Dominion (17 page)

“Work against the Emperor’s magic?” said Aslan, turning to her with something like a frown on his face. And nobody ever made that suggestion to him again.

“Then Edmund really has to die?” Jonah asked quietly.

“We’ll see,” Clarence said. He’d never read the stories before and didn’t know what would happen next.

He read on, as Aslan talked to the witch privately and no one knew exactly what was said. But Aslan came away and announced to the children, “I have settled the matter. She has renounced the claim on your brother’s blood.”

All the children rejoiced and everyone was relieved, both in Narnia and in Keisha Abernathy’s bedroom.

Clarence then read about how deeply troubled the Great Lion was, sad and lonely, and how the children could not understand why, since Edmund no longer had to die. Then at night they saw Aslan plodding away and they sneaked out and followed him to the Great Stone Table. There ogres and wraiths and hags and the witch herself lay in wait, torches in hand and gloating their evil threats. Aslan appeared and the crowd was at first terrified, but the Witch ordered them to bind him. He permitted them to do so, “though, had the Lion chosen, one of those paws could have been the death of them all.”

The Witch ordered him to be shaved, and they cut off his beautiful mane. They mocked him, called him names, and muzzled him. Then as the Lion lay quietly on the stone table, the witch sharpened her knife.

Keisha and Celeste looked horrified; Jonah looked perplexed. Clarence continued to read. As the White Witch lifted up the knife over Aslan she said to him:

“And now, who has won? Fool, did you think that by all this you would save the human traitor? Now I will kill you instead of him as our pact was, and so the Deep Magic will be appeased. But when you are dead what will prevent me from killing him as well? And who will take him out of my hand
then
? Understand that you have given me Narnia forever, you have lost your own life, and you have not saved his. In that knowledge, despair and die.”

With this she plunged the knife down into the Lion, killing him, to the roars and celebration of the spectators.

Clarence stopped reading, the chapter over. The children sat stunned and teary eyed.

“You mean Aslan
dies?”
Keisha said. “But I thought he couldn’t die! Isn’t he too powerful to die?”

“I thought Edmund was going to die,” Celeste said.

“I didn’t think anyone would die,” Jonah said quietly.

“Keep reading, Daddy,” Keisha pleaded. “Something has to happen.”

“No. I’ve read too long already. I have to get ready.”

He shut the book, wishing he could tell them life was different. That no one had to die. But that would be a lie.

She stared at the Cosmic Center, intoxicated by his character. This was her only king. This her only kingdom. The character of God defined the landscape of heaven. The Carpenter had prepared a place all right. What a place!

Her family and old friends had greeted her. Finally she had a chance to ask her mother a question.

“Did he give you a special name too, Mama?”

“Yes. He gives one to all of his redeemed. Wherever you go you will be a testimony to one particular facet of his character, that reflected in your new name. Everyone who meets you will see something of Elyon they have never seen before.”

Torel, the giant warrior who had carried her to this country, said, “It takes all the redeemed together to paint the picture of his character. Even then, the multitudes of his followers are insufficient. The caverns of the knowledge of God each lead to another and another and another. Should any explorer exhaust them on one world he can simply move to the next. There will always be more to learn, more to discover about him and his universe and his people. The learning will never cease, the reverence always deepen, the symphony of worship ever build, one crescendo upon another.”

“But,” Dani said, “I thought we would know everything here.”

“A common error of Adam’s race, one I can never comprehend,” Torel said, looking puzzled. “Only Elyon knows everything. Creatures can never know everything. They are limited. They are learners. We are learners. You have already learned much here, have you not?”

“Yes,” Dani said. “For one thing, I’ve learned why America never felt like home to me. For a time I’d thought maybe Africa was my home, but somehow I knew that wasn’t right either. I always sensed I was on foreign ground. Whether it was in the city, the suburbs, the country, or on a tropical island, nothing there could be a permanent home. And given all the injustice and suffering, who would want it to be? I never fit in there, Torel. Sometimes I thought it was because of my skin color. Now I realize it was because of the God-shaped emptiness within me, the void that could only be filled by being in his presence. By being here.”

Torel nodded, listening intently, as if he was not tutor but student.

“While on earth I kept hearing heaven’s music,” Dani said, “but it was elusive, more like an echo. All that clatter, all those competing sounds, all the television programs and ringing phones and traffic and voices drowned out Elyon’s music. Sometimes I’d dance to the wrong beat, march to the wrong anthem. I was never made for that place. I was made for this one.”

The wild rush of Joy, the rapture of discovery overwhelmed her as if she’d just gotten in on the greatest inside joke in the history of the universe. Now she saw and felt it with stunning clarity. Her unswerving patriotism had been reserved for another country. Every joy on earth, such as the joy of reunion, had been but an inkling, a whisper of greater Joy. Every place on earth had been at best a rented room, a place to spend the night on a long journey.

