Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [39]
“Business, business, yes,” my uncle said, “the busyness of our lives. Your father seems quite determined to educate you in these matters.”
My attentive cousin poured me another glass of the wine, and then poured another for himself.
“These matters,” I said.
“My business is failing,” my uncle said.
I sat up, alert to the news.
“He never told me this. He told me only to study your enterprise.”
My overstuffed uncle leaned forward with a smile on his moon of a face, his large head floating in front of his body in the candlelight.
“Do you know the difference between us and the Gentiles?”
“They worship Christ,” I said. “We merely produced him.”
“Very good,” my uncle said, with a laugh. “Very good. But there is something more, something in the character of the Gentile to which I’m referring.”
“They are less devout?”
“Sometimes they are more devout, much more.”
“Then we are less?”
“People say we Reformed are less than whole Jews. But we are inspired to act as we do by an inner power.”
“But what about Gentiles? You were talking about them.”
“They go into the business without a thought for the morality of it.”
“And we Jews?”
“We struggle with the problem, we exhibit great soul-searching and painful thought.” He pounded a fist on the table. “We moan, we groan, we worry…”
“And then?”
“And then we go into the business.”
While he laughed at his own witticism, I took the liberty of pouring myself another glass of port. Before very long, I felt my head drooping.
“To bed!” my uncle announced. “Tomorrow for part of the day we will continue your education.”
“To bed,” Jonathan stood to announce—and make a toast—“where all life begins, and every day ends…”
I wove from side to side as I followed Black Jack who showed me to my room, a fine little closet on the second floor at the rear of the grand house with a window, covered with netting, wide open to the night.
I took some time removing my things from my bag, and from my person, such as the small pistol, which, figuring that I had arrived in the peaceful kingdom, I would not need, and so I placed it in the top drawer of the bureau, beneath a pile of handkerchiefs. I continued unpacking, eventually unwrapping the portrait of my mother and placing it on the bureau (and with a twinge of nostalgia poking at my chest like an insistent finger taking care to fold the newssheet from the New York newspaper that had wrapped my mother’s portrait that I might read some of it later). I lay there a while on my soft down bed with the lamp burning, musing on the faint memories of that dear departed woman, and then I put out the light and lay a while longer thinking in the shadows of the room. What was it? The humming in the near-distance, like a chorus of some tuning of strings in an orchestra, but also the sissing of a million tongues, as though the stars, so bright beyond the trees, were each a lamp hissing after some cosmic god had blown cosmic breath across the sputtering wicks. It was the music of the low country under cover of darkness, the news of the land, the swamps, the creeks, the woods, and the skies filled with those stars, but lower toward the earth, the insects and the swooping birds who flew with beaks wide open so that they might just scoop up all that they needed for nourishment. Thus settled over me the last night of comfort and freedom from care that I would ever spend.
Chapter Sixteen
________________________
Taken
Overhead, chattering away, monkeys awoke her. What they were trying to tell each other, Lyaa could not say, noticing only that they were excited. But then, as anyone knew, that might mean one of them had found a dead bird or a rat or a mate or had a dream and awoke as startled as people were when they awoke from dreams dark or dreams cheerful, dreams of flying or dreams of dying, which she, as she had once told the local witch, sometimes suffered to great degrees.
Those monkeys, what might they see? Growing to girlhood in this green world just to the south of the river Lyaa had learned some things about the life