In the dim, cold little pantry she fished into the pocket of her apron and pulled something out and dropped it into Peyton’s hand. Peyton looked down. It was a strange object, primitive and rather beautiful: an intricately interwoven knot that formed a rough cross on a leather thong. She looked up at her grandmother.
“It’s pretty, Nana,” she said. “What is it?”
“It’s an amulet. It protects you. It’s a special one. It’s got my hair woven into it, and some herbs that are very old. I want you to put it on now, and I don’t want you to take it off again.”
“Protects me against what?”
Her grandmother was silent, and then she said, “I saw her again. Your Cousin Nora. I saw her this morning when I built the fire.”
“The fire—that’s not so good, is it? She wouldn’t hurt me, Nana. I know she wouldn’t. I don’t think I like her very much, but she’s always taking my side and doing things for me, and she absolutely hates Aunt Augusta. That can’t be all bad, can it?”
Her grandmother shook her head impatiently.
“I can’t see bad or good this time,” she said. “I just know that I saw her first in the soup, and this time in the fire, and I don’t know what that means. I don’t see bad; I don’t see anything. It’s like fog. I don’t know what it means.”
Suddenly Peyton was tired of all of it—the dark pantry, the visions and the incantations and the mutterings of fire and water and protection. She wanted light, air, normalcy, laughter, the sound of her record player, the smell of supper cooking with nothing in it of bitter herbs.
“I think we need to go, Nana,” she said. “Daddy’s going to be in before long and Nora’s going to make us Cuban black bean soup for supper. We’ve got to go to the grocery store.”
Her grandmother looked at her for a long time and then sighed.
“So it begins,” she said. “All right, Peyton. You run on and have your soup. But you put that around your neck right now. I’m not going to let you out of here until you do.”
Peyton put the little cross around her neck and let it slide down under her sweater. It felt rough and cool against her collarbone, but not unpleasant.
“Promise you won’t take it off?”
“Oh, Nana—”
“Promise!” Her grandmother’s voice cracked with a kind of urgency Peyton had never heard before.
“I promise,” she said. “I really promise.”
On the way toward Lytton’s small Piggly Wiggly to get black beans and rice, Nora said, “She really does get a little bit peculiar sometimes, doesn’t she? Yesterday she was so kind of…joyful. I thought—no, I know that she liked me then. I wonder what got into her. Did she say?”
“No,” Peyton said, the lie coming smoothly and quickly. “I don’t know, she just gets funny sometimes. I think maybe she drinks too much of that stuff she makes. She’ll be entirely different the next time you see her.”
“I hope so,” Nora said. “I think she would make a bad enemy.”
Peyton looked at Nora under her lashes. It was a strange thing to say, but she knew that her cousin was right. You would not want to get crosswise of Agnes McKenzie.
She wanted to wait in the car while Nora went into the store, feeling suddenly naked with the lightness of her head and the air on her neck, but her cousin jerked open the passenger door and pulled her out.
“Come on. You’ve got to do it sometime,” she said. “You look terrific, and it’ll be all over town tomorrow that you do. And besides, you’ve got your protection hung around your neck, haven’t you?”
“How did you know?”
“I can smell it. Rosemary again, and maybe some hyssop. People used herbs for charms and amulets all the time in Cuba. Everybody had something hung around his or her neck. You’re lucky it isn’t a dead chicken. Is it me your grandmother is afraid of, do you think?”
“No. I don’t know. She just gets strange. One winter she made me wear garlic around my neck on a string when I went to bed. She said it was to ward off coughs and colds, but I heard Chloe tell Daddy it was for witches and spirits. It got so bad that I had to take it off. I told her I was still wearing it, but she knew I wasn’t. Boy, did I smell.”
Nora laughed, her joyous, froggy laugh. “Well, let’s go see. If we get through the Piggly Wiggly without being molested by a witch, we’ll know she’s on to something.”
Peyton laughed, too, and the strange dark sense of her grandmother vanished as if it had never been, and together they dashed through the rain into the grocery store.
