RoseBlood(52)

“You’re the parasite! Get out!” Maman screeched, pushing Batilde toward the shack’s paper-thin door.

Batilde pushed back, almost losing the moth-eaten shawl on her narrow shoulders. “One day you will see! You’ll tire of men’s pawing hands, their slimy tongues, and diseased lusts. We can leave the filth behind. Have working lights, hot baths, new clothes, restaurants . . . all the things we once had. The offer stands. Never has he seen a child so beautiful, Arnaund says of your Etalon.” The old woman lifted her hands to punctuate her point. The flab hanging on the underside of her arms shook like a chicken’s waddle. “This from a man who deals in children every day.”

“And those dealings are the very reason Arnie is the devil himself. Leave and never come back!” Maman tossed a plastic-wrapped brick of cheese onto the muddy ground, shoving Batilde out alongside it.

Etalon wiggled atop the pile of books that made him tall in his chair at the kitchen table. His body ached and shivered from fever as he drew circles with a dried bread crust in the surface of thick dust. He’d seen other children in the slum playing with real toys—stuffed animals, tiny metal cars and airplanes, music boxes. Some even had plastic walkie-talkies that worked with batteries. But he used his imagination. His toys were just as good as theirs.

“What are you drawing, little Ettie?” His mother asked as she kissed his temple, testing his temperature. “Are you practicing your letters?”

“Musical notes, Maman,” he answered. “See the colors?” He often made up tunes in his head when he was frightened or upset. The songs would come alive in his mind, a rainbow that sparkled like the jewel-colored candied fruits at market—the ones Maman loved but could never afford. One day, he would buy them and fill the cupboards and pantries as fat as treasure chests. And Maman would never be sad or hungry again.

As Batilde stood outside their door screaming obscenities, Etalon heard that word once more.

“What’s a bastard, Maman?” he asked.

“A filthy lie that has nothing to do with you,” she said, raking his hair from his face with a hand that smelled of tobacco, stale men’s cologne, and something he didn’t quite know—a soured bleach stench fraught with regret and desperation. “Now, you just draw your music. Don’t listen to that wretch. I will get a washrag to cool your face.”

She puttered about the tiny kitchen, and as she opened the cupboard to find a tattered cloth, Etalon munched on the dust-caked crust, craving the cheese she’d tossed out for Batilde’s payment. His stomach sucked into itself on a growl so deep, it pulled all the way to his feet. For a distraction, he wiggled his toes until they poked out of the holes in his stockings. Earlier, he’d drawn eyes, noses, smiles, and frowns upon each one with a piece of charcoal. Though they chilled in the cool air, he giggled at them, his piggy puppet friends.

“Maman, Batilde’s a mean old witch,” he said, making his voice high and silly, pretending his toes’ mouths were speaking. “Take me with you next time.”

His mother’s sad brown eyes met his. “No, Ettie. You will never go with me. Do you understand? Never follow me, either. Do you hear? The place where I go . . . it’s no place for a child.”

“But Batilde said it is. She said Arnie likes me most of all the children. He loves me.”

His mother paled as she pumped water from the spigot, holding the rag under the brownish flow. “You shouldn’t even know that demon’s name. And you don’t want that kind of love. It isn’t love at all. It’s dark, and it’s evil. Just like the devil and the witch in your favorite story, who treated Jean and Jeanette like possessions, to be eaten like fatted calves. But children are powerful, and clever. They should be treated as gifts from the heavens. Remember what happens?”

“They ax the witch and outrun the devil!” Etalon shouted, laughing.

“Yes.” Maman pointed her finger at him in praise. “But that’s the only time killing is all right . . . when it’s to save a child’s precious life. Do you hear me, Ettie? Now, enough of this gloomy talk. Sing for me. Make my heart full.”

Etalon started humming then, following the colored notes written in the layers of dust. Maybe it was the fever, or maybe it was the suffocating worry as Maman spoke of the fairy tale, but something was different this time. The colors conjured by his voice didn’t stay in their place at the table. They rose and drifted to his mother beside the sink, spinning around her then capturing her wrists and linking together—a rainbow of chains. She closed her eyes, and tears streamed down her cheeks. Soon, she’d fallen to her knees with a loud thud.

The melody was simple, yet somehow it weighed heavily enough to drag her to the floor. Her eyes opened, and sunlight streamed from the window, shadowing every wrinkle and line within her once-pretty face. Her mouth gaped, and like the spigot spouting tainted water, she confessed the ugly truth: why Etalon never knew his father. That she didn’t even know who the man was, but he was too beautiful to be real; he’d come to her in a dream and then was gone. She believed the devil himself had seduced her. She believed it the penalty for the life she lived. For she was a whore, and Etalon her baseborn child.

After that day, his mother loved him even more fiercely, but she also feared him. As he grew over the next two years, she watched with cautious, sidelong glances. Each time he became agitated or sad, he would sing instead of cry, and level her emotions until she confessed something else from her past. Something she’d never told anyone.