The Fifth Sacred Thing (89 page)

Maya put on a white dress that she had worn years before to ceremonies for the orishas. It was very old, a thick white cotton skirt, a crushed cotton blouse that dipped to a slenderizing point at the waistline. Not that she needed slenderizing anymore. She brushed out her long silver hair and let it hang down. She wrapped a white cloak around her and took down from its peg her silver-handled walking stick, which seemed the appropriate prop, in every sense of the word. She scribbled a note to Sam, another to Madrone, and left them on the bed.

She peeked carefully out of her doorway. Nobody was in the hall. This was fun, in a way, like sneaking out of her mother’s house when she was a kid. Quietly she tiptoed down the stairs, tucking her cane under her arm and gripping the handrail to steady herself. Out the front door and there, she had done it. She was free.

For a moment Maya stood looking at the door of the house after she
closed it behind her. Up these steps she had come, so many years before, to find a home with Johanna when she had tired of Mexico, of being on the run. Here she had brought Rio home. Inside these walls she had told stories to Rachel, Madrone’s mother, and held tiny Brigid’s hand on the steps as she first learned to maneuver her own way up and down. Maybe I will return and walk back through that door, she thought. Maybe I will not. In any case, you’ve been a good house. You’ve sheltered me a long, long time. But you cannot shelter me now.

She walked on. The summer gardens were parched from lack of rain, and the streambed was dry. The soldiers must have rebuilt the dam again. Oh, whatever came of this, there would be hunger. No children played among the dry brown sticks. No one moved on the walkways, except, here and there, an armed khaki-dressed figure or a ghost in white like her, on a mission of haunting.

The Transport Collective had immobilized the gondolas, and the soldiers so far had ignored the aerial transport system. Maya would have to walk downtown. That was okay, the exercise would do her good. She would take one last slow look at the city she had loved for so many years. It still shone in her imagination as a place of magic, of gingerbread houses and green-topped hills and fairy spires. Goodbye, labyrinth of winding pathways. Farewell, streams and fruit trees and gardens.
Adiosa
, you cheerful and confident children who now scurry into your houses, afraid. Perhaps you are waiting for me to free you. Perhaps you already suspect I will fail.

The morning had passed by the time she reached the old stone mansion atop Nob Hill where the General made his headquarters. The house had been built as a monument to the private wealth of one of the gold barons back in the nineteenth century, had become an exclusive men’s club in the twentieth, and after the Uprising a home for the very old, where they could be cared for in peace and dignity. Maya wondered what had happened to them, who had taken them in, whether any of them were as old as she was, why she was still alive.

The garden in the grounds was still green and flourishing, she noted. The gracious steps of the house were lined with ghosts, silent and patient in their white cloaks. Maya could discern that in some of the watchers patience had hardened into apathy and desolation. Still they waited. No one emerged.

She would not wait.

She mounted the steps, leaning heavily on her cane. The ghosts made way for her, one young woman leaping up and offering her arm. Maya looked into her eyes for a moment, startled, thinking they were her daughter Brigid’s eyes. But no, not Brigid, just another dark-eyed, dark-haired young woman. Brigid was dead anyway, but ghosts should be dead, and Maya was wandering in the confusion of the old.

The heavy front door was locked. She raised her cane and pounded on it. Silence. She pounded again, harder. The door opened a crack and a dark face peered out at her.

“Get off the steps, or we’ll clear you off! You can’t come in here!”

“You cannot keep me out,” Maya said, sliding her cane into the crack and butting against the door with her shoulder. But really it was her eyes that gave her entrance. For now she had slipped out of herself and something larger had slipped in, the Reaper,
La Segadora
, the Old Crone, the Death Hag. She had become the Implacable One. No boy soldier could withstand her. She pushed the guard out of the way and strode down the hall. He followed after her and tried to grab her arm, but she dangled her cane between his feet and he tripped and fell hard on the marble floor. I’m skirting the edge of nonviolence, she admitted, but while he was gathering himself up again she pushed through a pair of imposing double doors and found herself in the General’s office.

The sunny room was lined with bay windows facing the north, looking out over the water to Mount Tamalpais across the Bay. The General sat behind a large oak desk, his feet on a faded but still beautiful oriental rug. Three of his staff stood at loose attention around him.

Maya pounded her cane on the floor, and the General turned and stared. With his soft belly hidden behind the desk, he appeared to be a solid edifice of muscular flesh, topped by straw-colored hair cropped short. He peered up at her with eyes small and hard as buckshot.

“What in Satan’s name is this? How the hell did she get in here?”

“Sir—” the breathless soldier from the hallway began, but the General motioned him to be silent. He rose from his desk and came over to Maya, towering above her.

“Who the Jesus are you?”

Maya opened her mouth to say something reasonable, but what came out seemed to come through her from somewhere else.

“Your death,” Maya said. “I am what you have always resisted and what you come to in the end. I am your fate.”

“My fate is to exterminate the sinners who corrupt this world.”

He was much taller than she, but suddenly her eyes seemed on a level with his. A voice poured through her, spilling out over him. “Your fate is in your blood and bones, where every person’s fate lies. Your fate is right here, arisen before your very eyes. I stand face to face with you.”

“Who are you?” the General said again.

“I am what you cannot escape, the gray in your hair, the lines on the back of your hand. I am the Reaper, the reckoning, the consequences of your actions. Clench tight your hopes and I will pry loose your grip. I am your destination.”

She was a vessel for the voice as a streambed channels water that comes from some greater source, high and far away.

