The Last Warner Woman (14 page)

But she resisted the temptation and walked instead into the first building where Captain Lucas was already disrobing. She sat on the edge of his bed.

“It was a powerful sermon today,” she said. “Is like Archangel Gabriel was speaking mighty through you.”

The Captain nodded. “Seven and seven and seven.” These were his own mystical words. He said them often and no one could agree what the incantation meant, or what it was supposed to do. But the words sounded powerful on the Captain’s lips, and for this reason people remained impressed. He was now completely naked. Adamine considered his body, how everything about him was thin and long. His penis dangled almost halfway toward his knees. Captain Lucas caught her eyes on him. “No sister. Not on the Lord’s day.”

“Yes,” Adamine whispered, chastened.

Just as no one truly understood Lucas’s mystical words, no one would claim to truly understand the man. Stories surrounded him like a swarm of mosquitoes in June. People saw him everywhere. Rumor said that Lucas could split himself and be in five places at once. Most often people saw him after midnight, walking with a chain of padlocks around his neck, a machete in his hand. Adamine knew this story wasn’t always untrue. She had seen the chain. Captain Lucas explained to her that it was for battling. It was part of his Duppy Conquering outfit.

“It is like the armor of God, Ada. When I wear it, angels make way for me and demons tremble. I tell you this, and I don’t tell you to be a boasting man, but my greatest reputation is in a world different to the one most people can see. I talking bout the spirit world, Ada. Every spirit know bout me. Suppose I was to tell you stories, Ada? One time an old woman come to see me right here in this yard. Right here. She say to me she don’t come for deliverance, she only come to testify. The sister tell me that she had been set upon by a real troublesome spirit. Then one day when she couldn’t even rise up out of her bed, she did just get fed up to the brim. She shout to her daughter, ‘Daphne! Daphne! Call Captain Lucas to the house now!’ Same time the demon jump out of her. Yes, Ada, you can say it again. Hallelujah. The sister tell me she could see the shape of the demon—a green lizard-like man. It turn to her and start beg. ‘Don’t call Captain Lucas!’ She see now that he was scared of me in truth, so she say to the lizard demon, ‘Yes, I going to call him. I going to make him tell you, seven and seven and seven. For you is like a mighty delusion and a pestilence unto me.’ When the demon hear that, it fly from the house, and the sister swear she don’t hear kemps from it again.”

When Lucas Gilles spoke, his words seemed to have, lingering on them, the trace of another accent. One rumor said he had come to Jamaica on a boat from Haiti. This was supposed to account for both the strength of his magic and the impenetrable silence he could sometimes slip into—as if he were a man who sometimes thought his thoughts in another language and could not be bothered to translate them. Adamine never asked him where he was from.

He pulled on an old pair of trousers to cover his nakedness, and he and Ada went out to the shed and began putting it back in order. The banner that read
SEVEN HEAVENS, SEVEN OCEANS, SEVEN FIRES
had fallen down in the middle of a particularly vigorous round of dancing; a basin of water had spilled; and the dirt that people carried in on their shoes was everywhere. The two worked silently.

And then the silence was broken.

“Help!”

They stopped. The zinc fence around the balmyard was so high they couldn’t see over it. They looked at each other. The voice was on the other side of the gate.

“Hello, please! Anybody inside there?” A woman. Her voice was the kind that had been broken somewhere in its center. A banging started against the gate.

“Hello! Hello, please?”

“Ada, go and see what is the matter,” Lucas instructed.

Adamine went and opened the gate. A woman in her midtwenties stood on the other side, but the resemblances between herself and Adamine stopped at age. This woman was light-skinned, her hair pressed, and her clothes, while not lavish, still announced that she did not belong to the ghetto. She must have been desperate to get to the balmyard, Adamine thought, and she knew it had everything to do with the boy the woman was holding in her arms. He didn’t seem to be conscious.

“You is the Mother of the yard? Oh God. Help him, please!” the woman blurted out. “I had to take him out of the hospital. They wasn’t doing nothing for him there. And him breathing get so shallow now, like … like him soon going to …”

“Come, come. Bring him in. We will see what we can do.”

