Temple of My Familiar (14 page)

“She lived on the other side of the Island from us, and sometimes she rode a mule over to see Lissie, and sometimes Lissie’s mother went and got her and brought her back by boat. Eula was good to have around, too, while Lissie was pregnant, because she had become a food
fool
and would always double-check anything that went into Lissie’s mouth. When she was pregnant herself, Eula had lived mostly on a diet of fatback, syrup, and white chalk that pregnant women dug out of a pit up in the hills, but she wouldn’t let Lissie have but the occasional thimbleful because she said that craving it was a sign that Lissie needed to eat beets, which she often fixed for her, and that eaten in excess, the chalk, which was full of iron that the body couldn’t absorb anyway, locked the bowels and weakened the blood vessels in the lower extremities. So both of these women seemed underfoot all the time near the end of Lissie’s term.

“Then one day, about a week before they thought she was due, they took the boat out to catch some fish. I think it must have been the season for croaker; that was old Dorcy’s favorite fish. Just after they left, Lissie had the first pain, and I ran down to the beach and tried to wave them back to shore. They thought I was waving good-bye, and so they waved good-bye back to me, and off into the horizon they rowed. I knew they’d be back in two or three hours at the most, so I didn’t worry; Lissie didn’t worry either. But what do you think happened?

“Out in the boat, Eula Mae and her mother got into an argument over which side of the boat to fish from, and as the talk got more and more heated and hearkened back to more and earlier disputes, mother and daughter almost came to blows. Dorcy’s temper was a frightful thing; it lacked foresight. At some point she swung her oar at Eula, and Eula took it away from her and flung it into the bay. Then Dorcy took the other oar and threw it away too. Now how do you like that? I’m just glad me and Lissie didn’t know anything about it at the time. So there they were, with no fish, no wind, mad as two hatters, sitting fuming at each other with their arms folded and their lips poked out, in a boat that went neither forward nor backward nor sideways, and wouldn’t for the rest of the day.

“At the house Lissie was beginning to worry. Not so much about herself as about her mother and grandmother. After about three hours Lissie said she’d discharged her plug and that her waters had broke. That was my first understanding that if the two women didn’t hurry and get back, I would have to deliver our baby. Now you can laugh if you want to, but though I could see plain as anything that Lissie was big with the baby and even beginning to sweat from the pain, and the baby was lunging about inside her, as far as I was concerned there still didn’t seem any possible way she could have a baby; it just seemed farfetched. I don’t know what I thought then. Nobody ever told you anything, if you were a boy, about childbirth. They just didn’t. And whenever a woman was having a baby on the Island, the husband was sent out of the house. He usually hung around the potbellied stove we had in the store. After a while one of his oldest children would come get him and, with a scared and sheepish look, off he’d go back home. I think somewhere in me I still believed fairies brought babies—I sure was praying they did—so I was beginning to wonder what I would do if that was just a rumor and fairies really didn’t. Come to think about it, I didn’t have the faintest notion of what fairies were supposed to be like either.

“Lissie had been walking up and down the room, but pretty soon the pains got so bad she had to lay down, and then, too, there was a trickle of something like watery mucous coming out of her. I helped her lie down on the rubber pad with a sheet over it, and I held her hand and kissed her about a thousand times every time she let out a whimper, which really just wrung my heart. Then she told me: ‘You have to deliver the baby, Hal. It’s a girl,’—she knew this because the baby always had hung low—‘and I want you to know, in case anything happens, I want to name her Lulu.’

