Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [153]
“All these questions.”
“But can you, can you laugh? I went all the way home to Africa and have only just skipped back to see you, to see if you can laugh.” The god Himself giggled and made bubbles in the water. “Oh, I do hop and skip all about the world, all about the stars…It is a merry life, this infinity I inhabit…”
Liza wasn’t listening carefully, but struggled with the possibility of laughter in the face of her pain, wrestled with it, soared along beneath the water torturing herself with it, and nothing came, nothing, except the difficult question and the water rushing through her, light all around and then dark all around, and then light again, and her belly rustled and a tickle rose in her chest, a tickle rose, and the grain of rice in her lower parts turned over and doubled in size, some miracle in nature and finally, “Yes,” she said. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I can laugh, I can laugh!”
“Then I will tell you a joke,” the god said.
“Tell me,” she said.
“There is a man coming…”
“What?”
“A man…”
“Who?”
“This is for you to find.”
“What about him?”
“Oh, seek him out and you will know.”
“Seek him out?”
“You will come close, but do not be indifferent. Take a step toward him, and all will change for you.”
Liza turned her head aside, preferring to stare down into the dark water rather than gaze in that moment at the smug face of the god.
“No,” she said, “I don’t want to take a step toward a man. I do not want a man. I have had one man and that is one man too many. I will keep myself from men, because such creatures will destroy my life and make my children miserable down to several generations.”
It was the god’s turn to turn away.
“You are so difficult!” he said. “You make me, girl, so exasperated! Where is your hope, child? Where is your love of the future? Where is your love of yourself?”
“Sleeping,” Liza said. “Fast asleep.”
“Nah,” said Okolun, “nah, nah.”
“Oh, yes! Fast asleep!”
“Slow asleep is what you are. But you had better wake up, girl. Because your chance is coming, coming down the sea-road, and you don’t want to pass it up because it may not come again.”
“You say ‘nah’? I say it now back to you, nah, nah…”
“Oh, you are such a trouble!”
Liza heard herself scream out underwater—“Because I have known trouble, because I have lived trouble before I was born and when I was born and now in my young life!”
“Still yours to take,” the god said.
Suddenly he released her hand, and she immediately fell behind him in the rushing stream of his watery power.
“You are on your own now, girl, so wake up! Wake up! Yours to take up!”
Before she could reply Liza felt herself both slowing down and sinking at the same time. The god became only a dark blur in the water some distance ahead of her, and now some distance below her, and now was rising to meet her.
She opened her eyes, soaked through to her skin, the old woman hovering over her.
“Is it done?” the woman said in her creaking croak of a voice. “I think it is done.”
And then she croaked something, one last thing.
“This,” she said, “you forgot this.”
And she extended her hand, clenched, and opened her hand, and there was the stone, missing for some years, which had squirted out of her womb in a dream.
Chapter Seventy-one
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Voices in My Ear
Yemaya Exults
We are coming so close, she is coming so close!
Chapter Seventy-two
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The Doctor Attends to Himself
He was a creature of habit, and had to be, but was any single morning typical of the way his days moved along? The doctor didn’t think so. You would notice if you were observing him that he rose before dawn and in nightshirt and slippers, with a cup of tea at his desk side, spent an hour or so reading and making entries in his notebooks by lamplight before the early sun made it just as easy to read and write in natural light, though by then his hour was usually up. He had done this before he had married, all the while during his marriage, and continued it after his beloved wife had gone to her rest. Even that