Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [64]
Yahweh, whose voice, when he employed it, seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, spoke his annoyance, sounding something like Zeus, one of his older cousin gods, worshiped by the smart and poetic pagans.
“You’re worried that he may drown? May? It seems quite certain to me.”
“Then rescue him.”
“I should rescue him? Can you give me a good reason. He is a nasty boy, bound to grow into a nastier man, and the world already has enough of these.”
Yemaya, loud in speech but also looking quite lovely in her mermaid form—a mermaid swimming in near-space? I cannot figure that, but that is how the story has it—challenged Yahweh the way a wife might challenge a husband—with the full force and knowledge of someone who knows her opponent’s greatest powers but also his greatest weaknesses.
“But so much depends on him!”
“He chose to walk into the waves.”
“He miscalculated.”
“He thinks he is invincible. This will show him.”
“Death will show him?”
“Some human beings have to learn the hard way.”
“And if he learns this, what good will it do him, what good will it do the world?”
“The world needs him? For what reason? Tell me a reason and I will save him. Though, let us admit it, you have the power to do that yourself, do you not? Which makes me believe that you want me to join in only out of a certain goddess-like perversity.”
“I want you to save him because he is one of yours.”
“In the narrowest way he is, yes, he has the sign upon his genitals that he belongs to me, and now and then he mutters a prayer when sitting with his congregation.”
“Do you want one less of him in the world?”
“Why would you want even one more of him?”
“Because…”
“You, Yemaya, are too coy to be in the Heavens! Come out and say it, because you know I see it, I see everything, you want him because without him—”
“Yes, without him—”
“Without him no one will be born to tell this story.”
“Exactly.”
Unheard cataclysms unechoed through the cosmos. Stars lived and died. Showers of some light that no one would ever, ever in the history of human science be able to explain came pouring up and down and sidewise among the galaxies.
“And your precious girl, not even born yet, and when she is conceived, conceived in awful torque and wretched forcefulness, you want her to be free?”
“Yes.”
“But you want me to take away this boy’s freedom to die?”
“Yes.”
“You want me to save one of my nasty own when you should be rejoicing that he will not live to do his damnedest in the world against your followers?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think I am bound to do this?”
“Not necessarily.”
“Do you think I reserve the right to be free and take his life?”
“Yes.”
“Then I will allow you in person to save him. As if I have a choice. Yes, because you are bound to save him no matter what I wish, correct?”
But Yemaya had already dived through space into the deep air of our planet, listening to Yahweh, because like any deity she could hear everything everywhere but often deigned not to admit all the speech and all the cries of anguish and pain and all the noise and blunderbuss burstings and agony of torture and outpourings of misery into her outward realm of sound, but already on the way to do her deeding.
Thus a black mermaid burst out from behind the sea-foam and ocean-wrack curtain, taking the drowning boy by the elbows and hauling him onward and up toward the surface.
“From what I have seen,” the black mermaid—Yemaya, goddess of oceans and skies above oceans—declaimed in his ear, “I should leave you here to drown. But so much depends on you growing into a man, however despicable a man you might be, that I had to come to your rescue. You will grow older, and aid your family in Charleston and become an owner of men, women, and children as you learn the business of growing rice, and one day you will see a young woman, beautiful, brown, helpless, because she is your property, and you will use her as you would use a beast, though your vile actions will not make her one, neither will what you do to the daughter she gives to