Читать книгу Creatures of Passage - Morowa Yejidé - Страница 11

FERRYMAN

The goddess Nephthys ferried lost souls through the dark currents of the Great Mystery, from one isle of existence to another and out to the far reaches of fate, all the while filled with a profound sadness for her brother, the murdered god Osiris, whose power was taken by dividing him into pieces …

Nephthys Kinwell was not a savior of souls. That was God’s charge. Or maybe the trade of the Devil. But she did ferry souls from one quadrant to another, and over the streets that now covered the prehistoric marshes of the capital of the territories. There was a certain geography to it all, she’d learned. To the win lose draw of lives. For Nephthys Kinwell knew—as all wandering hearts do—that it was not enough to know where things happened in the lines and circles of human lives, but why, since the reasons for happenings were buried much deeper than the happenings themselves. So she never had to look for the signs omens bones of creatures of passage. They found her.

The kingdoms of the land that together made the united territories had just turned two hundred years old the summer before, a fledgling in the long line of empires risen and fallen. But in 1977 Anacostia was still the New World, an isle of blood and desire. It was the capital’s wild child east of a river that bore its name, a place where much was yet discovered. Anything was possible in that easternmost quadrant, where all things lived and died on the edges of time and space and meaning. It was a realm of contradictions, an undulating landscape of pristine land and dirty water, of breathtaking hills and decimated valleys. Crab apple and cherry trees flourished in the yards of abandoned houses and centuries-old oaks flanked run-down corner stores. Pushers stood watch for cars when little kids were crossing the street and junkies held doors open for old women. Paroled men played basketball and chess with fatherless boys. The unemployed sat in windows and kept tabs on the injustices of the land. I’ll tell your mama was the universal threat, because next to God there was none more powerful. And the damnation and glory of man was forever intertwined in Anacostia, since all who lived there were faced with the unconquerable presence of both.

So the mechanics of rule and office and Congress and the four-year-old District of Columbia Council was all a vast gray mass glimpsed across the water. Fairfax, Arlington, Montgomery, and Prince George’s fiefdoms were distant domains. The triumvirate of the White House and the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument stood alabaster and resolute, and like the Acropolis held great dominion. But their reach was hardly felt in that east-of-the-river realm, where people lived a reality that was and was not of their own making. Where dreams came true even when people didn’t want them to.

Now Nephthys Kinwell sat on the throne of a worn-out chair in a crumbling Anacostia apartment on the anniversary of her twin brother’s death. Or rather, the day he was found in the river. Each passing year marked the loss of her binary existence, and this observance only heightened the unbearable inertia of one. She didn’t have the strength to get behind the wheel of the Plymouth at a time like this; she had no will to help her passengers journey through the pitch black of the happenings of life, for sometimes she was the one adrift. And none of the people who got into her car could help her cope with the past. Nor could the white girl in the trunk charm what lay ahead.

Nephthys shifted in the chair. She could still remember the inexplicable feelings she had that day, even before a body was found and she was called down to the morgue. Her head felt like it was exploding. She doubled over from some agony in her abdomen, as if being cut from the inside out. She was tormented by a searing pain in her lower leg that arrested her breath. And the more air she tried to take into her lungs, the more she felt as if she were drowning. That must have been when it happened. When she lost the other half of her soul. What that meant crept deep into her in June of every year, so that she had to boil it down to something tolerable with as much liquor as she could stand. Because if she didn’t drink, she had to think about the body. She had to think about the shark.

But no matter how much she drank, she could never completely wash away the sight at the morgue. The eyes bulged grotesquely out of their sockets. Clumps of hair scraped away along with the scalp, where bright-red splotches remained. The lower left leg was missing, torn away as if chewed off by some beast. Nephthys had stared at all that for a long time with disbelieving eyes. No, those couldn’t be the dungarees with the patch she’d affixed on the pocket just the week before. That was not his boot. No, that was not her brother’s half finger, the one shortened like her own, for they had been born holding hands. In the flickering morgue lights, she looked from one horror on the body to another and found that the world was big enough that it had to be someone else. Not her brother.

Nephthys settled deeper in her chair and reached for the small flask that lived always in the pocket of her housecoat and brought it to her lips and drank what was left. The passage of years did not make the image of her brother’s bloated figure among the putrid waters of the Anacostia River any easier to bear. Worse were the seemingly pleasant, undisturbed faces of the police officers when she’d arrived at the station to file that useless report. Her brother’s death was labeled “unsolved,” as if his life had been a riddle, his very existence quickly called into doubt. That was why she’d spread his ashes that way, in different places. It allowed her to think of him living in other bodies of water instead, moving through other currents that gave him passage to better places: the cherry blossom–flecked currents of the Tidal Basin; the shallow majesty of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool; the slushy inflow of the McMillan Reservoir; the black tranquility of the Georgetown canal; the roiling deep of the Potomac River.

