HEALING WATERS
Night, steamy night, a smothering pillow with the odors of rotting vegetation and carbon monoxide; the fishy swampy stink of summer curling in the dead-breeze air; the sounds of the creek running; the bright headlights on the road nearby blinding the woman who stood over the grave, beneath the bridge. The sour taste of three-week-old milk spread across her lips. Mattie Peru flicked at a crane fly with her tongue-it had crawled along the edge of her chin. Her trash bags rattled as she raised her arms up, then whipped them down through the air as if she were trying to fly away.
Who done this to you, my baby? Is he out of Hell now? Did he send his messenger to take even your bones away join me? "Baby!" she shouted. Sounds of footsteps on P Street Bridge above her; her voice echoed across the parkway, booming and crashing like ocean waves, but stirred up in the evening noises, the honkings, the screechings, the yowlings, the gigglings, the shooshing of Rock Creek, the cry diminished. The gigglings. Somewhere in the sparse dark woods around her, somewhere in the bushes.
Mattie looked at the grave.
The grave was empty, had been dug up, a perfect oval. She had planted her only daughter here, right here where the grass sang, where the water whispered, planted her bones all those years ago, planted them in red dry earth in the spring of 1968.
The grave was filled up with water-the recent rainfall had taken over the space, had buried itself there.
Mattie flapped her arms, yipping like a pained dog. She fell to her knees before the open grave. She bent over the water, dropping her face down to the muddy surface, cupping her hands to the water, splashing it up into her face, taking long slurping drinks of it. Open my eyes, my baby/ Open my mouth and my ears, open my heart, my little babygirl, give me your power, water of my child. Give me some power from the land of the dead, wash me in your bone water. And when she stopped drinking and washing her face in the water, she peeled her trash bags of invisibility from her. She stripped her raggedy clothes from her back, the old, stained men's boxer shorts she wore, the open-toed hiking boots. Naked and shining with grease, her gray hair white by moonlight, white and sparkling with the jewels of the bone water, she slipped into her daughter's grave and began washing away the clogged pores of her memory. From under the bridge, down by the creek, among the bushes: giggling.
"We found ya, nigra," the man snarled, but before Mattie saw him standing under the bridge she smelled him, and the smell was one from her memory, her memory which was shining and clean washed in the bone water of her baby. He was one of the men who had raped her in the springtime, up against a lamppost with his buddy, raped her and taken her bottle of Mad Dog 20/20. She could not make him out in the dark shade from beneath the bridge, but she saw what he was holding in his hands extended out from beneath the bridge: a skull, reflecting light from the moon.
The one called Pete wagged it in midair, and spoke for it in a falsetto whine, "Mama, mama, they done fucked my brains out, they fucked my brains out, and then they ate 'em, mama." The other man was there, too, Willy, and he emerged from beneath P
Street Bridge carrying part of a rib cage.
“You lookin' for these, bitch?" He held the ribs between his hands like an accordion, and then snapped them apart. His friend giggled, and he made Nadine's skull giggle, too. "Oh, mama, you must be shittin 'your britches, you must be pissin' your panties!" Mattie cried out at the noise. She remained in the grave, up to her waist in water. It dripped down her neck, in rivulets down her shoulders to her breasts, lingering across her nipples. Her body tingled with the water, with the smell of her daughter's muddy grave, with the clean feeling, the baptism she was undergoing. Down in the pit of her stomach she felt the water sloshing, her bladder filling with its warmth, her tongue moistened and smooth from drinking.
"We liked the way you went and stripped, piglet, and now you went and even fuckin' took a bath!"
The skull giggled and gibbered in midair. Pete had stuck his fingers into the empty eye sockets-he shook it like it was a rattle.
"We want a little of what you got, bitch." Willy stroked the ribs like he was plucking harp strings.
"Piglet, we been lookin' for a little nooky, and we been watchin' you for weeks, and we been seein' you come down here, we been watchin' you but we been waitin', and now no more watchin' and waitin'." The skull roared with falsetto laughter. Mattie felt the bone water inside and outside her skin, and her blood boiled with the cleansing that was going through it. The power that was shooting through her. The spirit of her daughter, rinsing her with the old power, the mind and the power and the knowledge and the memory of the old days, the days when she was a mambo. When she was a priestess. When she could call wasps from her womb, when she could protect the soul of the dead from the gods of evil.
