In Calamity's Wake (3 page)

S
HE FLOATED IN THE WATER IN THE WEEDY
creek, parched skin gleaming. Boys in uniform called abuse from the shore. She laughed and showed her finger. They dropped belts and guns and clothing in the long grasses and entered the water splashing like dogs, paddling to her. It was as if for an hour the war meant nothing. Martha and the other soldiers dove under the surface, touched the stones, scratched the soft silt and swam in circles. The cold water washed old dirt from wounds, erased false lines from their soft faces. Kicking, they felt feet and legs touch weeds. Empty stomachs rumbled.

She looked down at herself and then at them, how thin they all were. She turned her face towards the sun and touched the part in her hair where the scalp had burnt. She bent her knees, pulling herself under the surface. Water filled her ears and she heard the roaring.

T
HEY CALLED IT OBLATION
. I
T BEGAN IN THE
East but when it came to the West, the practice of leaving infants on the steps of monasteries, or in churches, or by cemetery graves had become the very incarnation of gifting a life to God.

I was an oblate?

Yes, you were a gift. St. Benedictine said that if a child—like you—Miette, should be donated to the service of God, then the child's hands should be wrapped and in one hand a petition should be placed so that the parents' intentions would be clear. These were not unwanted children; they were the offspring of noble families.

Father, I wish I were yours. I wish—

Shh, you don't understand what that would mean.

T
HERE WAS
no town at all behind the hills where the crazy man who hit my horse and claimed to be my brother had pointed. I saw no one on the trail after him until I arrived at a hamlet in magic hour.

The low sun shone more yellow on the walls of the houses as the pink sky deepened and the heat began to lift. Certain birds sing at different times of the day but the birds that sing at magic hour are all like doves, cooing. Even the moulting ravens sound like cooing doves if they make a noise at all. Though I heard children laughing, hidden behind walls in the yards of their houses, the place where I stopped (I did not know what it was called) seemed hushed as if the roofs had absorbed the last human energy of the day along with the red stains of sunset. My footsteps echoed on the cobbled paving stones of the main street. I felt quite suddenly all right, no longer wondering about the ravings of the crazy stranger who had cursed my mother dead and hit my horse. I released him completely from whatever ill he meant me and said a little prayer for his health.

The picture of my father I carried in my pocket began to sweat with the heat until it was almost like he himself was sweating up against my heart. I took it out and studied it. It was an old photo, ragged all around the edges, riddled with pinpricks from where I had posted
it many times, and with a hole the size of a pencil where the paper had decayed. It was the only image I had ever seen of him before he took the robes. I had found it in a flowerpot filled up with herbs: dried lemon balm, castilla blossoms, rue. I took it without telling him and pinned it inside my dresser drawer.

He was sitting in front of a bookcase in a suit and tie and hat. His moustache and sideburns looked fuller and darker than I had ever seen them. He looked like a man that women might have conspired to be near in the dusty summer hours. But stiff and so still because he couldn't move for the picture, and that made him a stranger, for I never saw him alive when he wasn't moving, farming, hiking, hammering, digging a grave, or soothing something. He was restless and he liked to be away from people but maybe that is what it takes to be a man devoted to God in a place where you build and rebuild Heaven alone. I touched my pocket and wondered if the picture would help my mother to remember the young priest she saw that day she surrendered my little self.

All the doors to all the houses were shut, which was strange when any breeze was worth gold. A few doorways were overgrown with weeds. When we were about to reach the edge of town I saw an old woman, wrapped in a coarse dark shawl, cross the street ahead some
ways. I saw her long loose white hair picked at by the wind, and then I didn't see her and then I blinked a few times and saw her again cross the street in the other direction. Finally, a person, I thought.

Evening, I called out. Evening—where am I?

She stopped in the middle of the street and looked at me. Heaven, she said.

What?

Only a joke. This is Enchant, she said.

I calculated how long we had been walking the streets and not seeing anyone and I thought, I must be dreaming. But when I tested the smell of the air and I stomped my feet in the dust it seemed as if, in spite of the absence of children or birds to match the sounds I could hear, and in spite of the blue shadows creeping over the doorways burdened with weeds, the town felt alive. I looked at the woman, who had stayed in the middle of the street, and her mouth was full of teeth and her eyes blinked the way that living eyes blink. I had been so long used to silence. For a year my father had been so ill and I had driven away other chatty people to spend my life with my horse or with my father or with books. I had spent so much time being carried over the earth or as a bodiless person treading through memories and stories, I did not know much about real bodies, how solid they were or what size they should
be. So when this woman spoke again and pointed I just went where she told me, to a house beside a bridge. I knocked on the door and the woman walked up behind me, opened the door, went inside, closed it, then opened it again and said hello.

Where can I find lodging? I asked her.

You can stay here. I knew you were coming. Your father told me.

My father? My father is dead.

That must be why his voice was so weak. She shrugged. If you're looking, you may find someone still among the living tomorrow. You have nothing to lose by taking a look around. What are you called?

