My Soul to Keep (7 page)
Once again, he had killed.
Never kill again. That had been his vow. After the Century of Blood, the years of rage, he promised himself he would never again use his hands for killing. For a hundred years, Dawit had lived by his own law. Yet, in a moment’s forgetting, he’d done it so easily. So effortlessly.
What aberration of nature would murder his own child?
He remembered a conversation he’d had with his Life brothers years ago, smoking opium and feeling full of themselves, when they’d compared themselves to the Yorubas’ immortal Orisha, the Spirits. You, Dawit, a brother told him, are Ogun: Iron Spirit, warrior, lonely self-exile. “Oh! I am afraid of Ogun,” they’d chanted in Yoruba, laughing in a mock prayer. “His long hands can save his children from the abyss. Save me!”
No, he was no god. He could not save anyone, not even little Rosalie. His only power was to bring death to others, despair to himself.
“This is damnation,” Dawit whispered into the darkness, not loud enough to awaken the woman beside him. They were not touching at this moment, their nakedness was separated by several inches. Perhaps a taste of her navel with the tip of his tongue or a quick gaze at her sleeping face would wipe his mind free. But he did not move, so his mind remained hostage.
Never love again. That too had been his vow. How foolish he’d been to forsake it! He should have realized by now that, to him, love was much more perilous than mere killing.
Love that which is constant, like yourself
, Khaldun had told them all when they consecrated themselves to the Living Blood in the underground temple in Lalibela.
The body heals itself, but the mind does not
.
Now, 450 years later, Dawit knew what Khaldun had meant. His suffering, his worries, his losses, would be his living death. Nature had been poised to take his child, and for the first time he’d been a witness to nature’s inevitable triumph: his own child among the successsion of mortal lives constantly flickering out around him. In a blink of an eye, this was what became of a child. Every child. Always.
Was it more humane that he had taken Rosalie instead? No. It had been a selfish impulse, his shock at the profanity nature had made of her.
He should not have gone to see Rosalie. And he should not be sleeping beside this woman who had led him, again, to love, promising him a deeper abyss. Like Adele.
Before he could fight it, the horrible image swallowed Dawit’s memories: Adele’s naked corpse swinging from a rope tied around the thick branch of a tree. Adele’s face, which had kissed his, wrenched in painful death; her fingers, which had owned his private parts, bumping lifeless against her hipbones. He hadn’t remembered, until his eyes had seen Adele’s twirling carcass, what a mortal’s death meant. An end. A silenced voice. A stolen laugh. An emptied brain. Forever gone.
His own lynching had been sweet relief, for a precious moment. He swung beside Adele for a full day, moaning and sobbing, the rope slicing into his neck, always seeking to make him quiet. Three times, he gave the rope its victory; when his breath stopped, when he felt his cervical vertebra about to snap beneath his flesh, he did not fight. He let death come. And when he awakened, each time gasping to breathe, new tears waiting, he let death come again. And again. His last sight, always, was Adele.
Why must he always reawaken? Why couldn’t the Living Blood inside of him ever rest?
At last, when it was nearly dawn, he’d given up and found the strength to grip the rope above his head, hoisting himself up by his arms until the deadly coil released him. He was free.
Free? Yes, he remembered, enslaved no more. Free with no reason to celebrate his freedom.
“Was this what you wanted, Adele?” he’d sobbed to her corpse, which remained frozen as though it still hung in the air even after he’d cut her down and rocked her in his arms. “Was this the freedom you followed me to find? I can’t follow you where you’ve gone.”
He’d become a killer, once again, to blot out his loss. When the Union regiment disturbed his hermit’s camp after Adele died, Dawit’s prayer for vengeance was answered. He was armed for battle with a striped flag, a ragged uniform of blue, and a bayonet, the wicked firearm that doubled as a spear’s tip. He used his weapon well. He watered fields with blood.
And it was not enough. Never enough.
This new century, that much closer to the new millennium, had brought him hope. No more killing, he’d told himself. He earnestly tried to preserve his humanity; first through disciplined meditation and study under Khaldun, then by escaping to the mortal pleasures most of his Life Brothers did not care to know.