"Just a little nooky," Pete said, rubbing the skull between his palms.
"Seems you got plenty, and we fellers just want a slide or two."
"Sure, nigra, we done it before to ya, and you liked it, you liked it."
“You liked it, mama/" the skull screamed.
"Dug up my baby's grave," Mattie said, her voice a low growl. “You done stole my baby's bones."
"Shit, we just wanted to see what you got in here. You went 'n killed somebody -we gonna keep it a secret. Just the three of us if you gon' be a good girl. For such an ugly old hag you sure don't got much gratitude."
Mattie shook her head violently. Water sprayed out from her hair. "No, it's him, Baron Samedi make you do it."
"Crazy bitch."
"Baron Samedi, he done make you do this, and you don't know, do ya?"
"Nooky, nooky," Pete said, waggling the skull back and forth.
"Baron gets inside ya, means ya gonna die soon, means ya might as already be dead."
Willy dropped the busted rib cage and came to the edge of the grave. He dropped to his knees, reaching down to his crotch and unzipped himself.
"Nooky, nooky."
Mattie cupped her hands. She brought up a palmful of bone water. Holding her hands up to the moon, she prayed. The old prayers of her mambo days were forgotten, shut away inside her. She prayed to Nadine's spirit and the bones. Forgive me, my babygirl, forgive your mama what she done to you, protect me from the baron, protect these old bones.
She felt something like an eel slithering in the grave pool of water, and for a moment she was scared, afraid it was the baron here, come to drown her in her daughter's own grave.
But the water had a voice, charged with electricity, and she recognized the voice, briefly, a hint sound, the words were whispered and unintelligible, but they were her daughter's. The water around her began to roil and splash, feeling alternately hot and cold, and Mattie held her cupped hands high for the blessing. The skull giggled.
Magic Touch, Nadine, bring me the Magic Touch. Then she splattered the man who knelt in front of her, spraying the water across the flat small penis that flopped from his pants. When the water hit him there, he screamed. He screamed as if he'd been scorched with fire. The skin of his penis bubbled and blistered in his fingers. When she splashed water across his face, popping eruptions hissed where the water landed, his nose melting in the middle, one eye shut by its lid which had become waxen and dripped down and over to his cheekbone, his lips drooling down his chin. The screams became choked gurgles as he inadvertently swallowed some of the bone water. The man with the skull ran to his friend's side. “You fuckin' bitch, whatchu do to my buddy?"
Mattie ducked her head down and drank in some bone water, gargling it in the back of her throat. Then she spat it out at him, and it peeled off the top layer of skin across his right arm. He dropped the skull, holding onto his buddy as they ran away through the woods. The skull slipped into the bone water. Mattie reached down to catch it. She clutched it to her breasts. "My baby, my baby," she moaned. The dreams of the past beat their rhythms in Mattie Peru's mind as she lay across the park bench at midafternoon the next day, her trash bags thrown back away from her, her rags half falling off. A couple passed by, glancing down at the woman, upset because they could not use the bench for their lunch hour. Mattie's smell, like old dead meat in the sun, steamed from her skin and when a breeze came up, strollers in the park wrinkled their noses without quite knowing why. She lay still as if dead, but beneath her skin, her heartbeat was rapid and fluttering, her pulse beat fast, and if a doctor were to examine her at the height of this memory dream, he might diagnose a mild coronary-and when that moment came, Mattie would move. Cholychoppity-chop, the ax of her blood swung into her heart. Her right arm arched and her fist tightened. Drool sluiced from between her lips. Her eyes flickered open, then closed.
Her dreams unfolded like a closed fist, gradually opening, the palm spreading, fingers splayed. And in the center of that hand, a small rose made of fire, a small rose opening its heart, and in its heart, the flame, and in the heart of the flame a man who called himself Gil DuRaz.
Mattie Peru was on fire in her mind, but the fires raged with lust, lust for the dark man from the islands, lust for her half brother, Gil DuRaz. Gil had stood six foot five, a giant of a man, and so thin his ribs stuck out and rippled through the black cotton shirts he favored. His face was the face of a man who had seen beyond what life had to offer, who had done things that only dead men knew. It was ridged with dark knowledge, with a wild gleam in his deepset eyes, a supreme love for the dead. He looked like a god to her -he was handsome, and strong, with the sharp look of a fighter who has never lost but is always on the lookout for a worthy opponent. And his smile! Wide and thick with a forest of beautiful teeth -a gold one on the upper left side that shone when he smiled.