She looked around the cluttered room. It was dim and she could just make out the frames of objects at her feet. There was the tidal wash of things she’d brought in and dropped on the floor over the years, which covered the old rugs and kept the cracked tiles from view. She lost track of time and her mind drifted like ether in the gloom. Was it dawn or dusk? Or some other dimension birthed from memory and pain? She couldn’t be sure. The alcohol she’d been drinking moved slowly through the slack passageways of her veins, a seething current of heat searing her nerves. In that state she could sail an ocean of her own making, tepid and stagnant. She could block out nearly everything, except the image of her brother’s broken body and the fog that carried the call of other wandering hearts. Through the haze of the early-morning hours (late-evening?) she felt her half finger throbbing as it always did in dampness, the tip now dark and bereft of the topaz light it had when she was a child. The half finger didn’t glow anymore. Not as it did in the casket-black nights back on the Sea Islands, where she and her brother once played in the wonderland of the Gullah marshes, when they glared at a dark world through the fearless, hopeful eyes of children. The fact that she and her brother had somehow managed to move from one island to another kind of island was not lost on her, and she placed this on the long list of things she found darkly ironic.

One of her legs was going numb and she tried to reposition herself against the shabby seat cushion. She rubbed the mangled flesh of her half finger. They were born holding hands, she and her brother, their fingers conjoined at the pointer. And they would have lived their entire lives that way, if they hadn’t been cut apart soon after they took their first breath. It’s all gone now, she thought. The Sea Islands were far, far away, a past that lay underwater. Every bit of that long-ago life was now lodged in the tubing of ancient coral reefs, disintegrating beneath the verdigris of lives once lived, folded into the happenings of other happenings. Many years later, gated communities and resorts and time-share flats would be built on top of the old black-family cemeteries and bank-seized properties of the Gullah lands. And the few living who remained would be the unwitting stars of a sort of human nature preserve, where tourists came to smile and point as if looking at the last of a species. But Nephthys had no way of knowing this as she sat in her apartment in the southeast quadrant. What she knew was that now there was only the Washington Navy Yard and Bolling Air Force Base. Now there were overgrown lots and houses that were no longer homes. Now people walked the streets as shadows of themselves, joining the ghost tribes of the Nacotchtank Indians, creatures of passage from one generation to the next. Her half finger throbbed harder still, and once more she was reminded of how life could begin and how it could end.

Indigo swirlin’ round de vat …

Nephthys shook her head vigorously to silence the sound of the past, that old Sea Island song she and her brother sang as they helped their mother stir the indigo in the vat. She caught a glimpse of herself in the faded oval mirror that hung from the desiccated wall like a witch’s talisman and turned away. She did not want to see the creases that time had ground into her walnut-colored face, her graying hair now blending with the dust. More and more, she was uncomfortable looking at her reflection in that mirror. For the deeper she looked, the more she had a creeping feeling that someone was looking back.

No beginnin’ and no end …

She shook the song away again. Then, as if by some silent request, the peeling plaster wall cracked and the mirror crashed to the floor. Nephthys looked down at the shimmering mess and massaged her leg. She set her thoughts aside. She would have a drink, and after that she would have another, in a committed stupor, gathering memories to cremate. And this was how she began every sunrise and ended every sunset on the anniversary of her brother’s death.

More hours seemed to slip by, she couldn’t tell how many, until stray sunrays burned through rips in the window curtain, and it was then that she realized it was day and not night. She reached for her flask and felt its lightness. Empty. She looked around for the bottle, the one she thought she’d placed next to her chair. It was gone. The bottles seemed to move somehow, never where she left them. She found them in bizarre places: on the broiler tray of the never-used oven; beneath the piles of clothes in her closet; under the bathroom sink. Sometimes she sat in the fog of her Plymouth and thought about how the bottles moved if she didn’t move them. And what that could mean or not mean.

She stared into the din of her lair. She’d memorized every inch of the living room grid, every item among the objects spread across the floor and along the countertop of the kitchenette: scarves and dresses, newspapers and magazines, plastic containers and ripped paper bags, beaded necklaces and unopened envelopes, crumpled hats and shoeboxes. She knew all the rises and depressions of her mattress, the exact position of the falling-down furniture, the precise tilt of the little end table next to her chair where the bottle should be, the last of the others she’d already emptied. Which was why the missing bottle irritated her now, since she was certain she’d put it next to her chair where it would be within reach. But it wasn’t there.

