Bone Music (5 page)

The Present

Emma went drinking the night after the cancer finally got done with her daughter Lisa. Lisa was eight, and she’d died long and hard and painful, and when she was finally gone what Emma needed more than anything else was to forget, at least for a night.

The bar Emma went to was a dirty place called the San Juan Tavern. It was only four blocks from home — two blocks in another direction from the hospital where Lisa died. A lot of people who lived where Emma did drank at the San Juan.

She liked to tell herself she went to the San Juan for the music, and it was true the music at that place was special, music like from down home in the Delta. But the truth about the San Juan wasn’t music at all: the truth was Emma Henderson went to the San Juan Tavern when she needed to drink. And that night she needed something terrible to drink.

Not that she did it with a clear conscience. Just the opposite: It made her feel dirty to be drinking with her daughter not three hours dead. Twice she thought about stopping, paying up her bill, going home and going to sleep like someone who had a little decency. But the need for succor stopped her. Instead of going home she drank more and more till now the hunger for tobacco overtook her, and she knew she’d gone too far.

Just after one in the morning she went to the machine beside the lavatory and bought Marlboros. By then her hands were trembling so bad she ripped three cigarettes opening the pack, and she couldn’t wait, couldn’t wait a moment because she had to smoke now, and she lit her first cigarette from the candle on her table even though that made the smoke taste waxy.

Emma didn’t usually smoke at all — when times were good she didn’t even like the smell of tobacco. But she got a taste for the stuff when things went bad, and lately she needed it all the time.

As the night wore on she smoked cigarettes end on end, lighting one from the other from the other, smoking them so hard they almost burned her lips. But they didn’t help. Neither did the wine. When she was halfway through her third tumbler of the cheap red stuff the barmaid served when you didn’t think to ask for something special, Mama Estrella Perez sat down across from her and clomped her can of Budweiser onto the Formica tabletop. The can tottered back and forth a couple of times like it was going to fall over and spill, and for half a moment Emma was sure the can was going to tumble to the floor — but it didn’t.

Things like that happened around Mama Estrella all the time. It was like there was something in the air around her that made all the ordinary probabilities run awry.

And maybe they did. Emma had seen the botanica down in Mama Estrella’s store — she’d been there lots of times, even though she’d never bought anything from that part of the store. Emma didn’t need that kind of stuff! She was a Baptist, not some Santeria Catholic! She’d been into Mama Estrella’s store because it was right downstairs from her apartment and most of the rest of it was just a bodega. It wasn’t like she could avoid the place, anyway; Mama Estrella she owned the building, which made her Emma’s landlord. And besides, her bodega wasn’t like most of them. It was big and clean and well lit, and it didn’t really matter that there was a big botanica in the back, because nobody sensible took that stuff serious. So what if there were love potions and strange waters and things she couldn’t figure out because she couldn’t read Spanish very well? Emma always thought it was cute.

Then somebody told her Santeria was Cuban voodoo, and she didn’t like it so much.

“Your daughter died today,” Mama Estrella said. “Why’re you out drinking? Why aren’t you home, mourning?” Her tone made Emma feel as cheap and dirty as a streetwalker.

Emma shrugged. She knocked back the last of the awful wine in her glass, then refilled it from the bottle the bartender had left for her.

Mama Estrella shook her head and finished off her beer; someone brought her another can before she even asked. She stared at Emma. Emma kept her seat, held her ground. But after a few minutes the taste of the wine began to sour in her throat, and she wanted to cry. She knew the feeling wasn’t Mama Estrella’s doing, even if Mama Estrella was some sort of a voodoo woman. It was nothing but Emma’s own guilt, coming to get her.

“Mama Estrella, my baby died today. She died a little bit at a time for six months, with a tumor that finally got to be the size of a grapefruit growing in her belly, almost looking like a child that was going to kill her before it got born.” She caught her breath. “I want to drink enough that I don’t see her dying like that, at least not tonight.”

Mama Estrella was a lot less belligerent-looking after that. Ten minutes later she took a long drink from her beer and said, “You okay, Emma.” Emma poured herself some more wine, and someone brought Mama Estrella a pitcher of beer, and they sat drinking together, not talking, for a couple of hours.

