Swimming in the Volcano (33 page)

Driven into the priest's mouth like a wooden peg was the butt of a hand-rolled cigar. It twitched as he chewed and sucked the black juice from it, scrutinizing the woman and the boy with bloodshot eyes sunk into the alcoholic bloat of his face. “It is not I who mek summons,” he wheezed. “Not I. I mek no summons.” He fixed a menacing stare upon Emma until she bowed her head, nodding agreement, and when he turned and receded back down the darkness of the hallway, she pushed the boy ahead of her, through the strips of plastic that licked across his face like a nightmare of tongues, and they followed the verminous sound of the priest's steps, into the temple of Erzulie Mary. Arrows of feelings were flying at the boy —was this the wolf thing his mother had warned him about? was this the
zobop
thing? the
baka
thing? the hairless thing? the serpent thing? the thing
that caught you from behind? —
it seize you unawares
, Emma had threatened —the thing that killed and ate everything? So close now was panic he could hear its lion's roar, and he began to discover ways to hide within himself. But then the door eased open upon magic, and it was beautiful.

A white forest of tapered candles sputtered on the floor, on the dressing table, along the sills of the shuttered windows, lakes of pearly wax overflowed the upturned jar lids in a glacial flood that layered the floor, the furniture, the walls beneath the windows, which elsewhere were painted sky blue, and moved like water in the golden nervous light, tossing a gallery of pictures on its liquid surface —paintings, postcards, bold drawings made with a stick of charcoal, pages torn from magazines —each one of a lady, some in robes and jewels, some without clothes and others with haloes, some on thrones and some with a breast fed into a baby's mouth and some with wings like a pelican. There was a wooden pallet on the floor against one wall where the priest sat on a crumpled blanket, gesturing for the woman and boy to sit in the two rickety chairs at the foot of the bed. The boy covered his mouth and nose with his hand, because the room stank, smelling of sour tobacco and a stomach-turning perfume of rotting gardenias; something worse too —a pungent, fishy stench, not quite as bad as shit, not as searing as a dead animal, but nevertheless a sweetly noxious essence that made his head spin while his eyes dilated in wonder, feasting on the dazzling mysteries of the room.

Roots of tree daht shade de crossroads, deep and numerous
, the priest commenced the invocation, bending toward the fruit-crate altar to the side of the pallet.
En bas de l'eau
, in the Creole of the French who had ruled the islands for one hundred years, centuries ago. Two pickle jars were set at opposite ends of the altar, one filled with holy water, the other with crimson flowers. Carefully arranged between the jars was an arc of liquor and wine bottles, each filled to a different volume with a clear or amber liquid, and at the center of these glass pillars stood a foot-high plaster statue of the Virgin Mary, tiny bead necklaces draped around her neck, a small baked-clay lamp of palm oil burning at her feet. To her left, a mound of basil leaves and cinnamon sticks, to her right miniature perfume bottles and pieces of costume jewelry. The priest's chanting grew lower and lower until he only muttered with closed eyes, and then that stopped too. He uncorked one of the bottles on the altar and swigged from it. The odor of strong rum made a greasy pass through the room. He leaned his head
over the oil lamp and through tight lips sprayed a mist of alcohol into its flame, creating a small ball of blue fire between his mouth and the altar. Then, with hands that were supernaturally steady, he lifted the crate of the altar straight into the air, not one of its bottles rocking, to reveal a live rooster, its legs bound with twine, lying on its side. Exposed, the bird percolated calmly, as if it had every intention of being reasonable.

“Bwoy, come. Move dis cock aside.”

Without a change of tone, the priest repeated himself before the boy, glancing at Emma Quashie for approval, went and dragged the fowl out from under the crate, and remained watching, mesmerized, as the priest set the altar back in place, as cleanly as if the crate and its array of objects were a solid piece, only the liquid in each bottle canting gently. The priest Cassius then took a cloth pouch of cornmeal, and on the floor between his gnarled feet and the boy's shoes, tapped out the yellow powder in the design of a valentine heart, then a second sifting of lines that pierced the heart with a gold-dust sword.