Scattered rays beamed from the mirror shards at her feet, lighting the living room walls like a mineralized cavern. Then, she thought she heard a choked voice at the front door. It was barely audible through the limestone that walled her mind and it slid through the apertures of what she thought was her imagination.

“Nephthys …” said the voice.

She tilted her head with the slowness of a drowsy lioness bothered by some clatter in the savanna. “Cyan’t nobody be callin’ me,” she said, listening to the sound of her own slurred speech, thinking her mind was playing tricks on her.

“Nephthys Kinwell …” said the voice again.

She blinked in the darkness. Did someone call her name? That name of hers that she’d never fully understood? And yet she couldn’t say her name without thinking of her brother’s name too. And again, the image of her twin’s body on the morgue slab flashed in her mind, the missing pieces of him somewhere else, and she only wanted to drink more.

There was a soft knock at the door.

Nephthys sat listening. Was it the children playing in the hallway again? “Not now,” she mumbled, clutching her empty flask. She didn’t feel like struggling up from the chair with her numb leg to hand out any candy. The children who wandered the hallways came looking for her sweets nearly every day, early in the morning when only the very young or the very old paid them any mind. Each child at her door was a welcome distraction from thoughts of another child, another time.

Now her flask was empty and her bottle was missing, and there was the muddled memory of handing out a few sour balls and lollipops. But she couldn’t tell if that had been earlier that morning or the day before.

There was another knock. “Auntie?”

Her imaginings fell away at the sound of that word. She was Nephthys Kinwell. Or the Car Lady. She was nobody’s aunt. “Wrong door,” she said.

There was more knocking.

Reluctantly, with stiff and arduous movement, Nephthys struggled from the chair. She hadn’t bothered to change the ceiling light bulb and the light switch would be of no use. She shuffled to the window, tripping over empty bottles and shoeboxes filled with candy strewed about the floor, and inched the curtain aside. A blinding one-inch beam cut across the room like a laser probe. Was it midmorning or midafternoon? She went to the front door, heavy and cryptic like all low-income housing doors, and pulled hard. The potent smell of alcohol from her den slithered out like some phantom serpent as the hallway air rushed in.

A boy was standing under the flickering fluorescent hallway lights, staring up at her through two big eyes set in a chocolate face.

Dizzy, Nephthys leaned against the frame of the door in her formless housecoat, steadying her legs as she peered at the child. Even leaning, her head nearly brushed the top of the doorframe. In the antiseptic light, the silvery puff of her hair looked as if it had been sifted with flour. Nephthys stood over the child, squinting. And slowly, she realized that the boy was Dash, her great-nephew. His presence seemed impossible. But she’d learned many things about order and chaos in the southeast quadrant, how children of Anacostia appeared and disappeared. She glowered at the boy through yellow cat eyes scored with the bright-red lightning streaks of broken blood vessels. If she imagined the child, she would know it soon.

“Eh? Speak.”

The boy seemed stunned.

Nephthys looked down the hallway, wondering (hoping?) if Amber, the boy’s mother, had come there too. She heard only the sounds of other people and other lives behind the closed doors: babies crying, telephones ringing, men cursing. She looked again at the boy, squinting as if trying to see him from a great distance.

“Dash? Wuh you doin’ here, baby cootuh?”

The boy fidgeted.

“Mama know ’bout you standin’ here?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Done left school, huh?”

“No … I had to leave early.” Dash took out a folded piece of paper from his pocket and held it up to her like an offering.

“Wuh that there?”

“Nurse Higgins said to tell you it’s a sick note.”

“Wuh kinda sick?”

Dash looked away and held the letter out farther to Nephthys. “She told me to bring this to you.”

“Me and not your mama?”

The boy was silent.

Nephthys looked at the paper in the boy’s hand but did not take it from him. There was no use trying to decipher the words, a collection of symbols on paper. And she knew who Nurse Higgins was, knew her well. For there were some souls lost forever in the darkness, and a rush of memories about the nurse’s son, Gary, flooded her mind. The grocery store and the lighter. The police and St. Elizabeths. And there were souls that she feared would soon be lost. Like Rosetta.

Nephthys pushed the thoughts away and gazed at Dash. “Nurse Higgins, huh? Well, come in, chile.” She watched the boy step forward slowly, as if entering a chamber, navigating the floor of objects illuminated by the sunray’s spotlight. He made his way to a radiator near the window and sat on top of it. Nephthys closed the door and turned the dead bolt. She scanned the living room for the missing bottle once more. Nothing. She looked at the boy, frozen where he sat. She was immune to the spoils of her habits and the reek of rot and ruin, but she knew that the child was not accustomed to the fumes of time. She lumbered over to the window, snatched the curtain aside, and opened it. The world’s air entered and light and oxygen flooded the living room. Recoiling, she stumbled back to her chair and collapsed into it.