About three a.m. Mama Estrella got a light in her eye, and for just an instant, just long enough to take a breath and let it out, Emma got an awful feeling, a feeling like she ought to excuse herself and run away as far and as fast as her drunken legs could carry her.

No one lives long in Harlem without learning when to run, and Emma knew as well as anybody. But she was drunk, too drunk to know she ought to be afraid. Instead of running away she leaned forward and whispered: “What’s that, Mama Estrella? What’re you thinking?”

Mama Estrella sprayed her words a little as she answered. “I just thought: hey, you want your baby back? You miss her? I could make her alive again.” She was even drunker than Emma was. “No, that’s wrong. Not alive. More like . . . you know what a zombie is? A zombie isn’t a little girl, but it’s like one. It moves. It walks. It breathes if you tell it to.” She took another long drink from her beer can. “I can’t make your baby alive,” she said. “But I can make what’s left of her go away more slowly.”

It was a terrible, terrible idea, and even in her grief Emma knew that from the moment Mama Estrella suggested it. But she was drunk, and she was brooding, and the parts of her with prudence and good sense were drowned in grief and wine.

“A zombie. . . ?”

She missed her little girl so bad — she didn’t think. How could she think? Every time she tried to think her head was full of images, like the image of the awful dead-faced men who’d come to wheel Lisa’s body from the room, all cold and businesslike. Emma had wanted to shout at them until they acted like she felt, but she couldn’t find the heart.

She closed her eyes again, and another image came to her — the image of her darling baby Lisa whimpering in pain, and now she saw the awful hemorrhaging rain of blood that burst from Lisa just before she died.

It would’ve been better if she’d died herself, Emma thought. Dead is better than alive if you have to live without your little girl you love beyond all measure.

Mama Estrella offered Emma a handkerchief, and Emma realized she was crying. She didn’t feel like she was crying. She didn’t feel anything but numb, but the tears were there, and when she wiped them away they welled up all over again. She tried to stop, but it was no use. “I love my baby, Mama Estrella,” she said. She tried to say more, but the words wouldn’t come to her.

Mama Estrella looked grim. She nodded, picked up her beer, and poured most of it down her throat. “We go to the hospital,” she said. “Get your Lisa and bring her home.” She stood up. Emma took one last swallow of her wine and got up to follow.

It was hot outside — high in the eighties long after midnight, hot as summer even though it was still early in the spring.

When they got to the hospital service door Mama Estrella told Emma to wait and she’d go in and get Lisa. Emma wanted to say no, no, I’m going home I’m going to mourn my girl in peace, but she lost the words before she could speak them, and where she should have turned and run she stood at the service door shivering despite the heat, wishing she were someplace else, anyplace else at all. . . .

But she wasn’t anywhere else. She was outside that awful hospital, waiting and waiting in the too-quiet night. She raised her head to look up at the sky and saw the full moon, and it looked so wrong. And it was wrong — it shone bright as bone china on star-shot black cloth where most nights the city moon is pale and wan, where the city’s lights diminish the stars in the sky until they vanish in the greyness of the night.

Even the steamy air was silent, as though it knew a secret too terrible to hide.

Twice as Emma waited men came out the door carrying red plastic bags of garbage from the hospital. Once Emma heard a siren, and she thought for a moment that somehow she and Mama Estrella had been found out and that the police were coming for them. But that was silly; there were always sirens sounding in the Harlem night.

After twenty minutes the service door opened again, and it was Mama Estrella carrying poor dead little Lisa with her skin so pale, her eyes so hazy white with death. . . . It was too much.

“You okay, Emma?” Mama Estrella asked. She looked worried.

“I’m fine, Mama Estrella. I’m just fine.” That was a lie, but Emma tried to make it true.

“We need to get to my car,” Mama Estrella said. “We need to go to the graveyard.”

Mama Estrella kept her car in a parking garage around the corner from the San Juan Tavern.

“I thought we were going to take her home,” Emma said.

Mama Estrella shook her head. She didn’t say a word.

