“Customer? But me no see no customer! Me is the only customer in here buying anything.”
“Excuse me, ma’am.”
“Yeah, you excuse you damn self and come back with half pound o sugar and two pound o flour.”
“We don’t have none.”
“You don’t have no flour or sugar?”
“We don’t have neither. Go check somewhere else.”
“You don’t have neither, eeh? Then what you have in that bag by you foot mark flour, dog shit?”
“We don’t have—”
“Listen here, don’t take woman fi idiot! Is the flour bag that right at you foot and you telling me that you don’t have none to sell,” to which the shopkeeper, a rotund half-Chinese man in his forties, with thick glasses and thinning hair, came over to her. His face was less than a foot away from hers.
“No, you dry-up black bitch. We don’t have none to sell to you.”
The Widow pulled back. Eyes were upon her. She could feel every single one. A stare was a physical thing. Even after she grabbed her bag and left the shop, she could still feel their eyes on her, satellites for his eyes. They cut past skin and flesh and made bones tremble.
“Go with the Lord, ma’am.”
At the mouth of the bridge they waited for her return. With every stomp of her feet — seven miles to the nearest shop and back — her anger grew, pumping with the swifter beat of her heart. But at the mouth of the bridge fury withered and fear returned. The Rude Boys were waiting. Now they were Rude Boys for Christ, but that made them no less rude. She passed them on the bridge in silence. The Widow clutched her bags close and continued with her head straight and eyes ahead. At a good distance she turned around and they were no longer on the bridge. The Widow willed the lump back down her throat when she realized that they were following. The leader, tall and fat, swung from one side of the road to the other. The Widow walked faster. The Rude Boys followed. They would kill her with little effort, but toy with her first; four cats with one mouse. A can tumbled ahead of her and banged against the sidewalk. Several stones, some hitting her shoe, followed. They kicked garbage, dried shit, and cans. She walked faster, almost tripping over one of the things that hit her foot. Their footsteps sounded like a march. The Widow ran, cursing her burden and the man who was the cause. Clutching the bags, she almost ran past the gate. By the time she struggled to free the latch, they were gone.
Lucifer was not about to leave Gibbeah without a fight. Even now his servants in darkness were congregating. Multiplying. Possessing. They were ready to celebrate the victory of the Prince of Darkness, but no! said the Apostle to a circle that had gathered around the twisted calf. The Five had dragged it to the side of the road only minutes before. “Satan, we’re sending this abomination straight back to the Hell you brought it up from.” The Five sprinkled the calf with kerosene and the Apostle set it ablaze. He prompted those who were on the choir to sing “How Great Thou Art.” The Apostle spread his arms and prayed in tongues, but this was no Abba babba tongues. The fire, larger than expected, shot up through the dusk. The smell of kerosene and cow fat circled the village.
Lucinda followed him back to the church office, but the door was shut in her face. The keyhole was also shut. Leaving, she saw one of his red books left by the window.
“Apostle?”
The book’s pages smelt of old dust. Lucinda suppressed a tiny cough. Inside was his handwriting: dashes, slants, curves, and strikes that sometimes fell off the page. Most she could not make out, but he wrote “secret flight” in bold, block letters.
EAS AND W ST SAME M GICK. SOLANUM S TH KEY. TO SECR T FL G T. I HAVE FOUND THIS T TH ALL O V R THE W LD. TO LEA E PLANE FOR ANOTH IT MUST BE B R E W ED. A BR W OR A TEA FROM TH SOLANU, OTH W SE KNOWN AS BLA CH D CALLALOO.
“Jesus Christ!”
The book slipped from her hands and fell. She bent down to pick it up but his hand got there first.
“Lucinda.” He stared at her for several seconds, his brow knotted in a frown and his lips pressed so firm they disappeared in his beard. “You see anything in here written for you? Do you?” He held it up and looked at her. She looked away. “If you can’t mind your own business …”
“Y-y-yes sah. Yes, Apostle.”
“Good. And another thing.”
“Apostle? Apostle?”
The Apostle winced, sucking air between clenched teeth as he shut his eyes tight. He grabbed his head with both hands and swayed left and right.
“Apostle?”
He spun away from her, staggering and swaying. York still clutched his head with both hands, groaning louder and louder. His legs buckled and his heels stomped hard on the floor. He reached out with his right hand as if to grab something unseen and staggered toward Lucinda’s desk. York groaned, bellowed, and sucked air through gnashed teeth. He lurched into the desk and hit the edge with his knee.
“Goddamn to Hell!”
“Apostle?”
“Go.”
“Apostle, you sickly?”
“GET OUT!”
She left without her handbag. He threw himself into the chair and buried his head on the desk. Had she stayed behind the closed door, Lucinda would have heard what sounded like sobbing.
Outside, the night burnt with cow flesh.
Sometimes Pastor Bligh bolted upright in the bed, cried out, and fell back into sleep. Other times it seemed as if he was beyond sleep, adrift, yet on the bed, with only ragged breathing to signify life. The Widow never slept for long. Hours were spent watching and mapping her fear to the rise and fall of his chest.
At two in the morning she stumbled out of the armchair beside his bed and the cold bowl of soup flew from her hands. Bligh had been yelling for minutes. His eyes were wide open, seeing nothing. The room was blood. Something had gripped him. The Widow thought the Devil. The Rum Preacher pushed himself to the headboard with one hand, blocking his face with the other. He stopped screaming and collapsed. She hated him. Her spirit rose and fell with his and she hated him. Because of Bligh, the Widow’s heart was undoing her. They had struck a deal, heart and mind, and now heart was cheating out. It had begun by tricking her into doing things like adding more sugar to the limeade and looking at old dresses in red, yellow, and blue. She wished she could punch a hole in her chest and yank the frigging thing out. The Widow had grown accustomed to death. The routine of death; the mossy, mothy grayness of it. God had taken away every man who had unfroze her heart.
She left him and went into the living room, making her way through the darkness. Through the window she saw the arched roof of Mr. Garvey’s house move. Not until one of them flapped its wings and flew did she see that there was a multitude of them and they covered his roof, shed, fence, and gate.
John Crows.
Obeah was collective wisdom. The obeah man or woman was a dispenser of oils and spells, but also a collector of secrets. Ever since Clarence got the oil, Mrs. Johnson had to muffle her orgasmic screams with a pillow. Oil was responsible for the pregnancy of at least one of the Purdue sisters despite no known male inseminator. Poor little Elsamire, in a sudden fit of country madness, threw herself off a cliff in Port Antonio, and as her body slammed against the rocks, there was at least one once-jealous girl who knew that oil worked. Obeah was the suspected culprit, but nobody had ever seen it work that way. Nobody had ever seen it work in any way, for them is all good God-fearing people. And who is you fi ask that deh question? What a piece o cheek!