Adamine knew when she turned around, Captain Lucas would have transformed himself already. He was in his robes again, his head wrapped with strips of white and green and red cloth. His rod was in his hand. He stood by a bench in the middle of the yard.

“Go. Take the child over to Captain. He will know what to do.”

The woman walked across the yard slowly, Adamine nudging her forward from behind. Finally she rested the boy on the bench.

“Come, stand back now. Captain have to read up the boy. We can’t stand too close.”

“He is my little brother,” the young woman volunteered. “He fall sick two weeks now. Doctor don’t even know …”

Adamine hushed her. “Don’t say nothing just now. Let Captain do his work in peace.”

Captain Lucas was walking in slow circles around the boy, snapping his fingers as he went. His eyes were half closed. You could see the whites of them. “Seven and seven and seven,” he muttered. Suddenly he opened his hands and ran his thin, long fingers up and down the air around the boy’s body. His paused several times at a spot above the boy’s heart, as if he had hit an invisible stone there.

“Mmmm. This lickle boy not sick in his body. Is bad spirit take him over, and he going to dead by midnight.”

The fair-skinned woman collapsed into Adamine’s arms. She revived soon enough, a question immediately on her lips. “What can be done for him? They tell me whatever can do for him would be here.”

Lucas shook his head solemnly. “A very bad spirit indeed, my dear. Treatment would be expensive.”

“I can pay. I will pay you.” She took out folds of money from her pockets, ten fifty-cent notes and a few dollars. She began to open her purse. “Whatever it takes.”

“But even more than money, miss, you need to start talking truth. You spake a lie on the seal just now, and lies give strength to evil spirits. It make the healing process very hard. Impossible sometime.”

“I don’t think I understand you, sir.”

“You understand me very well, miss. Better you did just keep silent. But you tell a lie, and lying lips is an abomination here. Tell me who this boy is to you.”

She started to tremble, and then to cry.

“He is my son, sir. But he don’t even know it. Nobody really know. I get pregnant when I was too young and my mother take him like he was her own child. He only know she as his mother.”

“Good. Good. The truth. And the truth shall set you free. See now, the healing start already.” Lucas looked over at Adamine. “My sister, lend me your scissors there for a minute.”

Adamine handed him her scissors. Lucas began to snap them violently over the boy’s heart and the boy’s chest began to expand. It became so big, it was as if it would burst. Then the child began to cough.

“Now Ada, go get a clean white fowl. Do what needs to be done. Pour the blood into a bath. Make haste; it is a troublesome spirit we have here.”

Adamine ran to the fowl coop while Lucas recited from the Seventh Book of Moses. “I, Lucas Gilles, a servant of God, call upon and conjure thee, Spirit Alymon, by the most dreadful words, Sather, Ehomo, Jehovah, Elohim, Volnah, Denach, Ophiel, Zophiel, Habriel, Eloha, Alesimus, Dileth, and by all the holiest words through which thou canst be conquered, that thou appear before me in a mild, beautiful human form, and fulfill what I command thee. Restore this boy, who has not lived the proper allotment of his days. Restore him back to health.”

Across from them, Adamine held down a white hen in a big metal tub, squeezeing its neck so tight it could not squawk. With her free hand, she cut off its neck. Free of its head, the body fluttered magnificently. Blood gushed into the tub. Adamine held the body until it was still. Then she took every basin of holy water from around the yard and poured them. Red water rose.

“Lord, I can’t watch,” The young woman stammered as Lucas lifted the boy up from the bench and brought him over to the tub of blood.

“You don’t have to watch,” Adamine said coolly. “You done all you can for now. The boy need to stay in the bath overnight. Leave him here and come back in the morning.”

“No, no. I will wait. I can’t just …”

It was Lucas who snapped then. “The Mother say you are to leave, ma’am! She know what she is talking. Now go.”

Adamine crossed the yard briskly and opened the gate wide. The young lady stumbled out. “In the morning then?” she said sheepishly.

“In the morning,” Ada repeated, and for the second time that day she shut the gate with a bang.

It was almost midnight. The boy was now asleep in Lucas’s bed. He had groggily asked about his mama, and his sister Doreen, but then had dozed off again. Lucas and Ada were sitting outside, looking at a moon so low it seemed to rest on top of the red flag.

