Incantation (12 page)

I could not bring myself to think of all that the soldiers had done. If I thought about all the horrible things in the world, I would end up like my grandmother. A sack of ashes. As good as dead. Defying whatever days were granted to me, throwing them away as though I were a helpmate to those who wanted to destroy us.

My grandmother wasn’t talking. She was wrapped in her shawl, unmoving, as though ready to be buried. My mother had whispered that our people are always buried simply, ready to join the eternal, wrapped in a white shroud and quickly placed into the earth. Everyone is made from dust and everyone returns to it. That is what she told me, and that was what I believed. In my mind, I wrapped my mother and my brother and my grandfather in white cloth. I closed my eyes and put them in the ground under an almond tree, in a place where there was always water.

When I offered my grandmother a bit of stale cake, she waved me away. She said there was no point to anything, least of all eating. She said this world was a hole of darkness, of black light and evil and loss.

But if that were true, there would never have been any bright light in our lives. My mother would never have existed, my brother would never have been such a fine man, Andres would not be waiting for me somewhere, though I didn’t know where.

I told my grandmother she was wrong. We had to survive to remember. Otherwise everything we were would disappear. Those people we loved would fade as though we’d never loved them, as if they’d never walked and talked and burned. Forgetting them was the real evil. That was the hole of darkness.

I found a cup and took water from the mule’s trough and insisted that my grandmother drink. When she was done, I made a bed for her out of an old rug. I went to stand outside when she was asleep. I looked at the swirls of stars. They were the same stars I’d always seen and might not see again once we left this place.

The doctor came outside to say his nighttime prayers. He was still wearing the blue coat his wife had made out of my mother’s yarn, spun from the sheep in our yard, dyed with flowers from the hills above us. He prayed beside the red flower, proof of eternal love.

The doctor acted as if he didn’t see me, but he knew I was there. After he prayed he said,
It is fine for you to sleep in the stable. But leave in the morning while it’s still dark. That way the soldiers will not find you.

I thanked him for his kindness.
I think that red lily will always grow,
I said. I wanted to honor his wife in some way.

As I was leaving to return to the stable, I heard him say,
Now we both have people we love who are like birds. They have flown far from anything in this world that can hurt them. They’re flying away still.

I
THOUGHT
about how the soldiers had burned the books first. How the pages were like doves. Everything we knew condemned us, and our questioning condemned us most of all. Knowledge was the way of our people, and knowledge was dangerous. It was the thing that freed you and the thing that put you in peril. It was the key to the ten gates. I saw them clearly now, each and every one, the gates that were there for me.
Ashes, Bones, Grass, Heart, Stone, Love, Sorrow, Blood, Earth, Sky.

J
UST BEFORE DAYLIGHT
, my grandmother and I went back to the hills. We did not get there till late at night. Andres was waiting for us with two mules. I knew he wouldn’t betray me. I felt that there was hope for us somewhere in the world.

We would go to Amsterdam, where there was the boat waiting. We were going to a place so far away, no one would follow us. We were going to an island made of stones on the other side of the ocean. Hispañola. We would fit in there because we spoke Spanish; but we would not be like everyone else. On Friday nights, as the sky darkened, as the clouds moved out to sea, far past the island, past the shore and the stones, we would light candles and say our prayers, and no one would stop us. At last we could be who we really were. Some people say,
Save yourself and you save your life.
I say,
Be yourself and you save your soul.

A
NDRES WAITED
while my grandmother and I followed the path my mother had shown me. When we reached the pool, we took off our filthy ash-coated clothes. I saw my grandmother as the girl she once had been and the old woman she had become. I helped her into the bath and then I let myself slip into the dark water.

It was so clear and so clean, as though the pool had come directly from heaven. The stars were caught in the water, like embers. Where we were going, there would be different stars in the sky, so I wanted to remember these, the ones floating in our heaven-water, the ones I’d known all my life.

Even when I was an old woman, older than my grandmother, older than the oldest raven in the sky, I’d remember everything I’d ever known and seen. The ashes and the burning doves. The look on my brother’s face, the blue dye on my mother’s hands, the color of tears, the gate of sorrow, and the gate of love.

I’d sit down and make my sons and daughters listen, though we were thousands of miles away, far on another shore.

Remember what I’ve told you.

Remember me.