But his century of peace, clearly, was over.
Rosalie had shown him his own frailty. He could no longer navigate his path, imprisoned as he was by his emotions and an immortal’s haughty whims.
One killing, one loss. One loss, one killing. Maybe loss was his price for Life.
Dawit smothered a hot sob in his throat, afraid to make a sound. He was not alone, and he could not explain his tears to this woman. That pact was his curse.
No, Dawit decided, he was not worthy of Ogun’s name.
Prometheus was a better mythological soul mate. He was in chains, his innards picked at by an eagle, watching with disdain as his flesh, again and again, grew back to be freshly destroyed. Always. Loss had found him again, its talons and beak riving his liver, his heart, his soul. He would be forever stripped, reborn, stripped.
But reborn, Dawit wondered, as what?
David’s burn mark had vanished by Sunday, less than a week later. Jessica noticed his bare arms as he slung his starched dress shirt across a chair and went outside in his undershirt, insisting on tuning up her mother’s car after church. No sense paying a mechanic to rip you off, he told her. Searching for a scar—she couldn’t remember if he’d burned his right or left arm—she tried to recall the last time she’d seen the bandage at all.
“What are you doing, baby?” he asked while she ran her fingertips across his unblemished skin. The day was unseasonably sunny, nearly eighty degrees, so David was clammy with a film of perspiration as he worked beneath the Honda Accord’s hood in the unshaded driveway. Bright sunlight made his skin look brick-red.
“Your burn is gone.”
“Maybe it’s a miracle,” he said. “Can you hand me that ratchet wrench on top of the toolbox?”
The miracle remark stung Jessica. Sunday was church day, and every other Sunday the family met at Bea Jacobs’s house for an early dinner after the eleven o’clock service at New Life Bethel Baptist Church. The church was six blocks from Bea’s house in the hedge-lined middle-class black neighborhood in northwest Dade where Jessica had grown up. The area was now in the shadow of Pro Player Stadium, the Miami Dolphins’s football stadium, with horrific traffic jams on game days; during the football season, it was nearly impossible to make it to her mother’s house on Sundays because of the steady flow of fans.
David rarely agreed to sit through a service, but he came today because he wanted to be with her and Kira. She’d glanced at him during the sermon for signs of acceptance, some enlightenment, but his face always grew stony in church. Once, she saw him staring at the painting of The Last Supper, especially the bearded Jesus figure in the middle, with nothing short of contempt. She’d seen that look before, prompting her to ask David if he hated God. He paused before answering.
“If there truly is one God, then it’s God who’s displeased with me,” he said simply. He never answered when she asked why in the world he would say such a thing, claiming it was a joke. But she knew it wasn’t.
Watching David methodically remove her mother’s old spark plugs with counterclockwise twists of the wrench, Jessica told herself that her husband would never be saved. She would have to accept it. He’d been too poisoned against Christ as a Muslim orphan left to missionaries who were bent on converting rather than consoling him. He did not believe. If she trusted her Scriptures, that meant she would spend eternity without him.
Jessica had gone to church all her life, in her frilly pinafores and white gloves, but when she was young it was only another place she had to go. Home, school, church. She didn’t really learn what faith was until after her father died, when she stood on her toes to see what was in the rose-colored casket. She didn’t know what to expect, why she’d been so anxious to take her place in the line at the front of the church, clinging to her mother’s hand. There, inside, was the grim, washed-out face of Daddy.
Daddy was going to stay in this box? And they were going to bury this box in the ground? He had to be somewhere else, like her mother kept saying. That wasn’t him at all.
On that day, Heaven kept Jessica’s world from caving in.
David, somehow, lived without believing in a better place. And yet he could still wake up in the morning and carry out his day and go to sleep without being frozen awake with fears of death, of darkness, of nothing. She didn’t understand how he could do that. She tried, telling herself one night
This is all, there is nothing after this
, but she felt swallowed by the vast barrenness. She thought of her father’s bones, crumbling to black dust inside that beautiful casket beneath the ground.
Maybe David had a point. Religion was a crutch, a way people rationalized away their pain in life, like the slaves yearning for a better existence. A denial. When there is no fear of death, David had told her once, there is no need for religion.