When her dizziness subsided, Nephthys looked at Dash clutching the letter in his hand. “Read.”

Dash stared with a look of incredulity. “Me, ma’am?”

“Go on and read the letter fuh me, chile.”

The boy unfolded the paper.

“And speak up, baby cootuh.”

Dash blinked in the apartment’s atmosphere. Slowly, reluctantly, he began:

Dear Nefthis,

Forgive me if I spelled your name wrong but I never had to write it down. Today Dash was suspended for fighting and sent home early. He took a rock to Roy Johnson’s head and beat him silly, busted his forehead open and knocked out a milk tooth. It was extra bad on account of the fact that Roy is the principal’s nephew. I had both of them with me after I pulled Dash off of Roy, and as soon as the principal heard what happened he wanted to expel Dash. I talked him out of it on account of I been knowing his mother at church for upwards of thirty-five years, and I said that come Sunday I’d tell her that he wasn’t doing right by punishing one boy and not the other. Especially without asking no questions. He was ready to blow his top but he didn’t cross me. Now he’s saying if there’s one more issue with Dash, he’s out. Summer break is almost here. Lord knows there should be a way to deal with this before then. It would be a crying shame for the child to get all this way and then be put out of school at the end of the year.

But I really want you to know something else. I heard from the other children that the fight broke out because Roy was teasing Dash about talking to a man. Down by the river. A make-believe man. I wanted you to know about it and I didn’t want to say anything to Amber about it on account of not knowing what that girl would do. But it’s a strange thing talking to a make-believe man. Odd and troubling. Maybe Dash needs a man’s hand. Anyway, I think you need to see about him, even if you all don’t talk. It’s been a long time on a lot of things. Good and bad has passed. But you and I know that things can happen to a boy. —Nurse Higgins

Dash stopped reading and looked out at the window-framed bright sky as if watching the words on the paper fly away. A deep silence sifted down into the room and settled over everything.

Nephthys shifted in her chair and worked what she’d heard the boy read around in her mind. Down by the river. There was only one river Nurse Higgins could have meant. And once more her blood ran cold and she shivered at the image of her brother’s body.

She looked at Dash perched on the radiator and shook her head as if loosening the dust and moths from a dress worn only on special occasions. “Wuh happened at school?” She asked this with the innocence of a stranger, toneless and without judgment.

“Nothing, ma’am.”

“Don’t sound like nothin’ to me.”

“Just teasing.”

“About a make-believe man?” Dash was silent.

Nephthys had no plan to press the boy for an answer, for she’d seen many things in the darkened hallways of her mind and the byways of the quadrants. And in her years of ferrying souls from one place to the next, she’d learned that people were as real or as unreal as others wanted them to be. Which was one of the reasons why she drank. She reached once more for her flask and remembered that it was empty. Listless, she looked at Dash, this great-nephew whom she hardly knew. And she wished that she could conjure something matronly or mighty to say to him. What could she say? She didn’t know. But you and I know that things can happen to a boy …

“Oonuh hungry? Nyam?”

Dash nodded and then shook his head, seeming to half comprehend what she meant. “No, ma’am.”

“Rock candy?”

The boy sat up straight, brightening. “Do you have any mint?”

Nephthys scanned the cluttered floor for the rock candy as if deciphering a puzzle that she’d put together many times before. “Yeah, got mint. Get that Sears shoebox there,” she said, pointing.

Dash stood up and moved across the jumbled floor like a blind man making his way through a crowded street. He spotted the Sears shoebox and kneeled in front of it and lifted the lid. It was filled with the colorful mayhem of every kind of candy. He rummaged through the box. And snaked in and around the wonderful pieces was a delicate strip of faded indigo cloth. He pulled it out and examined it, holding it up to the light. The cloth was made of heavy cotton, decorated with a dark-blue and white geometric pattern. “What’s this?” he asked.

Nephthys was lost in her calculations of where the whiskey bottle might be. When she saw the indigo cloth Dash was holding, the tide of liquor in her blood receded. The cloth was hand dyed by her mother; a relic from another place and dimension, which like all bewitched treasures—ageless and so impossible—the ancients sought to keep from pirates by burying. Which was why she’d kept it inside an old hatbox in her closet. But how did it get in the Sears box, in the living room? She tried to make sense of it, but the tide of what she’d been drinking came in again and she was unable to do so. “Put that back,” she said. Then, softer, “You can have more candy.”

