The Widow's War (4 page)

She hasn’t visited the
quilombo
much in recent years. When she turned twelve, her father decided she was too old to run wild in the jungle. But the
quilombo
and Mae Seja have always had a place in her heart, and she intends to go on paying the rent for this land just as her father did.

Mae Seja still has her eyes closed. Carrie wonders if she’s fallen asleep. “I’ll be glad to pay for the ceremony,” she repeats.

Mae Seja opens her eyes and puts down her fan. “No, your father was a generous man. He bought the freedom of several people here. Zé’s wife, Ynaie’s uncle . . .”

“Papa hated slavery. After Mama died, he set me to copying his correspondence. He often wrote about how happy it made him to buy slaves from their masters and give them their liberty. He always said no one had a right to own anyone else.”

“He was a good man. We all mourn his passing. We can’t take money from his daughter for finding out if someone she loves is dead or alive.” Mae Seja doesn’t have to ask Carrie if she loves William. A woman who can see into the past and future is not likely to miss the signs of love on a young woman’s face.

Carrie kneels, takes the hem of Mae Seja’s shift in her hands, and kisses it. “Thank you, Mae,” she says.

Mae Seja laughs. “No need to be so formal, Carrizihna. Help me up, and we’ll go tell the men to pass the skins of their drums over the fires to tighten them. Tonight, the
Axé
will flow through me, the Ancestors will guide me, and my voice will become the voice of William Saylor; but I must warn you of two things: First, you must sit with your back to me as I speak and never look around no matter how tempted you are. Second, I will not be able to tell you if he’s dead or alive. Only he can tell you such things. Also, you will not be able to question him.”

She must see disappointment in Carrie’s face for she adds, “If he tells you nothing you don’t already know, he may not be dead. If, on the other hand, he tells you of his death, he may still be living. Sometimes what you hear during the ceremony is not what a spirit is saying but your own fears and memories. I will search for your William in the realms of the dead, but often the dead are hidden from the living. In any case, I will do my best to bring him to you.”

 

 

 

 

 

T
he ceremony begins a little after midnight in a clearing about a hundred yards from the
quilombo
. The moon has set, the stars are hazed by the moist breath of the jungle, and the only light comes from the candles on the altar. Approaching Carrie, Mae Seja’s oldest son offers her a gourd filled with a black liquid. “Drink,” he commands.

Accepting the gourd, Carrie drinks deeply of something so bitter she gags. Behind her, the candles on the altar flicker, casting shadows that rush over the vine-draped trees like swarms of butterflies.

For a long time everyone sits silently, waiting for the drink to take effect. Carrie feels nervous but not frightened. She trusts Mae Seja. Gradually, her throat grows dry, her ears feel as if they are being filled with cotton, her fingers begin to tingle, her legs grow cold, and a warm feeling spreads from her chest to her shoulders.

Suddenly, the jungle takes a step toward her. She starts, then forces herself to relax. The jungle takes another step and the vines on the trees become serpents. Impossible flowers blossom in the darkness. She sees pinwheels of light.

“
Á hora de começar
,” she hears Mae Seja say. “Begin the drumming.”

The drumming starts, the rhythms enter Carrie’s chest, and her heart begins to beat in time to the drums. How long does this go on? She has no way of knowing, but at some point the men and women of the
quilombo
rise to their feet and begin the whirling dance of the
orixás
. They are dressed as gods, holding mirrors and wooden swords, their faces veiled by strings of beads. As they dance, they appear inhumanly beautiful, surrounded by auras of light.

Carrie finds these transformations disturbing. She tries to convince herself that the black drink is making her hallucinate, and this is why she’s seeing these ordinary people—who she’s known all her life—as gods, but no matter how hard she struggles to separate dream from reality, the dancers continue to change. Zé becomes a jaguar; Ynaie, a sinuous, green-scaled python. Even the children whirling in the shadows seem to change into toucans, parrots, red-winged tinamous, and chachalacas.