“Lulu was the name Lissie had had when she was part of a harem in the northern pan of Africa, before any of that area was desert. It wasn’t called a ‘harem’ way back then, but some other name I can’t recall. ‘Weepen,’ I think. But it was really the great-great-granddaddy of all the harems we hear about or read about today. She said Lulu made her think of the green hills and the green fields where they used to put up their animal-skin tents, and of how happy she was in the harem, because the master was old and sickly and had hundreds of women it tired him just to see, not to mention to try to do anything to, and Lissie (Lulu) had had two lovers. One of them was another woman in the harem, named Fadpa, and the other was one of the eunuchs, named Habisu, whose job it was to keep the women from running away. They used to all sit around and plot about how to run away together, but Habisu was afraid to leave the safety of the harem, and he liked the sweets the women shared with him and the colorful clothing he got to wear. He was from a poor family, and he thought it wasn’t such a bad thing to give up his nuts for such pleasant room and board. Now I don’t know whether this was really the truth or whether Lissie was committing slander on poor Habisu. She used to laugh so, and shock me, too, telling me about her life as Lulu. She would talk about Fadpa and look at me and see that I didn’t quite get something, and she would just laugh and laugh. She had been a great dancer—she says she took it up out of boredom—and taught dancing to the young women who were captured or bought and brought into the harem. She had regular class hours. And she taught how to make love to a woman with just hands and tongue to all the eunuchs, who, she said, really came to love her. Of course some of them didn’t care about that sort of thing with women anyhow. There were some who just sat around and talked about clothes and food and ate, ate, ate. On her birthday they would make her cakes filled with her favorite thing: dates. She and Fadpa lived, with the other women and the eunuchs, completely cut off from the rest of society back then, and the rest of the world in general. Over time they became devoutly religious.

“They eventually got to the place they could perform miracles. Miracles, Lissie says she learned, as Lulu, are the direct result of concentration. The greatest miracle they performed was to get their freedom from the harem at the rather ripe old ages of ninety-six and a hundred and three, which was granted them by the great-granddaughter of their old master. They had prayed and concentrated on this for eighty years. This woman had been sent off somewhere far away to school, where she passed as a man, and, upon returning home, was shocked to see these old women locked up behind her grandfather’s palace. He was dead by then and had taken some of the youngest and prettiest members of his harem with him. His scowling sons had simply pitched the women into the flames on top of their father’s popping and oozing body, calmly, one by one. They, of course, were screaming and scratching and clinging to the sons’ ankles, but those, as the saying goes, were the breaks.

“Lulu and Fadpa had some good years left still, though their wrinkled faces looked like two raisins; so they set up shop as fortune-tellers and lived free, if not content, until they died—which they were happy enough to do, because what they noticed, once outside the security of the harem, was that in the world of men there is always war. They could not stand the noise and confusion of the battles that never ceased. They longed for the quiet and the peace of the harem, and the hours of cooking and eating and dancing or watching younger women dance. And when men came to them and asked their fortunes, they yawned. For every man, they saw war, a future of fighting. It was as clear as the sun. Their palms were bright red. But Lulu and Fadpa would say, instead, that they saw a hundred pretty women locked in a room to which the man in front of them, alone, had the key and at least half an evening of a man’s favorite kind of peace. This pleased the men. If they added that they also saw stores of dates, figs, silver, and gold, the men’s happiness was complete. They got used to throwing in camels, goats, and other men’s wives at random. They became quite famous.

“The name Lulu was fine with me. It was more a sound than a name, but so what? When our Lulu was born, I could see that she would make anyone think of green. She was all gold and honey and amber, that made you think of pansies. She was a springtime all her own.

“Now the hardest task was before me. It was very hot. Lissie was sweating buckets. I had plenty of water boiling on the stove. This much preparation, at least, I knew you had to have. Then Lissie began to really moan. It was horrible. Timidly, and with rising fear, I managed to glance down between her legs. I expected to see the top of the baby’s head. Maybe. Since something did seem to be happening down that way. And Lissie was moaning so. But no. It looked like a cheek. Either a cheek on a little face, or a cheek on a little behind. I looked again. Lissie’s stomach rippled, as if the baby turned itself over. Now it looked more like a shoulder. I looked still again. It looked like a knee. Or was it a side?

“I tell you, I felt like Prissy in
Gone With the Wind.

“Lissie was stretched so wide I didn’t see why she didn’t split. And, as I stood there watching, I saw she was just about to start to. At the same time, her moans were turning into screams. I couldn’t bear it. My instinct was just to step outside the door and do away with myself. I couldn’t stand the thought that I was causing her this pain. That making love with her caused this sad, pitiful behavior of hers. She wasn’t Lissie anymore, you see? She wasn’t even like an animal. She was out of her mind, out of control. She hurt so bad she couldn’t even tell me what to do. The baby was obviously stuck, trying to come out sideways. Lissie had turned one of the funniest of the gray shades I had ever seen.

