Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [197]
A million years ago? A conservative estimate, one of my advanced professors might say. No, no, no, no, much more than that. (But don’t tell my pastor I said so, he might say in a joke.) But move forward they did, and so lived long enough for the young girl to find a surviving mate, and the great unfolding chain of children growing into childbearing adults—the old story about Cain leaving Eden to go into exile in the Land of Nod and there finding a mate may be an echo of the earlier eruption that evicted our first parents from their African Eden—proliferates through the ages, a novel event yet one duplicated by millions of other families by the time recorded history begins.
My mother asked me to find her purse and to extract from it that same stone with which she began all of her stories and reveries and tales and recollections.
“You still have it?”
She nodded. Yes.
“I have always carried it with me,” she said in a whisper.
“The original? Over all those how many hundreds of years? Hundreds? Thousands! How can that be?”
She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling, and the heavens beyond the roof.
“It may have been a thousand years,” she said. “Or more. Much more.”
I found it and held it in the palm of my hand.
“A miracle,” I said.
She shook her head, nearly all breath and thus all words having left her.
“What now?” I said.
She gestured for me to keep it.
She nodded. Her eyes lighted up, as she saw me, and—who could know?—saw the past and the future one atop the other, in a palimpsest of time.
“Thank you, Mother,” I said, taking the relic, if it was the same one she had told me about, the stone her ancestors had carried and given to her for safekeeping, the stone marked with signs now undecipherable that once made up a story in themselves. Had that child, perhaps, walking steadily across that volcanic plain with her parents, ash rain falling about her head and shoulders, bent for an instant and snatched that object—icon?—from the ground and passed it along, years later, to her children, and these to theirs, until one day an artisan took up a new tool and carved it into a pleasing design?
After taking a moment to study its shape and markings, I touched it to my forehead and pressed hard. It felt cool, and then warm, and then hot, as though it were passing through my skin and skull-bone into my very brain! The longer I sat there with it the pictures of Eliza and all of the words in all of the stories she had told me fell into a certain order, which in that astonishing blooming moment showed me her life and a world in all its turmoil and beauty and striving and hope and misery and worry and woe and chanting and song! Birth, love, death, rebirth! All crackled in me like lightning leaping from one storm cloud to another, then like lightning leaping from a storm cloud to the earth.
I heard a noise outside the window, not seeing lightning but instead spying a sea-bird gliding past. I looked back down at Eliza.
She had been watching me.
“Ishmael,” she said.
“Yes, Mother?”
I kneeled beside her and kissed her on the cheek—her cooling cheek. I drew back and saw that something fluttered in her eye, like the wing of some bird or butterfly.
“I am not a bad person, am I?”
“No, no, no, Mother, you are not.”
“I have tried to be good. Though I have done terrible things in my life…”
“You have been a fine mother to me, a wonderful mother.”
“Considering…”
“Considering? Yes, considering the struggle you had to make, the struggles. Oh, Ma…”
I kissed her again, and found that her cheek had cooled even more.
Oh, my gods, I said to myself, oh, my gods! All of them, because she had taught me to be lavish with my hopes and prayers and not spend them all on a single narrow faith.
She spoke then one last time, locking upon me that gaze of hers