“Stahnd in it,” the priest barked, nodding at the paralyzed boy to step within the pinched and pointed shape of the heart. “Stahnd in it,” he said, his gruff voice echoing in the room, “Stahnd in it and meet Erzulie,” he said a final time, then took the boy by the belt of his pants and dragged him forward. “Sistah, come,” he commanded Emma, and as the boy heard the scrape of her chair, her lips spilling a torrent of prayer, heard the man tell her to remove his coat and tie and shirt, felt her fingers picking and tugging at him, felt the fetid heat of the air on his upper body —
Hold him now
—felt his mother's fingernails press painfully into his shoulders, saw the silver serpent of the machete strike and the bird flutter headless in the priest's right hand, disgorging its blood from the hose of its neck, saw the priest sprinkle red drops into the flame of the oil lamp and then felt the sweaty fatness of the priest's hand lock over the insignificance of his own tiny wrist and turn his right palm upward, felt how he was made to cup the sticky life of the chicken in his hand, felt how the priest swabbed the ever-lessening flow up and down his small arm, making its length slick with blood, as he heard and felt these inexplicable acts, it was then the boy became aware of the sinister presence in the bed behind him, heard what he had been too enchanted to notice before now, the faint labor of weary lungs, as if the air was being nibbled and not breathed; a rustling of fabric no more distinct than the velvety flight of a bat, and now —but he wasn't sure if this was a noise he made himself or not —a whimpering, a rhythmic trickle of fear. Then
the trickle turned into a cold rain and he began to quiver, telling himself, Don't look! Don't look! as he felt the tears of his mother, hotter than blood, carving down the back of his neck.

“Face me, look aht me!” The priest took the boy's chin and wrenched the tiny head up straight, the child's eyes wide open like a doll's, round and inanimate. “You must reach in and pull Erzulie Mary from you muddah. You must reach in and remove de
loa
from you muddah, or she will die!”

Don't look! he pleaded with himself. The thing that caught you from behind! the red-eyed
baka
thing! the big dog thing!

Emma Quashie was a tree in the wind, swaying above him in a storm. “Oh Gaawd,” the wind moaned, “No ... no. No ... no.”

Lumbering to his feet, the priest crossed to the bed, throwing back the sheets, and prepared the inert body of the girl for the ritual, the purifying rite that had been delivered to him in his cane-sodden dreams. He made Emma Quashie turn the little boy toward his true mother and escort him to the side of the bed, and Emma hummed in a gale force of misery, turning her eyes away from the blasphemous sight of the naked skeletal creature she had known as the girl Miss Diedra, the stick legs banked open and emanating rancidness, but she obeyed the priest in the powerlessness that was ancient and human, to ease the tremors of her own mortality, and held firmly to the shoulders of the unseeing boy while the priest grasped the child's hand, lubricated with the blood of sacrifice, rounding the fingers into a snake's blunt head which he guided up through the narrowing channel of Miss Diedra's thighs until the tips felt the scratch of a strange fluted kiss, and he made the boy lean forward onto the mattress and press, his hand nuzzling deeper and deeper into the yielding lips. The room was a squall of light, teardrops of fire raining upward from the candlespouts, the undersea women of the walls immaculate and secure amid this stormy luminescence; they allowed the boy to run to them, and shielded his face from harm. He pushed into the dry toothless mouth that constricted like the elastic cuff of a pajama sleeve. His hand burst through the ring of throat into the silk center of a warm cloud, not an unpleasant sensation, while the rubber mouth of the cuff inched up his forearm to suck at his elbow. A cat climbed onto the bed to sing with his mother Emma. The child felt sleepy from the bath of clouds where his arm rested, and felt the desire to immerse himself.

“Find Erzulie Mary, bwoy. Pluck she out.”