At supper her father frankly stared at her. He said nothing, only nodded as Nora talked lazily about her trip to Atlanta the night before, and ate the rich, dark soup appreciatively and had another bowl, saying it made him feel as if he were at a real fiesta, and all the while, out of the corner of her eye, Peyton was aware of his eyes on her.
Finally he said, “I really like your hair, Peyton. At first it was a shock to see all that pretty hair gone, but this is…right elegant. It suits you. I like the new clothes, too. You remember to thank your aunt, now. She was a little miffed that you never thanked her for the trip to Atlanta.”
“She’s going to hate the hair,” Peyton said.
Her father smiled, a small smile, but a smile nevertheless.
“I expect you’re right,” he said. “Never mind. This is good. She’ll come around. Did you thank Nora for the haircut?”
“She did,” Nora said before Peyton could remember that she had not. “We went down to her grandmother’s afterward, to show her. I think she liked it, too.”
Her father looked at Peyton.
“Oh, she did,” Peyton said, bending over her soup bowl. “She really did.”
“Well, then, you’ve got a hard row to hoe ahead of you,” Frazier said, but he smiled again. “Nora, tell me where you learned to make this soup. Cuba, you said? Were you there long? I realize Peyton and I don’t have any idea what you were doing so far away from home. I’ve always wanted to see Cuba.”
“It’s a wonderful country,” Nora said. “I might still be there if the revolution hadn’t started to heat things up. I believe in it, but I don’t want to live with it. I don’t take easily to sacrifice and nobility.”
She smiled through smoke, and Peyton thought once again how plain she was, and how utterly arresting. It was hard to look away from her. She had brought out fat wax candles from somewhere, and painted wooden candlesticks, and they ate by the flickering light. In it, Nora looked like some impossible firebird that had alit in a small southern town and decided to stay awhile, unaware that her plumage roiled the air around her. She wore a heavy cabled white turtleneck sweater and the black pants, and her long, thin hands wove in and out of the candlelight as she talked of Cuba.
“I went there in nineteen fifty-two with a friend,” she said. “I was just out of school and didn’t know what I wanted to do, and I had always wanted to see Cuba. He had a motorcycle. We put it on a ferry and took off, and I was a goner before the first shot was fired. He came back two months later. I stayed five years.”
Peyton saw her father remark the “he,” though he said nothing. It emboldened her to say, “Why didn’t your friend stay, too?”
“He was a priest,” Nora said. “He had to get back to his parish.”
Peyton thought about it: the hot sunlight pouring down on the fleeing motorcycle, its shadow leaping ahead of it. The huge pile of shining ocean cumulus. Blue seas unrolling beside it like something on a movie projector. Wind in Nora’s bronze hair, and the priest’s skirts fluttering like black crows….
“Did you ride in one of those little cars beside the motorcycle?” she said. “Did he wear those robes?”
Nora laughed. “I rode behind him sometimes, holding on, and he rode behind me sometimes while I drove. He wore Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt. It was a sabbatical for him. It meant he could wear his Bermudas and drink rum with the cane workers all night if he wanted to. The Catholic Church is kind of vague about that.
”
“Did he? Drink rum all night, I mean?”
“Once or twice, I think. I don’t really know. We didn’t keep close tabs on each other. He was a darling and a good friend, but it was really the motorcycle and Cuba itself that got to me. It’s funny, he went down there thinking he might stay and find a ministry in one of the really poor little villages west of Havana—God knows there are hundreds of them—and stay. Make it his vocation. In the end the heat and superstition got him, and it was I who stayed on. I liked the heat and I even kind of liked the superstition.”
“What superstition?”
“Well, the Catholic Church has had a hard time in Cuba. It’s always been the state religion, but there’s an older, darker worship, almost pure African, called santería, which sort of hovers just under the surface and simply can’t be rooted out. It’s the worship of saints and spirits, good and evil; everywhere you see the saints’ pictures on the walls with the glasses of water under them to trap the spirits. It must have been terribly frustrating for a Catholic priest. In the daylight the old, familiar saints of the church were worshiped, and after dark the Cubans simply named them something else and worshiped them, too. It seemed to me a pretty practical arrangement: nobody had to spend any more money on different saint images, and all the bases were covered. But it drove Tootie wild.”
