by Eugen Bacon
When they were gone, Moni Catch returned with those A-list eyes, emeralds shimmering in her pupils, and helped with household chores so Salem could rest.
Trotter, bless him. He had a cousin with a face full of beard who was an itinerant peddler. He unwrapped from a boxful of boxes diapers with a pee pee bell, a fanned stroller, a set of feathered britches and a reusable burp bag.
For all preparation, the baby did not wait for a neighborly visit before it started pushing down, come out say hello. Birthing a baby would be a simple thing, you would think, but it wasn’t. Breathing exercises . . . who did that breathing when the pangs hit? Wasn’t time either to practice how the nurse, Miss Louden, positioned Salem to lean on a birthing ball, to rock and sway the baby down the birth canal. No time for T-Mo to use the rolling pin (a spinsterly gift), roll it up and down gently on Salem’s lower back to ease her pain. No time for the rice sock (a spinsterly tip), frozen for when Salem got hot.
T-Mo soared mother and child (head crowning) to the Tambo. There, the doctor whose name was a sentence enlisted the help of Miss Louden. In the private room with many bright lights and a poster that read “Bellies to babies,” they hauled, Salem pushed. She had followed the spinsters’ opinions: Salem had eaten neither melon nor squid. But the bub was not easy coming out. Doc inserted curved tongs, cupped the head. Yet it was the giant cup that sucked the baby out. For all medical intervening, tongs and vacuums, the bub refused to breathe. Gave cause for doc to administer vigorous stimulation. Profound slaps on the bub’s bottom, on its heels, stirred nothing, even repeat upside-down dangles. Nurse Louden held it by its feet. The doc rub rubbed with two hands like how you kindle a fire . . . But this was no ordinary bub; it needed T-Mo to call it. He said, “Wakey, young’un,” and the baby coughed, spluttered to life.
T-Mo had told Salem the story of how he was born looking all beautiful: big brows, full lips, smooth skin. His bub when it was plucked was all squished, looked a mess. It resembled a fur ball that a monster had spewed. Unfurled, rubbed and dried, turned out that—for all the spice scones, cream tortes, layered crepes and honey cakes Salem gobbled—baby was a blue-haired girl. She did not cry but stared at them, and saw them, one by one with onyx eyes full of curiosity. The eyes settled on T-Mo. With a pleasure-filled burp and a happy squeal, fat legs kick kick kicking, she held out her arms. He scooped her and she purred and kroo-ed on his chest.
And while he knew naught of the making of hair lockets, of the softening of baby bottoms with hydrangea dust . . . T-Mo learnt. Same way he learnt the meaning of a gurgle or a whimper, which one was joy, distress or simply talk.
• 17 •
Silhouette . . .
I was born in a family where women became midwives or witches and it ran for generations. Keera of Tafou. She taught me to use magic.
I saw the earthly girl in East Point a week before T-Mo plummeted from his roaming. That was before their worlds collided at the IGA.
Salem.
Same S as in Sayneth but this girl was no snake. I thought she would settle him but roaming was his thing. T-Mo was never a homed being, despite seeing the birthing of his young’un with vacuums and tongs. Even got it to breathe, took so long he had to call it and wake it. In Grovea, the right poke in the midrib from a sharp midwife—one like Nene, Corio, Anakie, Blanket, Norlane or Ma Space—the bub would be squealing inside a moment.
The trip to Grovea happened when the child turned four.
T-Mo’s face was a calm stone that night at the table when Novic’s wives prepared and laid out a feast. Salem’s face was something glowing, unprepared for sunset when it happened. She found dusk in the one she called T-Mo. The one whose love for her once lit him more than sunshine. This same one was as deadly as he was charming because in a flash his heart had turned to petrified wood.
Giving context, are we? I speak for myself when I say no words could fix this. Him saying, “My love,” over and over in that smothered voice—nothing could fix this. You ask how I know; of course I know. I make it my mission to know, to make Keera swelled with pride at my mastery of ma-gik. I glided through doors, levitated behind an invisible cloak like a leprechaun, saw them all, every single one, watched them for a reason.