She’s beginning to get frightened. She wants this to stop, but when she tries to stand, she finds she can’t move. She opens her mouth to cry that she can’t bear any more, but before she can speak, she hears William’s voice. He seems to be sitting directly behind her. For a moment she’s too shocked to put her thoughts in order.

Carrie
, he says.

She starts to turn around, then remembers Mae Seja has forbidden her to. This is too cruel. How can she be so close to him and not speak or see his face or tell him that she’s carrying their child.

All at once she feels something brush the back of her neck, light and quick as a kiss. The drummers find a different rhythm. The candles on the altar flare, and William speaks her name again.

She can bear this no longer. “William!” she cries, “Where are you? For God’s sake, I must know! Are you dead or alive?”

At the sound of her voice, the drumming stops abruptly, and the dancers freeze in place. There is a sudden silence in the clearing. Carrie shudders and turns around. Mae Seja is gone, and the candles on the altar have been extinguished. She tries to see past the dark altar, but her eyes won’t focus. Did she really hear William’s voice just now or did she only imagine it?

There is no wind blowing, but when she looks back at the jungle, it’s moving in a long, slow wave.
I’m drunk,
she thinks,
or in a trance or hypnotized. I can’t tell what’s real and what isn’t, and I still don’t know if William is dead or alive.

What was in that drink they gave her? Papa would have known or at least he would have asked; but her lips are numb, she can’t form words, and all she wants to do now is sleep.

Late November 1853

 

 

 

I
n the parlor of her house on the Ladeira da Glória, Carrie sits at her writing desk trying to deal with the mound of correspondence that has piled up since she last had the energy to sort through it. She is wearing an old green cotton dress this morning because green was the color her father liked her in best. Papa would never have wanted her to put on mourning for him. He hadn’t even dressed her in black when her mother died—an act that had scandalized Rio’s entire English-speaking community.

“To wear black in the tropics is a mark of either insanity or idiocy,” he’d said, but now she thinks he simply could not bear to be reminded of his own grief every time he looked at her.

In the garden beyond the open double doors, the fountain is playing over the ceramic rims of its bowls, each note of dripping water growing lower as it progresses. The air is filled with the scent of jasmine and the raucous cries of a band of monkeys who are once again harvesting the papayas before Carrie’s gardener can get to them. In the past, she would have strolled out onto the patio to watch them feed. They are the tiny, amusing sort of monkeys who look like furry-faced squirrels. She spent her childhood longing to keep one as a pet but Papa would never let her.

“Not even a caged bird,” he told her. “Wild things need to be wild.”

“What about orchids?” she retorted once, when she was ten and in a combative mood and still determined to make him pay for leaving her in Kentucky after her mother died. There weren’t many fathers who would have tolerated that kind of backtalk from a ten-year-old, but Papa merely laughed.

“A good point, but orchids don’t have mothers and fathers, and monkeys do.” And then being an honest man, he added: “So to speak.”

Carrie cannot help thinking about her father this morning because every time she looks toward the garden she can see the spot where she buried him. There is a newly planted tree where his grave was, its trunk covered with the vivid purples of
Sophronitella violacea
, the delicate whites of
Brassavola reginae
, and an incomparable bunch of
Crytopodium parviflorum,
bursting forth in cream and burnt umber. She has had his body re-interred in the English cemetery after a proper funeral and used some of her newfound wealth to buy him a marble headstone carved with stone orchids, but these living orchids are his real memorial, and she can sense his presence in them even though he now lies next to her mother and the little sister and brothers who died before they ever really lived.

She turns away from the sight of the garden and picks up another black-edged condolence card.
Brazil is too full of death,
she thinks.
The tropics are merciless. They have killed everyone I love except perhaps
—

She stops herself from bringing this thought to its logical conclusion, grabs the letter opener, and slits the end of the envelope. The question of William’s whereabouts is keeping her from properly mourning her father. There may be worse things than being perpetually suspended between hope and fear, but at the moment the only one she can think of is knowing for certain William is dead.

