The Salt Eaters (6 page)

“Be cool.” Palma was patting her, one of the bracelets sliding off into Velma’s lap. “Don’t get overheated, Vee girl.” Palma was winking, being their grandmother. “Be still, girlie.”

Velma ghosted a smile and leaned back, her stocking feet clutching at tufts of the carpet that softened the debate in Patterson’s office.

“Be still, Velma. Just relax now,” Ruby was bending with the basin, trying not to bump against the tent, damp with rain. “One monkey don’t stop no show. Not one, not six. The struggle continues. Haste not, waste not. Not to mention a stitch in time. Et cetera and so forth. Just get your feet to cooperate and everything’ll be just fine.”

Ruby was trying to put her feet in the basin. Daisy Moultrie was brushing her hair. Velma had no control over her feet. No control over her head either. It seemed to bang around on her shoulders one minute, loll and bob the next. She feared the cronie had broken her neck shoving her out of the hotel. But the water was cool, it calmed her. The stroking of her legs was
soothing too. The washcloth soft and fragrant with something Ruby always wore. But Daisy Moultrie was brushing too briskly. And the sparks that flew threatened to ignite her all over again, catch the tent on fire, burn up the stack of fliers waiting on a camp stool for her to distribute. She could hear the crackling wheeze of red silk ablaze.

“Sistuh mine, it’s a hard row to hoe, but ain’t nothing to go out about,” Ruby was saying, flinging the water out back, the flap of the tent lifted and moonlight spilling in, the arc of water frozen for an instant, just long enough for her to believe she’d been washed clean of it all.

“How ya feel? Velma?”

And she wanted to answer Ruby, wanted to say something intelligible and calm and hip and funny so the work could take precedence again. But the words got caught in the grind of her back teeth as she shred silk and canvas and paper and hair. The rip and shriek of silk prying her teeth apart. And it all came out a growling.

“Velma!” He was out of the booth again, leaning over the table toward her, his jacket hem in her coffee cup. “Aw, baby, don’t get angry about things over and done with. Come on. Let’s go home.”

“Growl all you want, sweetheart. I haven’t heard a growl like that since Venus moved between the sun and the earth, mmm, not since the coming of the Lord of the Flames. Yes, sweetheart, I haven’t heard a good ole deep kneebend from-the-source growl such as that in some nineteen million years. Growl on. You gonna be all right … after while. It’s all a matter of time. The law of time. And soon, sweetheart, this will all be yours. You just hold that thought, ya hear?”

“Quit wrasslin, sweetheart, or you may go under. I’m throwing you the life line. Don’t be too proud to live.”

“Speakin of wrasslin with pride, Min—”

“What you say?” Minnie Ransom hadn’t been aware of her spirit guide’s presence, or of her own drift elsewhere.

“Say she can’t hear you, Min. Don’t even see you. Henry gal off somewhere tracking herself.”

“Mmm. Hanging on to her’s like trying to maneuver a basket of snakes on a pole. Spasms in every nerve center. And me, I feel like I’ve been in the middle of a hornet’s nest for days. No time to recharge and replenish myself. But talking to Doc’s like talking to sidewalk. He will have his little shows. What’s ailing the Henry gal so, Old Wife? Not that I’m sure I can match her frequency anyway. She’s draining me.”

“Maybe you’ve met your match, Min.”

“What you say?”

“Say she sure is fidgetin like she got the betsy bugs.”

“She one of Oshun’s witches, I suspect. What’s Oshun’s two cents worth on the matter? Maybe she’d like to handle this Henry gal herself.”

“I don’t know about the two cents cause I strictly do not mess with haints, Min. I’ve always been a good Christian.”

“When you gonna stop calling the loa out of their names? They are the laws alive. Seems to me you need to slough off a lot more of the nonsense from this plane if you’re going to be any help to me. Some spirit guide.”

“Leastways I know that Oshun ain’t studyin this problem, Min, cause I hear Oshun and Oye prettyin up to hop a bus to New Orleans. Carnival in this town ain’t fancy enough for them. Town gettin too small for some other proud spirits I could name too.”

“Bus? What are you talking about—the loa on some bus?”

“I’m talkin about them haints that’re always up to some trickified business. They ride buses just the same’s they ride brooms, peoples, carnival floats, whatever. All the same to them. What they care about scarin people with they ghostly selves?”

