Eating Memories (22 page)

GO HOME, RED, it said.

And below that:

GO HOME, NIGGER.

Simple and to the point.

But Robert, after all those years up North, after all those protective years in the Air Force, was home. Southerners were like big dogs, and Robert, who was also a Southerner, knew he was about to get his throat tom out.

“Why do they come back?” Yuri wailed. “They come every night now. What do they want?”

Robert knew very well what they wanted, but he shrugged anyway.

“They are waiting.” Yuri giggled. “They come with their Bic lighters and their charcoal briquettes to make burning crosses of us.”

The inside of the truck was dark, but Robert imagined he could see darker shapes moving in the shadows: the round shapes of heads, the lethal, thin shapes of rifles. The truck’s engine was idling, and it breathed puffs of white smoke from its tailpipe.

“Shut up,” Robert said. He couldn’t see them yet, but he knew they were coming. In the screen of trees to the back of the truck he could feel bodies moving, he could sense 30.06s. in shadowy hands.

“The U.S. military has caused this. I understand now that is why you have not called them. You mow they have always hated black people. I myself have nothing against blacks, of course. No Russian has. But I have been thinking of a way out. We should call my embassy,” Yuri said. “They will grant us asylum. My army will come with a helicopter and many soldiers. They will shoot these men who mean to kill us, and then they will take us away to safety. To safety, Robert.” The Russian was trembling like the DTs had hold of him.

Robert sat cleaning his Beretta and staring at the blurred shape in the television screen. Next to his leg was his M-16 and three hundred rounds of ammunition. “No,” he told Yuri.

When Yuri reached for the phone, Robert slammed the clip into the automatic, spun in his chair, and leveled the pistol at the Russian’s face. “No,” he said.

* * *

The next day the old ladies came with a lemon cake. Robert started to eat some, then thought better of it. He put it down on the counter and backed away.

“You look peaked,” Ida said. She patted Robert on the arm and then turned to look at Yuri, who sat rigid and tight-lipped in his chair.

Robert glanced at him, too, flashing a code out of his eyes: YOU OPEN YOUR MOUTH YOU SON-OF-A-BITCH AND I’LL BLOW YOUR BRAINS OUT.

Yuri didn’t even blink. He might have been afraid to. Robert didn’t like folks who talked back.

The two women had surrounded Robert. Out of the comer of his eye he caught a glimpse of Minnealetha. She’d remembered that it was necessary to be polite, and she’d replaced her sweet, porcelain mask over the horror.

Robert grinned at her. She grinned back.
Oh, my, Grandma. What big eyes you have.

And Ida was growing twin yellow fangs. When he whipped around to face her, she had already hidden them, the way old white ladies always do.

See what big teeth you have, my dear.

Minnealetha was looking out the window, sending signals to the white men gathering on the other side of the woods.

On the security screen in the comer there was the pale shape of a pickup truck on the road, passing fast. The microphone picked up the clunk of a thrown rock.

Ida laughed. “Don’t you pay any attention to those Sutton boys. Their Daddy just got them riled up. It’ll all be over soon.”

Yes. Soon it would be over. Robert looked out the window. In the pasture was a scarecrow shaped like a black man burning, and in the woods, black men hung like heavy fruit from the trees. The light from the flaming scarecrow made Robert’s eyes water.

He turned around.

* * *

The Russian angel comes up to the bed. “I must know. Was Major Yeremin in it with you?”

I feel the smile start at the corners of my mouth and work its way wide and happy towards the middle.

“Did he find a way into the computer system? Did you kill him when you saw what he was doing, or did you kill him for trying to stop you? Please, Captain Strickland. It is important to both our governments that we know the truth.”

The truth.

The truth was that He wasn’t a white man. That was the secret they were trying to hide, because if I had known it, things would have been so different.

God was never a white man at all.

* * *

Out in the pasture God was walking. When His foot hit the high tension lines there was a roman candle flash, a bone-jolting zzzzzzt. Trees exploded into flames.

“I speak God’s secret language,” one of the sisters said. “All white people do.” Robert wasn’t certain whether it was Ida or Minnealetha who had spoken.

