Ancient of Days (49 page)

The following evening, Adam and I were sitting on the L-shaped porch of his cottage, darkness thickening around us. On the beach, visible as lithe silhouettes, RuthClaire and Caroline were building a bonfire. They planned to bake yams deep in the accumulating coals and barbecue several varieties of fish on a smutty grill that RuthClaire had found in the storage shed. Adam and I were supposed to prepare exotic tropical drinks, but the women—who had chosen bonfire-building over tending bar—were gathering driftwood and poking at the feeble flames licking up through the scrap lumber that we had helped them drag down there earlier. It would be a while before we ate, but no matter, for in our anticipation lay much of our pleasure.

Adam said, “Alberoi and Dégrasse joined Hector and Erzulie in the caves today. They’re all well—the last of
Les Gens
, the last of my people.”

I said nothing. Prix-des-Yeux was going to have to be abandoned and torn down. Maybe we had dealt effectively enough with Bacalou and Bobo in delaying the disclosure of the caves’ existence—but, with their own eyes, the other two macoutes had seen the habilines, too. Chances were good that they’d tattle. Rumors would spread, and Pointe d’Inagua would become a popular vacation site, a mecca for rock hounds and hikers and amateur naturalists.

Shifting in his rattan chair, Adam said, “Agarou carried you to revelation? You saw God?”

“I saw something. The prehistoric creature who gave your ancestors a divine validation of their survival struggles. It didn’t look particularly holy, Adam. It was a kind of monster, in fact.”

“All gods, Mister Paul, are monsters in human eyes. That is to say nothing very terrible against it.”

“It looked something like a hyena or a dog. Its head did, anyway.”

Adam smiled. “I know. With a hominid body, yes? What you saw was the avatar of God most meaningful to every prehistoric specimen of the human family—by some reckonings, the Master of the Hunt. It lived in the collective unconscious of
Homo habilis
,
Homo erectus
,
Homo neanderthalensis
, and early
Homo sapiens
. It lives in many so-called primitive peoples even today. It ties the human to the divine and the divine to the animal—so that they are interconnected not just by Mind, but also by a unifying perception of the Sacred.”

“I saw the Sacred?”

“Yes. A projection of the God Beyond Time into the evolutionary aesthetic of his creation. You saw meaning, Mister Paul, and spoke in your possession to a messenger from its source.”

“Not Buddha or Jesus but the Master of the Hunt?”

Adam—a shadow in the indigo twilight—lifted both hands in an unsettling draw-your-own-conclusions gesture.

I leaned toward him in my rocker. “Why didn’t bells go off, Adam? Why didn’t the sky open up and light pour through? Why didn’t I feel that I could float eight feet off the floor of the cave? I mean, if that was a religious revelation, Adam, I prefer falling in love. With falling in love you get Roman candles and light-headedness and invisible champagne bubbles. With that business in the caves, all I got was horror-movie special effects and a theological lecture, and a lingering headache. How can I put any credence in a revelation like that?”

“Did you learn anything that you did not know before?”

“I was told some things I didn’t know before. Why?”

“Because if you didn’t know them before, or hadn’t been told them before, well, then, you would be foolish to conclude that what you experienced was nothing but your own subconscious talking. Something outside you was putting in its two cents of worth.”

“I don’t feel any different than I did two days ago. I’m the same materialistic rational pagan.”

“Who has been ridden by the
vaudun loa
of our African ancestors. Who has broken through one of God’s masks to talk to him face to face.”

I shivered. “Only in a manner of speaking.”

“It will come gradually, Mister Paul. Your bells will sound like they’re ringing at the bottom of the sea. Your fireworks will unfold in big slow-motion umbrellas. You will float only at the most modest, and so nearly imperceptible, heights. But it will come, and each instance of it will have its own design, and the many individual designs will compose an encompassing pattern, and that pattern will have its ground in the Mind and Megapattern of God.”

“You sound like a crackpot Indian guru, Adam.”

“Then I’ll shut up. Right now. Better to think about eating—” he gestured at the beach— “than get lost in the metaphysics of another.”

We sat in silence watching our wives pull coals into a circle of stones upon which they would soon place the greasy grill rack. Paul and Caroline, Adam and Ruthie Cee. Just another pair of sophisticated fun couples partying in a secluded cove on Montaraz. The bonfire ten feet away from their makeshift barbecue pit leapt like the funeral pyre of a Roman emperor. Caroline’s and RuthClaire’s shoulders gleamed in its roaring blaze as if made of bronze. They tonged strips of fileted fish out of a metal cooler onto the grill rack. They took turns basting each strip with the sauce that I had made. I watched them for a long time.

Finally, RuthClaire stood and shouted, “It’s nearly time to eat!”