“Then you tell me, Old Wife, teller of tales nobody much wants to hear anymore except this humble servant of a swamphag, where’s the Henry gal gone off to? I don’t feel much turbulence in her now.”

“Swamphag?” leaning over to flounce Minnie’s dress and jangle her gold bangles, chuckling. “She’s off dancing, Min.”

“In the mud?””

“Mud seems to belong to her ways, Min.”

“Dancing in mud with cowries. Mmm. Twisting and grunting for the reward-applause of a bloody head on a tray. Lord, have mercy. What is wrong with the women? If they ain’t sticking their head in ovens and opening up their veins like this gal, or jumping off roofs, drinking charcoal lighter, pumping rat
poisons in their arms, and ramming cars into walls, they looking for some man to tear his head off. What is wrong, Old Wife? What is happening to the daughters of the yam? Seem like they just don’t know how to draw up the powers from the deep like before. Not full sunned and sweet anymore. Tell me, how do I welcome this daughter home to the world, when they all getting to acting more and more like—”

“I’sh potatoes?”

“Exactly. One in here yesterday whooping and hollering about some hole in a bucket. Took me a good five minutes to recall that song, remember—‘There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza. Well, fix it, dear Henry’? Like that was a message to go after her husband with a hammer. I’m telling you, when we started letting these silly children arrange their own marriages without teaching them about compatible energies, about the powers, we made a serious mistake. More mix-match mating going on, enough to make you crazy. Buckets. Full-grown women talking about a song told her to hit her husband in the head. Like she don’t have options. Hmph. You know what I mean?”

“I know, excusing the part about the bucket. But course I member the woman.”

“Course you do, bless your heart, and thank you. A dormant nerve in the clitoris. No wonder she restless and jumpy with back pains and her legs aching. And no wonder, no mating fuel there at all. But like I say, she got options. Just like the Liza in the song. She can just go ahead and fix the fool bucket herself and quit getting so antsy about it. Or she can go find a man that can. Always got options.”

“Say which?”

“Options. Affirmation and denial. Ole no-count Henry ain’t the only reality. Or she might try affirming his ability to wield a hammer or tote her some water and see what that’ll do. How
come you squinching up like I’m talking foreign? Ain’t you studying at all, Old Wife?”

“Well you know, Min, I never was too quick at learning.”

“Were too. Wisest woman in these parts, bless your heart. Look how you had it all together this morning when that grieving child commenced to sit on my lap and I was about to keel over.”

“You was about to dump her on the floor as I recollect.”

“True, true. But little did I know till you gave me the message that there was more to the wailing than grief.”

“Message?”

“You mean you don’t remember? You said to check in the floor of the third ventricle. So I did and zapped a little energy up there near the pineal, good ole pineal, and those lavender beams commenced to glow, and she was right as rain.”

“I said which?”

“You said ‘Malignant ependyma attempting to take up residence in the base of the brain, Min.’ Old Wife, don’t you take notes on these sessions? Ain’t you getting it all down?”

“I got all there is to be got, Min, excusin a tablet and pencil.”

“You the beatingest guide I ever heard of. Did you leastways get the drift yesterday when the little honey started singing the Henry/Liza/bucket song? Well, anyhow, I don’t understand these women sometime. Baby a man and then get all in a stiff cause he don’t know how to fix the hole in the bucket. Sometime original mother is too much the mother, if you know what I mean.”

“I don’t be catching your drift at all much, Min. You all wound up today. What’s troubling you? It ain’t like you to be talking bout ‘Are you sure you wanna be well?’ What kinda way is that?”

“It’s these children, Old Wife. I can handle the dry-bone
folks all right. And them generations of rust around still don’t wear me any. But these new people? And the children on the way in this last quarter? They gonna really be a blip. But the ones pouring into the Infirmary are blip enough. Soon’s they old enough to start smelling theyselves, they commence to looking for blood amongst the blood. Cutting and stabbing and facing off and daring and dividing up and suiciding. You know as well as I, Old Wife, that we have not been scuffling in this waste-howling wilderness for the right to be stupid. All this waste. Everybody all up in each other’s face with a whole lotta who struck John—you ain’t correct, well you ain’t cute, and he ain’t right and they ain’t scientific and yo mama don’t wear no drawers and get off my suedes, and he hit me, and she quit me, and this one’s dirty, and that one don’t have a degree, and on and on.”

