The Voices of Martyrs Read online

  “But two is okay? I’d hate for you to do the bare minimum to keep a relationship going.”

  “The key is to space them out. You know, make it seem like there’s more to the relationship than there is.”

  The soft knock at the front door severed their dueling glares. Von wiped her hands on her pants and took a deep breath. She chanced a glance at Earl, who nodded.

  Isabelle Bogle (now Isabelle Aster) loomed so much larger in Von’s memory than did the diminutive woman who stood before her. Von hugged her with the awkward embrace of a security point pat down.

  “Yvonne, it’s good that you found time to fit me into your schedule.” Her mother still insisted on calling her Yvonne, despite her legal name change. She smiled with the predatory gleam of a shark. “This is your new dad, Neville.”

  “Don’t do that. It’s a lot of pressure,” Neville said, and concentrated on wiping his feet on the doormat, probably to dodge the awkward “do we hug or shake hands” dance. The thick gray of his hair was cut low, and he nearly matched Isabelle’s burnt honey complexion, despite her orange glaze of foundation. He pushed past them into the house with a portly waddle, his expansive belly nudging the both of them. Like with aging, with death men got the better part of the bargain; there was a social cachet to men who were widowed. The cloak of sorrow made them sexy in a way that the stigma of divorce couldn’t. Divorce meant someone or someones had failed. Widowhood meant someone had stuck it out to the end.

  “Anyway, if I want a dad, mine’s just down the street.” Not that Von had seen him in months, but the ability to be absent from another’s life was what the two of them had in common. She probably owed him a phone call. “This is my husband, Earl.”

  “The ’Ville’s in the house!” Earl shouted, and reached out in a wide arc to grab Neville’s hand. Earl had a wild swagger to his grin, a contagious charm when he wanted. A forced light danced in his eyes, but, if Von closed her eyes and listened to his laugh, she heard her father’s chuckle.

  “Too much, honey,” Von tugged on his arm, a plastic smile plastered on her face.

  “Earl.” Isabelle pronounced it like some gauche mistake, so beneath her delicate sensibilities, so utterly … American. Except for his color, Earl behaved exactly like her father. When he walked, his bearing and shamble was so similar that the fact that her mother never commented upon it spoke volumes. Earl no longer worried about pleasing his mother-in-law and engaged her as little as possible—a series of head nods and “uh huhs.” Similar to the way he handled Von these days.

  Isabelle glanced about the house, crinkling her nose as she inspected the place. Von expected her to run a gloved hand along the bookshelves, with her other hand free to speed dial her friends to report on the state of the house. “Oo-wee,” Isabelle clucked in conclusion, the house not kept the way she would have.

  When they arrived in the living room, Isabelle and Neville took separate couches, dividing them by sex as Von joined her mother. Distance didn’t stop Isabelle and Neville from bickering, correcting, and talking over one another without heat, as they discussed the best directions to get back to their hotel, whether to use a whole sheet or scrap of paper to jot down a note, whether it was warm enough to wear a jacket. Each married over 40 years before divorce or death caught up to them, they understood the rhythm of relationships.

  Von hoped to disguise the appearance of her boredom by tapping at her laptop. Earl fixed his gaze on her. She exited her programs without meeting his eyes.

  “Is it almost time for tea?” Isabelle asked.

  “Somewhere over the Atlantic, I’m sure,” Von said.

  Von’s mother was only conveniently British. Though born in Jamaica, she did her schooling in England. Tea time became a sort of game they played, as if any of their relatives in England still practiced high tea. Today it would have to be 1:00 p.m. rather than 4:00 p.m. because Isabelle wanted to eat at MCL Cafeteria to take advantage of the all-too-American senior citizens’ discount rather than eat with them. Which was fine since, rather than “biscuits” or scones, she’d have to make do with day-old chocolate chip cookies. From McDonald’s.

  With the ease and forgetfulness of two people for whom the rest of the world disappeared, the chatter between Isabelle and Neville lapsed into thick Jamaican patois. Von believed in her heart that this was partly designed to exclude Earl. She rolled her eyes and headed toward the kitchen. Earl followed.