My name is Miette, I told her, although my name is Martha after my mother. Only my father called me Miette and then only when we were alone. Little crumb, it means in French, sweet little thing. It made me happy every time he said my name.

I
N THE
house it was as if she had been waiting with everything prepared for me. New candles were so freshly cut and lit in the dining room that the wicks still flared. Two places were set at the table. Baskets of breads and fruit and plates of meat were arranged between the settings. A chipped green vase held wild-flowers that strangely had no scent. That she had done
all this within the second or two of closing the door and then opening it again was impossible. I heard music and I saw by the table a large stand on which sat a black box with a bugle sticking out of it. A tan cylinder rotated, horizontal, on top of the box. Music strained out of the wide brass mouth of the bugle, a human voice singing some song. It was in French.

It's Creole music, she said, when she saw me looking at it. It's a Louis Moreau Gottschalk song. Haven't you ever seen a phonograph before?

I shook my head, no. The only music I knew were songs the Blackfoot sang, and hymns.

She laughed and motioned me into a dark hall where I could barely discern the doorways from the rest of the walls. By the light from the candles on the table behind me I could see bulky shadows loom in otherwise empty rooms, cast by what I could not tell.

I'm a friend of your father, she said. I have some of his things here. People leave me their things. They stop here on the way to somewhere else and leave behind things for me to store but they never come back. I have had to burn my own furniture to make room for all the odds and ends that people left. I'll fix you a good mattress and you can stay in the room where I have his belongings. I think he left a bed, a pillow and a chest.

My father stayed here?

Yes, he stayed here on his way to the church. We were close friends. How is he?

He died.

You said that. He must have thought I had forsaken him. We always promised that we would see each other again and take the last steps of life together. We were the best of friends. Did he ever talk about me?

No. Are you sure you mean my father?

I drew his picture from my pocket and showed it to her.

She smiled and grabbed the little picture and kissed it. Then she held it to her nose and smelled the fading herbs and melting chemicals and my sweat.

Yes. That's him. I went with him the day this photo was taken. I said, You should have a picture of yourself so you can remember what you looked like before you left me behind. He was here getting ready to cross the border into Heaven. He crossed a few times before he stayed away. Of course, that was years ago and I was a young girl being wicked. I loved him very much. I loved him very, very much and I ask myself sometimes if I might have married if I'd never met him. I ask myself about the true nature of that deep love. When you let yourself feel that much you ruin your chances of a happy marriage.

She sighed and handed me back the picture.

So, he's dead, she said. That's strange. He was so pretty, and so
sweet
. It made a person want to love him. It made a person happy to love him. Well, I will catch up to him. I know a few shortcuts to Heaven and God owes me a small favour. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I shouldn't speak to you like this. It's only that you're his daughter and so it feels to me as if you might have been my daughter.

He adopted me.

Of course he did.

It was clear to me by now that she was insane. Loneliness had turned her empty rooms into storage for the phantom belongings of people she may or may not have ever known. When we reached the room she meant for me she opened the door and inside there was no bed, no chest, no furnishings of any kind. On the ledge of the open window was a small stack of books holding back the frayed curtain. She left me there and I unpacked my sleeping bag. After a minute I went to the window and picked up one of the books. I turned it over in my hand, stroked the spine, felt the leather cover, set it down. I went back to my pack and took out the one possession of my father's I had been unable to leave behind. It was a copy of Jules Verne's novel
Five Weeks in a Balloon
. I knew it, every chocolaty French word, and I knew the signature on the inside leaf.

I sat and fell in love again with the words and the voice I remembered. How I loved the unicorn-shaped balloon, half full, rising with the trade winds to travel across Africa. I climbed into my sleeping bag, pulled it up to my neck and read, listening to my father as if he lived in me. I could not count how many nights he wasted candles reading me to sleep. And in the mornings I would translate the story and write it out in a notebook. I translated to myself again, here in the semi-darkness, remembering at once his voice:

Four thousand pounds floating over lions and boars and wildebeests!

Yes, Miette. That's enough for tonight. Tomorrow we'll read more. Let me pray with you before you sleep. He closed the book and kneeled beside me.

H
E HAD
always held the book. The weight of it in my hands was new. I sniffed it and flipped through the pages. Near the back was a folded piece of paper, tucked in, separating chapters. I opened it and read:

He left everything in this room his last time through here.

I looked up and the woman was in my doorway. She was in a nightgown that made her look like a rag doll.

What time? I said, while I recovered myself and pushed down a sudden swell of anger at her for spying on me in the dark.

Keep them. There are more secrets in those odds of furniture than I can decipher.

Thank you but I can't take the furniture.

He left them the time he came to get you. You were two months old and half dead, wrinkled and thin and yellow. We spent every minute trying to get some water into you. Your mother rode with you tied to her back. Your face was in the sun and she didn't stop even once to feed you. She was the ugliest woman I ever saw, tall and filthy, and she smelled like liquor. I couldn't ever imagine who would make love to her.

I sucked on my tongue and then said, I don't believe you.

Suit yourself, she said and shrugged and left.