My heart started pounding.
She started to take off her dress, a dress I could now see was covered in indigo flowers. The flowers seemed to quiver, or maybe that was just my eyes playing tricks on me. I was about to try to stop her, but… my god. Her body. Her collarbones. The barely-there dip between her breasts. The skin of her belly, so soft that it looked like sand-colored velvet. Her hips. And down to the dark hair covering her sex or leading me down and in. And that goddamn coin. Which she put on the kitchen table. And then another — the crazy-hair-lady coin. She started pulling coins from her hair, one and then another and another, until coins were falling to the floor all around us. Where were they all coming from?
Then she got on top of the kitchen table. I eased my pants off my hips and down my thighs and over my knees, which, goddamn, were shaking some. Pulled my feet free. Climbed onto her. Coins everywhere.
On top of her, I could see the snake in the corner birthing her eggs. The piles of coins at our feet were growing all around us. The air smelled like copper and our sweat.
She was right; my father never came home. Not that night, not the next day, not for the weeks she stayed with me. He had fallen. He had died.
The grief and loss were as heavy as iron. He was all I had. He was a son of a bitch most of the time, but he was my son of a bitch. And he was the best iron walker there was. Ask anyone. The only one greater might have been my grandfather, John Joseph, but I never met him. He was just a story.
She said, “I will enter desire with you inside your loss. I will carry it with you inside our lovemaking until you can breathe again. Grief is an object you have to carry over time, like a body. Someday, you will be able to take care of me and my father in return.”
One night, as we lay coiled around each other, I asked her how she’d known what had happened to my father. This is the story she told.
“There was a whale.” She drew small objects on my chest with her finger. I could feel her speech and breath on my skin.
“I was in the current, on my way to an otherwhere, and the whale swallowed me. After I scraped my way beyond the baleen, and crawled across the tongue, and made my way down the tunnel of the whale’s throat, I could hear the whale’s voice vibrating the whale gut as well as my whole body. The whale was singing. Inside the whale’s belly, she carried me through the Antarctic current. I could hear the speed of things in the walls of her. The vibrations shook my whole body. We made our way through water. After a while, she stopped and vomited me out.
“I made the rest of my way through water to children. Then the whale became a boat. Then we came to my father, Aster.”
“The whale became your father?” I asked, her head against my skin and shoulder. I wanted her to become my body — I wanted to forge her to me, to solder our bodies together.
“No,” she said. “I mean, my father’s people…” But then she fell silent and licked my nipple instead of finishing her sentence. She straddled me.
“What about your father’s people?”
“I was going to tell you something about the Yakut, about Yakutia, but that’s just a story I could tell. Truth is, my father doesn’t have any people — as far as he knows, as far as I know. There are a hundred stories I could tell. One of them is about how the prisoners were rounded up in Yakutia, and about the long Road of Bones, where tens of thousands of prisoners were sent to gold mines and work camps and gulags in Siberia. More than a million laborers and prisoners traveled the Road of Bones. Geologists looking for gold deposits are still finding piles of soggy coffins and decaying bones. Everything there is resting on bones.”
I put my hands on her hips, then her breasts.
“Isn’t everything everywhere resting on bones?” I said.
“Yes, the past gets buried like that, and then comes back when people least expect it. Like ice melting away. Or water rising. The Indigenous death toll in this land, where we are, was probably more than thirteen million, but that’s not the story that got told.”
She leaned over me. Mouthed shapes on my neck. Her hair keeping the rest of the world out of sight.
“You are going to meet my father. When you’re an older man, I mean. My mother told me. You’re going to meet me again too, only I’ll be younger, just a girl. I know, I know. Don’t be afraid or confused. My father and my baby brother and I — when you’re older, you’re going to take care of us for a little while, like I’m taking care of you now. I am carrying you through this grief so that you don’t die or become terrible. Your father is gone. My father will die too. Everyone goes back to the motherwaters eventually. Then becomes something else.”
Laisvė stayed for a month. When she told me she’d be leaving, I gave her my knife. An object to carry, to prove we were real.
—
The next time I saw Laisvė—the second time — she was a child, just like she’d told me. Her father was frantically looking for work and somewhere to stay. And I was an older man. There was a baby boy too, but that story took a very sad turn.
When I met Aster, I wasn’t entirely sure it was her. But I knew Aster was a man who needed help, like a boy who’d lost his parents. I could feel it radiating out of him. Turns out, he’d lost his whole heart. He was gutted, living a kind of ghost-life. From what I understood, his wife had drowned, and his boy would float away, and there is just no way for a body to bear that weight. I understood I should love him. I mean, for fuck’s sake, whatever love means.
Love isn’t what we’ve been told it is.
Time isn’t either.
What it amounts to is, I met that young woman, I met that girl, out of order. Stories don’t care how we tell them. Stories take any shape they want. Not all stories happen with a beginning, a middle, and an end. I’ve come to understand maybe they never do. End, that is.
I remembered something about my own mother when Laisvė left that first time. I remembered her saying to me, This is not the end of your story. It is the beginning.
Over the years, I always thought that Laisvė must have wanted a baby — that that’s why she came to me when I was twenty and she was a young woman. I even wondered if maybe she got pregnant when she was with me. But when I met her again as a child, I saw the error in that story. She didn’t want to have a baby.
I know because of something that happened when I met her again, when she was a girl. One morning, I was drinking coffee and Aster was showering and Laisvė was standing near the front window looking out at I don’t know what. I started wondering aloud about what she wanted to do, or be, when she grew up. “Someday you’ll fall in love,” I said. “Maybe start a family.” I don’t know why I said that. Maybe because of the piece of her future that I’d seen, or maybe just how her mess of black hair fell down her back and the way her shoulders squared off against the light from the window. She didn’t know what a beautiful young woman she would turn out to be.
She turned around and looked at me. “That right belongs to the planet, to plants and animals,” she said.
“What right?” I asked.
“The right to make a family. Species, genome, family…”
I’ll admit, I worried for her after that. I wasn’t sure of how she was in the head, of how she could possibly deal with it all. But when she came into my life with Aster, and I was an older man, I could not have loved them more. What else was there to do but love them? It was my turn to take care of something besides myself.
Ethnography 5
I started working at The Crisis in 1918. I worked under Jessie Redmon Fauset. What a time that was. The novels she would write changed my life. Her characters were Black working men and women — professionals. She was more than a mentor to me. So much more. She was a mirror I could use to see myself; she was a portal I could step through to something more. She wanted literature to split open so that more voices and stories and bodies could get through — forging a second passage as proud and profound artists. She birthed and nourished so many important voices: Langston Hughes. Countee Cullen. Claude McKay. Jean Toomer. Zora Neale Hurston. Arna Bontemps. Charles Chesnutt. Her younger half brother Arthur Fauset, the folklorist and activist.