Brown Girl in the Ring Page 18

  You lie, Ti-Jeanne thought.

  “A-true, me tell you,” Rudy said. “Mi-Jeanne come running to me for help. Your grandmother did putting visions in she head, trying to control she. Trying to make Mi-Jeanne stay with she. Making she see things to frighten she.”

  Ti-Jeanne remembered that night so many years ago when her mother had woken up screaming. Mi-Jeanne hadn’t wanted Mami’s comforting. She and Mami had been arguing a lot. Dunston had moved in and Mi-Jeanne was talking about leaving, taking Ti-Jeanne and finding their own place to live.

  Rudy’s words echoed in Ti-Jeanne’s head. Maybe he was telling the truth, and Mami was at the root of all their problems. Maybe Mami had tried the same trick on both Ti-Jeanne and Mi-Jeanne; caused the visions and made them feel that their only chance for being rid of them was to stay with her and receive her help. Ti-Jeanne was confused. The drug made it hard to breathe, hard to think clearly. Rudy’s voice came again:

  “Think about it little more, sweetheart. You nah see the power I did give Mi-Jeanne? Knife couldn’t cut she, blows couldn’t lick she, love couldn’t leave she, heart couldn’t hurt she. She coulda go wherever she want, nobody to stop she.”

  His voice flowed soothingly over her. Heart couldn’t hurt she. What if Tony hadn’t been able to slide into Ti-Jeanne’s heart like a thorn from a rose and stick there, aching and aching? She probably wouldn’t have got pregnant. There would be no Baby constantly demanding her attention and her energy. She coulda go wherever she want, nobody to stop she. Suppose she could have chosen her own way, instead of trying to tear herself in three to satisfy Tony, and Baby, and Mami?

  “Mi-Jeanne beg me to help she live only in she spirit, for she didn’t want the pains of the body no more. The only part of she flesh that she take into that calabash with she was she eyes, so she could see for me. She gouge them out sheself and put them in the duppy bowl, Ti-Jeanne.”

  Ti-Jeanne’s mind reeled at the image of Mi-Jeanne digging her own eyes out of her head. She must have been desperate to become a duppy!

  “And, granddaughter,” came Rudy’s soft whisper, “if you hadn’t break she bowl, she woulda never dead.”

  Rudy was right. She had killed her own mother. “Uh, uh,” Ti-Jeanne moaned through her paralyzed larynx. She couldn’t feel the tears that she knew were rolling down her face.

  “Granddaughter, I giving you a chance to be free of all this right now,” Rudy told her. “That body don’t have to be your home no more. You don’t have to feel pain no more, sweetheart. Your granddaddy could help you. After I speak the right words, the powder you take will give your spirit strength to act on it own, without the body. Let your spirit talk to me, Ti-Jeanne. Let it light the gunpowder.”

  He started mumbling the words of a ritual in a language she didn’t recognise. The mumbling went faster and faster, the words running together into a gargling noise. A gurgle. A thumping like a low drum tattoo, as though Rudy’s body were jerking about on the floor.

  The effect of the bufo powder on Ti-Jeanne was increasing. She felt herself floating free of her body. She lifted clear of the black sack. She could see Rudy quivering on the floor at her head as his lips moved in the words of the ritual. He was in some kind of trance. Crack and Barry stood nearby, watching the knife blade. She could feel the bonds parting between herself and her body. The ants-under-the-skin feeling had become distant. The pain of her distended belly had eased, and the burning in her body’s fixed-open eyes. Her astral body saw clearly through Guinea Land eyes instead, saw the spirits of the three men sitting like slipcovers over their corporeal bodies. Rudy’s fluttered and shuddered in synch with the quivering of his tranced flesh. She could still feel her body, nothing but an aching weight dragging her back to the pain of her life. If she said yes to Rudy, she could fly. She could burn bright as fire and never hurt. It was what she’d always wanted. Something clenched and released in her astral form, like an unfamiliar muscle flexing. The first mound of gunpowder on the knife burst into flame, sizzled instantly to black, and died out, leaving the rest of the gunpowder untouched. Barry pounded Crack on the shoulder, pointed at the knife. Crack nodded, his narrowed eyes holding satisfaction. Rudy kept up the incantation. Ti-Jeanne made the strange inner motion again, almost just to see if she could do it consciously. Gleefully she watched the second mound of gunpowder flare. Two more to go.

