Cursed Be the Child (3 page)

Rufus! Rastus!

Johnson Brown!

Whatcha gonna do

when the rent…

No, Lisette, that new song, the one about this silly old flu thing everyone’s so afraid of!

There was a little bird

An itty-bitty bird

And his name was Enza!

But her mama always went away. Mama had to go.

Mama was dead. She was really, really dead.

It’s terrible to die! I won’t die!
Not ever!

She heard the click of a door chain, then the sound of a key in a lock, a doorknob turning, the small, sharp screech of hinges, the hush and scrape of leather on wood.

She turned her head, and her one eye peered toward the stairs. She could not see legs or a face, only the ghostly gray white of the top of his union suit floating down through the blackness.

Uncle is coming.

She was afraid but maybe it would be all right now. Maybe he’d take her back upstairs where there was light—she missed the light so very much—and she would never be locked away again and he would never hit her again.

She would be a good girl, a good, good girl to make Uncle love her.

Certainly she had tried to be good, but in some way she did not understand, she had failed. Uncle wouldn’t have punished her like this if she had been good.

Uncle will take care of you, Lisette. Mind your uncle, always do what he says. Love Uncle and he’ll love you back, just like you were his own little girl.

That’s what Mama had said before she died.

No!
It was her silent shout against the actuality of her mother’s death, against Death itself, against the death filling her up, advancing calmly and inevitably as the blood seeped within her, bypassing channels of life and taking routes through and around torn tissues.

“What do you want? What do you want now?”

The voice drifted to her from far away, but Uncle was close, so close she smelled the oily-brown smell of his slippers and his sweat—and a smell that she sensed was death.

Her tongue felt thick, and she could move her jaw only a little. Her lips were unable to shape a word.

“I know what you want. Lord God, look at me! You’re still tempting me! Don’t you see? Don’t you know we’re dying?”

No!

“We’re dying, and the world is dying, and you’re yet a harlot! Doesn’t it end? Doesn’t it ever end?”

No!

He squatted down alongside her. A hot, dry finger stabbed her ribs. “Want Uncle to play a game with you? Want Uncle to touch you?”

The dim memories came to her, the times when he had touched her and kissed her, kissed her all over in a way that was like some strange kind of playing, a game she didn’t understand but that made her giggle and feel warm and funny, and whatever he wanted her to do, she did, even when it hurt her deep inside. But that never seemed to make Uncle love her. He was almost always angry afterward, accusing her, “You’re going to tell, aren’t you? I know you are. You’ll tell the world. I know. Don’t lie to me.”

I won’t tell. Never tell. Not anyone. I promise, I promise.

He never believed her, and he just got angrier and angrier. “You made me do it, you know. You made me.”

And then he would start hitting her, using his fists on her belly and back and face.

Uncle said, “Not this time. No!”

He rolled her onto her back. “Whore! Slut!” His hand covered her face, fingers spread like a wolf spider on top of a robin’s egg. He smashed the back of her head against the floor again and again.

The bony bowl that held her brain shattered.

She was dying as he lurched up the stairs.

No!

The basement door opened and closed. The key clicked in the lock. The door chain metallically slithered.

She drew up her left leg and planted her foot flat.

Her right eye rolled back.

Her heart stopped.

She was dead.

— | — | —

One: 0 Drom Le Ushalin

The Way of Shadow

The vast body of Romany folk stories and myths, orally passed on from generation to generation, is called
Darane Swature.
Like all classic myths, a
swato
is a fable that reveals
tshatsimo
; it tells the truth.

Long ago, in the old days, the days of ever-golden summer, when the Gypsy caravans traveled the roads, proud horses pulling vurdons as bright and festive as peacocks, Pola Janichka was regarded by the Rom as a gifted narrator of
Darane Swature.
Scarcely more than a child, she was not yet the
Rawnie
, the Great Lady who had the magical power to work all manner of
draba
charm, heal the sick, and even ward off
zracnae vila,
the malevolent spirits of the air. That came later. For the time being, it was enough for her to be able to relate a
swato
in a dramatically entertaining and instructive way.

Late in the evenings, the
kumpania
would gather around the campfire, and Pola Janichka would tell her
swato
to the attentive children, their dark eyes gleaming in the firelight, and to the men and the women.

