Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [195]
Did she want to go on like this, every day, every day? For this was it she pulled the trigger of that pistol, for this was it she killed not once but twice?
She walked directly up to the edge, where nothing but ice-plants and their roots held the cliff solid beneath her feet. The wind whipped about her, carrying sounds cloud and chaos she imagined soared over the Hawaiian Islands roaring all the way from Asia where she longed to go but knew she never would.
Why not?
Because of time.
What is time?
The roots that hold together the cliff on which we stand.
She held out her arms as though they were wings, and stood against the pouring wind, balanced between falling forward and falling back.
Time? Perhaps not the roots but instead the wind, the resounding wind.
She called out that name she had spoken only intermittently in these California days—“Yemaya! Oh, goddess, forgive me my thoughts about your watery abode!”
***
“Darling?”
Argus, her Dutchman, came up behind her and took her by the shoulders.
“Step back, my soul, so dangerous here!”
She turned and studied his face, looked into his eyes, feeling that chest-surge again, and thinking, Who is he? And, Well, he is good to me.
Oh, she had lived! So, oh, she would live a bit more!
Chapter Eighty-nine
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Eliza Stone & Son (cont.)
She lived long enough to see me graduated with honors from Cal, where in my studies I found new science that fed into a dream of mine that recurred around that time, a dream of our early ancestors that I had wondered about ever since my mother first told me my first stories when I was a child. In my dream an erupting volcano on the horizon of a long plain stirred inhabitants to hurry away from its billowing cloud of fire and smoke and ash. That event took place before the time of human memory, if I believed my mother (supported by some evidence about prehistoric life presented to me by some of my most radical instructors at Cal, who made it their business to try and reconstruct actual events contained within “the adult bed-time story,” as one of them put it, we found in the Bible (in which the Mosaic signs from God of a cloud by day and a pillar of fire at night may well be a long-lost memory of that same volcano)). For a while that event took place weekly in my dreams. Perhaps, I had to admit, it had always been a dream of mine and I had only recently begun to wake with it as a memory.
But now something shifted in our family life soon after my commencement, as my mother ended, for whatever reason, her companionship of her Dutch painter—he moved to Los Angeles, and except for a dwindling number of post cards each year we never heard from him again—and she became a woman sure enough of herself to live alone and enjoy the solitude. These things happened, as I soon discovered when my Hawaiian Holly and I recognized that we, too, had to part ways.
Once again Eliza and I took to having many a meal together—at least once a week—during which time I began to make notes in a leather-bound volume out of which would grow my narrative, based on her facts, about her lineage going all the way back to Timbuktu and even before, and about her life at The Oaks, a narrative that I hoped would one day find its way into the hands and then the hearts of whatever children I might foster myself.
Still, I had my good high hopes for separating truth from legend, and history from speculation—that was just my inclination both as I had been as a student and now as a citizen of the world (which is how I saw myself once I graduated). Long I mulled over these stories—mull, mull, mull, the whirring of my unsatisfied mind at work—and kept her talking. Was it possible ever to know what actually happened in my mother’s life?
Her stories nourished me. Though now and then I gave back to her, especially on one of these occasions when I read to her a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier, which I had found in a small volume that I purchased from a curious shop across the Bay.
“I hope you will enjoy