It was when the priest pushed his arm impossibly forward that the boy realized he was being swallowed, and when his fingers brushed
against the hard skin of the fetish that had been implanted inside his mother by her wretched lover, he shouted out, and jumped to withdraw his arm but couldn't budge against the weight that held him. The clouds roiled and bucked around the limb of his right arm; Emma Quashie heard the goddess within them speak in a thunderclap —
Cock of Almighty Christ
—and struggled with the priest to make him release the child.
Don't look
, begged the women of the walls, where he had been hiding with them, below the water. But now he was too afraid to stay with them. He ran squealing from this safe place, opened his eyes, and looked upon the first heartstopping assault of the demons that had launched an invasion into his life and there in his hand, when he finally twisted away and his devoured arm was spit back onto his body, the claw thing, black and scaly, its talons wrapped around the blue eye of a marble. The women called him back and he went toward them haltingly, having lost trust in their protection, and he barely noticed the priest douse and wash his arm in white rum, was less and less aware of his mother dressing him, and then he was being lifted up into the embrace of the undersea women and carried home to bed.

“Where is Cassy?” Rupert Quashie asked at supper that night, and his wife told him the boy seemed to have a touch of the influenza. Less than a month had passed when his father stopped home to tell Emma that a house had caught fire early that morning, the house where Miss Diedra and the priest lived, and them burn up.

“I ain surprise,” clucked Emma. “I ain surprise.” The man so careless with rum and candles.

At ages five, six, and seven, Cassius went to school with his sisters, and though he wasn't smart, he wasn't dim-witted either. Dutifully, he learned his letters and numbers and was taught to read his primers. With the other boys, he began to reverse the course of the mothering that had circumscribed their lives. He learned to play marbles and kick a soccer ball, lash the air with a cricket bat; learned to push back when he, smaller than the other boys his age, was pushed; to hold his tears inside and to show no public respect for girls, but to obey teachers, parents, and the old people. Roaming with schoolmates in the afternoons and weekends and holidays, he found out how to capture land crabs for his mother's cookpot, and catch iguana, though he hated them, with a stick and wire; how to hit birds and bush cats with a slingshot; how to take a cow to pasture, and bring it back when it wouldn't come, and how, with the other boys, to hold a she-goat by the head and slurp milk from her titties, and how to beg a shilling from the tourists who came on the ferry, and in sailboats, and to crawl and paddle in the shallows of the harbor without stepping on the spines of an urchin; how to steal fruit, how to climb mango trees and shinny up coconut palms; how to race down a hill alongside an old tire, keeping it upright with a flat stick, and how to use a machete properly so you didn't hack off your own fingers. How to jump from rock to rock atop the windward cliffs, how to tell jokes and how to lie, and how to run fast enough past graveyards before the duppies saw you, because he, of all the boys, knew what would happen then. In the midst of the other children, he was an able student of all these things, helping to construct their happiness, and his, and the wonder of that pretty sunswept world, where nothing seemed too much out of place, or wrong. As for the priest and Miss Diedra, they had dissolved into smoke even before they had burned themselves up, so
that when he heard his parents speak of the fire that had consumed them, he, the boy Cassius, didn't know who they were talking about, though sometimes late at night would come a whiff of their char, and he would know without knowing, and remember the undersea women.

But for one responsibility that had been given him by his mother, these years of his boyhood would have remained spellbound by precious normality, especially since his mother had given up on the church. Instead, Cassius had cause to learn the meaning of rage, and what it felt like to have an enemy so strong as to be immune from defeat. Rage meant you couldn't stop somebody from making you do what you didn't want, and having an enemy felt like you never knew what bad thing was going to happen next.

While the boy was still small, Collymore sent Emma Quashie's fish up the road with one of her neighbors who had come down to Norman's Cove in the afternoons to buy from the boats. He was an unreliable supplier, though, skipping days, sending trash fish or the first caught, uncleaned, gone dry and soft in the sun or flattened under the bigger, fresher fish. Exasperated, Emma went herself one evening to the spot where Collymore rigged his scales on the limb of a sea grape. He was stooped at the water, yanking the skin from a jumbo-size oldwife.

“Collymore, how you get so clevah to cheat me, eh?” she said, hawking at her feet. “Come, give me daht nice oldwife, or is baby you muss mek room fah, in de boat.”

There was no escaping it: fish must pay for the boy, either with Emma Quashie or the next house. And his own mother already keeping two pickaninnies he make, and put she foot down, won't take three. And them babies but fancy-pants girls, sad to say, and each one due a piece of fish. And Quashie have the only boy, and the mother dead. Resigned, he held the oldwife out to her, because he
wanted
that boy.