This is a
swato
of Pola Janichka:

“Once some people came to a great lake under the cold, silver light of
Chon
, our Mother Moon. The lake was still. Not a bubble disturbed it, not a ripple. In the center of the lake, the reflection of
Chon
was a huge white ball.

“The shore on which the people stood was the end of the Earth. As we all know, the Earth belongs to the living.

“Beyond the Earth is the realm of the mule, where the dead dwell.

“But the lake was the Void, a place between the Nation of the Living and the Dead. Here you might find those souls who had not made the great journey
anda I thema,
beyond the waters.

“Suddenly, far out in the lake, in the center of the waters, something happened! It was a small splash, the very smallest of splashes, and it made the mirror image of
Chon
shimmer in its own light. The splash caused so soft a sound that you might have thought it made by a pebble, but that was not what did it.

“Could it have been the gentle brush of God’s little finger, giving comfort to the dead? Or perhaps was it the breath of
Beng,
the Old Evil One? Or maybe it was a
mulo,
the spirit of one of the dead deep in the lake? Ah, who is to say? Not I. I am a simple teller of stories.

“Now, who among the people on the shore heard this tiny splash? I will tell you. Only those who had ears that could hear very, very well.

“Then the tiny ripples rolled away from the reflected
Chon
.

“And who among the people saw these tiny, fluttering waves? I will tell you. Only those who had eyes that could see very, very well.

“Then the waves came to the shore and touched it with the softness of the fragile leg of a butterfly upon a flower.

“And who among the people on the shore felt the waves touch the shore? I will tell you.

“Those who heard the splash and those who did not hear.

“Those who saw the waves and those who did not see.

“All the people on the shore felt the waves from the Void, the lake of the dead who have not passed on.

“As do we.”

— | — | —

One

She was right on time for her 11:30 Monday morning appointment, and, as soon as she took the chair alongside his desk in the small office, she told him she didn’t understand the assignment.

“What exactly is it you don’t understand?” he asked. He arched an eyebrow. It seemed funny to him now that he was nearing 40 and his brown hair was receding to give him a marked widow’s peak that his eyebrows were getting bushier.

“The assignment, you know,” she said.

That narrowed it down, Warren Barringer thought. The assignment for Lit and Comp 101 was to read Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience” and to write a paper showing that Thoreau’s ideas either did or did not apply to the 20th Century. The reading and writing parts obviously were beyond her.

Damn! Miss—what was her name? Only the second week of September, he hadn’t begun to learn his students’ names. He slipped on his reading glasses and checked the appointment book that lay open on the desk—Miss Luttemeyer, Ellen F. She was typical of the majority of students in his three sections of basic freshman English, typical, as he had to admit, of the students who attended North Central University.

Established 18 years ago, North Central University, some 50 miles south of Chicago in the middle-class suburb of Lawn Crest, was the product of state and federal misspending and the last gasp of the radical educational optimism that had marked the 1960s. When it first opened the doors of the single, huge, octagonal building that was its College of Arts and Sciences, College of Business, College of Education, College of American Studies, etc., it had two basic admission requirements. A prospective student had to be able to prove he was alive and could somehow manage to pay the tuition. Since then, of course, with the end of the education boom and the realization on the part of accreditation committees that NCU was awarding degrees to people who were not quite critically retarded, things had changed. Still, the students who enrolled in NCU were, by and large, not exactly Harvard, Yale or Brown material.

And he was stuck with the dregs of the dregs, Warren reflected, the low man on the departmental totem pole. He was new this term, without a dime’s worth of seniority. His doctorate—earned at the University of Iowa’s famed Writers’ Workshop, no less!—and his publications—the three dozen-plus short stories, the two novels, read by perhaps twice that number of people—didn’t mean a goddamned thing.

Well, that would change, once
A Civilized Man
was published.

“So do you think maybe, you know, you could kind of help me,” Miss Luttemeyer was saying.

He studied her face, as round and expressionless as a cream pie. Help her, he thought, perhaps a brain transplant.

“Read the essay several times,” he said.

“I’ll try,” she said, “but I don’t know, a lot of it is, well, kinda confusing.”

“Just take it slow,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll get it.”

He pushed his chair back on its rollers and rose. She didn’t get the message; he had to gesture at the door. “Miss Luttemeyer, why don’t you get to work on it and then, when you have a rough draft of your theme, you can bring it in and we’ll take a look together. I’m sure you’ll have fine ideas.”