Jakob’s Colors (23 page)

W
onder if you knowing what ash can be used for? Can be used to bind things together, lock 'em tight, like a glue that dries thick an' hard, and this is what my pa was thinking 'bout when he burned all them wooden crosses. He sat there thinking how best he gonna turn that ash into something worthy of itself.

We watched them flames rising, spitting their fiery ashes out, lit up an' sparkling like something you'd not be putting a price to. Brightest things on earth in them moments, but come the end of that fire, we're left with a mound of ash, the dullest gray.

My pa, he comes then with all number of strange things into our
kampania
. Comes with a great hunk of rock to begin with. Grinding it down to whatever secret is held inside of it. Mixes an' kneads his mounds of ash, and his hunks of rock, and it is days later before I see what he's been up to. On the table lies the finest mound of powder I ever seen, and this mound, that come from the grayest, dullest ash, and the grayest, dullest stone, is now as bright a blue as ever I seen. And my pa stands there with his fingers all stained, as if the color has become a part of him, the dye seeping into his pores, like he is holding the sky an' the sea in his hands.

After that we packing up our horse and our wagon an' sets off on that long road again. My pa finds work as a harvester, a miner, a digger, and after he has us fed an' watered, he buys back them crops he harvested, them stones he mined. We travel onward to those saffron fields, timing it right with that blue harvest, that you best be picking before that yellow sun goes setting in that big sky. Traveling to them cactus plantations with those small cactus beetles you can crush between your fingers with a pop, staining them sweet with the brightest red. Down to the shore then, finding them sea snails that weep violet tears, tears that do not fade, that grow brighter beneath that hot sun, brighter 'gainst that gusty wind. Collect them quick after the rising o' the Dog Star, or if not then, before them first days of spring. Heading on up to them copper mines, finding rocks the size of melons, that my pa turns into green-tinged seas, and blue hues that give height to them artists' skies.

All number of smells seep from our wagon, stinging our nostrils, stinging our eyes, but not one of us is complaining 'cos we knowing this something my pa gotta do. So my ma stops her laments, and I become my pa's right hand, ready to run go get this an' go get that; a little more salt, a little more lemon, wine if we have it, my hammer, my chisel, my mortar an' my pestle. I learn the names of chemicals we not ever knew existed, strange words, hard to get our tongues around: potassium, ferrocyanide, caustic soda and sodamide, cadmium, sulfide, iron and aluminum salts.

My pa suspends hunks of orange rock over tubs of red vinegar, which we putting out under the trees, watching how the acid burns that copper metal to a green that gonna color all them artists' leaves. We chew those indigo leaves, and those woad mustard plants, crushing them to a murky yellow. Fermenting them, drying them out on the banks of some merry river as we sleep, praying it don't rain throughout the night. Come morning them leaves have changed to a dull-green clay that if we leave out beneath that burning sun is turning into the dark of midnight by day's end. Pa finds them salmon pinks in the rock lichens that grow in the damp nooks an' crannies of the earth. Finds them deep browns in cooked wild walnuts that we catch
as they falling from the trees, and when he has used all them woad leaves he finds more midnight blacks in the branches of breeze blown mimosa trees.

He is stirring an' mixing and getting all his colors right, and all the while a little bit of them cross ashes gets put into his palette of paints. Like watching some magic happening before you, all them bright colors coming out of the dullest thing, like all along they'd been just waiting for someone to release them into this big bright world. Glass jars of color stack up in the back of our wagon, rattling along them roads. And in every town, and in every city, my pa is seeking out the very best painters, giving them a jar of this, and a jar of that, selling them at markets, at shops, at fancy galleries where he goes knocking on the doors. Those paints give them artists the very substance of things. They dip their brushes into the air, spreading the light of it onto bare canvases. And as we rattle around the land, I peer through them house windows, wondering if the paintings on those gray walls are the ones that hold them dead soldiers' sorrows in their skies. Life's not simple. Full of a mystery an' a magic we're not ever meant to understand. The end not always the end. The beginning not always the beginning.

Seen it with my own eyes. Seen how those colors can save a life. There was this young 'un, a wiry wreck he was, all skin an' bones under the rugs flung on top of him to keep him warm. But still he lay shivering, 'cos he got a fever buried deep and something nasty ripping through his blood.

Heard of this young 'un the day we arrived at that
kampania
. Followed a track, slipping an' sliding through the bog, mud sloshing over our wheels, that brought us to this field and this river, all beaded with frost an' silver shimmering. And lined up to face the sun, a gathering of wagons, all colored an' hand painted like our own.

We set up camp, and soon enough I could hear the hiss of them oil burners, smell that kerosene, and we'd found ourselves a place that looked good an' friendly enough to stop a while.