Trouble started at the dinner table. T-Mo was suddenly a stranger to Salem. He jeered her every move, shot a barb for her every sentence. She went silent, as did everyone at the table. Only the cutlery spoke. A crying child, perhaps it was Cassius or Amora—or was it Tor? One look from T-Mo and the crying clipped to quiet, to fog that had entered the room. T-Mo kept up his goading. At one point Novic said: Odysseus!
A strange word to Salem but it appeared to quieten T-Mo. He retired with Novic to the incense room. Salem took leave with her child to her rooms. When T-Mo reappeared with the stealth of an assassin and a weapon in hand, a bottleful of grog, she was sat on a bed reading a bedtime story. The child was at her feet, hair blue as blue, coal eyes dancing dancing. Myra. M, M, M. I like that sound. I press my lips together, make a circle. M, M, M. Such elegance, such complexity in one so young. It seemed, very much it seemed if I remember this right, that Salem looked up one moment, saw T-Mo, and a flicker touched her eyes.
Was his act a pulse of drunkenness, or was it bedevilment? The man Salem knew, thought she knew, was at speed by her bedside same time as the bottle crashed. She paused, mid-sentence in her reading, as he jerked her arm and the book fell. Her hand was tender on his chest, her look gentle. And she said, “Please, no.” Perhaps a cloud of sadness entered the gentle look when he groped her, when he ripped her garment to bare her tit. Her lips parted as if to speak to him lightly but it was the child’s, not Salem’s, sound that came. The child’s face went all wrong, her arms gnarled. The sound formed shape on her lips before it came, and when it did it was animal. It was the guttural howl or scream of a creature. It trembled windows, made my core freeze.
Before I could do something—I couldn’t let him take her, rape her in front of the child—I saw Novic. My chant was already forming, its spell swirling to blind T-Mo with a burst of light, to cast paralysis upon him, to unmake his intent, when Novic arrived in a pummel of gust. He stood by the doorway, eyes ablaze: Odysseus!
T-Mo went still for a moment. His whisper of horror turned to rage. Then he fell to his knees, put his head in his hands and looked broken. “My love,” over and over he said in a stifled voice. Salem knelt by him, pushed his face to her breast but her expression was flat as a pretzel. Tension never left her neck so you knew something was working inside that pretzel. You had to guess, could only guess, how she . . . mentally explored, interrogated territories of cause, found something or nothing to explain it.
“My love,” he said one last time, before he was no more able to speak. A spell of silence had homed.
Salem’s head was tilted, her eyes fixed to a distant place. There was no definition in her gaze, no heave in her gut, no kick in her chest, nothing to tell you of her state. Finally she faced him. “Delusion—,” she chose her phrasing. “We—all s-snap at some stage.”
Novic had a shining for the child; perhaps it was something in her adventurous spirit. Or was it her restless spirit? He took Myra, lifted the skinny thing, her face puffed up with temper, her clumps of sapphire hair damp with tears. She closed her eyes on his chest and slept long after he tucked her, slept three whole days. The image will not leave my mind; it repeats in slow motion: Novic walking barefoot on bottle glass, robes and hair flowing. He scoops the child, presses her face to his mane. He is tall as tall, walking, walking away and away from me, like always.
What-am-a-say? Played us all, Novic, like a masterpiece. Was all his doing; he created this. Odysseus was his finest art. How could you look at T-Mo without wondering if whosimawhotsis was gonna show?
Ninth year of T-Mo and Salem together, that’s five years and a four-year-old child, T-Mo was gone. That night in Grovea, he resembled a man who’d lost all card
s. The loving he tried to show afterward didn’t last more than a month because the spark where it came from was already dead. Same month they returned from Grovea to Yellow Trek, he fell ill. How? You should ask, “Why?” Don’t you see? Something in him had clogged, perhaps dissolved. Something had surely shifted. Was it the entrance of his new hate? It was the kind that came with knowledge that he would never be free while Odysseus lived, that those he loved would never be safe as long as Odysseus was. What was it like to know, I wonder. To know that Odysseus didn’t come in pockets; that he arrived full gear. Same one—two people. Novic created this. When T-Mo vanished from a sickbed, people took it he had died, disbanded as an otherworldly might.
The night he took off, before he took off, the child—unable to appreciate an immortal father’s disease—threw a tantrum. First a shimmering of tears, then a tantrum that came with belly sound. When she calmed, she kept vigil by his bed while her mother slept. At the child’s first nod, at a hint of sleep nudging her eyelids, he was gone.
