The Fifth Sacred Thing (4 page)

“I’m so sorry about Sandy,” Maya said.

“It’s Bird I’m thinking about,” Madrone admitted. “Today’s his birthday, remember?”

“I should remember.” Maya smiled. “I remember his birth clearly enough. Brigid went about it quite efficiently, the way she did everything. How a daughter of mine turned out like that, I’ll never understand. Four hours of labor, start to finish. I wasn’t even late for the ritual that night.”

“Did she have a home birth?”

“Yes, my friend Alix was the midwife. I was there, and Bird’s father,
Jamie, and Marley, who had just turned three. Brigid thought it would help him bond with the new baby. But he seemed much more interested in the drum I was playing than in his new brother.”

“Marley was always more interested in drums than people,” Madrone said.

“But what a percussionist!” Maya said. “He could drum the rain down from the sky! I had such talented grandsons, once. Bird was a genius with any instrument he touched. That’s not boasting, that’s just stating a fact.”

“I loved his voice,” Madrone said. “I loved to hear him sing.” I loved him, she thought. I loved him from the very first day I spent in San Francisco, still in shock from what happened in Guadalupe, and grieving for my mother, and scared of those strangers who called themselves Grandma Johanna, Grandpa Rio, Auntie Maya. Bird gave me his favorite stone, a flat black beach rock with the white pattern of a fossilized sand dollar on its back.

“And so handsome,” Maya went on. “The boys both had my eyes, set in that clear milk-chocolate skin. Do you remember chocolate?”

“We used to have it sometimes in Guadalupe,” Madrone said.

“Don’t outlive your descendants,” Maya told her. “It’s no fun. I’m only sticking it out until Bird comes back.”

“You may have to live forever, then,
madrina.”

“No.” Maya shook her head. “He’s not dead. If he were dead, I’d feel it. Anyway, we’re here for Sandy now. Say a prayer for him, and place his stone.”

Faded marigolds and wilting chrysanthemums dotted the mound. There were no cemeteries in the city, no land that could be spared for burial, so people brought their grave offerings here. Sandy’s stone would lie in company with others, sharing their offerings in death as people shared food in life. He, at least, would not be lonely.

“What is remembered lives,” Madrone said, stooping and placing the stone on the north side of the mound.
“Jiyi shi yongyuan bu mie de.”
She stumbled over the inflections Lou had painstakingly taught her. Sandy had come from the north side of the city, where they spoke Mandarin instead of Spanish as their second language.

“He was a good man,” Maya said. “So sweet to everyone, and sensitive. His passing leaves a big emptiness.” Yes, she would miss him, like she missed so many others, but the ache in the back of her throat was for Madrone. She was too young to bear so many losses.

Madrone nodded without speaking. Maya could feel the earth under her, alive like a beating heart. Or perhaps, she thought, I’m feeling my own throbbing feet? Still, it was good, at the place of the dead, to acknowledge that One to whom she had pledged herself long ago, the aliveness at the heart of things, the ever-turning wheel of birth, growth, death, and regeneration. It had occurred
to Maya lately that calling
that
the Goddess, even though she’d fought for the term all her life, was—what? Not so much a metaphor, more in the nature of an inside joke.

Madrone turned away abruptly. She felt a great need, suddenly, to be alone.

“I’m going to make an offering to Yemaya,” she said. The Yoruba Sea Goddess was her favorite of the orishas, the old Goddesses and Gods that had come on the slave ships from Africa.

“Give me a jar of honey,” Maya said. “I’ll go annoy my ancestors.”

“I thought ‘commune with’ was the operative term,” Madrone said, pulling out a small jar of honey from the depths of the basket.

“Jewish ancestors don’t commune. They kvetch. That means complain.”

“That’s one Yiddish word I know,
madrina.”

Maya walked over to where a small crowd was gathered around the Jewish shrine, a brightly tiled and weatherproof ark under an arching pomegranate tree. A carved stone lectern provided a platform for the Torah scroll, and a young woman was chanting in Hebrew. The sounds took Maya back to her childhood, the voice of her grandfather praying in the morning, the voices of her mother and father, arguing.

“Lay off me, Betty!” she could hear her father say. “I’m not going to synagogue, I told you! I don’t believe in his damn God!”

“You don’t go for God, you go for him. He’s an old man, Joe. For once in your life you could do something to make somebody else happy.”

“Why should I? Would he do the same for me? Would he chant
The Communist Manifesto
to make me happy?”

“He’s your father.”

“Big deal!”

Maya slipped quietly behind the tree so as not to disturb the prayers as she placed the jar up against the slender trunk. The tree was encircled with a copper ribbon, inscribed with writing in Hebrew and English that said,
She is a tree of life to them that hold fast to her
.

“Hedging your bets, you old heretic?” whispered a crusty voice behind her. She turned and recognized Doctor Sam, one of Madrone’s colleagues from the hospital. With his mane of white hair and tufted eyebrows, he reminded her a bit of her own father in his old age, an age she had now surpassed by a good three decades. Not a handsome man but interesting, she reflected, favoring him with a smile.

“Honoring my ancestors,” Maya said.

“Are they impressed?”

“Who knows? If I really wanted to placate my father’s ghost, I suppose I could burn some incense in front of a picture of Karl Marx.”

“You
are
a heretic.”