  “You were chatting with him again.” Earl’s whisper had the steel of accusation to it.

  “Him, who?” Von turned the heat up on the kettle of water. She attempted to find matching mugs but couldn’t. Too many had broken over the years. She gathered the two remaining from their original set, a Star Trek: The Next Generation one, and another commemorating Prince Charles and Lady Diana’s wedding. She couldn’t believe it had survived all these years.

  “We’re going to do this again?”

  “I ended it. I keep telling you it was nothing but an internet … fling. I guess.” Von rifled through the cabinets to find something suitable to serve tea from.

  “So, what had you so occupied on the computer?” His arms folded over one another, Earl leaned against the counter.

  “Work. Hell, taking my turns at Scrabble would preoccupy me if it meant,” Von lowered her voice another notch, “not having to pay complete attention to my mom.”

  “Work? You expect me to believe that?”

  “Yes. Are we going to go through this every time I log onto the computer?”

  “Yes. Shit. No. I don’t know. I’m still getting my head around it all. How you could get feelings for … a set of 1s and 0s?”

  Von prayed he didn’t notice her wince at the dismissal of what she had shared. It was all emotional, that was as far as it went, she had told him, and it was over. She eyed the bottle of vodka in the glass-doored cabinet above the kitchen sink. Her mouth watered at the thought of a drink, but she knew she shouldn’t. Not until she made her choice. She slid a stack of saltine crackers alongside the cookies, hoping they would settle her stomach. “There’s nothing to get your head around. It’s over.”

  The kettle whistled, sending them to neutral corners. Von arranged the cups on a tray. She used the champagne flute from their wedding as the creamer. She poured some lumpy brown sugar into a small, faded, blue plastic bowl. She slammed the tray down in front of Isabelle harder than she intended.

  Serving himself, Neville said, “Add raisins to your brown sugar. It keeps it from going hard.” He was one of those types that was an authority on everything. “The Chinese keep buying up all of the sugar fields in Jamaica. They process the sugar too fine. Not enough molasses left in them, and that’s what’s good for you.”

  Reminded of something, Isabelle snapped her fingers and dove for her purse. She fished around in the huge thing for minutes. Finally, she withdrew a photograph. “Look what I found.”

  Her grandmother—who had forced everyone to call her “Aunt Mame” instead of anything warm like “grandma”—posed beside, yet apart, from her daughters. They stood oldest to youngest in descending degrees of misery, bitterness plain in all of their eyes.

  Earl leaned in to see better. “How many brothers and sisters do you have?”

  “There are 16 of us. No, 17. Aunt Mame insisted that we count Zaccie even though he never made it to term.”

  “You look like your mother when she was younger,” Neville said to Von. Von resisted the urge to spit in his eye. “It’s like looking at the ghost of future past.”

  “The dying are travelers, going on to a better world. Sometimes they get lost. A duppy haunt me up once.” Isabelle sipped her tea without blowing on it first. “Back when your father and I were having problems.”

  “So, for forty years?” Von asked. Earl shot her a “don’t poke the crazy” stare.

  “Hmpf.” Isabelle’s face twisted in an odd expression. “I was asleep, and suddenly this weight was on my chest. I tried to swing my arm out to wake your fathe
r, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t catch my breath. Then suddenly it was gone. I turned on the light, and your father wasn’t even in bed. He was downstairs watching television.”

  “Don’t mind her,” Von said to Earl, “she has a duppy story for every occasion. Treefoot. Rollin’ calf. There’s a whole menagerie of Jamaican bedtime folk tales. Any excuse to tell one of their stories.”

  “It’s better than any obeah man.” Neville stretched his arm out along the couch and settled into it, leaving his tea untouched before him. He dabbed his forehead with a red handkerchief that didn’t match any part of his outfit. “They tell you stuff you don’t want to hear. Stuff you don’t want anyone else to know. They scare me sometimes.”

  “What’s obeah?” Earl asked.

  “It’s like the Jamaican version of voodoo,” Von stage-whispered.

  “Like my sister Carmen,” Isabelle said. “When she gets sick, before she go to the doctor, she go see an obeah man. Her daughter, too. Me, I don’t truck with no obeah nonsense. I remember walking into town once with my mother …”

  Von closed her eyes, the way she had when she was a little girl and her mother started one of her stories.