On the horizon a tongue of fire shot up towards the heavens as God marched towards Birmingham. Robert tapped a few more commands on the keyboard, and above his head, in the cold depths of space, he could sense the satellite turn in a slow, deadly waltz.

Yuri was staring at him in horror. There was a wet, red hole in the Russian’s chest.

“Do you know the secret language?” the old woman asked.

“‘No,” Robert said softly. He had always, always wanted to learn it. “Can you teach me?”

Ida was talking even though her mouth no longer moved. Her eyes were half-open. Blood had made a thin, neat crimson stripe down her face.

“Of course,” she assured him, as if Robert were eight again and she had made him a promise. Promises to children, even little black boys, were never, ever broken. “I have a recipe for it,” she said.

Author’s Note:
I’m a sucker for Victoriana, therefore this novelette is one of my all time favorites. I was pleasantly surprised when one of the male members of my writer’s group told me that it was his favorite, too. “The husband could have been a cardboard villain, but instead he becomes a tragic figure,” he said, much to my relief. Having survived an awful marriage, I’m not particularly sympathetic for the plight of controlling husbands.

I’ve often thought of expanding this into a novel, but each time I realize that I would ruin the impact of the story. This says everything I wished to say about the serenity of the mind and the cruel bonds of some marriages without saying a word more.

Lionel always said the plain muslin dress was one a parlor maid might wear on her afternoon off. Had he known Iona was wearing it with company in the house, he certainly would have made her change. But Iona was one whose rebellions were quiet; and so, to forestall any arguments, she’d taken early breakfast in her rooms.

The morning dew on the meadows outside the manor was dense. Where her hem brushed the grass, it came away wet. In her left hand she clutched a small cheesecloth bag; her right was occupied with her walking stick. Every few yards she paused and studied the ground to see if she could spy any tracks of
gastropodae.

The night before, the revelation of her interest had spawned great derision and some shudders. Lionel’s huge-bellied uncle Edward, a veteran of India, had scowled and asked why Lionel could not manage to keep his wife from tramping the fields. Dowager Lady Darcy, visiting from the neighboring manor, had lifted an incredulous eyebrow and wondered whether snails weren’t something more to be banished from the garden than collected. Rosanna Powell, the widow of Lionel’s younger cousin, had asked in her superior way if Iona couldn’t find a more agreeable pastime such as pressing flowers.

The fact was that she could not. And had the guests known the entire truth of it, a truth she also carefully hid from her husband, they would have been stricken speechless. Iona studied the reproductive cycle of gastropods, not for any salacious knowledge, but for the science itself.

She moved towards the opposite shore of the lake, whisking past fat spiders who dangled patiently in their webs. The forest was a jewelbox: the fog pearlescent, the dew-burdened leaves diamantine. As Iona studied the depths of the untouched woods, a thrush trilled in the gloom. She stepped into the shadows, shouldering her way past two young ash trees.

Suddenly the air was illuminated as though a pale match had been struck in the darkness. Disoriented, she took a moment to notice the trees were gone. In their place was a small, white room where an unlikely creature sat, peering at her from a chair.

She had never before experienced a swoon, but perhaps, she thought, this was what other women saw when consciousness faded and the mind disarranged itself.

The atmosphere was hushed. Apart from the chair and the creature, the room was barren, aglow in soft, parchment light. Hand held to her throat, she backed up the way she had come.

Within an instant the atmosphere darkened. She was in the forest again, the two ashes and the thick spring woods behind her. For a moment she stood there, stunned. By the evidence, she hadn’t experienced a swoon at all, but a mutiny of her imagination.

Creeping around the saplings, she inched into the woods. The forest was aromatic with the sweet scent of loam, the sour pungency of leaf rot. There was no gnomish creature sitting astride a plain chair, no otherworldly room. She might have continued her search for
polygridae;
but, reminding herself that timidity was unconscionable in a researcher, she turned back and entered the small opening between the ashes.

The change in the lighting was breathtaking. She blinked and then blinked again as she caught sight of the being in the room.