For a moment, watching David examine her mother’s dirty air filter and shake his head, she envied his strength. Here I am with a two-month-old scratch on my wrist from Teacake, but he heals by himself, she thought. His spirit, his body, everything. No wonder he never seemed to age a day.
“Din-ner!”
Her sister’s shrill voice flew out of the open living room jalousie windows, a reminder of childhood. That was the same window where Jessica had stood vigil, waiting for her father to come home from his job working on the telephone lines; she’d probably been waiting by that window when he drove to Burger King in his billed Oakland Raiders cap, the one night he never came back. Jessica saw Alex’s hazy figure in her place, in a bright-purple dress. Kira was beside her in the window, a ball of white taffeta and lace. “Dinner, Mommy! Dinner, Daddy!” she echoed. As usual, Kira needed to be a part of the production, whatever it was.
Bea Jacobs had fixed baked chicken, collard greens, cornbread, and two desserts, a sweet potato pie and a lemon pound cake. Jessica was amused by her mother’s sudden culinary finesse. She’d never cooked this way for the family before, but she started in earnest after Kira was born, assuming a grandmother’s role, and Uncle Billy had passed along some down-home Georgia recipes since he moved in, like peach cobbler and chicken feet stew. Bea was a neurotic cook, obsessed with kitchen details the way she’d fretted over the books before she retired as business manager of a chain of beauty shops. Like her daughters, she was a perfectionist. And she caught on fast.
“Where’s David?” Bea asked, pulling her chair up to the head of the table after setting down the plate of cornbread. She’d always been thin, and she wore her hair in a silver natural, cut short the way Alexis wore hers. Only Jessica relaxed her hair, letting it grow in a straight page-boy style just past her ears.
“He’s washing up,” Jessica answered.
“Let’s go on and say grace, then.”
In a clash of wills with his in-law, David had once made a production of refusing to sit through grace at her table. Jessica thought her mother would bite through her lip, she was so angry. All things considered, Jessica thought with a smile, Bea was adjusting well to having a heathen in the family; both her father and grandfather had been pastors.
They grasped hands; Bea taking Jessica and Alexis’s hands on either side of her, Jessica holding Kira’s tiny fingers, and Alexis reaching over to Uncle Billy’s wheelchair to touch his ruined left hand. Uncle Billy still couldn’t move his left arm since his stroke. They murmured their amens in unison.
“You finished fooling with that car yet? I got something you need to listen to in back,” Uncle Billy said when David joined them at the table. He’d dressed again and smelled of fresh cologne. The scent, whatever he’d found, suited him.
“Don’t tell me you rooted out that old Jelly Roll record.”
“Told you I had it somewhere up in all them boxes. Original recording, nineteen and twenty-five. Got me some Satchmo too.” Uncle Billy’s words slurred slightly, the stroke compounded by missing front teeth and a heavy Georgia accent. Sometimes Jessica couldn’t understand him, but David never had a problem. A relative from Bea’s mother’s side, Uncle Billy had been born near the grounds of the same plantation where the family had been slaves for years.
“I’ll be damned, Uncle Billy,” David said, smiling. “I may just have to sneak in here one night and steal those away. And that old Victrola of yours too.”
“Oh, no. You ain’t stealin’ nothin’ from this old man. And I’ma still find that Jazz Brigade recording. My daddy left me that from when we was in Chicago, right ‘fore the Depression. He used to watch those boys rehearse. Said they could cook. Seth ‘Spider’ Tillis, Lester Payne, all of them.”
Something like rapture passed across David’s face. He loved music. Whatever shelf space on their walls and in the closets that wasn’t filled with books was dedicated to his vast record and CD collection, exclusively classical, blues, and jazz. He’d once told her that his CD collection alone numbered more than four thousand. But it was much more than a hobby to him; the New York Times had called David’s book on the early jazz age, which he’d written at Harvard as his doctoral dissertation, the “definitive history of jazz.”
David leaned closer to Uncle Billy, his chin resting on his palm. “Uncle Billy,” he said slowly, “if you could find The Jazz Brigade … I lost all my originals. And it’s so rare—”
