House of Rougeaux(7)

The plants worked together, and Abeje marveled. Anaya was there to soothe the heart. Each plant had a song, its own notes, and they called among themselves as she had heard the birds and insects do. They gave her their names. In her hands they would do their work.

Then from her own belly, her own heart and throat, came her song. It flew high like a bird, and hummed low to the ground in a steady rhythm. It played in the wind, and joined together with the songs of all the plants. Now she lived in their village, and her own song brought forth her strength. She was a rooted tree, a rushing river, and the solid earth. She was the dancing flame, and the wind, the breath of the Holy One itself.

Abeje’s feet balanced once again on the narrow bridge. Down below, her brother lay beside her. The bridge stretched out ahead, she who was awake in her dream-body, and her steps were slow. The Holy One breathed above.

Fever burned her insides, leaving a trail of ashes.

She saw Overseer, reduced to his bed with fever himself. She knew that when she rose from her sickness, he would cross his own bridge, and she would not see him again.

In the days that followed Abeje’s return from the Sick House, Adunbi didn’t want her to go alone to fetch water in the morning. He didn’t want her to lift a heavy load of firewood or even go into the Grove. Over what Abeje did during the day’s work he had no say, but in the Quarters he watched her every move with piercing attention. One night he shouted at her as she was bent over the cooking fire, saying she was far too close and would fall into it if she became dizzy again.

“Adu,” Abeje hissed, “I am not a child.” Even as the words escaped her, she felt their falsity, because under Adunbi’s gaze she did feel like a child, shameful and unworthy.

She had never spoken in a harsh tone to her brother before and he stepped back in shock, his mouth agape. He turned on his heel and strode toward the empty hut. A loose palm frond from the thatched roof hung over the doorway and he yanked it, tearing it off.

There was fire inside Adunbi. Abeje could see its red halo. The spiky palm tree that guarded Adunbi was ablaze, white and crackling. He screamed, reached up and seized more of the thatch, ripping it off the roof. He tore at it again and again, until blood ran down his arms. No one tried to stop him, not Abeje, nor the others who slept in their hut.

Abeje sank to her heels. Adunbi’s fire would consume the Quarters, the whole of the sugar estate. It would consume her, Abeje, the cause of his pain, because somehow she had let Overseer do what he did. She had not been invisible: there in the field, as she should have been, invisible as she had been once, when she was so small. Overseer had seen her female shape, bent over the cut cane, and he had cut her down too.

Abeje scrambled forward, sweeping up the fallen fronds of the thatch and hurling them onto the coals under the cooking pot, where they smoked and sparked. The flames rose high into the sky, a pillar of flame, all the way up to where the starlight Anaya sparkled. For a moment she was alone with Anaya, floating in her peace, and this cooled the flames that attacked her skin. Abeje was just a baby, Anaya seemed to say, this fire did not belong to her. It had not, in fact, burned her.

Now, down on the hard earth, the cooking fire and the palm fronds had spent themselves. Thin trails of ashes lay about Abeje’s feet, marking the places where the fire had raged. The hut was half destroyed. Abeje saw Adunbi slumped to the ground, covering his face. She went to him, and he let her tend to his bleeding hands.

They slept that night in view of the stars, thankful there was no rain.

At the end of the next day, when Adunbi returned from the barns, he found that someone had left several bundles of new thatch stacked beside the hut. He did not allow anyone from the Quarters to help him repair the roof, not even Abeje, but he stopped scolding her as she fetched firewood and water for the cooking pot.



* * *



Sometimes at night by the cooking fires the people spoke of an Obeah woman, a great healer, who lived on a sugar estate some leagues away. She traveled to tend the sick, and often the sick or injured were brought to her. But travel was quite difficult, especially as bondsmen had little leave for such things.

There was a light-skinned carpenter and his wife, Floria, who had a hut to themselves, a small distance apart from the Quarters. Unlike most of the people, who on Sundays tended to what crops they had and business of their own, the carpenter had Sunday and half of Saturday free as well. He sometimes hired himself out for wages, or was seen mending his roof, or building a pen to keep pigs and the like. His wife took sick when she was heavy with their first child. Louise, who helped many women birth children, went to visit her. The wife had pains and weakness, and bleeding before her time. Louise had strong, clever hands but no knowledge of medicines.

Abeje, now in her fifteenth year, heard Louise tell Vere that the carpenter would not take his wife to the Sick House, saying people went there only to die. So one night the carpenter took a horse from the stable and went to seek the Obeah woman, and the next night she arrived.

She sat erect on the horse, in a long dark dress and a blue cloth wound tightly around her head. Everyone tending their fires watched as the carpenter led the horse to his hut and brought her inside. Several people went to see what the Obeah might need for her work, and to have a look at her. All were curious, and many hoped they might ask for her help as well. They did not see her come out again that night, but early in the morning she appeared in the Quarters. The people bade her to sit down by the largest fire. Word spread around that she wanted coffee to drink, but none was to be had. Someone found some chicory, and another had a bit of blackjack made from burnt sugar, and soon a pot was heating for her.