The black swan (78 page)

"You care about me? You admit that?"

He looked quickly to her upturned face, the questioning eyes that demanded an answer. "Of course I do. Ever since you were just a little tiny thing who laughed when I gave you a ride on my shoulders."

She turned away sharply, a sardonic smile on her lips. Nearby the water made soft slapping sounds against the shore. "Adam, will you marry me?"

Adam went white. "I'm married."

"You were married. Were! She drowned!"

Through stiff lips he said, "Stop talking about her. She—"

Angela went on, heedless, "All my 'life I expected to marry you! You promised you'd wait for me, and you broke that promise! That's why she died!"

"I was teasing," Adam whispered. "Teasing is not a promise."

"Next you'll deny you love me!" She took a step back. "Adam, look at me. You have said I am too young for you. What do you think now?"

She turned before him, like Glory or Dulcie, pleased with a new dress. Adam's head buzzed, looking against his will at this woman he had considered a child. She was tall, willowy, her pose seductive. In her pretty face, so reminis-

cent of Ullah, there was none of her mother's unquench-at)Ie innocence. In her body there was no babyish softness.

She saw it in his eyes. She said triumphantly, "I'm ripe, Adam, like a peach ready for picking. I'm ready for a man. Ready for you."

"God." He swallowed. "Angela, you can't do this . . . go around putting yourself on the market like a—a slab of bacon."

"The market has only one prospect, Adam. I won't have you marry some other woman like last time. I'm grown now. There's no reason to wait. You're free, and I'm ready."

"Don't talk like that!"

"Why not? Who's to say I can't, and who would care if I did?"

"I care." He tore his eyes away from her. "Your Aunt Zoe cares. Your father cares. Oh, God, Angela, I care!"

"How do you care, Adam? Do you want me? Or are you just helping another little pickaninny?"

Mouth open, he pivoted to face her. "What are you saying?"

She laughed contemptuously. "Oh, I know! I'm a nigger, Adam. Tom told me. Even showed me Zoe's letter to my mother."

"Did he tell you . . . everything?"

"She was a slave, and they murdered her. Tom would be dead, too, if it hadn't been for you." She shrugged, her hard, angry eyes on the ocean. "If he'd died, no one would ever know I'm not white. Not even me. You owe me something for that. You made me suffer for what I am.

"Damn you! What you would have been is a slave, if your father hadn't loved her enough to make her his wife."

"And killed her because of it. Some love."

He grabbed Tier shoulders. Her insolent smile remained. "There was no woman finer than your mother! You remember that and try to live up to her. Tom loved your mother as few men ever love any woman."

"Will you love me like that, Adam?"

He released her. "I love you as an uncle ... a brother."

"You're a liar!" She ran, stopping halfway up the beach. "You want me! Liar, liar!"

During the holidays an uneasy reserve lay between Adam and Angela, dampening Zoe's«festive celebration. Angela was more cooperative than she had been in months, but Adam was restive and ill at ease. Zoe suspected what was bothering him. Gently she brought their conversations around to his ship, Nassau, the war, the blockade, anything that might stir him to leave. Though it tore at her, she wanted her son to leave. She couldn't send Angela away, therefore it had to be Adam.

By the end of January Zoe was nearly out of her mind with worry. Adam showed no signs of wanting to go back to sea, and the tension generated by himself and Angela was all but unbearable. It was only a matter of time before something happened.

By the first week in February Zoe decided to tell Adam bluntly that she wanted him to leave.

She found him in the study. He hadn't shaved, and for the first time since he had been home, he was drunk. His eyes were red, his face haggard as though he hadn't slept in days. Zoe's nose crinkled at the heavy alcohol smell. She sat rigid-backed on her chair.

"Adam, this has got to stop. Dulcie's death was an accident. I love you, dear, but I will not be a part in your blaming yourself."

He wiped his hand across his forehead and then reached quickly for his glass, downing the bourbon with a grimace.

Zoe snatched the bottle. "Stop it! I won't tolerate this!-I won't have another drunk under my roof, never again!'*

It was as if she had slapped him. He had not thought of his mother's feelings. To her he must seem like Paul Tremain, that ghostly figure whom Adam remembered as a drunken, vindictive man. As a child Adam had run from his father's hot temper and unjust punishments. But Zoe had lived with that man, suffered through days and nights as his wife. Adam's red-rimmed eyes filled with tears. "What's the matter with me, Ma?"

