Deacon King Kong(66)
“It’s a custom back home in Haiti,” he said. When she seemed doubtful, he explained defensively that black Americans had their own rituals: black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day, carrying a raw potato in the left pocket for rheumatism, or “holding a copper coin under your tongue during coitus.”
“Coitus?” she asked.
“Doing the nature thing,” Dominic said. “You hold the copper coin under your tongue during . . . coitus . . . to keep from getting pregnant. My first wife was from Tennessee.”
Bum-Bum received this information with a snort. “What did they feed her down there, smog? I never ever heard such nastiness. Anyway, that ain’t the same as witchery.” Still, she let him walk her home.
The next time he “happened” to be across the street from the wall of Jesus painted on the back side of Five Ends Baptist, where she stopped every morning on the way to work to silently pray for the destruction of her ex-husband who ran off to Alaska, that his testicles might be pressed in a juice maker or lopped off with a saw. Dominic happened to be marveling at the wonderful artistry of the garbage piled high on the back wall of the church under the painting of Jesus—garbage that the church sexton, Sportcoat, had somehow forgotten to haul to the curb, being that he’d unexpectedly received a bottle of Haitian Creation from his wonderful neighbor Dominic that very afternoon, who had supplied it with the hope it would spark a binge and Sportcoat would forget the garbage altogether. Which is exactly what happened. That left Dominic with the task of informing Bum-Bum that since they happened to be at Five Ends together on a Tuesday morning when sanitation picked up, it was their civic duty as residents of the Cause and respecters of all religions to clean up the house of the Lord, as it wouldn’t be right to leave garbage setting right under Jesus’s nose for a full week before sanitation came again. Bum-Bum muttered that Five Ends’ rival church, Mount Tabernacle, put its trash out faithfully, and Five Ends’ garbage was Sportcoat’s business, not hers, plus she was dressed for work in all white, being a home care attendant. But she agreed that no Christian person in their right mind could walk away while Jesus’s painting stood above a pile of garbage. Which gave them a full twenty minutes of setting out the garbage that normally took thirty seconds, since Dominic refused to let her dirty her uniform and did all the lifting while he talked. That gave him twenty minutes to explain to Bum-Bum what a mojo could do.
“Mojos,” he said patiently, as he swung a half-filled garbage bag toward the curb, “can work on a person for miles and miles.”
“How many miles?” she asked.
“A hundred miles. Five hundred miles. A thousand miles even,” he said, marching toward the curb as she followed. “As far away as, say, Alaska.”
Bum-Bum, standing at the edge of the street in front of the garbage, worked hard to keep the lightbulb that went off in her brain from showing in her face. She frowned. So even the Haitian Sensation knew about her husband’s running off to Alaska. She wondered if he’d heard the part about her ex taking up with a man. Probably, she thought. She shrugged. “It’s better to pray for the saving of an enemy’s soul than their ruination,” she said, “but tell me about it anyhow,” and allowed him to walk her to the subway as he explained the magic of rituals.
The third time he “happened” to be passing through her building, Building 17—a good fifteen-minute walk to her third-floor unit from his own apartment on the fifth floor of Building 9—it was a warm night, and Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me” played out the window of an upper apartment. He arrived holding a plate of Haitian mayi moulen ak sòs pwa, poul an sòs—cornmeal with beans and stewed chicken. He knocked on her door, holding the plate and the doll, which he had ripped in half. “I’m going to make a pillow out of it,” he explained, then handed her the plate and asked her out to the movies. Bum-Bum refused. “I’m a Christian woman and I don’t do worldly things,” she said firmly. “But I’m going to Five Ends tomorrow morning. We need folding chairs. And Mount Tabernacle is offering us some.”
“I thought Tabernacle and Five Ends don’t get along,” Dominic said.
“We are Christian people, Mr. Lefleur. Their music is too loud and they fall out and speak in tongues and so forth when they gets filled with the Holy Spirit, and we don’t do that here. But the book of Hebrews twelve fourteen says ‘Strive for peace with everyone,’ which means Mount Tabernacle too. Plus my best friend, Octavia, is a deaconess there and everybody knows the police is trying to shut our church down for protecting old Sportcoat, who helped me put in my washing machine even though Housing says I’m not supposed to have one. Mount Tabernacle is with us for sure. We’ve always gotten along.”
Thus it was the sight of Dominic Lefleur, Bum-Bum, Sister Gee, and Miss Izi struggling toward the side door of Five Ends Baptist with seventeen folding chairs stuffed inside an old post office dolly, the chairs stacked six feet high, that greeted Sergeant Potts Mullen as he swung his Plymouth squad car to the front of Five Ends Baptist Church a week after Soup’s big party. Sister Gee didn’t notice him when he pulled up. Her back was to him. He watched as she peeled off from the others and moved to the rear of the church, grabbing an old-fashioned weed chopper from the back wall and stepping into a field of high weeds. The weed cutter was shaped like a golf club and she swung it high over her head, slaying weeds as she went. Had he driven by the church three weeks ago and seen that sight, he would’ve said to himself the woman looked like a cotton picker on a plantation someplace. But now he saw a woman whose long back reminded him of the sea near the Cliffs of Moher in County Clare, the part of Ireland he’d seen when he’d visited, the sea gently pushing against the mountainous shore. She looked beautiful.