Oscar and Kevin conferred briefly. Kevin was very spooked by Fontenot’s story. He really disliked being surrounded by illegal alien black people in the middle of an impenetrable swamp. Visions of boil-ing iron cannibal pots were dancing in Kevin’s head. Anglos… they’d never gotten over the sensation of becoming a racial minority.
Oscar was adamant, however. Having come this far, nothing would do for him but to interview Papa Christophe. Fontenot finally located the man, hard at work in a whitewashed cabin at the edge of town.
Papa Christophe was an elderly man with a long-healed machete slash in his head. His wrinkled skin and bent posture suggested a lifetime of vitamin deficiency. He looked a hundred years old, and was probably sixty.
Papa Christophe gave them a toothless grin. He was sitting on a three-legged stool on the hard dirt floor of the cabin. He had a wooden maul, a, pig-iron chisel, and a half-formed wooden statue. He was deftly peeling slivers of brown cypress wood. His statue was a saint, or a martyr; a slender, Modigliani-like woman, with a serene and stylized face, her hands pressed together in prayer. Her lower legs were wrapped in climbing flames.
Oscar was instantly impressed. “Hey! Primitive art! This guy’s pretty good! Would he sell me that thing?”
“Choke it back a little,” Kevin muttered. “Put your wallet away.”
The cabin’s single room was warm and steamy, because the building had a crude homemade still inside it. Presumably, a distillery hadn’t been present in the village’s original game plan, but the Hai-tians were ingenious folk, and they had their own agenda. The still had been riveted together out of dredged-up automobile parts. By the smell of it, it was cooking cane molasses down into a head-bending rum. The shelves along the wall were full of cast-off glass bottles, dredged from the detritus of the bayou. Half the bottles were full of yellow alcohol, and plugged with cloth and clay.
Fontenot and the old man were groping at French, with their widely disparate dialects. Fed with Christophe’s cast-off chips of cypress wood, the still was cooking right along. Rum dripped down a bent iron tube into the glass bottle, ticking like a water clock. Papa Christophe was friendly enough. He was chatting, and tapping his chisel, and chopping, and muttering a little to himself, all in that same, even, water-clock rhythm.
“I asked him. about the statue,” Fontenot explained. “He says it’s for the church. He carves saints for the good Lord, because the good Lord is always with him.”
“Even in a distillery?” Kevin said.
“Wine is a sacrament,” Fontenot said stiffly. Papa Christophe picked up a pointed charcoal stick, examined his wooden saint, and drew on her a bit. He had a set of carving tools spread beside him, on a greased leather cloth: an awl, a homemade saw, a shaving hook, a hand-powered bow-drill. They were crude implements, but the old man clearly knew what he was doing.
They’d left their ragtag of curious children outside the cabin door, but one of the smaller kids plucked up his courage and peered inside. Papa Christophe looked up, grinned toothlessly, and uttered some solemn Creole pronunciamento. The boy came in and sat obe-diently on the earthen floor.
“What was that about?” Oscar said.
“I believe he just said, ‘The monkey raised her children before there were avocados,’ ” Fontenot offered.
“What?”
“It’s a proverb.”
The little kid was thrilled to be allowed into the old man’s work-shop. Papa Christophe chopped a bit more, directing kindly remarks to the child. The rum dripped rhythmically into its pop bottle, which was almost full.
Fontenot pointed to the child, and essayed a suggestion in French. Papa Christophe chuckled indulgently. “D’abord vous guettй poux-de-bois manger bouteille, accrochez vos calabasses,” he said.
“Something about bugs eating the bottles,” Fontenot hazarded.
“Do bugs eat his bottles?” Kevin said.
Christophe hunched over and examined his charcoal outline. He was deeply engrossed by his statue. For his own part, the little boy was fascinated by the sharp carving tools.
The kid made a sudden grab for a rag-coated saw blade. Without a moment’s hesitation, the old man reached behind himself and unerr-ingly caught the child by his groping wrist.
Papa Christophe then stood up, lifted the boy out of harm’s way, and caught him up one-handed in the crook of his right arm. At the very same instant, he took two steps straight backward, reached out blindly and left-handed, and snagged an empty bottle from its shelf on the wall.
He then swung around in place, and deftly snatched up the brimming bottle from the coil of the still. He replaced the bottle with the empty one — all the while chatting to the little boy in friendly admonition. Somehow, Christophe had precisely timed all these ac-tions, so that he caught the trickling rum between drips.
The old man then sauntered back to his work stool and sat down, catching the child on his skinny leg. He lifted the rum bottle left-handed, sampled it thoughtfully, and offered Fontenot a com-ment.
Kevin rubbed his eyes. “What did he just do? Was he dancing a jig backward? He can’t do that.”
“What did he say?” Oscar asked Fontenot.
“I couldn’t catch it,” Fontenot said. “I was too busy watching him move. That was really strange.” He addressed Papa Christophe in French.
Christophe sighed patiently. He fetched up a flat piece of planed pine board and his charcoal stick. The old man had a surprisingly fine and fluid handwriting, as if he’d been taught by nuns. He wrote, “Quand la montagne brule, tout le monde le sait; quand le coeur brule, qui le sait?” He wrote the sentence blindly, while he turned his head aside, and spoke pleasantly to the child on his knee.
Fontenot examined the charcoal inscription on the pine board. “’When the volcano catches fire, everybody knows. But when the heart catches fire, who knows it?’ ”
“That’s an interesting sentiment,” Kevin said.
Oscar nodded thoughtfully. “I find it especially interesting that our friend here can write down this ancient folk wisdom while he talks aloud to that child at the very same time.”
“He’s ambidextrous,” Kevin said.
“Nope.”
“He’s just really fast,” Fontenot said. “It’s like sleight of hand.”
“Nope. Wrong again.” Oscar cleared his throat. “Gentlemen, could we go out for a private conference please? I think it’s time for us to move along to our boat.”
They took Oscar at his word. Fontenot made his cordial good-byes. They left the old man’s cabin, then limped their way silently out of the village, full of broad uneasy smiles for the inhabitants. Oscar wondered at the fate that had stuck him with two different generations of lame men.
Finally they were out of earshot. “So what’s the deal?” Kevin said.
“The deal is this: that old man was thinking of two things at once.”
“What do you mean?” Kevin said.
“I mean that it’s a neural hack. He was fully aware of two differ-ent events at the same moment. He didn’t let that little kid hurt him-self, because he was thinking about that kid every second. And even though he was carefully working that hammer and chisel, he wouldn’t let that bottle overflow. He was listening to the bottle while he was wood carving. He didn’t even have to look at the bottle to realize it was full. I think he was counting the drops.”