"There's nothing wrong with you, Adam. This time will pass, dear."

Morosely he shook his head. "Am I like him?"

"Who?"

"My father."

Zoe's hand fluttered to her breast. "Paul? Oh, no, Adaml

Never. There is no similarity between you and Paul Tre-main. None!"

Adam shut his eyes tightly. "Something is wrong with me. Oh, God! Ma, I wanted her; I wanted her. She's like my sister, but I wanted her."

Zoe's knees gave way. Last night she had heard a woman's soft tread in the hall and had pulled her quilt tight around herself. Perhaps she had even known it was Angela going to Adam. Stammering, she asked, "Adam . . . n-nothing happened? You didn't—?"

Wildly he shook his head. "No. No. She's a child."

Zoe sighed in relief. "Angela's no child. She never really was."

Adam shuddered. He could still feel the smooth, silky softness of her bare skin against him, smell the clean, unsophisticated fragrance of a young girl. He stared down at his hands with disgust and felt again the sensual stirring of his blood as he remembered how he had touched her and how, with his hand once on her breast, he had given way to the fierce surge of passion, the fire that coursed through his loins, his mouth hungrily seeking the solace of hers.

He stirred uneasily, glad the desk blocked his mother's view of his body. "I can't stay here, Ma. I have to leave."

"I know," Zoe whispered.

Chapter Five

Dulcie opened her heavy eyelids. In the red wavering light the Face stared, heavy brows shadowing all-seeing eyes, a long nose, and down-turned open mouth. The forehead was grooved deep with judgment and disapproval. It moved sometimes, changing expressions, but it had not yet come near.

She closed her eyes so she wouldn't see the Face anymore. Her groping fingers explored the hammock upon which she lay. Around her body were wound strips of crisscrossed cloth. Her hair was plaited into a coronet. She was chilly in spite of the choking, steamy warmth that

rose from the pit beneath her, some cauldron of hell that issued bubblings and hissings, that blew steam to coat her with a malodorous sheen of moisture.

Tears slipped down. She didn't want to be dead. The dead suffer pain; they hurt, punished for earthly sins. Pain and burning. She burned. Her chest was freshly seared by every indrawn breath. Low in her belly a squeezing cramping drew her tighter and tighter into a spiral of pain that issued from her in a hot flood, and still the pain remained. Her skin burned, aching in a thousand places that throbbed at a touch. And inside was the terrible empty longing for something, someone.

Her eyes ached as she strained toward a soft footstep, a singing voice. It was the woman. The woman's fingers were skilled as she cleansed Dulcie's wounds, feeling her forehead with calloused hands, pressing on Dulcie's belly. Her monotonous rhythmic chant cajoled and soothed. It eased the awful loneliness.

*Oman ob de red sun, Mam'bo Luz ten' you, eh, eh.

Gib you medsin, mek you speerit float free

Out ob you body.

Luz let you do de dance fo' Erzulie, eh, eh.

Dulcie let her eyes close. It was the woman who placed the heated stones in the pit. The woman was her imp of hell, pretending to help, but instead keeping her prisoner unable to touch the earth, unable to go to those warm, loving memories that were too vague to grasp. She could only feel, and let the salty tears stream uselessly down her face.

The woman was wide and plump, with pale hair hacked short. Her skin was that of a serpent's, mottled, brown and pink. Pinto ... a pinto woman.

Dulcie stiffened against the bindings, some deep-buried instinct awakened. Cold. Wet. Wind. Water. Pinto woman . . . coming, bringing indignity, hurting, the abysmal sense of loss, taking away all good, taking her. She would escape, run from this red-black place of light.

A gray streak opened in the dark walls. The woman came in, singing her strange song about floating and dancing. She was there, her rough palm on Dulcie's chest above the swaddling. How long a time had passed? When had she come?

She began to clean Dulcie's infected coral wounds. As she poured on her powerful herb concoctions, the pain struck deep. Dulcie gasped, her weakened body retreating from this new torture. She watched as if from a distance, feeling but shutting out the feelings.

Dulcie looked up at the woman, unable to make herself known. The woman did undignified things to her body, chanting her monotonous song. Dulcie squeezed her eyes shut against the hideous sins she suffered, unable *to stop what took place. It was hell. A place of powerlessness, indignity, evil.

