“So you’re back among the living,” I said, using exactly the words and the tones of my uncle Oscar, the only black relative I knew coming up.
“Never left you, friend. How do you like it here among your brothers, the trees?”
“It’s okay, I guess,” I said. “But how did you find this place?”
“It was waiting for me just like it was waiting for you. There’s a place for everything, you know.” He brought his hands together in front of his face as if in prayer and rose. “I have to go tend to my forest, friends. I’ll bring you some supper when I get back.”
He moved gaily into the woods across from Number Twelve and was gone.
“He’s funny,” Addy said.
“I don’t trust him.”
“He’s okay. He did save my life.”
“Maybe he did. I don’t know, Addy. I don’t know.” It was the first time we were alone, really alone and talking, in days.
“What’s wrong, Chance?”
“Nothing,” I said, actually saying much more.
Addy nodded and smiled. She reached out her hand and I moved closer to hold it. The fire threw out a brilliant heat, but there was still foggy condensation from our breath. I don’t know that I felt better then, maybe just reconciled to my fate and happy that I didn’t have to face it alone at that moment.
Reggie was coming back from behind Number Seven. I could hear the girls laughing not far away in the woods.
The golden and yellow light from the cover of leaves winked and glittered. I left myself open to the half-told tales of where they came from and where they hoped to be. Each sparkle of light entered my mind, humming a forgotten tune that my heart tried to beat for. A dance took off within me. I was swirling to the fragmentary music of light. I was soaring and stationary like the giant pillars of my new home. I was decaying and dying but still full of life. I was decomposing the lies I had always believed defined me and my skin.
The children came back around the fire to eat and talk to us. Every now and then Reggie would wander off to Number Seven. I may have heard them. I might have even said a few words now and then. But mostly my mind was in the trees, in the light in the trees, swirling and capering to melodies older than life down here. Ordé’s blood moving in mine was a refuge from all the vacant fear that had gathered in my gut, clouded in my skull cavity.
I was dizzy with meaning that I did not understand. I tried to be brave in the face of immensity that dwarfed even my wildest dreams of expanse.
I fell asleep after an hour, maybe less. I was unconscious but aware of the scent of earth and decaying foliage. I listened contentedly to the girls playing and Addy cooing to them. It was a sleep with no dreams, as refreshing and as clear as water from a cold spring after a long long walk in July.
The visions of light had started to subside. I woke up thirsty just as the sun was throwing her last rays on the ground around my body.
“So you’re back among the living,” my uncle Oscar said.
When I looked, I saw that it was Juan Thrombone mimicking my words to him.
“It’s just in time too.” The little man giggled.
The fire had been expanded to three different units, each separated by and surrounded with similar-sized oblong stones. Over each fire was a pan or a pot. There were trout simmering and mushrooms and some kind of forest green too. Everyone was sitting around the fire. The flames seemed to echo the visions of my afternoon nap.
“Time to eat,” Juan said simply. “Eat first and then to tell stories, I think. Stories are good when you live out with the trees and bears and butterflies. Here, sleepy,” he said to me. “Have some sap and water.”
He handed me a carved wooden mug that was tall and thin. Instead of a handle, it had a leafy branch sticking out from one side. The mug was filled with water that smelled of sweet sap. There were bits of branches and leaves floating about in the drink. I tasted it and then couldn’t pull the cup away from my lips. It was the best-tasting water I had ever had. It was water and also the dream of water in a thirsty man’s desert.
The fish were from a nearby stream. The mushrooms were hacked from the sides of trees with homemade wooden knives, and the greens were small leafy plants that grew in the clearing between the forest and our cathedral of trees. Everything was delicious. I felt satisfied from the back of my mind down into my toes.
When the dinner was over, Thrombone came out with honey wine for the grown-ups and honeyed water for the girls. Reggie drank his wine too quickly and got drunk. He pulled himself up and declared that he was going out to find a drum.
“Now is the time for stories, my friends,” Juan Thrombone said in a singsong voice. “Telling the tales keeps them from sneaking up on you when you’re not looking. When you’re not looking.”
The girls laughed. Alacrity held Wanita in her lap. All her heroism and command had faded now that she didn’t need it. She was our charge again, her mother’s little girl.
Thrombone went to a hollow below Number Three and retrieved a dozen homemade beeswax candles. The candles were thick shapeless globs encrusted with gravel. We placed them around our campsite, letting Wanita light them because Addy wouldn’t let her play with the campfire.
We all settled in on one side of the fire, with Thrombone squatting down from us on the other side.
“What will it be, Chance? What do you want me to tell?”
“Why me?” I asked. “I don’t know your stories. You could just make one up.”
“Come on, Chance,” Alacrity said. Her head in Addy’s lap, she shoved her feet under the tent of my knees. Wanita leaned on me from the other side. Addy draped a sleeping bag over our shoulders.
Juan Thrombone’s eyes were like two more candles in the night.
I was fearful that he might really answer any question I had. I was tired of knowledge and truth.
“What is the blue light?” I asked finally.
Juan Thrombone laughed and rolled on his back. He rocked on his spine while grabbing his knees and let out a howl.
“Ho-ho, Chance the gamesman. Chance the checkmater. Chance the opponent till the end.”
The children laughed and Addy smiled.
I didn’t find his childishness funny.
Thrombone rolled to a squatting position in an agile move. He looked at me for a long time before speaking again.
“You think to ask me a question you already know the answer to, hombre. You think you know how the light traveled, how it bonded and took. You think that I will just repeat the words of your dead teacher. You do not want to know anything more, but you lost the gambit and so I will tell you more.
“Your question, my friend, should have been another. Because asking about blue light is like asking about blood when you have never seen an animal. How can you know about a man’s blood, its magic, if you have never seen him laughing and you’ve never heard him cry?”
Juan Thrombone settled easily on crossed legs and held out his hands as if to say, Isn’t that true?
“You must, it is clear, ask about life and not light or blood. Because life holds them both like the canvas holds paint.”
I was completely in his spell by then. The words and their rhythm charmed me like the sunlight had that day.
“Blue light or yellow or red, it doesn’t matter. They’re all like blood. Blood that sustains you, blood that builds. But blood in a bottle, or blood on the ground, is not a man, can’t be, but only a promise without an ear to hear.”
Holding up an educating finger, he said, “All the world is music, you see. There is music in atoms and music in suns. That is the range of a scale that you can see and read. There is music in emptiness and silence between. Everything is singing all the time, all the time. Singing and calling for what is missing. Your science calls it gravity, but the gods call it dance. They dance and fornicate; they listen and sing. They call to distant flowers when buds ring out. Because, you see, it is not only atoms and suns that vibrate in tune. Rocks sing, as do water and air. The molecules that build blood and men also build the wasp; these too sing a minor note that travels throughout the stars. Greedy little ditties that repeat and repeat again and again the same silly melodies. They change, but very slowly, chattering, ‘me me me me me me me me me...’ ” He repeated the word maybe a hundred times, lowering his head to the ground as he did so. He smiled when he was finished and shook his head sadly. The next instant he was on his feet holding his hands out in the question Why?