He was improbable in a humorous way, rather more amphibian than man. Placed to either side of his flat, brown-gray face were two inquisitive eyes which at her entry closed and then slowly opened, like a morning glory welcoming the sun.

A less well-bred woman might have screamed. Iona did not. “I do beg your pardon,” she murmured.

Those sad, intelligent eyes shut briefly, the lids wrinkled and dry as a bird’s.

“As I don’t believe in goblins or trolls, you must be a figment of my imagination, sir,” she said, feeling childish and silly talking, as it were, to the air.

He opened his eyes as though in inquiry.

“I am, to put it bluntly, delusional,” she said, detached from both the statement and the occurrence as though she were speaking through another’s lips. “But it is in a scientist’s nature to question, even though he plumb the horrifying depths of his soul and discover his own Mr. Hyde.”

Of course this was her own Mr. Hyde, she told herself. The room reminded her of the spartan rooms of her beloved Kyoto, that strange land where paper walls blushed with brittle light. The creature astride the chair might have been her own rough self, a specter which was comfortable only in the small- confines of its own imagination.

“Quite nice,” she told the being playfully, deciding to face her own insanity head-to-head rather than flee from its terrors. Indeed, the room
was
nice. It was free from the excessive ornamentation and damask-curtained gloom of England, more elegant and bare than the conceit of British pseudo-oriental decor. “But, if you will forgive me for saying so, you have need of a window.”

She glanced around the bare walls again, and her eyes snagged on the sight of a small square—how could she have missed it? —that opened onto gray sky.

She walked up and looked through, her tightened throat ensnaring her breath. Outside the window it was raining, the drops dimpling a bamboo-lined lake. Across one slender arm of the pond a lacy bridge arched, and from somewhere, faint and distant, came tile discordant tinkling of wind chimes.

“How lovely,” she said with a sigh. “How magical the mind can be. This is quite like the Gardens of Perpetual Happiness which lie outside the palace of Emperor Mutsuhito.”

It was like, yet not like. The flowers near the lake were a bit too colorful, the bamboo a sight too perfect. No, this was not the real place, but the magical garden in her memories.

Swiftly she turned away, tears wetting her eyes. How unbearable, how unbelievably sad. She’d come to look for snails and had instead found herself, her entire universe carried on her back.

“Please do come again,” the creature said.

She turned towards him, surprised.

“I see that you are ready to leave. I wish you would come again. It is so lonely for me.”

She studied him. His gentle voice rang in her head even though she hadn’t seen him open his mouth. No need of that, of course. The thoughts, the words, were her own.

“Naturally I shall come again,” she promised him.

How could she not? The boundaries of her loneliness were paper-thin, the atmosphere within bright and cramped, with room only for herself and her caged aspirations. Hefting her walking stick, she strode through the far wall, exited between the ash trees, and, specimen bag quite empty, made her way to the house.

By the time the butler had met her at the door, she had nearly put away the feelings of strangeness. Catching sight of herself in the glass, her cheeks high-colored from excitement, her blond hair blown wild by the wind, she hastened to straighten herself as best she could and, reminding herself of duty, inquired after her guests.

“Sir Edward is up and about as befits a soldier,” Haverty told her, his black, twinkling eyes belying the solemnity of his tone. “And Mrs. Powell has slept late and has taken her breakfast in her rooms.”

She had started up the stairs when he called after her, his voice now strained with timidity, “Madame? I’ve taken the liberty of informing cook about your interest.”

On the steps Iona turned, painfully aware of her sodden dress, her wet shoes. One part of her was .anxious to return to her, rooms and the ministrations of her chambermaid; another part was trapped by Haverty’s words.

“She encounters snails in the herb garden, madame,” the butler told her, all vestiges of his early smile vanished and a fearful apprehension taking its place. Haverty’s hand fidgeted at his coat and then lifted to his dark hair as though trying to neaten its already brushed perfection. “I have informed her that she is to save all interesting specimens she finds. I hope that is to your liking.”

“Thank you,” she replied absently, her gaze flicking around the hall, anxious that she might, in her disheveled state, meet Uncle Edward, or worse, Rosanna Powell.