Dulcie's head was raised. Broth wetted her lips. In her trancelike state she wanted to drink of it as of a river flowing sweetly through herself, but the vessel was taken away. A fruitlike substance rolled endlessly over her tongue and down her thoat, quenching the ungovernable thirst. Dulcie shut her eyes tight, waiting for the medicinal herbs to work further sorcery, waiting for them to carry her to that Other World.

Perhaps she was becoming like the imp-woman. Suddenly her other-self floated free of the bindings. From some high place she looked down on that bound figure of herself and saw a sprig of oleander on her breast. The pit yawned empty now. The room lost its stifling warmth. The Face stared. As she watched, the Face leaned over and looked at the self in the hammock.

The thatched walls sparkled and glowed, in geometric patterns, merging and emerging, forming new patterns, dripping, cooling, disappearing into thatch again. She slid down a beam of pale light into herself, content for body and spirit to remain prisoner awhile longer.

Her hazy mind groped for her past, for someone taken from her. Like the geometric pattern, the memories emerged, then merged once more into the gray nothingness that filled her. She stiffened. Green water swirled at her, tumbling, tearing,.filling her mouth and nose and ears, spitting her out upon the sharp cutting coral shore.

Time seemed endless, yet nothing. The woman came and went in the same instant. When Dulcie could think at all, her thought was only of hell. She lived there now, endlessly, timelessly. There had been water, then the fire and brimstone, the scourging of the body, and now the chanting and the scourging of the mind. She was being created

again. When she was but a husk, the Devil would take her. Lucifer waited.

Sometimes Dulcie's personal imp spoke understandably. Dulcie didn't know if she understood the language of Hades or if the imp spoke her language or if it was merely another Satanic refinement of her torture.

Sometimes in the blood-colored night grotesque dreams leaped before her eyes, dreams of a smiling black-haired man near enough to touch. When she reached for him, he became dust. She dreamed of a child, crying because it was lost. Awakening, she sorrowed all the deeper because she knew not for whom she sorrowed.

The days passed. The infections tightened their sharp-clawed grip. Down, down she sank into unawareness, except of the consuming fixe.

She no longer knew of the pinto woman's ministrations. She lay breathing shallow, her skin hot, her eyes glassy and unseeing.

The pinto woman worked over Dulcie, affirming what she already knew. It was time to consult higher powers. In the oum'phor, the temple room, the pinto woman sprinkled cockleshells and studied them intently. The red-haired one had been given to Baron Samedi, Lord of the Cemetery, and two dead-spirits sent to collect her. If she, MamlDO Luz, did not act quickly, not only would Lucifer be cheated of a beautiful body to house his soul but Mam'bo Luz as well. The woman from the sea would die.

Luz assessed her considerable powers. Baron Samedi would not give the woman up easily. What if Luz made an exchange? Baron Samedi wanted a body and a soul. Luz would offer him her own ugly-like-a-frog body and the sick woman's useless soul. Then, through ritual, the powerful spirit of Luz would enter the body of the red-haired woman and continue its earthly journey housed in shining beauty.

Such a transformation, properly proclaimed, would make her powers unmistakable, for she would have successfully bargained with the Lord of the Cemetery. She could become handmaiden to Mama Moon, Erzulie, as in her heart she had always been. Her spirit, cleansed and revitalized, would be more powerful than Lucifer.

Luz spat contemptuously. Desperate to change his hideous appearance, Lucifer lacked the audacity of Luz,

Daughter of the Sun and the Dark Night. Lucifer's powers were of earth, not of the spirits.

She shook the cockleshells again. The voodoo gods— the mysteres —would be with her.

At dark Dulcie was carried, barely breathing, into the ritual hut, the oum'phor. She was laid, properly oriented to the cardinal points, on a mat near the center post of the thatched hut.

In the caille-guede, an inner chamber, ritual drums beat softly. A veve representing a coffin was traced on the floor with ashes and coffee grounds. Two small mats covered the cabalistic design. With ashes, the sign of the Cross was made over the mats.

"I call fo' de red hair *oman,** Luz said. "Mam'bo Luz command de red hair 'oman ter walk inter de caille-guede."

The ogantier made an insistent clangor on his flattened bell. Dulcie's attendants shed their garments and put them on inside out. Dulcie's lips, crackling with fever, parted. The brown people listened for the dead-spirits that inhabited her body to speak through her. "We abide. We abide. We not depa't."