The boy put the indigo cloth back into the box as he was told and pulled out two more pieces of candy. “Thank you, Auntie,” he said. He glanced at her and quickly looked away.

Nephthys stiffened. Auntie. The word ran down her back like cold water, a flash of a feeling that quickly faded into the lifelessness of a title she felt she’d never earned. But the gratitude she heard in the boy’s voice resuscitated something in her heart that she thought was dead. “Welcome, Dash.”

Nephthys rubbed her half finger as something else came alive inside. She was working her way around to asking about how the boy’s mother was doing. There was no telling. Dash looked well enough. But Amber was capable of almost anything. And in that way that people in Anacostia ask loaded questions with loaded answers, Nephthys said: “How your mama been?”

Dash was enjoying the rock candy but the pleasant look on his face quickly faded. He shrugged. “Fine.” He toyed nervously with the empty candy wrapper in his hand, folding it and unfolding it. And after a long silence he said, “I think Mama had a dream about me.”

The words hit Nephthys like a rogue wave and she reeled in her chair. The old fear rose inside of her. Because Amber Kinwell knew things days or weeks or months before they happened. Sometimes years, it seemed. The woman with the peacock feather in her hat who drowned her husband’s mistress in a bathtub. The six black boys murdered in a special cell of the capital jail. And who could forget the dead toddlers? Amber said she dreamed that a woman was going to kill her three children with rat poison. Two weeks later it was reported on the news that a woman named Cenna Henson had killed her three children (a two-year-old boy and three-year-old twins). It was later discovered that on the eve of the woman’s eviction, she cooked an ambitious dinner and laced every delicious bite with rat poisoning. They were all found in poses—she and the toddlers—tranquil and polished, like cherub pieces in a menagerie. But there still seemed to be things that Amber didn’t see, even in the horror of the ordinary. She saw the woman feeding her toddlers but not eating the food herself. She saw the little coffins but not the mother’s casket beside them. Yet the dreams always seemed to come to pass, one way or another. Like her brother, the river, and the shark.

Nephthys rubbed her half finger. Could it be happening again? Because there was only one time before when her niece dreamed about a Kinwell. Her stomach was turning and her head was buzzing. She closed her eyes, not wanting to see Dash’s face when she asked the question, the same query that everyone had of Amber Kinwell whether they doubted her sanity or not. She gripped the arms of her chair with both hands, clenching her eyes tighter. “Wuh she see?”

Dash stared into the wasteland of objects on the living room floor as if the answer might be there somewhere. “She won’t say. But I can tell it’s about me.”

Nephthys sighed. Even if the boy could tell her what the dream was about, was there anything she could do? She opened her eyes and looked at Dash. And had she been able to find her bottle earlier, she might have left the whole matter alone—the letter from Nurse Higgins and the dream—and watched them sail away with all the other reasons she drank. But now she couldn’t.

Someone was singing loudly in the apartment hallway and Nephthys glanced at the grit-filmed clock on the wall, its hour and minute hands stuck in the same position for years. “School be lettin’ out soon, won’t it? Better get on home, Dash.” What she meant was that she didn’t want the boy in any more trouble for the day, because anything at all was possible in that little periwinkle-blue house at the bottom of the hill at the edge of the world. And she needed time to think.

Dash stood up from the radiator.

Nephthys watched him pick his way to the front door. And feeling helpless, she turned once more to the small things that she thought the old could offer the young, for she believed that sugar held great healing powers for the woes of any child. She struggled up from her chair and followed him to the door. She reached into her housecoat pocket and held out a red gumdrop. “Nyam. Eat.”

Dash took the candy from her, staring at her half finger.

Nephthys turned the dead bolt, trying to smile, thinking of what bothered her most about the letter. Down by the river. A make-believe man … A strange feeling crept into her and she pushed it away. “Oonuh push on through to tomorrow, baby cootuh,” she said, and turned the knob and pulled the heavy door open.

At the threshold, each looked at the other as if their eyes could help them find what next to say. But there were no more words between them—the boy and his great-aunt—nothing to frame the door that opened to this place they were now sharing. A place that held secrets.

Dash stepped out and Nephthys watched him walk down the glum hallway of sounds until he was gone. Loud static from a record player somewhere announced the beginning of a rhythm and blues song:

Caught between infinity and life

Reachin’ ever so high

Livin’ it up before it’s time to die

No bargain either way

Different kinds of judgment days

A million ways they make you pay

Caught between infinity and life …