  Ti-Jeanne did an experimental roll through the air, a full 360 degrees. Her flesh body always got dizzy easily, but her duppy body had no sense of disorientation from the spinning. She dove down toward the floor and, to her delight, went right through it to the level beneath. Moving through the solid surface tickled, like swimming through bubbles.

  She was hovering above the CN Tower’s famed glass-bottomed floor. The sight of the 1,800-foot drop to the city below her would have made her flesh body queasy and afraid, but her duppy body claimed air as its home.

  Knife couldn’t cut she, blows couldn’t lick she. She could go wherever she want, nobody to stop she.

  Yes, is this I want for true, Ti-Jeanne thought. She flowed back up to the observation deck level, mentally reaching out as she did so to flame the third mound of gunpowder. One more mound left.

  The Jab-Jab was perched on the deck, knees crooked upward, feet flat on the surface. It hugged its angular knees and peered at her through the branches of its limbs. “Having fun, daughter?”

  She heard the censure in its voice. Somebody else trying to make her do what they wanted, not what she wished. “You can’t stop me,” she told it sullenly.

  “You right, doux-doux. And I can’t stop the shadow-catcher, neither,” it said, jerking a pencil-point chin in the direction of Rudy. “He did make up he mind long time to turn to the dark side. We lose he now. We can’t talk to the ones who won’t talk to us.”

  Rudy’s mumbling had taken on a rhythm. It seemed to fill the air. Its cadences pulled at Ti-Jeanne’s duppy body. Her gaze kept being pulled to him.

  The “scree, scree, scree” of a noisemaker jerked her attention away from Rudy. The Jab-Jab was smiling its jokey smile at her and swinging its hand around on its wrist. The hand whirled round and round on its unnatural joint. The three men didn’t seem to hear the racket. The Jab-Jab steadied the swinging hand with the other, stopping the screeching noise. “You ever ask your grandmother what she was?” the Jab-Jab said.

  “She was a seer woman,” Ti-Jeanne replied. Even the memory of her just murdered grandmother caused her little pain. She was impatient for the Jab-Jab to stop its chatter. She had business with Rudy.

  “Yes, it have plenty names for what Gros-Jeanne was. Myalist, bush doctor, iyalorisha, curandera, four-eye, even obeah woman for them who don’t understand. But you what she woulda call it, if you had ask she?”

  “What you want, Jab-Jab?”

  “Gros-Jeanne woulda tell you that all she doing is serving the spirits. And that anybody who try to live good, who try to help people who need it, who try to have respect for life, and age, and those who go before, them all doing the same thing: serving the spirits.”

  Ti-Jeanne remembered all the slaps and whippings she’d received at her grandmother’s hand. How was that “living good”?

  As though she’d spoken, the Jab-Jab narrowed its eyes at her and nodded. “Yes, Gros-Jeanne was a hard woman. Now Rudy, he does try and make the spirits serve he.”

  And the visions flashed around her, through her, invading sight, smell, sound, touch:

  A blow to the side of her face jolted her, sent her flying back into a cheap aluminum folding chair. She was Gros-Jeanne as a younger woman, and Rudy had just backhanded her. He stood over her, fist pulled back for a second blow. He roared, “You think say is money me make from? Eh?” Through tears and the blood in her eyes, she could see her young daughter, Mi-Jeanne, watching, fist jammed into her frightened mouth, from the bedroom doorway of the run-down apartment.

  Hunger. It filled her, burned her up. She would die of it, kill for it. She was Mi-Jeanne’s
duppy, looking up at Rudy from the little world of the calabash. From that angle, shadows limned the underplanes of his face, made him look otherworldly. He tipped a cup into the calabash, and blood poured over her, intoxicating in its heat and smell. She drank eagerly, but the cupful was not enough. “You could have more,” he told her, “when you kill Dunston for me. Kill he and trap he soul in there with you, and you could have all he blood.” She railed silently at him, but the hunger was too much. It made her a thing without a will of her own, obedient only to Rudy’s commands. She knew that she would murder her stepfather.

  She was slumped in a chair in this same room, belly painfully swollen and eyes fixed open from the effects of the zombie drug. She couldn’t move. She was Tony, watching Rudy tear a strip of living skin . . .

  “Ai! Stop, Jab-Jab, stop.” The images of Melba’s last moments were too much to bear.

