin was wrinkled and red, like clay. Her eyes were warm, dark and familiar. She wore trousers and simple blouse. I could tell by her wavering that she was dead—like Aunt Ondine. I wasn’t afraid of her, though. I’m not sure why.
She walked over to me, and sat down.
Are you all right? she asked. She didn’t move her lips, or even smile. In spite of that she seemed friendly.
“Yes,” I said.
She put an arm around me. I could feel it. Her touch was feathery.
“Who are you?” I asked after a while.
She just glanced at me and smiled.
Ask your grandmother.
Her smile dazzled me like a prize, a flash of teeth like cowry shells. The wrinkles around her mouth and eyes were tiny canyons, pressed into the folds of her skin.
She tapped me on the shoulder. Look.
I turned around, following her pointing finger. There, on the beach below us, were hundreds of wavering people, both red and brown. They wore a mishmash of old fashioned clothes. Black folk wore bright, if clean, rags—homespun dresses and kerchiefs for the women, gray suits for the men. Indians (they could be nothing else) wore everything from leather to linen, and all points in between. They walked hand in hand, mixing with one another. A fire burned on the beach, even though this was early morning. Trays of corn, beef, chicken, greens and other things waited cooking. My mouth watered. I’d only eaten a thin, watery bowl of farina that morning. Two people on the beach spotted us, a tall, thin Indian woman in flowing robe with a stylized design on it, and her boyfriend, a young black man, the same color as me, in a white suit.
We waved back, the old woman and I. Then I felt incredibly sad. For I learned their story. The old woman showed me it, without words. Years ago, they’d escaped from slavery. The scent of sugar, the damp of the rice fields, the sting of cotton was on their hands, shimmering in their haloes. Some people in the group were clearly damaged. Welts and scars decorated their bodies. There was a man with half an ear. I saw a woman with roughened, pockmarked skin—she’d been burned. I could hear them singing now: plaintive gospel voices intertwining with majestic chants. Two kinds of “savagery”, as my mother would call them, mixing. I heard that savagery, of their pride. Even in death they wore it. The man with half an ear was transformed by it. His lost ear became a whole black shell, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The woman’s burned face became a sculpture’s head, carved of rock. People’s scars became maps of pain and survival. I heard the savage pride in their music, too, in drums from Africa, from old America. Weaving together until—
I bent over and retched. Farina burned my throat. I saw the peaceful village wiped out. Men, on horses, carrying torches. The crack of gunfire and bones. The whole village wiped from the beaches. In an instant I saw blackened and reddened bodies, lying side by side. I saw the bodies sinking beneath the sand.
I turned to the old woman sitting next me.
“Why did you show me this?” I croaked out.
She said nothing. She smiled. It was a horrible thing, that smile.
I went back home, in a daze. Granny greeted me, surprised. She felt my forehead, and immediately sent me to bed.
A few hours later, she came in, bringing a bowl of soup with her. I told her about my encounter with the woman, but not about the massacre. I didn’t want her to worry too much.
“This woman,” Granny said, “she was red, like clay?”
“Yes.”
“And when she smiled, her teeth were uneven, but the whitest teeth you ever saw?”
“Yes.”
She sat still, considering something or other. She was smoking her pipe. A rich, pungent smell of tobacco rose.
“That was my Aunt Zora. Your great, great aunt. She was half Algonquian, and crazy as a loon. So my parents thought. But I loved her, when I was a child. She would sing to me, Indian songs about corn, birds, and such.” She paused, the wrinkles in her face cracking with concentration. “I can’t remember them. They’re gone.”
A melody snaked its way into my head. It was one of the songs from the scene on the beach. I sang it to my grandmother. She smiled, her whole face did. “That’s it, child, that’s it! One of the songs. You have the gift. Like I reckon Zora and Ondine did. Zora would always be talking about voices. She’d always be talking about hearing people singing.”
Granny looked off into the distance, seeing beyond my bedroom wall. “Or screaming.” Her aura deepened in color. It took on a bluish tint. If pearls were blue, they’d be that color.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her.
“Ondine heard voices in the swamp, that called to her.” Granny got up, and began to clear away the dishes. She pulled the shawl tight around her shoulders.
“Aren’t you gonna tell me what happened to her?”
Granny didn’t look at me. “You need to get your rest. Go to sleep, child, so you’ll get better.”
She closed the door on me, leaving me with memories that wasn't my own.
- - -
When I got better I went back to school. By now I could pretty much ignore my heightened senses. It helped that I was considered to be kind of odd by my classmates anyway. So when I saw that their auras were bright orange or urine-yellow, and giggled, they paid me no mind. Besides in the daytime, these things wasn't as clear as they could be.