Adam and I carried two pitchers of iced daiquiris to the beach, and, sitting on the sand at a remove from the bonfire, we ate and drank—somewhat solemnly, considering the late hour and the formidable size of our appetites and thirsts. Tomorrow, Caroline and I would fly back to Miami from Cap-Haïtien. That knowledge may have contributed to our solemnity, but, of course, a lot of it had to do with Toussaint’s death, the upheaval at Prix-des-Yeux, and the uncertainty of our own several futures. I found myself thinking forlorn thoughts about Livia George, Paradise Farm, and the West Bank. To keep from getting maudlin, I limited myself to three small lime daiquiris in a ceramic coffee mug. In fact, I did everything in threes—three strips of fish, three baked yams, and three avowals of either eternal love (that one for Caroline) or eternal friendship (one for RuthClaire, one for Adam) for my companions on the beach.

The bonfire started to die.

RuthClaire said, “We’ve got to build it up again,” pulled herself to her feet, and trudged up the sand toward the cottage. Halfway there, she turned and beckoned to us with a tipsy wave. “C’mon, you guise! He’p me get some stuff fer th’ fire!” Adam, Caroline, and I struggled up and followed her on her drunken anabasis.

Over the next hour or so, we hauled from their storage niches inside the cottage all the paintings in RuthClaire’s series
Souls
. Then we tossed each canvas, whether loose or affixed to a stretching frame, right into the crackling pyre. They burned well. In fact, in the fire they had the kind of stunning luminous beauty that they’d had for me on only one other occasion—a memorable occasion in the upstairs studio at Paradise Farm. Soon, though, they scrolled and blackened and turned to oozy char. It amazed me that we were abetting RuthClaire in this activity—Adam as eagerly as anyone else—and yet I asked no questions until we’d flung the last painting in.

“You destroyed them because they weren’t popular, is that it?”

RuthClaire straightened, as best she could. “It was either them or my porcelain plates. Porcelain won’t burn.” She laughed so hard she had to grab Caroline for support, and, again, they shared a sisterly hilarity with a rationale impenetrable to male intellects. Adam and I had no choice but to wait them out. Finally, still leaning on each other, they regained a parody of uprightness.

“The concept was all wrong,” RuthClaire said, swaying a little. “In spite of what the hot-shot critics said, I did ’em okay. I mean, I
executed
’em okay. But a soul’s not a soul’s not a soul.”

“Who said that?” Caroline asked.

“Gertrude Steinem,” RuthClaire said, and they both guffawed. Then RuthClaire waved her hand and said, “What I mean is, the pastels were to show the insubstantiality, the immaterialness, of souls—but souls are living bodies, and so my stupid concept is all wrong. My stupid paintings never lived except when the light hit ’em just right, and they looked better burning than they ever did in the morgue of my studio gallery. I had to get rid of ’em, I have to start over, thash—
that’s
—all there is to it.”

“Adam liked them,” I said.

RuthClaire broke free of Caroline, tottered over to Adam, and put her arm through his. “Adam’s my hushbin, Paul.” He grinned, and the bonfire illuminated his teeth as if they were a bracelet of ancient ivory charms.

Still later, a little more sober, RuthClaire fetched the burial urn containing Tiny Paul’s ashes to the beach and asked me to open it. I was T. P.’s godfather, after all, and the honor of scattering his ashes on Caicos Bay was rightly mine. If it weren’t rightly mine—by the standards of Emily Post or proper cremation etiquette—well, she and Adam had decided to countermand those standards with an appeal to simple sentiment. I took the urn to my chest with one arm and tried to unstopper it. Nothing I did budged its form-fitting lid, though, and I feared breaking either the lid or the urn itself.

“My hero,” Caroline said. She took the urn, set it on the sand, squatted next to it, fiddled with it for forty seconds, and successfully unscrewed the fire-baked clay stopper. Then she stood and placed the urn back into my arms. I accepted it, smelling sea and ash and particulate spirit.

“Go on,” RuthClaire said.

So with the urn in my arms the way small children sometimes carry a rubber boot into the water to give them both ballast and a fragile sense of security, I carried Tiny Paul into the shallows of Caicos Bay. Like his father, he was home. Without looking back at the people who had sent me, I sowed the murdered child’s ashes on the murmuring inlet. Those that stuck to my palm I washed away in the gentle lapping of the evening tide. They weren’t inconsequential, I told myself, and they weren’t lost: They were afloat in the consciousness of God.

And I tried like crazy to believe it.

About the Author

Michael Bishop is the author of the Nebula Award-winning novel
No Enemy But Time
, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award-winning novel
Unicorn Mountain
, the Shirley Jackson Award-winning short story, “The Pile” (based on notes left behind on his late son Jamie’s computer), and several other novels and story collections, including
The Door Gunner and Other Perilous Flights of Fancy: A Retrospective
, edited by Michael H. Hutchins. He also writes poetry and criticism, and has edited the acclaimed anthologies
Light Years and Dark
, three volumes of the annual Nebula Awards collections, and, more recently,
A Cross of Centuries: Twenty-Five Imaginative Tales About the Christ
, and, with Steven Utley,
Passing for Human
. Soon to appear is his novel for young persons,
Joel-Brock the Brave and the Valorous Smalls
, dedicated to the Bishops’ exemplary grandchildren, Annabel English Loftin and Joel Bridger Loftin. Michael Bishop lives in Pine Mountain, Georgia, with his wife, Jeri, a retired elementary school counselor who is now an avid gardener and yoga practitioner. They share a house with far, far too many books.