And she loved him because he made her love him. But the man was inspired with the spirit of the dead, he knew the rotting secrets of the graveyard.
In those days, when Mattie was called Madeleine Perreau, she was the most beautiful young girl in the projects around Winthrop Park. She was tall and sturdy, but she had the smooth curves of a cello, and long, shiny black hair -she looked like a Gauguin island girl, even though she herself had never seen any island in her lifetime, not even her mother's native Haiti. But her older brother had. He was ten when Madeleine's mother, Jacqueline, had left Haiti and had come to Washington, D.C., to live with her own mother, and to bear her daughter on U.S. soil. Madeleine had been born watching her mother scrub the floors in the Bram Apartments, but the young girl soon discovered her mother's true power over the black people who lived in the enclave of Winthrop Park. And she discovered the secret of the Screaming House, the one called Draper House-the place where the petro, the spirits of evil, passed through on their way to Hell. But then, when Mattie was a teenager, her half brother had taken her mind off such fears: he was a bokor, a high priest, a powerful man who could capture a soul in a clay jar and shatter it just as easily; he could bury a man alive and make him a zombie to do his bidding, and he could make his half sister fall in love with him, because inside him, inside his tall, lean dark body, there dwelled the mind and the spirit of the Lord of the Dead, of Baron Samedi. Mattie's brother, Gil, had undergone a thousand possessions by spirits, but only at the Screaming House had the spirits stayed within him, as if now he were the jar, holding them.
And she learned some of the secrets of the rada and petro, of the spirits and their rhythms, and she watched as he cut the babies from the wombs of young girls, and she became possessed with the clamoring spirits of the house and she made love with her brother, with her brother and with any man he wanted her to make love with, and she became a mambo, a priestess with him.
She intended to spend her whole lifetime by his side, until he betrayed her, and betrayed her with a white woman, a woman that he emptied out and filled with another spirit, the spirit of evil that dwelt in the house.
She loved him until she saw him devouring a corpse. She believed it had been a corpse.
Until the corpse had moved.
And Mattie knew then it was no corpse at all. that her half brother Gil had become a cannibal, that he had developed a taste for flesh and blood, that he had perverted the Voudun religion that their mother had taught them, and had let something vile and evil into his worship.
And the woman, the Housekeeper, was ensuring his corruption. When her brother finally had become Baron Samedi, the foul-breathed flesh and blood of the grave, he turned against her. And he devoured the body of her only child, a child by a man that Gil had wanted her to love in the first place, an evil white man who had been Gil's tool for bringing the child into the world. Because the night Gil came to her like a lover, possessed by the spirits, and every night after, she did not conceive with him, no child was born. So he wanted her child, even if it was hers by another man. And he wanted her child's child.
And he ate her baby, and he took her baby's baby, and Mattie made him pay.
She made him pay.
And as Mattie remembered how she'd made Gil DuRaz pay, she heard her little girl calling something to her, something that sounded like… Mattie awoke, screaming. Pigeons scattered away from the bench she'd been sleeping upon. Nadine, honey, you callin' to me, but I don't understand nothin' you sayin '. Her breasts were heavy and she felt sharp pains along her ribs, down to her thighs. It was still hot and sunny. Late in the day, and sundown may have been five hours away, but Mattie could feel the night in her bones, eating away at the daylight. Her heartbeat was like an ax chopping away at an old thick tree, pausing to swing back, and the chop, chop, choppity-chop. Her right hand dug beneath the trash bags, pushing aside her left breast, trying to hold her heart steady, trying to slow down its chopping. A memory of love came back to her, through a smell -it was an annoying odor, one which she could not identify, not sweat, not cologne, not food cooking, but somehow, all of these. And she saw the face of the man who was Nadine's father.
Mattie thought it was a dream as she lay there on the bench, clutching her heart, watching the two men in the car going by. One was young and handsome and she did not know him. The other was Mr. Big Man, and how he had changed on the outside, and how she could tell at a glance that on the inside he had not changed at all.