“Min?”

“Don’t they know we on the rise? That our time is now? Here we are in the last quarter and how we gonna pull it all together and claim the new age in our name? How we gonna rescue this planet from them radioactive mutants? No wonder Noah tried to bar them from the ark. Hmph. Shove over some, Old Wife, it don’t seem polite to poke my hand through you. I need to find some music to get it said. All this madness bout to rock me off this stool, Old Wife.”

“Not madness throwing rocks at you, Min. Best see about yo sef.”

“Well, I’m bearing up at least. But, Old Wife, we gonna have to get a mighty large group trained to pull us through the times ahead. Them four horses galloping already, the seven trumpets blasting. And looks like we clean forgot what we come to do, what we been learning through all them trials and tribulations to do and it’s now. Come in here after abusing themselves and want to be well and don’t even know what they
want to be healthy for. Lord, the children.”

“The chirren are our glory, Min.”

“Amen on that. Wish I had some music to get it out there. These crazy folks need some saying-it music.”

“In our extremity is God’s opportunity.”

“I’ll hold that thought, Old Wife, but get your big buns out the way so I can shuffle through these tapes. Can’t seem to find …”

“What you lookin for is in the chapel, Min, if you ain’t too proud to come and join me there.”

If anyone had asked her—not that The Master’s Mind thought to query, or the old-timers would have interrupted, or the visitors dared, or the youth from the Teen Clinic would, or the staff had ever thought of it, or her guide or the loa who leaned against the window witnesses who of course knew, needed to—Minnie Ransom would have had to admit that she was stalling, stalling and failing, her hands resting on Velma Henry’s shoulders silent and her fingertips still.

Over the years it had become routine: She simply placed her left hand on the patient’s spine and her right on the navel, then clearing the channels, putting herself aside, she became available to a healing force no one had yet, to her satisfaction, captured in a name. Her eyelids closed locking out the bounce and bang of light and sound and heat, sealing in the throbbing glow that spread from the corona of light at the crown of the head that moved forward between her brows then fanned out into a petaled rainbow, fanning, pulsing, then contracting again into a single white flame. Just like the corona of the high-tension cables in the old streetcar sheds near the Bible college where day after day, drawn to like a craving, she stared at, strained toward, till one misty night many years later and in another place altogether, a powerhouse in the north, she could finally see it. One misty winter night when Venus
beamed down on the corrugated roof at home and Pleiades clustered in the New York sky like the illustration of the double helix taking up so much space in the magazines and papers, she could see it. The light pulsing, the light breaking up and bouncing, swimming together in a rainbow of color, fanning out, and then the pinpoint flame.

And she learned to read the auras of trees and stones and plants and neighbors, far more colorful, far more complex. And studied the sun’s corona, the jagged petals of magnetic colors and then the threads that shimmered between wooden tables and flowers and children and candles and birds.

On the stool or in the chair with this patient or that, Minnie could dance their dance and match their beat and echo their pitch and know their frequency as if her own. Eyes closed and the mind dropping down to the heart, bubbling in the blood then beating, fanning out, flooded and shinning, she knew each way of being in the world and could welcome them home again, open to wholeness. Eyes wide open to the swing from expand to contract, dissolve congeal, release restrict, foot tapping, throat throbbing in song to the ebb and flow of renewal, she would welcome them healed into her arms.

“Why couldn’t it be something usual like arthritis, bursitis or glaucoma?”

“Deal with what you’re dealt, Min.”

“Mmm.”

Calcium or lymph or blood uncharged, congealed and blocked the flow, stopped the dance, notes running into each other in a pileup, the body out of tune, the melody jumped the track, discordant and strident. And she would lean her ear to the chest or place her hand at the base of the spine till her foot tapped and their heads bobbed, till it was melodious once more. And often she did not touch flesh on flesh but touched mind on mind from across the room or from cross town or the map linked by telephone cables that could carry the clue
spoken—a dream message, an item of diet, a hurt unforgiven and festering, a guilt unreleased—and the charged response reaching ear then inner ear, then shooting to the blockade and freeing up the flow. Or by letter, the biometric reading of worried eyes and hands in writing, the body transported through the mails, body/mind/spirit out of nexus, out of tune, out of line, off beat, off color, in a spin off its axis, affairs aslant, wisdom at a tangent and she’d receive her instructions. And turbulence would end.