Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [142]
“You can help me?”
The witch woman held up a twig on which had sprouted several thorns. Without warning, she pressed it to Liza’s throat, pricking her.
“I already did,” she said, tossing the twig aside as Liza slumped to the floor like an old curtain detached from its rod.
“What did you do?” Isaac stepped up to her, but had to turn his head aside at the odor of her breath.
“What you came for,” the Witch Woman said. “Put her on the bed and let her sleep. When she awakes, all will be over.”
With an agility quite surprising given her age, she attended to the sleeping girl, stripping off her clothes and applying various poultices to various parts of her body even as she dripped some sort of portion from a large spoon into the girl’s open mouth.
“Now go outside,” she ordered Isaac.
He lingered outside a while, fretting about his dear friend, sister-cousin, however it was he thought of her. Here at the back of the cabins few people passed by and he could barely hear the shouts let alone the murmurings of the plantation folk going about their taking of the evening meal. Now and then a burst of noise or a burst of music reached his ears, but mostly it was quiet, quiet enough so that he could listen to the voice inside him that wondered about this life, this world, the fate of the girl inside the cabin, what little hope he might have for the future, his aging father’s condition—he had some sort of illness that kept him out of the fields and most of the time flat on his back in his cabin—the faint memory he had of his mother, poor woman.
He pulled himself back from those thoughts, focused his mind, as he was doing more and more as he became more and more adept at the tasks associated with rice farming, on the state of the crop, at the prospect of good weather, thinking then of what powers made weather, wondering whether it was God—as the master would have it, steeped as he was in the lore of his religion—or the gods of old Africa, whom many in the cabins still spoke of and spoke to, or the Jesus he had heard about when he spoke with slaves from other plantations. Now this Jesus, who was some sort of son of Moses, the Jews’ hero, was supposed to be the Son of God, and Isaac could believe that, except that he knew too much about Okolun and the other great spirits who gathered around Yemaya and made the world a much more lively place than the way the Christians would have it. Those folks, he heard, didn’t like drinking and dancing, not to mention doing the thing with each other, male and female, not that he had done that yet, but he certainly knew of it, it was all around him, part of the life of the fields and streams, the rivers, and the ocean he observed whenever he went to town. The Christians, if they had their way, would change the music, take out the drums, make only feeble moans to a God he simply did not understand, a God without flavor, without thirst, without the drive to make the world over every year the way he and his fellow slaves made the fields over, planted, cultivated, harvested, and then planted another crop. Not that the Jews were much better. Look where the Jew got Liza—with an inflated belly and a great sorrow in her big sweet young girl’s heart.
The cabin door opened and the witch woman peered out.
“Bring me the water, boy,” she said to Isaac. Fortunately he found some in a small wooden basin in a corner of the room. He stared as the old woman washed the younger woman.
The woman seemed to forget that he was present.
After a time, the witch woman asked Liza, “Do you want to see the outcome?” pointing to the small roll of sheets where the aborted child lay enshrouded.
“Never!” Liza said, still naked on the bedding. “Never, never!”
Isaac, too shy, even in the faint light of the cabin, to stare for very long at the naked girl, turned his eyes toward that small bundle on the floor in the corner of the hut. A tall boy, it hurt his back to lean over and peer down at it, to squint deeply into the dim light. What he saw did not seem worth the effort—a reddish-blue stump