One day in Sister Margaret’s math class, I was drifting between protractors, proofs and equations. I found that the room was multifaceted, and upside down. I felt everything—the slightest breeze, a classmate’s sneeze, and the vibration of Sister Margaret’s chalk on the board—throughout my body. The trick was to weave my fibrous, filament-nerve in one corner, hidden. Then I’d wait for the violet-silver shimmer of dinner’s wings. I folded my legs into myself.
“Aime,” said Sister Margaret, in her habit of fly-black and soft underbelly white. “I asked you a question. Describe to me what an isosceles triangle looks like.”
I cried out.
My classmates giggled nervously. Sister Margaret frowned. Then she followed my gaze, up to where my eyes rested. In the corner of the chalkboard, rested a black spider, nestling in a spool of gossamer. Sister Margaret and many of the girls in the room screamed. Except for Gwen, who stood up and captured the spider. She was fearless. She placed Brother Spider in front of me, stepping gingerly to my desk. She p
ut it on my prayer book. I smiled at him, having heard his story. I admired his cunning, trapping the insects in his masterpiece of a home.
Sister Margaret bought her answer book down on the spider. I screamed. A thousand eyes closed forever.
“Aime, what are you yelling for?” she asked him. Her face was a mask of disgust, as she lifted her sticky book back up.
“You are a murderer!” I cried.
Her disgust dropped, briefly. Her aura flamed. She loved control.
“What do you mean, boy, that I am a murderer?”
“You killed him— “
Her eyes narrowed. “For killing a small, foul insect, you think that I am a murderer? Aime, go to Father John.”
“What for?” I don’t know what possessed me. I wasn’t usually this forceful. “You’re the one who killed an innocent soul, who could teach you more about geometry—”
“Aime. I will say this once: go to Father John.”
I left the classroom, accompanied by my classmates’ chorus of ohhhs and ahhhs. As I went down the hall, I thought to myself, What just happened? The new way of seeing things didn’t bother me so much. I was more concerned with the how of my new powers of observation. I didn’t remember the exact time of my illness. When I remembered the day that I became ill, all I could see, in my mind, was the forest on the North side of the island. Up in the trees, I saw row upon row of moth egg sacs, oozing and webbed.
I shook that image out of my head as I went to Father John’s office, with the note that Sister Margaret had given me. After he read it, he questioned me about my actions. I confirmed them. He took out a stiff, leather strap, and asked me to put my hand out across the desk. I complied, knowing what to expect.
Crack! Crack! Crack! went the strap across my tender palm. But I didn’t feel it. I was entranced by Father John’s halo. It glowed dark and murky. It was tarnished, not at all like the circles of gold around Jesus and Mary’s heads.
I began to find that my strange vision was more of a nuisance than a miracle.
One day in Social Studies, Sister Ernestine was teaching us about the Father of Our Country. I drifted in the class usually because of her bewitching beauty. She was the youngest of the sisters, and her skin was smooth and brown like a chocolate milkshake where the other Sisters’ were cracked and parched like the earth in drought-times. She had large, doe-like brown eyes and the most striking lips: the top one was dark and smooth, like her skin, and the bottom lip was flamingo-pink.
My history book was lying open, and my elbows rested on either side of it. I wasn’t really listening to Sister Ernestine; I was following her with my eyes. I noticed the swellings and movements of her form beneath her habit, the way her wimple left an exposed patch of her soft hair. And her aura-—it got me in trouble.
She called on me, while I was dreaming of saving her from some villain. I didn’t know what the question had been; I was just thrilled that she had asked me something.
I said to her, dreamily, “You’re glowing, like the pink part of a conch shell.”
Sister Ernestine looked at me blankly. Then she blushed, her ears turning purple. Her aura turned that color, too, more or less.
The boys in the row behind me snickered. That seemed to set her off. She ran out of the room, tears flowing down her face. The class didn’t know what to do. We had never seen teachers behave in this way. We were used to cruelty. Minutes passed in silence. After a while, someone, I think it was Gwen, made a half-hearted attempt at tomfoolery. Even she, who was usually fearless, was uncertain. It was almost relief we felt when Father John barged into the room. He stood there for a second, scanning the children’s faces before he found the culprit. Me.
Then he marched over to me, and yanked me up. He grabbed my arms, squeezing hard. I wasn’t hurt, though I should have been. I was too busy noticing that murky outline of his fingers on my flesh. Then BANG. Something hit my head, blanking out my vision. Then I felt the pain. A sharp object was wedged against my scalp. It was only when he released me, in his office, that I could see again in that strange way. I turned to regard Father John, in his dark clothing. The object banging against my head had been his crucifix.
He forced me to sit down, and called my mother at the gift shop. In about ten minutes, she arrived, flustered and out of breath.
“Father... John... I... came... here—”
“Please have a seat, Rebekiah.”
My mother sat. She still wore her uniform. As she gained her breath, she glared at me. Snow, this time. A blizzard.
“Tell me what this is about.”
Father John sat at his desk, arranging himself in an actorly way. “It seems that your son has taken an active interest in vulgarity.”