My pa is up before first light. Hear him shifting from his mattress below, catch the silhouette of him leaving our wagon before sleep is
pulling me back. Later I hear the boil an' whistle of the kettle. Wake to light streaming through our windows.

“Where's Pa?” I ask Ma, as she standing by the hob with leaves in her hair.

“A boy's sick. They asked for him.”

“They asked for Pa?”

“Yes,” she tells me.

I take the buttered bread she hands me, pull on my cold boots, and out I go, running through that hard frozen grass. Smell that frost, the ice on the river, them scents of salt an' resin.

Find my pa in the last but one wagon, kneeling on the wooden floor, by a crib where the young 'un is lying, shivering still with his eyes all rolled back in his head, the whites glinting back at us. My pa's hand is resting on that young 'un's forehead, his fingers in his hair, and around him on the floor he's laying out them mounds of colors. Rubs a bit of malachite on the wrist of that boy, a bit of ochre on the other, like some strange ointment.

I watch him. Wait. Absentminded. Scoop a little bit of them colors up, one by one. Then I start streaking them 'cross the wooden walls of that wagon, streaking them in an arc, from one end to the other. Right in front of that young boy's eyes. Watching how a light film sticks to the grains, so light you barely seeing it at all. But look hard, and colors be glistening over the wood, like the haze of a rainbow.

“Pa,” I says, 'cos he didn't see me come into that wagon. But my pa don't turn his head. Got a funny expression on his face, like he can't hear nothing. I step back, stay quiet an' mouse-like. Leave that rainbow arc on them walls. Go sit out front, beside the mamo and da of that sick boy, who sit pale faced and clenching their hands, chewing on a handful of nuts an' shredding the shells onto the floor. We sit like this for an age. The only movement, those nuts popping into the back of that man's mouth, and the only sound, the crunching of them nuts between his teeth. That light outside changes from blue to white, and that frost melts, by the time my pa stands up. He takes my hand like he knows I been there all this time, nods to the man and the woman
on the steps, and then we are walking back to our own wagon to start unloading for our stop an' stay.

It's not 'til evening that I hear the cheering of people's voices and see a small crowd come crossing them long shadows to our wagon with their lanterns rattling. And that young 'un, he's right in the middle of that merry group, taking strong steps to get himself to us.

My ma's all smiles. My pa rises from the table inside our wagon. Comes standing in the doorway and I can hear them all thanking him, addressing him with respect, like he is something special.

My pa don't say nothing. Just stands, tall an' straight backed, taking in what they saying. When later that night them people have gone, and I ask him how he made that sick boy well again, he won't set about telling me. Eventually he gets sick of my carry-on and then he says Yavy Boy, and I know he gonna tell me something big 'cos he not using my name often. Keeps it for them important things he has to say. 'Cos he is called Yakob, and I am called Yavy right after him. Always feel a warmth inside the way my pa says my name. He speaks it soft, puts all his loving of me in the way that he says it.

“Yavy,” he says this time. “Done nothing no one else can do. Them pigments I make, some got an antiseptic inside of them that gonna kill the likes of an infection. But perhaps that don't explain why a boy so sick as that can stand by sunset. Perhaps there's something else that warrants that turn around.”

And he has a glint in his eye as he speaks on, like his smile is gonna widen at any moment. “I reckon he is remembering that thing we call
Apasavello
,” he tells me. “What we calling the Belief. In life, in the hope of it. Ain't nothing like some rainbow arc spread out before your eyes, to be reminding you of that.”

My last memory of my ma and pa. I remember hearing a noise so loud it bish-bashed the silence out of the night all around. My pa's like me, shut eyed in his sleep, with my ma cozied up beside him, her hair splayed all silky soft an' unraveled on the pillow, and her hand laid flat out on his chest 'cos she loving him even as she sleeps. Them Authorities come to take us little 'uns. Come to take my three sisters and there
is nothing either Pa or I can do. My pa's up as soon as them sounds hit against the night. Standing there in his nightshirt, all undone 'gainst the dark. But those Authorities, they got my sisters by then, got them already to the door. Roughly they pull me, yanking at my arm, my shoulder sharp an' screaming in its socket. Hit my pa down when he comes stalking toward them. Hit him clean down 'cos they are
barri
men and he is slight. Still I see him get back up, and though I have a pair of heavy arms wrapped around my head, blocking out the sound from my ears, I still hear the screams of my ma as they pummeling their big fists into my pa. I ain't never heard screaming like that before. Coming from a place down deep in her belly, gravelly, like there's a big beast inside her. But ain't nothing gonna stop them Authorities taking us then. They got a task they gotta finish. To wash the gypsy out of us.

My pa got his hands over his head now. All curled up in a hedgehog ball, trying to ward off them punches. My sisters out of the door, and I, pulled right behind them, out into that cold night in my nightshirt an' nothing else.