She remembered the rough sketches she used to make before starting to paint. “Mount Hood, Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, the Oregon Coast, all those places on earth were only rough sketches of this place. The best parts of the old world were sneak previews of this one. Like little foretastes, like licking the spoon from Mama’s beef stew an hour before supper.” She smiled at her mother and grabbed her hand.

“I’m home,” she shouted, first hugging her mother, then grabbing the angel’s hands and dancing in a circle, turning around and around and around, taking pleasure in his unfamiliarity and awkwardness at the dance, while her mother clapped a beat. “Did you hear me, Torel? I’m really home!”

Clarence looked up Barnes and Noble in the yellow pages and called. “How late are you open tonight? Ten o’clock? That’s great. I’m looking for some books on racial issues. You have a black literature section, don’t you?”

“We have an
African American
section.”

“Okay. Guess that’ll have to do.”

It chafed him to be corrected by a white woman, as if he wasn’t entitled to say “black.” He knew the woman assumed he wasn’t black just because he pronounced his words clearly.

Geneva stood in the bathroom, looking in the full-length mirror that hung from the back of the door. Her five-foot-three slender build fell nicely within the mirror’s borders.

When Clarence got six feet from the bathroom door, he started saying, “I’m walking toward the bathroom. I’m getting closer. I’m still coming. Hand on the doorknob now. I’m going to open it slowly.”

Suddenly Geneva let out a blood-curdling scream.

“Clarence Abernathy! How many times do I have to tell you, don’t sneak up on me!”

“I
didn’t
sneak up on you. I tried to tell you I was coming. But if I’d spoken any louder I would have startled you. There’s no winning, Geneva!” He laughed. Finally, she did too.

Clarence stepped into the bathroom. When he entered rooms, he didn’t pass through doorways, he filled them. As tall men negotiate doorframes vertically, he negotiated them horizontally as well. He stood far back from the mirror, positioning himself three different places before he could see everything he needed to, and then never all at once.

“How do you get all of yourself into this mirror at the same time?” he asked Geneva.

“Just petite, I guess.” She finally had her breath back. “Of course, you help my image, you know.”

“How’s that?”

“Standin’ next to you, a rhinoceros would look petite.” She smiled. “Maybe that’s why I put up with you sneakin’ up on me like a prowler.”

“I pity the prowler who has to hear
you
scream.”

Clarence looked sharp in his dark blue dress slacks, maroon sweater, and blue tie, overdressed for a dinner at a casual restaurant. He never dressed garishly, never with too much color, making sure no one thought he was a black man trying to draw attention to himself. No shiny Florsheims like black hustlers wore, but not the penny loafers of the imitation white crowd either. Years ago he’d read
Dress for Success
, underlined it profusely, made some alterations for his blackness, and used it as a flight plan.

“What would you do without me?” Geneva asked, as women do whose husbands don’t ask the question themselves.

Clarence didn’t hear her. He was busy leaning toward the mirror with the tweezers, zeroing in on a stray nose hair. He pulled it hard. His eyes watered. He put away the tweezers in the drawer without looking down, closely studying the white fringes of his short sideburns.

“You’re goin’ gray, old man,” Geneva teased.

“Not sure I’m ready for all these white hairs.”

“Well, it’s not the same as a melon goin’ bad, you know.”

“Feels the same.”

“Could be worse. Could be your skin turnin’ white on you!”

They both laughed.

“Baby,” she turned toward him and straightened his collar, “I declare you just get more handsome with the years.”

She put her arms around his thick firm stomach, and he hugged her tight. She liked that. He enveloped her and it made her feel secure. She would have liked him to add how beautiful she still was too, but she’d take the hug.

When Clarence left the room, Geneva resumed her look in the mirror. She rubbed skin softener onto her face. Her skin was “maple syrup,” her mom had always said in the many discussions of grades of skin color she’d heard growing up. She and Clarence were both “black” by popular description, but there was a stark difference between his deep brown and her sandy brown, a little lighter than Dani’s skin, but with less yellow.

Geneva’s eyes were called brown, but had just a touch of what sometimes seemed blue and sometimes green, depending on what she wore.

“Your eyes are most striking when you wear red,” her mama used to tell her.

Geneva had always been intrigued by the hint of light colors in her eyes. It made her think of the European blood in her veins, presumably going back to slave masters and overseers who molested her great-great-grandmothers when they were slave girls. That’s where the lightness in her skin came from, she knew, because none of her ancestors had ever married a white, not in the last three generations anyway, and before that, interracial marriage was almost unheard of. The thought made her tremble, and she felt uncertain and powerless about the forces that had shaped even the genetic code that made her who she was.