“What do you mean?”
Father John repeated what I said to Sister Ernestine, changing my words.
Mom looked at me, on the verge of tears, or murder.
I said, “But--”
“Child!” they both said in unison. Mom finished the sentence: “Speak when you are spoken to.”
I ignored them: “But that’s not what I said. I like Sister Ernestine. I told her that she glowed pink, like a conch shell.”
Both of them looked at me coldly. Apparently this wasn’t much better than what they thought I said.
In the end, it was Mom that got me out of serious trouble. She explained to Father John that I had been sick for a long while, and perhaps this was just an after-effect of the illness... When I got home, she gave me a spanking, and sent me to bed, without supper.
This vision thing was quite annoying.
- - -
For weeks afterward, when I went in public, I wore my mother’s rosary beads underneath my shirt. They hid, if only partially, the worst of the visions. I caught glimmers here and there of the outrageous stuff, and the auras sank down into nothingness. For weeks, I was free of plaguing images. I felt safe and normal once more with the cold lead beads against my skin. Every now and then, and in the evenings before Mom came home, I took them off. At once, I was pushed back into a multi-layered reality.
I took walks after my homework. In the forest, I could see the birds, insects, and flowers. Watching them glow, dart and radiate was my favorite thing to do in the evenings. Once, I saw Ondine, in her white dress with blue flowers, silently following Granny on her way to the grocery store. She caught sight of me, and waved. I was hesitant to wave back. Part of me wanted to talk to her, to have her tell me her story. But somehow, I knew that in her spirit state, she wouldn’t speak. What she had to tell me would be told in her graceful, balletic movements, and through images. All the same, I wasn’t too keen on that method of storytelling. What Zora had shown me still scared me. I viewed my sight with ambivalence. And I avoided the hilltop and the beaches.
Sometimes, after school, I would wait for Mom on the park bench just opposite the cathedral. I’d watch tourists and visitors from the mainland drift by. It was better than kaleidoscopes, watching their auras mingle and blend with one another.
One day, I was doing just this, when someone sat next to me. I didn’t notice anyone until a voice said, “What are you doing, Boy?”
I turned and saw this man, nearly seven feet tall and black as molasses. He wavered. His hands were large, the fingers splaying off his hands like roots. Even the palms of his hands were dark. I looked into his eyes, seeing that they held things. A memory of openness and wideness. I scaled mountains with him and ran the plains. I also knew confinement, chains, and the smell of my neighbors above and below me. I stalked a sea hungry with sharks and floating bodies—
I looked away from his eyes. They were worse than what Zora had shown me. I focused on his root-hands and beet-purple clothes.
How you like seein’ things?. His voice boomed and gonged in my mind,
“Not much,” I told him. “It gets me into trouble.”
It can do that, certainly. And he laughed, a deep, woody chuckle. I could feel plates beneath the earth move. After a while, even watc
hing his spectral fabric became disturbing.
I cut to the chase: “Who are you? Are you one of my relatives, here to show me some awful thing? If you are, I don’t want to see it!”
He laughed again. I felt thunder and waterfalls, this time. It was a laughter that was bitter and innocent at once.
I am your relative, and everyone else’s.
“What do you mean by that?”
The giant root-man stood. His purple and magenta surged and swirled. I have many names. Ask your Granny who I am.
“No thank you.” I was petulant.
He was well over seven feet now; I reached his shin.
That is fine, for now. We’ll have all of forever, after you come join we.
He threw his huge head back, and roared with laughter. Then he dispersed.
“Aime!” Mom’s shrill voice carried across the park. “Who were you talking to?”
“No-one,” I told her. I walked home sullenly.
“You were talking aloud,” she said. I looked up at her. There was concern in her voice.
I got out of my sulking. “It was just an imaginary playmate.”
“You sure?”
“Yes, Mom, I’m sure.”
I didn’t tell Granny about the giant. This aspect of my sight, I wanted to go away. The dead always had sad stories to tell. However, I knew that this giant was no mere dead thing. He was something more. Something even more terrible than a recording of death.
Things got worse. One day in music class, the rosary beads warm against my skin, I began to see spirits tramping in and out of the classroom. We were learning Ave Maria, wobbly children’s voices just slightly out of tune. I was playing the melody on a glockenspiel. Sister Agnes was leading us, with bold, exaggerated strokes of her wand. The dead gathered around her. Angels in robes of blue, their haloes gold. Or maybe they wore wreaths, made of holly, flowers and candles on their heads, and sashes made of Christmas tree lights, their wings of aloe leaves. They began to sing with us, eventually drowning us out.
“Aime,” said Sister Agnes, “pay attention.”
I found it impossible to do so.
I realized the rosary beads no longer worked. Instead of hiding the spirit world, they now intensified it.
Sea Swallow Me and Other Stories Page 9