  Isabelle was back home for a visit. A cock crowed in the distance, but, by six in the morning, Isabelle and Aunt Mame were well on their way to the cave to collect water for the day. Isabelle balanced her basin on the nest of long plaits on her head. A thick mist rolled in from the hills. The wind stirred the trees, the banana leaves whispering.

  Someone beat a drum. The arrhythmic pounding echoed from all around them, the sound scattered by the early morning fog. An old woman carried a lantern, its wan light smothered by the cloud. She swatted the drum she cradled in the crook of her other arm. She wore a blue gingham dress with dirt smudges along its front. A red bandana tied her hair back.

  “Isabelle!” she said sharply.

  Called by name by the stranger, Isabelle froze. Aunt Mame didn’t move either, but she didn’t show the apprehension of being approached by a complete stranger.

  The woman took Isabelle by the chin, turning her head side-to-side, her hand with the grip of a vice despite her age. “You have the mark of God on your forehead, but you’re disobedient.”

  Aunt Mame nodded. She followed the old woman along the washed-out road, pausing long enough to turn around to call after Isabelle. “Come, nuh, gal. She to read you up.”

  They approached a dingy shack of gray planks. Some of the boards had been painted sky blue at one time, as one wall was still washed with the faded color. Log stumps raised the house from sitting directly on the dirt mound. Stones strewn throughout the yard, looking more like they’d been accidently unearthed rather than forming a deliberate pathway. Barefoot children with their unbuttoned shirts or their one-piece dresses, scampered about, not noticing the rough ground. They said nothing, only watched as the trio entered the house.

  Isabelle was careful not to run her hand along the rough-hewn banister for fear of splinters. She took a seat on a dilapidated vinyl chair in the gloomy living room. A card table was turned off to the side. Knickknacks, a random assortment of kitschy figurines, lined the shelves.

  The woman hung the paraffin lamp in the corner and, without a word, began beating her drum. She bucked and jerked to the erratic rhythm, dancing as invitation for the spirits, though it looked to Isabelle like the dying spasms of a madwoman. The old woman’s skin seemed so much darker indoors; her face was a filigree of wrinkles polished by sweat. Without buildup or crescendo, she stopped.

  “Put two shillings into my hand,” the crone said.

  Isabelle suspected that the woman wanted to see if she wore a wedding ring. But Isabelle wore her band on the wrong hand, not wanting anyone to know she was married unless she told them. The woman’s claw of a hand was thin but so alive as it wrapped Isabelle’s own.

  “There is a man in your life.” The woman fixed her large, piercing eyes on Isabelle, their intensity unsettling. “You are conflicted.”

  “I’m here for you to tell me something,” Isabelle said, avoiding the obeah woman’s fishing.

  “The spirit can’t go through because you’re too tough to break.” The woman turned to Aunt Mame. “If you put ten shillings in my hand, I could go further.”

  Aunt Mame dropped the coins into the woman’s palm, all the while complaining about her stubborn, willful daughter who ran off with the first man she found. Off to America, away from her family. Her roots.

  The woman pressed the coins to her forehead. “The spirits have something to say,” she said in an all-too-knowing tone.

  “Lord Jesus,” Isabelle said. “Duppies not dead out if they get paid?”

  “Don’t vain the name of the Lord,” Aunt Mame said.

  “You have a brown boyfriend,” the woman said. “You lived near a burial ground.”

  Isabelle nodded, even though everyone lived near a burial ground since they buried on their property.

  “Your boyfriend has another girlfriend. And there will be an altercation.” The woman slumped into her couch as if spent. She waved them off.

  Aunt Mame gave her ten more shillings.

  “Come,” the woman led Aunt Mame to a back room.

  Isabelle wondered who the woman pretended her ancestry from. All of the healers and mystics claimed to be descended from Abyssian royalty, Jesus, or John the Baptist. The door to the back room creaked open. Aunt Mame emerged with a smile on her face. She smelled of spiced olive oil.

  “A whole coolness has come about me.”