  Rudy had lied to her. And she had wanted to believe it. Her grandmother had abused her offspring and had suffered for it, in her own heart’s pain as she watched her daughter and her granddaughter reject her. Love couldn’t leave she. Rudy cared nothing for love or loss. What would she be if she became his creature? Hesitantly she said to the Jab-Jab, “I can’t keep giving my will into other people hands no more, ain’t? I have to decide what I want to do for myself.” No answer. It wasn’t going to tell her. “But Jab-Jab, how I go stop someone as powerful as he?”

  “Rudy is Bull Bucker,” it said quietly, “so you have to be Duppy Conqueror.”

  She looked up, but the Jab-Jab was gone. She had to figure out how to stop Rudy herself.

  She remembered her grandmother’s words: The centre pole is the bridge between the worlds. Why had those words come to her right then?

  Ti-Jeanne thought of the centre pole of the palais, reaching up into the air and down toward the ground. She thought of the building she was in. The CN Tower. And she understood what it was: 1,815 feet of the tallest centre pole in the world. Her duppy body almost laughed a silent kya-kya, a jokey Jab-Jab laugh. For like the spirit tree that the centre pole symbolized, the CN Tower dug roots deep into the ground where the dead lived and pushed high into the heavens where the oldest ancestors lived. The tower was their ladder into this world. A Jab-Jab type of joke, oui.

  She was halfway into Guinea Land herself. She could call the spirits to help her. She wouldn’t have to call very loudly.

  What were the names Mami had told her? “Shango!” she called in her mind. “Ogun! Osain!” Her flesh body moved its lips slightly, trying through the paralyzing effect of the drug to form the same words. “Shakpana, Emanjah! Oshun, Oya! And Papa Legbara, my Eshu! Come down, come down and help your daughter!”

  With a flash of instinct, she knew that the call to the heavens should be mirrored by a call to the earth. “All you children; every one Rudy kill to feed he duppy bowl—come and let we stop he from making another one! Dunston! And Mami! And Mi-Jeanne! Is Ti-Jeanne calling you! Come up, come up and help your daughter! Melba, you come, too! Climb the pole, allyou; climb the pole!”

  She wanted to wait in her duppy body to see what would happen, but her flesh body was reeling her in again. Its pain was descending upon her. Like tumbling headfirst into mud, she rejoined her flesh body, which had worked itself partway out of the bag. The drug was beginning to fade. She could move her head a little and blink her eyes.

  The chandelier was swaying. In fact, the whole structure of the CN Tower was shaking. An 1,800-foot needle, trembling. Rudy grunted. He sat up out of his trance and in his old-man voice asked, “What the rass a-go on?”

  No one answered him. The bottles of alcohol on the bar started to clink together. The chairs shuffled around under the dinner tables. The lights flickered, and there was a low, tooth-rattling hum. Ti-Jeanne’s head felt stuffed full. She could hear the rhythm of the blood vessels in her brain, pounding like drums. Rudy was standing. He tottered on his ancient legs, grabbed for the edge of a table to steady himself. “Must be an earthquake,” Barry said nervously. He took a small step and looked around as though he could see the source of the disturbance.

  Ti-Jeanne was facing one of the windows that ringed the observation deck, so it was she who saw the flash of white light flower in the night sky, zigzag down, and strike the glass. The building flashed into the negative against her abused retinas. Black flared to blinding white, colour to dead black. The structure of the tower creaked. Outside in the miles-high air, Shango Lord Thunder drummed his rhythm while Oya of the storm flashed and shattered the air like knives. Ti-Jeanne had an impression of an ecstatic woman’s features, silver dreadlocks tossing wildly as she danced around a hugely muscled, graceful man who clasped a tall drum between his knees. The lightning flashes crawled, whipping around the length of the tower. The first of the Oldest Ones had arrived.

  Rain pelted down like boulders. The lightning cracked fissures into the tower’s structure, and water began to leak in, buckets of it. The water traced forms along the wall, and two majestic Black women stepped out from its current: graceful Oshun and beautiful Emanjah, water goddesses both, anger terrible on their unearthly faces.