Of Southeastern Missouri

August 1938

When the sky was quiet the Lady who some people call the goddess who repented closed the Eye and sealed it shut. Then she set it back into its place above the great wide river, and looked on it, examining her handiwork.

When she looked on it she had a vision that chilled her to the bone.

She saw a vision of the world, the Eye, and Hell; she saw hateful ardors growing in the breasts of innocents, and breeding everywhere inside the hearts of men and women.

Our Lady of Sorrows cried when she saw that vision. She cried because the people are dear to her, and precious — but she did not turn away from it. She knew she didn’t dare.

When the vision was done she shuddered and sobbed and ran to the arms of the great King, partly for comfort, partly for succor, and partly too because he and his fate were terrible keys to the vision.

She found him in his Mansion high upon the Mountain, sitting in his study where a roaring fire burned inside the great black stove. She found the Right and Left hands of the Lord, Dismas and Gestas, in his study with him, offering their counsel.

The Lady ignored them. She went to the King and shed her tears upon his shoulder until her heart could cry no more. Then she said, “I had a vision, King — a terrible terrible vision.”

The King held her close, and rubbed her softly near the spine. “I saw a glimmer of it too,” he said. “Your sorrow reflected on the jewel.”

The jewel he meant was a tiny simulacrum of the Eye of the World that hung from a leather cord around his neck. The Lady gave that to him not long before he died; he never removed it under any circumstance.

“I saw my handiwork undone,” she said. “I saw the Eye would break three times. Once now when I have sealed it; once again when that seal wears away. I saw a way to remake it then — but the only way will cost the world its soul. And even then the binding will not hold! I saw you and yours, everything that we hold dear, cast into the deep pit of oblivion. And no matter how that price was paid, the Eye still broke again. The world will fall into corruption, and then when no one can stand tall enough to stop it, damnation falls onto the world, unstoppably.”

The King, the Lady, and the good Hands of the Lord stood quiet after that for the longest time, mourning against the destiny that lay before them.

“If I’m going in the pit, I’ll go there unafraid. But I won’t go without a fight. Is there any hope? Is there nothing we can do to fight the dark?” the King asked at last.

The Lady shook her head. “Nothing. No hope at all! No matter how we rail against the darkness, it will consume us.”

And then it got quiet again. Until at last the Left Hand of the Lord spoke to them unbidden:

“You’re wrong,” he said. “There’s always hope, no matter how it may grow faint.”

The Lady arched an eyebrow; the King turned to face the Left Hand of the Lord, put a hand upon his shoulder, and spoke to him demandingly. “Tell me,” the great King said. “Tell me what you see.”

“Hope is a thing,” the Left Hand said, “that grows in the hearts of the faithful as they struggle to survive. No matter how they suffer it never abandons them.”

The great King laughed. “That’s an easy moral,” he said. “But I never seen a man come to good depending on rules without arrangements. Be forthright for me — tell me what to do.”

The Right Hand of the Lord shook his head. “The Lord helps those who help themselves,” he said. “Salvation is a thing that comes from the heart. No machination we could give you could ever salve the Eye.”

“Then what do you mean?” the Lady asked. “Riddles aren’t salvation, either.”

The Left Hand of the Lord sighed impatiently. “Look at the world,” he said. “Look into your hearts. Know the history and the mystery that’s gone before you, and make salvation where you find it. There isn’t any other way.”

And then the Hands were gone, disappeared as thoroughly as though they’d never sat beside the King.

When the air was still again the Lady said, “They always talk in riddles. I can make no sense of them.”

The great King nodded. “I can’t either,” he said. “But I’m going to try.”

With that he opened the door to the black iron stove, and fed three good hickory logs into the fire. Took his Hammer from its place beside the book case, and tuned it, adjusting the pegs that were made from bits of his own bones.

And then he played, long and loud and hard to charm a prophecy from the roaring fire. The prophecy it gave him wasn’t hope, exactly, and in most respects it made him grievously sad. But no matter how grim the news it gave him, it also gave a possibility, a shadow of a hope that grew out of the ashes like a free-bird come to season.

And no matter what it cost him, the great King took that vision to his heart. And faced the doom it made for him.