“I am fate, and chance, your chance to rise to the great opportunity you have here. Yes, I see who you are, and who you might be. Your ancestors cluster around you. One of them is a small boy who watches as the Inquisitors drag his mother off, strip her naked in the public square, prick her with needles searching for devil’s marks, rape her, burn her alive. Yes, I see his eyes as he watches the flesh that meant his comfort and food crackle and char, as the hands that soothed him blacken. I see him wear that pain as armor, grow into it until it becomes his skin.

“And now he is a grown man in a faraway place, Africa. Here he is on
La Gorée
, do you know that name? The Last Door, they called it, an island through which all slaves passed on their way out of the continent. And here he is, your illustrious forefather, in the rape room, violating a black woman while her own small boy is forced to watch. Maybe he leaves his seed in her, seed of pain that grows in her belly and somehow survives the Middle Passage through hell to be born. Not your ancestor, that one, but the father of fathers of someone else, one of these men here, maybe, or my own grandson. And the woman is able to love the child, as women do love, because she understands that what has been planted in her is the pain of a child, until this one too is torn away from her. Oh, it is awesome what human beings are capable of doing to each other and surviving. So many women harboring seeds of pain, nurturing, bringing them to birth so those offspring can enact their pain on some other woman’s body, and always, always with one hope—that somehow, someday, this will change. Someone will refuse to pass the pain on any longer. Who knows? Maybe you are that person?”

The General was staring at her, transfixed. “Pain forms a man,” he said.

“Or breaks him.”

“A man is not made until he has been broken.” Then he seemed to shake himself awake again. “What is your name?”

Maya took a deep breath. The Reaper deserted her, and she was just a woman again, old and small. She drew herself up to her full height and spoke with dignity.

“Maya Greenwood.”

“Aha. The writer?”

“I wasn’t aware my reputation still survived in the Southlands.”

“I once had the pleasure of burning a number of your books.”

“A fan,” Maya said. “I’m flattered.”

“You intrigue me,” the General said. “What did you hope to achieve, coming to me like this? Did you expect to win me over with your blasphemous babbling? I would have thought Maya Greenwood was smarter than that.”

“I came to warn you,” Maya said, although her voice felt old and tremulous. “You cannot win here.”

The General laughed. “Your grandson wouldn’t agree with you. He seems to think we can’t lose.”

Now, Old Bitch, now would be a good moment for Divine Possession to strike. But Maya remained empty. Still, I won’t beg him or plead with him to let me see my grandson. “I have come to share his ordeal,” Maya said.

“That can be arranged.” The General gestured to his guards. “Lock her up. But don’t work her over. Her heart might go out on us, and I’ve got a special use for her.”

Maya sat down on the rug. “There is a place set for you at our table, if you will choose to join us,” she said as the soldiers dragged her away.

The room they locked Maya in had once been an office. It still held a desk, if not a bed or a chair, and she perched on it, swinging her legs. There was no toilet but perhaps she would use one of the drawers as a waste bucket, when the need arose. They had left her water and a hunk of bread, but she would not touch their food. No, she would just close her eyes, and drift. She was close to Bird now; surely she would reach him now.

But she did not reach Bird, only Johanna, who stood with her hands on her hips, observing Maya disapprovingly. “This is a fine predicament you’ve landed yourself in,” Johanna said.

“I had to do it,” Maya said.

“No, you didn’t have to. You wanted to, Goddess only knows why. Some unresolved Jewish guilt complex, maybe.”

“You just can’t wait to come on over to our side, can you?” asked Rio, who appeared behind her.

“I’m sorry you made them tear down the jail after the Uprising,” Maya told him. “I could have been locked up in a real cell that had a bunk bed and a toilet.”

“If it’s creature comforts you were interested in, you should have stayed home, where you had a nice comfy bed and someone to warm it for you,” Rio said.

“Jealous?” Maya asked.

“Hah.”

“Anyway, you know how it is,” Maya said, “when you get all fired up to commit some brave political act, and you feel invulnerable for a while, like you’ll never care about food or sleep again. But then it wears off, leaving you mourning for your bathtub and a hot teakettle.”

“Maya, we’re with you,” Rio said. “Whatever happens.”

Suddenly she was very afraid. Really, I’ve been afraid all along, she admitted,
but what a good job I’ve done convincing myself that I wasn’t. Goddess, what have I done to myself? What have I done to Bird?

“What’s going to happen?” she wailed. “What’s going to happen to me?”

“Oh, you’re going to die, of course,” Johanna said, “Eventually.”

“I mean now. What’s going to happen now?”

“Now you’re going to get some sleep,” Johanna said. “See if you can curl up on that desk, and don’t let your Gandhi complex keep you from drinking some of that water.”

“What do you mean, she’s gone?” Sam said. “Where did she go?” Suddenly he looked every bit of his eighty-some years. His face crumpled, and he gripped Madrone’s shoulder with a shaky hand.

“She left us notes,” Madrone said, trying to keep her own voice calm. “I guess she slipped out this morning, while I was over at Lily’s and you were asleep on the cot.”

“But that was hours ago!” Sam protested. “How could I have not noticed that she wasn’t here?”

They were standing in the kitchen, where Mary Ellen continued chopping greens for supper.

“I didn’t notice either,” Madrone admitted. “I came home and fell asleep. There were dozens of people here; I didn’t realize she wasn’t one of them. It wasn’t until I went to get her for dinner that I saw the notes.”

“Let me see,” Sam said. He grabbed his note from Madrone, but his hand was shaking and his eyes were tearing. “Read it to me.”

“Dear Sam,” Madrone read. “I’ve gone to haunt the General. Don’t get in a flap—it’s what I’m called to do, for better or worse. And the worst will be that they kill me, and really, Sam, at my age death can scarcely be seen as premature. I do love you. You’ve been a great comfort to me in a terrible time, and whatever world I’m in, I will always thank you. I regret leaving you alone. Forgive me, and please try to understand. Love, Maya.”