Tropic of Night (24 page)

My father seemed delighted with this predicament. At last he was back in the seventeenth century, an era far more true to his spirit than our own. Of course, we always sailed with a complete kit of hand tools, and so, by means of the most backbreaking, hand-ripping work I have ever done, we three cleared away the wreckage, skived and fidded the main boom to the stump of the foremast to make a jury rig, resized and rerigged the foremast gaff and boom to suit a scandalized gaffsail, set up the stays and shrouds for the new mast, shot the sun to determine our location (150 miles NNW of Bermuda) and set sail. I had never seen him happier. I hated him, and grumped about my tasks, and resented that he did not see I hated him. I hated myself more, for being a coward, for deserting God, and hated God for deserting me. I looked at Josey and saw that he knew what had happened to me, and I also knew we would never talk about it to each other or to Dad. Something loved was over, the saddest thing in the world.

He was singing “Flowers of Bermuda” over and over; and we both falsely played along with the merriment, because you would have had to have been a monster like Mom to crush that much boyish happiness, and neither of us was that bad. We even sang along on the chorus:

He was the captain of theNightingale

Twenty-one days from Clyde, in coal

He could smell the flowers of Bermuda in the gale

When he died on the North Rock Shore.

I suppose he would have liked to sail unobtrusively into Hamilton harbor and stroll into the yacht club as if nothing much had happened. My mother, however, had raised the alarm with her characteristic shrill energy, and so, as soon as the weather cleared, the air and sea were crammed with search planes and vessels. We were picked up seventy miles out and, over my father’s ferocious objections, put in tow back to the twentieth century, Hamilton, Government Dock, and my mother. She came running down the pier as we debarked from the coast guard cutter, ran up to my father, and slugged him in the mouth.

The sun sinks behind the city. We leave the lovely boat and walk back up the dock across the long shadows of the masts stretched across our path like bars. I pull a scrap of double-braided line from a waste barrel and I do some knots and string tricks for the amusement of my nondaughter, as my father used to do for me. In a few years, I will teach her to sail her first pram. Or not.

There will be no pram, Guitar is not Kite . Still, we both feel better for this, the healing power of salt water, or memory. We stroll back to the car, I make a turk’s head for her, and in my head comes And sure I could have another made, this in my father’s clear baritone, in the boatshop down in Dover
But I would not love the keel they laid
Like the one the waves roll over
I’ll go to sea no more .p>

Later, getting ready for bed, Luz asks what flaky means and I ask her where she heard the word and she says that in the ice-cream parlor Betty Jean Stote came in with her mommy and Betty Jean Stote’s mommy asked who Amanda’s friend was “and that was me, Muffa, and Amanda’s mommy said who I was and she said my mommy was flaky. Is that like cornflakes?”

“Yes,” I say, and then she tells me she’s going to be in a play at Providence about Noah’s ark and I have to buy her a special clothes thing, but she forgot, but there is a note in her lunch box. I tell her I will look at it later. Then she says, “Amanda and me were playing princesses. I was a Pocahontas princess and Amanda was a fairy princess, because she has golden hair. Am I adopted?”

I swallow hard. “No, baby, you’re not.” Technically the truth. I could swear to it.

“Annie Williams is adopted from Korea. Is my daddy going to come and see us?”

“I don’t think so, baby.”

“Why not?”

“Because he died a long time ago.”

“He got sick and died,” she agreed. “But we could get a new daddy.”

“That’s right, we could.”

“Kids could get new daddies. Beth Weinberg has two new daddies. She’s so dumb. Me and Amanda hate her. Kids could get new mommies, too, couldn’t they? If their mommies get sick and die, or if they turn into witches.”

“Yes,” I say, my spine prickling, but the dreaded questions are not pressed home. She picks up the stack of books at the bedside, arranges them in order, and hands them to me. The first one is Are You My Mother? I read it with real feeling.