“Every once in a while I ran to the porch and looked out on the bay for Eula and that fool Granny Dorcy, but they were nowhere in sight. Besides, night was coming on fast. I looked up the hill for some customers coming to the store. There wasn’t a soul. No one but me, Lissie, and little Lulu.

“I prayed for strength and I prayed for my wife and child. Then I washed my hands real good and greased them with Vaseline and greased Lissie with Vaseline and greased what I could get my ringers on of the baby with Vaseline. I had Lissie laughing about this one time; I said Vaseline was one big thing she and her mother had in common: her mother used it on her face, and said that’s what kept her skin so young, and I used it on Lissie’s behind. Anyway, I began to gently push the baby around, kind of slowly spinning her. And I started to talk to her, telling her to come on out, that everything was ready for her and we knew we were straining her but that we didn’t mean her no harm. I don’t know what all I said; I was dying from the pain Lissie was feeling. Hating myself and all mankind. I mean I started making some serious promises to God. Way after a while I identified the baby’s arm, really the upper shoulder. Then I somehow got hold of the arm, it felt no bigger than a thumb, and I worked at it, all the time telling Lulu about how good she was going to have it out here, and I finally pulled that out. Oh, God, what next, I thought. And Lissie fainted. But then she came to, but just looked destroyed, and I could see in her eyes the hundreds of times she had suffered in giving birth, and I swore it would never happen again, and my desire for her, for sex with her or with any woman, died, and I became a eunuch myself. I just knew I would never be able to deal with making love to a woman ever again.

“And then Lissie sort of laughed and said, ‘I thought somebody was supposed to tell me to push.’ She hadn’t, all this time, because we’d forgot—and it turned out later, according to her mother and Dorcy,
not
pushing was just the right thing to have done. I’d certainly forgot about the pushing, if I’d ever known it, and I grabbed old Lulu by the hand—it was like shaking hands with a little slippery rabbit—and stuck my other hand up in Lissie so that my fingers kind of pulled on Lulu’s armpit and lower jaw and I said, ‘Well go on and push then.’ And she pushed like she was coming and really seemed to enjoy it in just about the same way. And that shocked the hell out of me. And then Lulu was born, snuffling and sneezing even without anybody slapping her or blowing smoke in her face, and for a minute I felt real confused and left out. I laid Lulu on Lissie’s stomach, and Lissie wiped her off with a rag, and I started looking for a knife to cut the cord, and by the time I found one—it was in the boiling water on the stove and too hot to touch right away—Lissie had bitten through the cord with her teeth.

“‘God, it’s like rubber,’ she said, making a face and spitting into the rag. And I looked at Lissie sitting up now with the naked baby next to her naked body, and I thought to myself how primitive she was.

“When the afterbirth came—a lump of bloody, liverish-looking stuff that made me feel even woozier than I was—she wrapped it in newspaper and gave it to me to bury at the corner of the house for luck, so that we could have a houseful of babies. When she wasn’t looking though, I threw it into the fire. It wouldn’t burn. It put the fire out.”

“L
ISSIE HAD FOUR MORE
children,” said Mr. Hal, staring into the remains of his coffee, which had long been cold, “but three of them died while they were still in babyhood. I delivered all of them, though none of them were mine. One was a little boy, the child of that picture taker I mentioned. It died before its second birthday. One was by some other lover she had, and the last two were by your great-uncle Rafe. They started out healthy enough, but only a son by Rafe made it to being grown—your uncle Cornelius, who was killed while on duty in the navy. And Lulu was always healthy as she could be from the minute she was born. Lissie never wanted anybody but me to deliver her babies, just like she didn’t want anybody but me to be their daddy. I wanted to be with her, too. I got to the place I loved delivering her babies, and I loved the babies themselves. We developed what you could call an understanding. But before we reached it, we had, both of us, shed rivers of pain.