“It was a bad spirit that did take set on that lickle boy, but you do a good work today, Mother Ada.”

Adamine looked at him curiously. He was not a man known to give compliments, so she didn’t know how to respond and simply nodded.

“A long time now I been thinking Ada, you will make a good helpmeet unto a certain man. But you need a man who mighty in the Lord.”

Adamine felt her chest grow warm all of a sudden. She smiled. “You talking in riddles, Captain,” but she understood his meaning. He was officially going to take her as his wife. She would move out of Bishopess Herbert’s room, and into the balmyard.

“You see how the moon shining bright tonight, Ada?”

“Yes, Captain. Like we can just jump right into it from here.”

Lucas reached over and let his long fingers rest on hers. “When the moon sit that low, it mean you must break an egg and read up your future.”

“Break egg in holy water, you mean?” Ada looked at him sternly, as if the magic between them had been broken. “No. I don’t want to see no future for myself. I see enough future for everybody, and I don’t like it. The future always come like a burden. Nothing good is there.”

Lucas allowed himself a rare smile. “Not all the time, Ada. You must remember the people that you give warnings to is people who walking far from God. But for those of we who is like gentle sheep, who never go astray from the master, who live safe and sound under the rock, then we have nothing to fret bout.”

“Maybe so. But if that is true, then why read the future? Tomorrow come whether we want it to or not. I can tell you now what you have coming to you. A big brown coffin. Yes, you going to dead. And one day a coffin coming for me too. It don’t need no messenger spirit from Heaven to tell us that. Leave the future where it is. It will come to us in its own time.”

“Ada,” Lucas’s voice was firm again. “Get the egg.”

She sulked. Sometimes she realized she felt too comfortable around him, spoke in too familiar a tone. She crawled into the fowl coop and the flock began their terrible squawking. She returned with an egg, white feathers all over her body. “What now?” she snapped.

“Come, don’t ruffle up your feathers with me.”

Despite herself, Adamine laughed.

“
OK
,” Lucas instructed, “Crack the egg soft gainst a rock. Then you open it into the water.”

She cracked the egg and opened it over the basin of water. The yolk seemed to be its own full moon, and the white, which had been invisible, slowly gathered its color, from the edges inward.

“What now?” Ada persisted.

“This part will take time. Best we sit back down and wait.” They sat, their knees touching.

“Ada. Now let us reason together. There is a brother in the Lord who name is Milton Dehaney …”

“I never hear the name before.”

“Well, he was part of this band before he go to England. I get to understand that his life is now very hard over there. His wife, God bless her soul, was never very hearty from morning, a delicate thing she was. Now she has crossed the great Jordan River.”

“Oh bless her in her sleep,” Ada whispered.

“Indeed. But the brother write me now because he need a helpmeet. The work too much for one man …”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Sometimes Ada, life take we somewhere we never expect. We must count that as blessing. As opportunity.”

“Yes, Captain,” Ada said again, but now it was her voice that was breaking at its center. She saw that she really hadn’t understood the Captain earlier. And sometimes the future came crashing into the present so fast, you lost your breath. It would have been good to have had a hint before, a warning. But a warning of what? What was Captain Lucas even saying?

As if reading her thoughts, he continued, “All I am saying Ada, is that whoever go to do this work in that far, far field will be doing a mighty work indeed. Milton will send money to pay for the fare …”

“Oh,” Ada said softly. And then again, “Oh,” understanding more. And a third time, “Oh!” She was angry. “I see the whole plot now,” she hissed. “He going to send money for a woman and he going to send money for the band as well. He going to send money to you!”

“Things hard. The work have to get done somehow.”

“So you just plan to send me off like that? Like I is prize whore? And you will take money for what you never did own? That is what we come to? A set of whores and thieves.”

The Captain spoke through gritted teeth.

“Ada, do not pass your place with me tonight. I will beat the devil out of you, so help me God. Now listen,” he grabbed her arm and held it painfully, “me and Bishopess talk long about this …”

“Bishopess Herbert know too?”

“Yes, and she agree. This is opportunity for everybody. Plenty of the sisters from the church would take this as fortune, so you best believe I not forcing this on nobody. So get up now, my daughter of Zion. Get up and look into the water. Tell me what shape your future has taken.”