She goes out halfway through Goodnight Moon. Back in the kitchen I sit down at the table with my divination, and read through it several times. Uluné was a famous diviner as well as a sorcerer, an unusual combo, actually. It’s a little like baseball pitchers being good hitters, not impossible, but rare. Although Uluné’s clients were all believers, still they could not help but be astounded at the accuracy of his work. Typically, questioners don’t tell the Ifa diviner their questions. Uluné had to select the relevant verse from a number that related to the figure cast, and as far as I could tell he always chose the right one. In the present case, doing it for myself, I knew the question, but still this was a clear bull’s-eye. Okay, I won’t take a caravan to the north, check. It would be foolish to leave the farm right now. Check. Witches are definitely coming to carry off the eldest child, which is me, or maybe Luz, or maybe both of us. Check. My strength is no match for his, no question, check, especially if he is really going to go ahead and do the full okunikua. I get up and check the Providence Church calendar by the refrigerator. I have marked the date when that woman died in Overtown. If he is going for okunikua, I see, he will have to do the second sacrifice and eating in the next two days, or else wait for the dark of the moon again and start over. He won’t want to do that. The he is him . I no longer believe that it might be Lou or some other disciple. It’s him. Suddenly I am weak and weeping and nauseated. I stick my head between my legs until it passes.

Perhaps I should call the police. Hello, 911? Yes, I’m calling to report a murder that’s going to happen two days from now. The murderer is going to kill and eviscerate another pregnant woman. Who’s the murderer? My husband. He’s actually an African witch. That’s right. He’s doing it to accumulate power in his magical body, his fana. Should I spell that? Oh, if he gets it done he’ll be the witchcraft equivalent of a small thermonuclear bomb. Nobody’s done it in the longest time?it’s against the rules. All the Olo sorcerers agreed not to do it, like the test-ban treaty. Yes, that’s O-L-O . Am I crazy? Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I am. Thank you. Bye!

No, focus, Jane! No time for hysterics. I stop myself from shaking, and when I can drink tea without it sloshing out of the mug, I do so, and sit again at the table. You fear something, you adopt a host of ritual behaviors to keep it away, and when it comes you’re both more frightened than you imagined you could ever be and at the same time curiously calmer. It’s here, you have to deal with it. I have to stop him, and Ifa has given me the means, if I can just figure it all out.

A son with no fathers. A woman from a farm. A yellow bird. Thank you, Ifa. I have no idea what you’re talking about. Allies, maybe. You have to wait for magical allies to come to you. You can keep your eyes open, of course, but you can’t put an ad in the paper or treat it like a treasure hunt. Much of Olo sorcery consists of keeping your eyes open and waiting. I mean really open.

I can do the sacrifices tomorrow. Or … maybe I’m not reading this right. Does the “four are necessary” mean I have to wait until I’ve contacted the son, the farm woman, and the bird, making four with me? Or does it refer to the two pairs of birds? Then what about the cowries? And the escape by water? But I have to stop him, I can’t just escape. What’s that about? Was it really a sign that I was impelled to go down to Dinner Key and there find a boat that could have been the sister of the boat in which I faked my suicide, the Kite, my father’s pride and joy?

It’s too much right now. Dolores is too tired to cope. Maybe it’s time to lay her to rest. I would have to get another job. Work up my résumé. I can hand, reef, and steer a sailboat by compass or stars. I can ride a horse. I can shoot a pistol, a rifle, a shotgun. I can butcher a deer, a duck, a fish. I can tie flies, fix cars. I know the alphabet cold. I can speak French, and get by in Yakut, Yoruba, Bambara, and Olo. I can do ethnographic research in library and field. I can do the fifth, fourth, and third kyu in aikido. I can do a few tricks of legerdemain with coins and little balls. I can detect magical emanations and perform some elementary sorcerous acts. I can foretell the future. Print up five hundred copies and mail it out.

Stripped for sleep, swinging in my hammock, I think, oh, my, Jane, back in the soup again. One good thing about Miami: if my excursion with Ifa lit up the m’doli, it’s unlikely that it stood out enough against the sort of continuous fireworks you get in this town. Eshu probably has a major substation dedicated to carrying messages to and from the Miami-Dade Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area.

And once again, I have to deal with the mystery of belief. I’m a scientist. I have a pretty good idea about what underlies the technology of sorcery, and it’s perfectly explicable in standard scientific terms. But Eshu and Ifa aren’t, not quite, even if you buy Roger Penrose’s notion that consciousness is at least in part a quantum phenomenon and partakes of a universe in which time’s arrow doesn’t always point in the same direction and precognition is as ordinary as changing an electromagnetic field from positive to negative.