“Tootie?”
“Tootie LeClerc, fresh out of Loyola in New Orleans. I met him on the beach in Miami and we spent the afternoon drinking beer. Once I saw the motorcycle and heard where he was going, I knew what my next move was going to be. I guess I didn’t think much further ahead that that.”
“So you stayed on,” Frazier said. There was nothing of the shock Peyton felt in his voice or face. He looked and sounded merely as if he really wanted to know about this scandalous flight into the sun.
“I did. At first I just wanted to be a tourist—we poked around Havana and did all the touristy things you’re supposed to do—but pretty soon we both got restless. There was not enough humble poverty for Tootie and, in the end, too much glitter for me. Living was pretty good then in Cuba. You didn’t see the real poor around Havana. So we got on the motorcycle and headed west, toward Mariel. It’s beautiful country, or it was then—wild and empty, and the blue, blue water, and those huge tropical skies. And poor enough for anybody, I guess. That’s where we began to see little adobe shacks with tile roofs and chickens going in and out of the open windows, and rusted old American cars in yards, and the village men hanging around the lone flyspecked cantina because one or another of the cement factories had shut down and there was no work. And the children, some of them naked as jaybirds, some in rags, playing in the roads and ditches with not a sign of any supervision, or a school anywhere. Tootie thought he’d found paradise; he went straight to the Catholic church in the square and asked if he could sign on sans pay, and the senile old priest almost kissed him. I went into the cantina and told the barkeep that I would start a little school for the children, teach them English and some geography and what all, in exchange for room and board somewhere in the village. I had a little money. I was going to stay until it ran out. So they found me a room with a village family and I moved in and fell in love with them and it and everything else, and when Tootie got a bait of it and went back to New Orleans, I just stayed.”
“For five years,” Frazier McKenzie said.
“Yes. Some of the great years of my life. I’ve never felt so in tune with a place or a people. It was as if that’s what I was meant to be doing—living there with those people, teaching those children, swimming in that water, eating that food….”
“But you left.”
“Things change. One day it was time. I came back to Miami and got a job with a sort of pre-Head Start program they had for the Haitian refugees from Papa Doc and his benevolent Tontons Macoute. They were pouring into Florida by then, dirt-poor and with no schooling whatsoever. I liked doing that, but it wasn’t the same as Mariel. But you don’t want to hear all this….”
“I do,” he said. “It’s fascinating. Peyton and I both would love to hear your stories. You’ve done something really valuable.”
“One day I’ll tell them all to you.” She smiled and got up and said, “Leave the dishes. Peyton, come with me. I have something for you.”
The something was a tiny tiger kitten, thin but with a hard little potbelly, slanted green eyes, and a fierce little spike of a tail. Nora brought his box out of the bathroom and set it down, and the kitten scrambled out onto the floor, blinking and mewling furiously. He looked at Peyton and she looked back.
“I found him behind a trash can at the bus station last night,” Nora said. “Somebody had obviously dumped him. I bought him a hamburger and brought him home. His name is Trailways, and he needs a friend.”
The kitten mewed again. It was not a plaintive sound; it was an imperious demand. Peyton put out a hand and he sniffed her fingers and then climbed into her lap and curled up. Something in her heart softened into a spreading pool.
“Is he for me?” she asked.
“If you want him. He’ll need a lot of taking care of. He’s eaten now, and has water and a litter box of sorts, but I don’t know what else he needs. Shots, surely, and maybe vitamins, and most certainly a flea bath. We need to get a vet to check him.”
“We can take him to Dr. Kidd,” Peyton said, her voice trembling. “He does mainly horses and cows and mules, but I’m sure he’d know about cats. What does he want? He’s yelling so.”