  Crack groaned. His body twisted. His skin erupted in suppurating sores. Ti-Jeanne could see the halo of the spirit inhabiting his head, overpowering his own spirit. Shakpana, lord of disease. Crack reached a palsied hand to Barry for help. At Shakpana/Crack’s touch, pus-filled buboes blossomed on the other man’s body. Barry trembled, clutched at his own throat, and fell dead to the ground. His corpse began to swell immediately with putrefaction. Oshun wrinkled her nose in distaste and fanned her face with the intricate cutwork fan she was holding. It appeared to be made of beaten gold. She delicately picked up the hem of her white-trimmed yellow robe and stepped out of the way. Her sister Emanjah simply quirked an eyebrow in amusement. The tribal scars shifted on her cheeks when she smiled.

  Then Ti-Jeanne felt the beneficence of Osain, the healer, leaching the poison from her body. Her burns and cuts healed. She could move again. She was holding Osain in her head, but it was as though he were cradling her consciousness in his hands, allowing her to remain aware simultaneously with him. Ti-Jeanne sat up and thrust off the black bag. She felt both light and heavy, part spirit, part flesh. Her eyes searched and found the knife with which Rudy had tried to bind her. It had kept its weight of gunpowder. With her spirit strength, she melted the knife where it lay. It shrank into itself in a glowing lump of slag, leaving the last mound of gunpowder unfired. “No,” she said simply to her grandfather.

  Ogun-who-wields-the-knife nodded his satisfaction at her. He picked up the red-hot lump of metal and popped it into his mouth like a toolum candy. He smiled, pleasure in every deep line of his broad, brown face. He licked the last sweetness of the iron off his fingers, then with his square, strong blacksmith’s hands, he bent to the floor, brushed the gunpowder away, and was gone.

  Lightning cracked once more, then the storm vanished as suddenly as it had arrived.

  “One more of we left to appear, cousin,” said Osain with her lips. Rudy fled to the elevator and started frantically pushing at the button.

  The pressure in Ti-Jeanne’s head was almost gone, now that the Oldest Ones had manifested. Except for Legbara. Where was her Eshu?

  She understood then. She knew why the Jab-Jab was always grinning. She laughed, starting deep in her belly. She laughed at all her fears, all her sulks. She laughed for the pleasure of knowing that Mi-Jeanne’s and Gros-Jeanne’s spirits had reached home safe to Guinea Land. She laughed at the sorry man who had thought he could hold death forever in a calabash. She laughed, because now she knew who the Jab-Jab was.

  The elevator dinged. The door opened, and there he was, tophatted, skull-faced, impossibly tall. He held a pretty sprig of nightshade coyly in front of his mouth and giggled along with her. Papa Legbara, Prince of Cemetery. Her Eshu. The Jab-Jab.

  He was supporting a child in his other arm. Her arms were wrapped trustingly around his neck. She turned her head to look at R
udy, and the lips of the deep slash in her neck rubbed against each other. Rudy’s toothless mouth dropped open. He mewled and backed away. “Yes,” said Legbara in his death-rattle voice, “is you send this one to me, Master Sheldon. In fact, all of these my children.” He stepped out of the elevator, followed by ghoul after ghoul, many of them children, all bearing the marks of Rudy’s knife on their bodies. A man dragged himself along the floor on the stumps that had once terminated in hands and feet. Melba held her own skin draped over one arm. Her stride was determined. And . . .

  “Mami,” Ti-Jeanne said. Her grandmother smiled proudly at her. Her chest gaped open where her heart had been removed. “You do good, sweetness,” Mami told her.

  “No!” It was Rudy. “Oonuh can’t touch me! I move beyond where the powers could reach!”

  Mami turned to him, hands on her hips. “Rudolph Sheldon. What a man I take for my husband, oui? You have to understand, Rudy. The powers deaf to you, is true. Them won’t come if you call. But is not you call them this time.”

  Rudy tried to flee, hobbling on his aged legs. His face was a mask of terror, lips gaping. He tripped over Barry’s corpse and fell hard. The distended cadaver split open under his weight. The stench was appalling. Whining, Rudy tried to wipe the gore off his body and crawl away from the corpse at the same time. The ghouls silently blocked his way.

  “No, master,” said Legbara. “You ain’t going nowhere. You try to give me all these deaths in exchange for you own, but I refuse the deal. I give them all back to you.”

  Rudy screamed as the weight of every murder he had done fell on him. Ti-Jeanne had to look away then. The sounds coming from him were bad enough: a desperate plea for mercy; a choked-off gargle; a cracking; then a wet, ripping noise. When she looked back, the chunks of flesh lying there looked like something that should have been on a butcher’s block. It was fair, but it sickened her.