Disappearing like that, he put the earthling, Salem, in an impossible position. Didn’t matter that the child they begot proved that T-Mo, when he was that age, wasn’t the fastest being. Much as T-Mo had done, when the child mastered the art in her feet, it was startling how fast she moved. Coal-eyed thing had bursts of liveliness, surges of strength, left her mother curious, excited and confused. But leaving a woman with an exceptional child does not excuse the abandoning. In her hooking up with an otherworldly, Salem had sacrificed much. In his breaking loose from the human, T-Mo had fragmented much. He left behind a fragile thing, an already orphaned one. Broke it, left it worse than when he took it. T-Mo had exploited and then protected, seduced and then destroyed. Had discarded a thing most precious.
Poor girl she was beside herself. She moved around the house, putting her hands on anything he had touched. She just wanted to feel, and he was everywhere. In the cushions, in the throws, on the dinner sets, inside the quilt . . . He was in her bath, in the lighting of the house. Beside herself! But panic is a state of mind. What mind do you get when a man takes off at the height of your love, leaves you standing with a ditch in your heart? Turned out that what was simple and complicated was complicated through and through. Worst was the death he faked. And she was quick to believe it. There was no body. Without a body, how do you prove death? She buried an empty coffin. How could she not? She had nothing else to believe. What but death could vanish a man who had once looked you in the eyes, measured you with his own eyes that teemed with wilderness? A man so enamored that his heartbeat said you were profoundly beautiful. Whose lips once said, “You are the one for all of me.”
He felt right but was wrong on many levels. He showed her the art of living without the weight of time. Imprinted, rather than showed, how to live a timeless living. He snatched a good person and took her to hell. Imagine what it took for her to leave East Point, to cross the boundaries of what she knew and, with fear, enter a new world she didn’t know: his. Even while uncertain of the fate for her it offered. When he left, the weight of time slammed itself upon her. She loved him, loved him, so much. She hated him.
News crept like winter fog. On a day colder than normal the neighbors—Moni, Trotter, Divine, Glory, Sultry and Spring—hands on their cheeks, chests, heads . . . all stood with her as six men lowered the empty coffin into the yawn of a grave. Stood with her to the last (amidst the wilderness of mourners from all over Yellow Trek, people Salem didn’t really know but had likely once glimpsed, walked past or smiled at), to the fistful of soil gently sprinkled into a grave on top of the casket. The sound of its falling on wood was an eternal gong. When they led her back to their high teas, to honey cakes and crème tortes and whatnots (someone even made cricket pizza), none of it could go down Salem’s throat. Because by then she was speaking in tongues:
Ahmm-bralla-gaither-malu-theologa-umber-trivo.
Pla-ci-te-reciter-spiriniu-printa-go.
Sounded like nonsense but it carried meaning. Her friends, the neighbors, understood these were not words of exorcism or something of the Holy Spirit. These were words, as Salem’s tears flowed, that only T-Mo, if he were present, not the Lord, would understand.
Salem wept for Pastor Ike, for Pageant, for East Point and all of Yellow Trek. Then she found silence inside her scream. The explosion of tongues, all that weeping, diminished. An impossible calm took its place.
Dissolving from her life as promptly as he had appeared left Salem parentless, homeless, for what was home without T-Mo? She found herself repeating history. Like me, she had a boulder inside the gap in her soul. Like me, disaffected, no goodbyes. She put one leg in front of the other, leg leg away away . . . from anyone, anything she knew. Left with qualms those neighborly friends who amplified her fulfillment, her definition . . . in the hitherto quiet comfort of Yellow Trek. She clutched in her hand the fist of a charcoal-eyed child who in infancy appeared better able to fly than walk, who never stopped riding on water or wind, unafraid and in her element with nature. A child whose face and hands went all wrong and whose sound trembled the world when her temper flew.
Unseen, I stood with Salem at the bus stop in Yellow Trek, different one from my first seeing of her in East Point. She tried to look independent, determined. But she was unchanged. Salem . . . she was that caliber of woman who never knew, never said, could never say, “I am strong. I am woman.” What-am-a-know? Let’s talk about this. I was there, in that caliber, once. What might that be, to be strong and woman, I wondered, until the answer came, and I left Novic.
