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They walk down the hill. Chamfer returns to his absolution to ignore the hunger pains, this time full in voice. He focuses on the words of the prayer, emphasizing “so that I may see You and my ancestors, and walk with You toward you ever-sunlit garden.” Jalla joins, emphasizing “and cleanse my soul of its impurities.” Chamfer sees each word, each letter and then shapes his mouth to produce the sound. Soon, he feels the dip marking the fork in the road to the Big House. ‘Turn’ appears in his mind as it does every sunrise when Chamfer is not quite awake, and hurries to be outside of Sunelion’s door when his nanny wakes him. His waist twists and the boy begins to turn down the path.
“…so that I may see You…”
Jalla touches his shoulder again and nudges him back, the way one would redirect a sleepwalker back to bed. The competition between Chamfer and his body continues all the way down to the bottom of the hill, where the sun now warms his back and thickens the moisture in the air. Here, shouts are distinct, not just in-between drumbeats. The breezes are saltier. Twine with more streamers and roses is attached to the pavilion, and the barracoon--the barracks where bonded workers sleep--are planted into the ground like a pitched tent. Under the pavilion’s roof, the Mistress, dressed in red, orange and yellow--Muscul’s colors--stands bolt upright over Sunelion who wears a leather jerkin and high, riding boots. He stares, wide-eyed, across the road at Aunt Espy.
Aunt Espy in a bright parrot-feathered headdress and vest holds a conch shell with incense smoke rising out of it, which she fans onto a little girl as Aunt Espy circles her in prayer. A dozen or so other children, some with boots tied together with string, others barefoot, all of them children of field hands, are gathered next to Aunt Espy. Their parents are pretending to be busy tying decorations, or clearing space around the dirt path where Aunt Espy is working.
Aunt Espy mumbles “…cleanse my soul of its impurities…” around each child.
Each child replies, “So that I may see You and my ancestors, and walk with You toward your ever-sunlit garden. Amen.”
When Jalla and Chamfer arrives, Jalla squeezes Chamfer’s shoulder once more and then joins the adults. Aunt Espy steps to Chamfer. Her deep brown face is covered in yellow and orange stripes of paint. The stripes rise over the ridgelines of her hollowed cheeks and jaw, cover her liver spots, and sink into the etching around her eyes, reminding Chamfer of the mudflats south of the plantation where he once followed Sunelion on a hike of marse Benedict’s land.
A naturalist and monk had arrived near the end of last harvest. Señor Paolo. He brought the stuffed corpses of many beasts, and the encased skeletons of others. He’d gifted Sunelion a mounted white wolf with an equally preserved fish in its mouth. The boy had the wolf placed in the center of his bedroom. The monk was bald, with a tattoo of the Sun God’s sigil on his forehead. He told Sunelion many stories of the different wilds of the continent. The one that Sunelion begged to hear over and over again involved a trek up a volcanic range on a tiny island far north. Midway through the ascent, a snow storm fell on his team. Searching for a sheltering cave, his men were surprised by an ice wyrm. It rose and arched the height of four men. This was the part that always drew a gasp from Sunelion. Chamfer memorized the monk’s inflections, pauses, recurring slight stutter at the description of the creature’s ringlet of teeth larger than machetes. Sunelion would order Chamfer to retell him the story at bedtime, or even running through the back fields of the Big House, or in the cove along the beach where they would wait and try and catch fish spawning in the small pools. Anything the two would capture, Sunelion would proclaim as a new species on behalf of King Javier Vicente del Mascul, and imagine his striding through the continental court, petty lords parting to either side as he approached the throne. There, the king, played by Chamfer, would heap reward and proclamation upon Sunelion and his family. Chamfer would then hurry behind Sunelion and mimic the shouts and rapturous applause of the court.
After the monk dined for a couple of days at the Big House, and studied Marse Benedict’s old maps, he departed to the wet lands to search for new species. There was nothing Marse Benedict could do to keep the young marse from following. The idea of a wyrm or some other terrible creature on the island was too much.
The monk captured only a few flamingos. Sunelion moped for a week, ignoring his lessons until his father threatened to beat him. Chamfer, however, returned home and recounted everything to Aunt Espy: the smell of swamp gas, the light and fire that occasionally erupted from the peat floor, and the fireflies like distant stars and the choir of toads near the ponds. Chamfer knew Aunt Espy had lived in the swamp a while back, returning to Caridad when she grew too hungry. It didn’t matter. Aunt Espy and Aunt Amalia rocked in wicker chairs, held hands, sipped warm run and listened to every detail. It was the only time Chamfer had ever passed the plantation gates.
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Chamfer part 4 (Read 134 times)