  “When you’re rubbed down with oil, it’ll cool you down,” Isabelle said.

  “A spirit haunt your mother. The oil will protect her,” the old woman said. “You too foolish. Come on, I’ve had enough.” Isabelle grabbed her water basin with one hand and Aunt Mame with the other. The old woman followed her out of her shop and down the street.

  “They will all leave you. Your every relationship will sour. You will be a poison to your own.” The woman stopped and convulsed for a moment, sputtering nonsense in a strange tongue. Isabelle and Aunt Mame paused midstep. The woman ceased her tremors and stared at them. “Someone is going to have an abortion, and then someone is going to die. This is curse you to the third generation.”

  “To the third generation?” Earl asked.

  “The woman did love her threes. Those obeah cons love to try to shame you when they don’t get their money,” Isabelle said.

  “The third generation?” Von repeated Earl’s question. “Does that start with Aunt Mame or you?” Von asked.

  “Either way you’d be included, Yvonne. Besides, I had to have two abortions, and I’m just fine.”

  “You did?”

  “I’m sure we’ve talked about this. I wanted to have six children, one right after the other, but the doctor said that it was too high a risk for me. That’s why there’s the large age gap between you and your brother.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me about this before?” Von asked.

  “I’m sure I did. What does it matter?” Isabelle sipped her tea but crinkled her nose at it now that it had cooled. “No one believes that crap.”

  “‘Crap?’ That’s awfully American sounding,” Earl said. Von shot him a glare.

  “Don’t be foolish. Anyway, the obeah people them, they just con artists. They try to get a read on you and twist your greatest fears against you.”

  “Why are you so dismissive about what she said? What she predicted came true,” Von said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I love him, but Daddy wasn’t the most faithful of men. And you did get into that shouting match with that one woman who tried to sue for child support.”

  “Hmpf,” Isabelle said without commitment. It wasn’t her most dignified moment, and she hated to be reminded of it.

  “Obeah works through belief. Either you have a spirit in you, or you don’t. You have to choose.” Neville folded his red handkerchief and tucked it back into his pocket.

/>   §

  Gentle snores drifted across the gulf between Von and Earl, the exigencies of life reduced to the way of slumber. In bed, in dreams, anything was possible. She could go anywhere she wanted to and start anew. Like clearing away dishes after a tea party: she could give the illusion of tending to someone’s need without any real exertion or risk on her part, even if the someone in need was herself. Beyond this place of misery and anger, surviving the wounds of childhood, but not wanting its scars to last the first, second, or third generation.

  Her mother made sense to her in a way. Von thought of the story she told herself about her life, like she were cursed and bad things hunted her like a hungry lion hot on the scent of a wounded gazelle. But it all came down to a choice. That was what her mother was, a series of choices, the choice to strangle relationships to within an inch of their lives, the choice to remain in a bad marriage, in a situation that made her miserable. Von thought about the picture of her grandmother, mother, and aunties and saw her future. Bleak. Miserable. Bitter. One day she might stumble into the living room of her child and mutter about her ingratitude, the refrain to her same, sad family song, ticking off the litany of offenses, both real and imagined. Each slight clung to and nursed like a coddled infant at her venomous bosom. She didn’t want to join the ranks of sad desperation. She wanted to be free from it all, to go where she could heal from the mistakes of her past, to be someone … whole.

  To the third generation, the voice now whispered.

  She would be the master of her fate, not the legacy of her mother’s fears. And she dared anyone to tell her otherwise. It was her choice.

  Perhaps it wouldn’t be too late to create a life of joy with Earl. She wasn’t sure he even much liked her these days. Nothing would spite her mother like her finding happiness. For a brief moment, Von wondered what life would be like if everyone told the truth. Whenever words landed in a way that cut. Whenever actions failed to live up to expectations or frustrated. Whenever life hurt or the heart was denied. To live in the open, in complete honesty, to forge life from truth. Life was messy, and there were no easy answers, especially after so much deception. She pondered how to begin repairs to correct the mistakes of the past and move forward. She just wanted a chance at finding happiness. If not for herself … her thoughts drifted off while ticking off mistakes to correct.