Trying hard to find the
dook
inside o' me. Trying so hard to see what my pa has taught me to see all my life, as them
barri
men drag me and my sisters away. 'Cos my
soori
is breaking with the last sight o' them. My ma on the ground, like she felt all the pain of the world in them last moments, her hands grasping at empty air. So weighted down with her crying, even my pa can't lift her off the ground. And my pa himself, face bleeding from them punches that didn't stop, and I can see him mouthing out my name. Yavy, he whispers. Yavy Boy.

They don't run after us, 'cos they know an' I know, them
barri
men gonna bash their skulls in if they come running to save us again. So they stay put right there on that wet earth, clinging to them footprints we pressed there before we were gone into the night. Gone their three girls. Gone their only boy. Gone. Gone.

We're pushed into a truck, and I see other faces inside that dark, sleep smeared like us. Smelling of oil an' hay, and that truck, better for the sheep, not children, who sit all weeping, scared an' missing their ma's already.

My
soori
is screaming out. Tumbling an' hammering in my chest.
Sa so sas man-Hasardem
. All my heart.
Sa so sas man-Hasardem
. All my life.

But even then, as tears spill down my sisters' faces, I hear my pa. Telling me loud an' clear what I have to find. Shouting out that
Apasavello
to me, telling me to see it, so when I close my eyes, shutting out that truck's black gloom, I see that life—sun bright. Tree bright. Sky bright. Have the whole of nature in front o' me. Seeing colors where there ain't no colors. Seeing them mounds of powder my pa made, them piles of brightness that he pulled out of the grayest stone.

Just have to find them, I keep telling myself. Keep seeking out them colors that gonna make this life worth living.

T
hey followed the river to the lake, followed the lake to the Institution, through reeds and the nests of warblers, arriving, in the end, as Lor had left it. She could see the expanse of the building above the trees, such was its height, grand still, despite the bleached dilapidation and the crumbling stone. The mist came in swiftly, as if nature had made a sudden decision to hide the sky. Swallows that flew in across the water appeared, then vanished, then vanished and reappeared, wings beating furiously, as if they were racing the swoon of a wave. The fog spiraled in from the shore to the lawn, wrapped around them, clinging to the trees, to the grasses. The air was dank with it. They walked around to the boathouse, past collapsing balustrades and trees weighted with shriveled fruit that had refused to fall at the end of the summer and hung rotted on the branches. Around the bare vines of wisteria, to the workhouse, where at first she simply stood, lost to the ghost world of her past.

“Ma,” Jakob said beside her. “We here?” She took his hand, fought to hold on to who she was now. Her past was a foreign land. She was not who she had set out to be.

“Yes, we are here,” she told him.

They struggled up the path to the workhouse. It stood now like some old boat dredged up from the lake, abandoned and barnacle covered, mollusk and shell kissed. The woodpile sat much the same as it had before when she and Yavy left it, worn with wind and rain. But no one, it seemed, in all the years that had passed, had made use of his cut logs. Jakob pushed open the door, stepped inside, pulled Malutki with him. Lor hung back in the doorway with the lake behind her, looking in. Everything was as he had left it. Faded certainly. Diminished. Bleached by the sun. Layered with a film of dust. But his colors still clung stubbornly to every crevice, hung from every nail upon the stone wall. Though the edges of his leaves, his petals, his paper fragments had curled upward with time, though cobwebs had spun across the eaves, across the corners of the walls and the windows, veiling the light like a pall upon a tomb, his colors were still there.

She stepped inside, trailed her hands along the shelves, along the sills as she had done the first time she had found this space.

“Is he not here?” she asked herself. “Is he not?”

Jakob followed, watching her. “These are Da's?” he asked beside her. He held an object in his hands, a walnut that had blackened and shrunk in the years past.

“Yes, these are his.”

He did as she did, caressed each object, dust on his fingertips, on the palm of his hand. They stood in the silence. She allowed time to move onward as she pushed aside the doubt that Yavy was not there. For to live hopelessly was not to live at all. He had taught her that, so she gathered her courage, as she would the pleats of her skirt, and led the way on up to the main house. They kept to the shadows and the outer fringes of the lawn. The doors to the house were open, warped from wind and rain, clinging on by loose hinges. It smelled sourer now. There was still a hint of disinfectant, but more the essence of it, as if it had for so long been washed across the floors and walls that it had become a part of the very foundations.

Though it lay abandoned, there were signs that people had been there. A scattering of food cans, some empty, some full, a stack of flour, bricks that had been heated in embers and still held some
semblance of warmth inside them. They helped themselves to dried cookies, crammed them into their mouths. Lor cut open a can of beans, another of sweet peaches, the juices dribbling down their chins as they mixed mouthfuls. Tentatively they wandered from room to room, the corridors damp and bleach scented, the hallway with its grand, now dilapidated staircase that spun up to the cavity of the house above. In the old ballroom the door creaked when she opened it, the echo of it bouncing back at them from the walls. The black-and-white tiles had been ripped up from the floor. It lay now chalk scented and full of rubble. Covering it were rows and rows of tiny blankets, cut coarsely down to size, discarded now, but each laid out neatly upon the floor as if those who had slept beneath them had still made an attempt to keep a morning ritual of making their own beds. She closed the door behind her as they left, as if she might preserve the tidiness of the room.