“And what about you? Don’t you claim to be the last godless atheist?”

“I come for the arguments. Is the destruction of the environment the new form of the destruction of the Temple? And which tree of life should we hold to, Torah or Asherah, the Earth Goddess?”

“And did you reach any conclusions?”

“Nah, conclusions aren’t the point. You of all people should know that. If we ever came to conclusions, we’d lose the fun of the argument.”

There was that spark between them, Maya realized suddenly. Could she develop a father fixation on a man twenty years her junior?

The prayer was ending and the scroll was being replaced in the ark when the conch shells blasted forth again.

“It’s time,” Sam said, holding out his arm. “Allow me?”

Yemaya’s shrine was on the western slope of the hill, toward the ocean, although the bulk of Twin Peaks blocked the water from view. Madrone paused for a moment, beneath the statue of the pregnant fish-tailed mermaid, the great mother, Goddess of the Sea. She laid down the last of her offerings, a perfect sand dollar she had found long ago. It reminded her of the stone Bird had given her. Fossilized sand dollars were plentiful, but these days the cast shells of live ones were rare. It made a worthy offering. She hated to part with it, to lose a link to a memory: walking with Bird on the beach below the sea dikes that protected the outer neighborhoods from the rising waters of the ocean, the light playing on the waves, his songs in her ear, his hands smoothing her wind-whipped hair.

The last warning blast of the conch rang out over the hillside. Now it was really time to leave the ghosts of her old losses and get on with the ceremony. “Original mother of life, first Ancestress, accept this offering,” she murmured to Yemaya. “Preserve the lives of the living. Lend me strength. And hey,
Iya
, Mama, I’m sad, I’ve lost my lovers and
compañeros
, old and new. I’m lonely. Turn the tide for me.”

The sun was hot on the nape of Madrone’s neck as she headed back to the gathering place. To the east, shimmering waves of heat rose from the sun-scorched valleys, and ribbons of dust twisted in the air. West of the hill, blue fog lay in bands along the slopes of Twin Peaks.

At the summit, a bowl-shaped amphitheater was hollowed out. It was filled with onlookers, but Madrone saw Maya down below, in the innermost ring where those who had a part in the ceremony assembled. Sam stood beside her, and Madrone sighed softly. He’d want to know how the birth went, and she’d have to talk about it again. She left the food from her basket at the feasting site, and joined the other two. They exchanged greetings as the
four
concheros
, bearing their shells aloft, walked proudly to the center of the circle. With eerie, dissonant harmonies, they saluted the four directions and then earth, sky, and center.

The musicians began to play, and everyone sang together, as the ritual fire was lit by four masked figures, bird, fish, coyote, and deer, who symbolized the four directions and the Four Sacred Things.

Next came dances and songs and invocations, to the Four Sacred Things, to the ancestors, to Goddesses and Gods of all the different people assembled. Madrone loved to watch the dancers, especially the Miwok and Ohlone troupes in their feather capes, but she found her eyes closing and her head drooping during a lengthy poem in praise of communal spirit declaimed by a very earnest young woman from the Teachers’ Guild.

“They were supposed to have a five-minute limit on speeches,” Maya whispered to Sam. “If they don’t get on with it, my ass is going to atrophy.”

Finally the last speaker finished and beckoned to Maya. She stepped forward. A young girl, very solemn with the weight of her responsibility, handed her the Talking Stick, an oak staff beautifully carved, beaded, and feathered, carrying in its tip a small microphone. Powerful speakers were hidden in the branches of the four sacred trees that stood at the four quarters around the outskirts of the bowl. On the Signers’ platform, a man stood waiting to interpret as she spoke. All was ready.

She paused and looked at the crowd, letting her eyes roam over the brilliantly colored festival clothes and the faces of every hue and shade, eyes uplifted, heads set high and proud. This is good, Maya thought, this is what I worked for all my life, and you too, Johanna, you too, Rio. But how many more must we lose, like Consuelo, like Sandy? Like Brigid and Marley and
Jamie
and, yes, maybe Bird? What is this worth if we can’t preserve it, protect it?

The drums began to beat, a trance rhythm, steady but just slightly syncopated, to lead the mind and then shift it in unexpected directions. Maya spoke, her voice rhythmic, musical, crooning an incantation.

“Éste es El Tiempo de la Segadora
, the Time of the Reaper, she who is the end inherent in the beginning, scythe to the grain. The Crone, Goddess of Harvest. In this her season we celebrate the ancient feast of the Celtic sun god Lugh, his wake as he ages and descends into autumn. It is a time of sweet corn, ripening tomatoes, the bean drying on the vine. The harvest begins. We reap what we have sown.”

Madrone sat up straighter, listening attentively. She always enjoyed hearing Maya work a crowd.

“The Crone, the Reaper, is not an easy Goddess to love. She’s not the nurturing Mother. She’s not the Maiden, light and free, not pretty, not shiny
like the full or crescent moon. She is the Dark Moon, what you don’t see coming at you, what you don’t get away with, the wind that whips the spark across the fire line. Chance, you could say, or, what’s scarier still: the intersection of chance with choices and actions made before. The brush that is tinder dry from decades of drought, the warming of the earth’s climate that sends the storms away north, the hole in the ozone layer. Not punishment, not even justice, but consequence.”