“I think he’s just saying, ‘Here I am. What are you going to do about it?’”
“Can I take him to my room?” Peyton said. Her voice was tight with love for the angry little cat.
“In a little while,” Nora said. “You stay with him right now. I want to go down and tell you father about him. I get the idea that there haven’t been many pets in this house.”
“No. Buddy had a dog, I think, but I don’t really remember it….”
“You just sit tight.” Nora got up and went down the stairs toward the breakfast room. Peyton wrapped a small towel around the kitten and took it and sat with it on the second step, out of sight but not out of hearing. After wriggling for a while, the kitten curled against her and fell abruptly asleep. She could see his tiny ribs rising and falling and could feel the small thrilling against her chest that meant he was purring. She tightened her arms and closed her eyes.
“…not set up here for a cat,” she heard her father say, his voice cool again now, louder. “She’s never taken care of an animal before. Chloe isn’t going to have time to take care of it when she gets tired of it.”
“She’s not going to get tired of it, Frazier,” Nora said, and her voice was cool, too, and utterly level. “I wish you had seen her face. Do you realize that she literally has nothing of her own? Everybody needs something. Everybody. If it’s a problem, I’ll find another home for it, but I can promise you it would hurt her badly to take this kitten away from her.”
“Did you ever think of asking me first?”
“I did, and vetoed that idea in a second. Would you have permitted it? And besides, it isn’t your kitten. It’s Peyton’s.”
There was more talk that Peyton could not hear. The voices dropped and the tight levelness went out of them. Peyton sat on the step and rocked the sleeping kitten against her.
Presently Nora came into the hall and looked up and made a circle with her thumb and forefinger. Peyton felt tears sting her eyes.
She slept that night with the susurration of the wind and rain in the trees outside, and over it, just at her ear, the rusty purr of the kitten.
8
When Peyton woke on Sunday morning the house was still and full of pearly gray light, and the rain was a blanket of sound that muffled wakefulness. She stretched her full length, hearing her joints pop, feeling the new lightness of her neck and head against her pillow, thinking how she would like to simply lie here in this silent, rainy cocoon until she felt like getting up. But
Sunday meant church and often Sunday school, though she was sometimes given grudging permission to miss that. Perhaps Nora would be reason enough to miss it this morning. Peyton hated Sunday school. She had once won first prize for being able to faultlessly parrot the books of the Bible, both Old Testament and New, but she was not allowed to receive the prize because it was a Boy Scout flashlight and clearly unsuitable for girls.
“Didn’t anybody think a girl might win it?” she had asked her father aggrievedly that afternoon.
He had said little, only smiled absently. But the next afternoon he had brought an authentic Girl Scout flashlight home with him. Peyton could not imagine where he had gotten it. At that time, there was no troop in Lytton, only a straggling band of Brownies.
She was just putting an unwilling foot out from under her covers when she heard Chloe shriek from the kitchen. It was the shriek she used when she was frightened or, more often, driven to extremis by the willfulness and stupidity of children, black and white alike.
“My God and my JEEEZUS!” she squalled. Peyton was halfway into the kitchen before she remembered the kitten and registered that it was not in her bedroom.
“Oh, shit,” she said softly.
Chloe was standing flat-footed, arms akimbo, in the middle of the kitchen, glaring down at her skirt. Trailways hung from it, fastened securely by his needlelike little claws, swinging gently and lashing his meager tail.
Peyton ran and unhooked him from Clothilde’s skirt and folded him protectively into her arms, where he struggled and yowled. There was blood in Chloe’s eye.
“What that sorry thing doing in this house?” she demanded. “I was just standing here fixin’ to call y’all to breakfast and he come barreling out of your room and climb right up my leg and grab on my skirt before I even seen him.”
“I’m sorry, Chloe,” Peyton said miserably.
“I thought he was still with me. Nora brought him to me from Atlanta. His name is Trailways.”
“Huh. His name mud for all I care. Does your daddy know about him?”
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