Later, Salem would find a man to sell the house in Yellow Trek, sell the soft-top and split all proceeds four ways: Moni, the spinsters, Trotter, Salem. If the neighbors did wonder about their liberal benefactor, Salem was by then far away in a future where the past was too raw to visit.
At the bus stop in Yellow Trek, she stood unchanged: same pulse of fear, same uncertainty . . . Like me, she found connection with a plant that touched her ankle. Mine had been a dwarf plant that crept all the way to hug me the day I left Grovea. Salem’s was a potted plant named Red. It stayed close to her foot, to her present and future. She was no longer bubble-wrapped in sermons and church fetes, no more clad as a nun like the first time T-Mo saw her in the IGA, but still wearing a tremor on her lip and those large brooding eyes. She, who was defined in terms of others, who perhaps had no core . . . a tragedy already without everything else . . . Salem, same S as in Sayneth. She needed padding from the world. No wonder she picked the first blockhead she saw.
SILHOUETTE
• 18 •
Peaches, his name is Peaches. P, the sound is voiceless, no vibration in the throat. Lips together, you mean to exhale. You build pressure inside your mouth, lips together still, you exhale and out comes P, an explosive sound. Like the P in Miss Potty.
Baby is a loose bundle in his crib, limbs everywhere. Peaches folds and unfolds in his sleep. He coos, babbles, grunts, squeaks. Sometimes he sighs. He is never fussy, his cry a rare thing. When he wakes, he likes the outside barking of rosellumus birds: Gwa! Gwa! Gwa!
Gets himself into a sitting position in his crib, pulls himself to a stand, walks holding the rails toward the sound. Head aslant, his ear is keen to catch the twitter of birds. Gleeful, head bobbing, he imitates: Ga! Ga! Ga! Takes a few tries for his throat to get it right: Gwa! Gwa! Gwa! If it is a Koolah bird, he crawls forward on his belly, copies their lazy amble, croons like them: Koo-wee-oo! Koo-wee-oo!
He understands each bird, the sound it makes. When I say: “Look, Peaches, see the rosellumus!” He looks at the tree, points with a finger to the right bird from a flock, makes the right sound: Gwa! Gwa! Gwa! “Peaches, the Koolah bird!” He gets into a sitting position, imitates: Koo-wee-oo! Koo-wee-oo!
When Keera lets me, I take him further out close to the volcanic mount so we can bounce echoes off the hills surrounding it. When we mimic birds, an outcry from the birds roars back, bounces in
echoes.
Often you forget he has no brows because his eyes command everything on that face. When I first met him, took me awhile to grow accustomed to this child who never relaxes his eyes, who reminds me without heart-wrench of T-Mo. Having left my own child, I search but cannot find reason to close myself from this baby. Sometimes he creeps on you silent as a startle; tickles him silly when you jump.
I adore his liveliness. One minute he is crawling forward on his belly imitating ground-worm play, next he is proceeding with purpose on hands-and-knees to find insects, finger-feeds himself fallen wings before he hunts the hiding critter. He finds it, lifts it to his face, but if it is an inedible kind, Keera—ever watchful—reaches him with a few long strides, knocks his fist from his mouth. “Naw get!” He understands the warning. Another baby might pucker, howl. This one, happy chappy, looks at his mother with those white as white eyes full of snow and, unruffled, his mouth forming vowels and syllables, begins to test sound: Ya ya ya. Tey tey tey. Ne ne ne. Po! Po!
Sometimes I show him pebbles and hide them so he can find them, which he does. Squeals of glee that finish with a hiccup, he holds up his find. Peb! Peb! he cries. “You don’t say,” a shine in my voice. Keera sweeps a glance at us from her hoe, her smile sunny with flowers.
She is good with her hands. The little pocket of land where she lives has volcanic soil rich in nutrients. You can see speckles of calcium in the black. Her hut sits in a cleared patch in a tangle of forest. She hoes, digs up roots for feed, snips off shoots for cure. The day we met on the crag, when she approached me, touched my arm and it burnt, she pointed somewhere in the distance where the sky met the earth in a line of orange fire and I understood that there, right there, was our destination.
“Keera a Tafou, this my name,” she said.