“Cook has them ready for you, if you’d care to see them.”

Curiosity besting her, Iona came down the stairs and followed Haverty into the kitchens. The tweeny was polishing silver at the table. By the stove, cook was in command of an army of boiling pots, her sleeves pushed up on her thick, floury arms. When Iona entered with Haverty, the woman wiped her hands on her voluminous apron and smiled. “Got some snails for you, missus,” she said. “Cooked them up for you as Haverty ordered, so they’d be clean and all and not nasty when you puts them with the others.”

Iona took the silver tray that was handed her. Cook had painstakingly boiled and cleaned at least a dozen specimens of
helicacea,
.the common white garden snail.

“I’ll get you more,” Cook offered. “There’s plenty about.”

“Yes, of course,” Iona told her. “I’m quite pleased.” And she was pleased, she realized. The pair had accepted her pastime, although it was obvious they did not quite understand the point. She stood in her kitchen, bedraggled from her hike, and was overwhelmed by the gentleness of her servants’ attentions.

“The master has gone off with Sir Edward,” Haverty told Iona in a conspiratorial whisper. “I’ll call the chambermaid to come up to you presently.”

She felt her cheeks bum. Of course the servants would be aware of the dissension her scientific interests had caused in the house, but she didn’t care for their knowledge to be tossed in her face. Without another word, she spun on her heel and, toting her platter of
helicacea,
hurried upstairs.

Later that day she brought her embroidery to the withdrawing room and sat with Sir Edward’s pinched wife and Lionel as they listened to Edward’s tedious rendition of the manliness exhibited at some battle or another.

“That is work more befitting a woman, my dear,” Edward said abruptly, pausing in his description of the red tide as it descended on rebellious natives.

Iona glanced up from her sullen jabs at the cloth. Sir Edward’s beard was trimmed into obedience, his great mustaches waxed and tamed. He was staring at her, his gaze critical and edged, as though he feared his own mousy wife might catch some of Iona’s mutiny and he might have to single-handedly put it down.

“It is agreeable,” she said cautiously, aware of her husband’s dark, warning look. “But not altogether challenging.”

Edward harrumphed. “Men have challenges. The call of battle and such. Women need none other than bearing children and raising them properly.”

Iona’s face grew hot. “We have not been so blessed,” she told him.

“Perhaps if you’d not spend your time poking and prodding in the grass,” he told her, resting his clasped hands comfortably on the bulge of his waistcoat, “you would discover that blessing forthcoming.”

Lionel glanced from his uncle to Iona, his expression stony; and much later, after a boring dinner conversation which was conducted uncompromisingly by Edward and not much lightened by Rosanna Powell’s Mosaic handing down of the laws of fashion, Iona repaired to her rooms.

As she was sorting through her collection of exotic Eastern shells and deciding what to do with the dozen or so cook had given her, Lionel knocked at her door.

“Put them away,” he snarled. “And while my uncle is here pretend to be a dutiful wife.”

She swung around on her dressing stool to regard him. “I should think I do more than pretend,” she told him.

“Put them away, I tell you!” He crossed the carpet to her, his tall body in a threatening stance. “By law all that you have is mine. Should you forget that, I’ll gladly take them from you.”

Meekly she slipped the tray back into a drawer, afraid he would exhibit one of his rare, but violent tantrums. He had never forbade her the studies before, but should he wish to, he clearly had the right. When she glanced up she saw him contemplating her in the mirror, the stem expression gone and a simpering one taking its place.

“Just for a while, Iona,” he said. “Just while the guests are here.”

She nodded and rose, thinking that he would leave. He did not. As she turned, his arm encircled her waist and his lips sought the solace of her neck. She stiffened for a moment in his embrace, hoping that tonight he should find his manhood and not blame her for the failure. The argument ended as all their disagreements had, smothered by Lionel’s needy and despairing groan.

* * *

However peevish Lionel might be about her studies, Iona knew promises were meant to be kept. The next morning she arose before the sun, dressed in a plum gown that was slightly out of fashion, put on a pair of scuffed boots, and walked out to the lake.