She’s changed since the morning she woke up in the Casa de Misericórdia to find herself lying next to a row of empty beds. For the first time since she was a homesick child of six, she wants to leave Brazil. She has no ties in Rio. She has already bought the land the
quilombo
stands on, deeded it to the community, and set up a fund to pay the former owners ongoing bribes. Most of the girls she went to school with are married women, and she no longer feels particularly close to any of them. She is not attached to this house. If she wanted to, she could put it in the hands of an agent, pack her bags, and buy herself passage on the next ship bound for an American port. But where would she go when she got there? Her grandparents are no longer alive, and the idea of living in Mitchellville with Aunt Josephine sets her teeth on edge.

Fire ants in a box
, she thinks,
that’s what Aunt Jo and I would be if we lived together. We’d be fighting from morning to night. Not to mention that she owns her cook, her maid, and the old man who drives her carriage, none of whom she is about to free. Kentucky is a slave state and I’ve already lived too long among slavers. I don’t have any friends or relatives in the north. I suppose I could go to Massachusetts and join the abolitionist movement, but a few months after I arrive
—

A few months after she arrives, her baby will be born. She no longer doubts she is carrying William’s child. You do not miss your menses, have your breasts swell up like bladders, and feel as if you can’t keep down dry toast in the morning if you are not going to have a baby. Most of her former schoolmates are so ignorant they won’t know they’re with child until their mothers tell them, but thanks to her parents, she has known the basic facts since she was seven, although—and this makes her smile—neither Mama nor Papa ever mentioned that the process of getting in a family way was pleasurable.

Again, she thinks of William. By day she can convince herself he survived the epidemic, but at night she wakes up gripped by panic.

She forces the thought out of her mind and turns back to her correspondence. The card in front of her is from a Mrs. Alice Montjoy, wife of a British coffee merchant. She studies Mrs. Montjoy’s flowery protestations of sympathy with growing annoyance. She cannot recall meeting the woman and is fairly certain Mrs. Montjoy never knew her “dear, departed father.”

The bank has not been discreet. News of Carrie’s wealth has spread through the city faster than tidings of the California gold strike. She’s surprised it hasn’t made the front page of
The Rio Sentinel.

Picking up her pen, she writes Mrs. Montjoy a brief, polite note, blots it with sand, and puts it aside. When she looks back at the pile of correspondence, she is seized by a desire to slam her writing desk shut and go out for a walk along the beach. Every mother of every eligible bachelor in Rio has sent her a card expressing sympathy on the occasion of her father’s death. She stares at the pile, thinking that it is quite an assemblage of fine, convent-trained handwriting. What would those same eager mamas think if they knew the heiress they were pursuing was with child? The British and American mamas would cut her dead, but the Brazilian mamas might continue the hunt. Brazilians are more forgiving about such things, and the money would be a great compensation. Perhaps she should just marry some Brazilian from a good family and give her baby a father.

The thought chokes her. Dropping her head on the pile of envelopes, she begins to cry.
I feel a hundred years old
, she thinks.
Older than Mae Seja; old and ugly and exhausted and terribly sad. I know I’ll never love anyone as much as I love William, and I don’t want to raise our child with anyone but him.

None of this was supposed to happen. She was supposed to be looking forward to her wedding day. Her dress is still hanging in the wardrobe in the spare bedroom. She needs to tell the maid to get rid of it. She can’t bear to think of it hanging there. If William shows up, she’ll buy another.

The crying sends her into a flurry of hiccups that jar her back to the job at hand. Wiping her eyes on her sleeve, she retrieves a kerchief from her pocket, blows her nose, and soldiers on with the task of replying to the condolence cards. She is crying too often these days, and she suspects it has something to do with being with child. Not, she thinks grimly, that she doesn’t have good reason to cry, but it isn’t like her to fall apart like this.

Around two, she stops working and retires to the dining room to eat a bowl of soup, some stewed chicken, and a plate of sliced fruit. Then she goes back to the parlor. She’s just getting to the bottom of the pile of condolences when the maid comes in bearing a visiting card.