That Marcel! At nearly every speech, someone would stand up and say, in a confused or a hostile voice, something like, “I don’t understand, professor. Are you implying that these spirits consulted by your sorcerers are real ?” And Marcel would say, “Sir (or Madam), I say to you that I am a professor of anthropology, an empiricist, a materialist, a scientist, moreover a French scientist, the heir, if I may say so, of Descartes and Buffon, a member of the French Academy, and if you ask me if I believe in these spirits, of course I must tell you that I do not.” Here a marvelously timed pause, and then in a lower voice, “But they’re there.” Jane would miss him like crazy, were she alive.

9/22 Lagos

The generator arrived today. NEPA, the Nigeria Electric Power Authority, or like they say here Not Enough Power Anywhere, sucks big-time & is under no real pressure to improve: big boys all have generators like us, everyone else steals it from power lines, so there is no money for capital investment. A typically African solution?simple, effective, self-destructive. W. working at last, at least typewriting noises from his room. I pray he is getting some good work done; at least something will be salvaged from this wreckage. He has his own room now.

Des away a good deal, making arrangements with his contacts, people high in clan and tribal hierarchies, finding out when ceremonies will be held, arranging for the grad students to be placed in various sites. And arranging things with the government, too. We are in bad with the government, according to him; there is often a car outside the hotel, fat guys with sunglasses and nice suits, watching. Colonel Musa would love to catch us making a pornographic film.

Talked with Des just now. David Berne is coming for sure, and he advised me to wait until I had a chance to talk with him before setting off for Ketu. I’ve been reading his stuff on Gelede magic and dance, and I agreed that was best. The guy is, in any case, one of the heavies in the field, and also one of the few who doesn’t think M. is a total charlatan. I wonder why that’s important to me at this late date; I’ve often called him that myself. In any case, looking forward.

9/24 Lagos

All day at the courts and jail, trying to get Tunji’s brother, Ifasen, out of trouble. Ifasen is a cabdriver and apparently he ran over a goat and the cops pinched him. In Africa, if someone works for you, it is the done thing that you are thereby the patron of his or her entire extended family. I am also paying the school fees of Ajayi’s two nieces. The sums are pathetically small, but it takes up so much time. W. observes this and gives me contemptuous looks. Miss Ann being kind to the darkies. I want to shake him!

9/27 Lagos

With Greer at the University here to look at the library, and introduced me to Mr. Odibo, the librarian. A ramshackle place, lizards running through the books, termites eating everything. It’s no wonder literacy was so long delayed in Yorubaland, and the rest of Africa. There is nothing to write on that will last more than a decade. Interesting discussion about this with Odibo, and the consequent survival of enormous feats of memory by traditional Africans, the preservation of, e.g., thousands of verses of Ifa prophecy by diviners, and of history and events by griots.

Oral culture, easy to sneer, but not when you actually observe a relatively recent shelf of books turned to powder. Odibo showed me some rarities he keeps behind steel, journals of missionaries and early British merchants and administrators. Some French material there, too, which piqued my interest. Always possible to get a paper out of crap like that, especially stuff that hasn’t been translated into English.

After that, Greer took me to a man he’s been working with for years, a healer named Sule Ibekwe, lives in concrete-block, tin-roofed house with a dirt yard surrounded by walls of mud-brick & rusted corrugated steel. We sat on stools in front of his house (they sat on them; I sat on the ground) and were given palm wine by a striking young woman. Greer translated. This case was interesting?a thirteen-year-old girl, Rosa, cerebral malaria, doctors had given her up. I saw her, agreed with docs, emaciated & withdrawn, goner. Ibekwe called some men in and they carried the patient out to the compound. More people filtered in from the house and the surrounding shacks, until there was a considerable crowd. Some men set up drums and began to play. It was a typical African affair?no one giving any orders, a coalescing of intent. Ibekwe explained to us etiology of Rosa’s disease?it was necessary that patient be restored to harmony with her spiritual and social environment, had been upset by a curse. This was a very powerful curse, and in order to cure, Rosa would have to be placed under the tutelage of a powerful orisha. Ogun, the smith, the master of iron and war, was picked to be the one, or rather he had picked himself during a prior ceremony.