She pumped water from the well, filled a bucket, washed her children in a patch of sunlight. Made herself practical, and hushed the words that resonated inside her head, telling her that he was not here. That either he never had been, for certainly there was no sign of him amidst the abandoned clutter, or that she was too late, that he had already left.

Eventually, as the light faded, she pulled them back down to the workhouse, where at the very least Yavy's ghost hung around them, living still in the layers of dust and leaves that had blown across the threshold.

Watching his mother, Jakob saw a calm, quiet space that made her movements lucid, seamless, one leading on from the other, as if to break the sequence would be her undoing. Slowly she made up their beds, gathered leaves, soothed her children as she had soothed them every night.

“So our vessels are full,” she told them, as they lay on the floor looking up at her. “Seven vessels, seven colors. You have found a rainbow.”

“A whole rainbow?” Eliza asked, her voice rising.

“Yes, the whole of it. The Ushalin still chase, with their hawkish march, the drumming of their boots across the land, the roar of their
war cries echoing back and forth, but they are halfhearted, move with doubt. Yes, they are still bellicose and puffed up with the vision of a future they feel is their warrant, without cause or justification, that is theirs for the taking by the very brute force of ambition. But day by day, step by step, the bleak horizon of their future is disintegrating before their eyes. They can no longer hold on to the belief of it. No longer see the clear path to their exulted ending.

“Quietly, you set out your colors upon the Walls of Monochrome, the Boundary between light and dark, sight and blindness. One by one you lay them out: indigo, malachite, violet, blue, saffron yellow, crimson red, a deep Cremona. And you wait. There is nothing but that to do. You have done the rest. Completed the task. Now all that there is, is to watch, for the Ushalin will come. In their thousands, like a great cloud hammering over the hills down into the valley to the lake. And you will watch as the courage drains from them when they see the bright lights upon the Boundary Wall. You will watch as they halt, as their horses rear upward, and you will hear the hollering from their God, the raucous bark that cuts up from his rotund and protruding belly.

“They will appear as a manifestation of all things loud and dark, but they will be desperate. They will be afraid. And try as they might, they will not look away. They cannot look away. The very ruthlessness of their inquisitive nature will be their downfall. And the light will sear their eyes. They will be blinded to their own dark. They will turn back to face their ashen land and find it streaked with every color, quivering and luminous before them. They will turn this way and that, lost in a confusion, the likes of which they have never felt before. And then, when their mighty God, roaring with contempt, unabated and still without remorse, is sucked back into those black waves, when his clenched fists have disappeared beneath the surface and there is no longer sight or sound of him, the Ushalin will turn back to face you. Will fall to their knees. Thankful for the new light in their eyes. And they will sing. Sing with exultation. And you will have no need to fear any longer.”

Only Jakob was still awake when she reached the end of the story. Only he knew of the exultation and the reasons to no longer be afraid. At length he stood and quietly walked around the room, picked up
first a round, lake-smoothed piece of glass and placed it inside a small wooden box with a crescent-shaped clasp that he had found hidden beneath the stack of logs at the side of the workhouse. One by one he picked up his father's colors, blew the dust from them, placed them, layer upon layer, inside the box. He collected them all, and only then did he lay himself down on his makeshift bed and, clutching his small box to him, fall asleep.

Lor lay in the darkness, the hope dimming inside her. He is not here, the voice in her head kept repeating. He is not here. Until eventually she, too, gave in to the exhaustion of the last weeks, the last months, succumbed to it wholly, and fell into the deepest of sleeps. There had been nothing else but this venture. Of their lives it was all that was left.

Much later, she woke in the night, gasping, hardly able to breathe. She stumbled from the workshop, out into the night, the cold of the ground beneath her feet. She stumbled down the path to the lake that lay like a sheen of polished glass, so flat and still was it against the frosted night sky.

“Yavy.”

She called his name, felt the full force of longing for him. It rushed at her, a void expanding outward, so that it seemed she herself was skimming the water's surface, hovering above the dark depths that reached down vertiginous and endless below. She let her tears fall. She sank into the abyss where everything that was known became unknown. He was the only steadfastness in a world that was always changing, from one place to the next; he was the seam of her skin, the stitches that held her together. He was of her bones, of her heart, the only thing she could turn and recognize in the unfamiliar. The compass that she navigated her life by. Without him, who was she? She did not know.