The End Has Come (28 page)

The crate was light enough to lift to the table with only slight pressure in her lower back, gone when she stretched. But she could only roll a barrel slowly, oh-so-slowly, across her threshold. How had Raul managed so easily? She left the second barrel outside. By the time she closed her door again, her lower back pulsed with pain and she felt aged by a decade.

“Lies,” Nayima said.

Tango and Buster agreed with frenzied mews.

She would have no Sunday dinner if she died tomorrow, Nayima reminded herself. So she got her cleaver from the kitchen, unwrapped the beef, and began chopping the meat on the table, not caring about dents in the wood. She chopped until she was perspiring and sweat stung her eyes.

Nayima held a chunk with both hands and sank in her teeth. She mostly did not bother with salt in her own cooking, so the taste was overwhelming at first. The cats gnawed at the meat beside her on the table with loud purrs.

“Could there be a child?”

Suppose they’d had a breakthrough, found a way to rewire the genes? But why go through that trouble and expense when other children were being born? The girl must be a failed experiment. A laboratory fluke. Did they need caretakers for a child born with half a brain — was that it? Nayima swore she’d be damned if she’d spend the years she had left tending the lab-coats’ mistakes.

“But there is no child,” she reminded Tango and Buster. “It’s all a lie.”

After dark, with her flashlight to guide her, Nayima set her traps for the thief cat with slices of meat and visited the wooden chicken coop Raul had helped her build, as big as her grandmother’s backyard shed. She checked the loose wires in the rear, but the hole was still secure. She hadn’t collected eggs earlier, so chickens had defecated on some. A few eggs lay entirely crushed, yolks seeping across the straw.

Nayima was exhausted by the time she’d cleaned the nestboxes, scrubbed the surviving eggs, and set them on a bowl in her kitchen for Raul to find later — but she couldn’t afford to sleep tonight. The marshals might come at any time.

Nayima fixed herself a cup of black tea from her new water — so fresh! — and sat vigil by her front window with her shotgun, watching the empty pathway. Sometimes her eyes played tricks, animating the darkness. A far-off cat’s cry sounded like a baby’s, waking Nayima when she dozed.

Just before dawn, bells jingled near the chicken coop. Heart clambering, Nayima ran outside. The food was gone from the first trap she reached, but the door had not properly sprung. Shit.

More frantic jingling came from the trap twenty yards farther. Nayima raced toward it, her light in one hand and her gun in the other.

A pair of eyes glared out at her from beyond the bars.

The cat scrambled to every corner of the cage, desperate to escape while bells mocked him. This was the one. Nayima recognized the monster tabby’s unusual size.

“Buddy, you stole the wrong chicken.”

Nayima could not remember the last time she had felt so giddy. She carefully lowered her flashlight to the ground, keeping it trained on the trap. Then she raised her shotgun, aiming. She’d blow a hole in her trap this way, but she had caught the one she was looking for.

The cat mewed — not angry, beseeching. With a clear understanding of his situation.

“You started it, not me,” Nayima said. “Don’t sit there begging now.”

The cat’s trapped eyes glowed in her bright beam. Another plaintive mew.

“Shut up, you hear me? This is your fault.” But her resolve was flagging.

The cat raised his paw, shaking the cage door. How many times had she done the very same thing? How many locks had she tested, searching for freedom?

Could there really be a child?

Nayima sobbed. Her throat was already raw from crying. Never again, she had said. No more tears. No more.

Nayima went to the trap’s door and flipped up the latch. The cat hissed at her and raced away like a jaguar, melting into the dark. She hoped he would run for miles, never looking back.

Is my little girl with those zookeepers without even a name?

“But it’s all lies,” she whispered at the window, as she stroked Tango in her lap. “Isn’t it?”

Dawn came and went with the roosters’ crowing. Nayima did not move to collect the morning eggs, or to eat any of the beef she and the cats had left, or to empty her bulging bladder. She watched the sky light up her empty pathway, her open gate.

Why hadn’t she closed the gate?

Based on the sun high above, it was nearly noon when Nayima finally stood up.

The metallic glint far down the roadway looked imaginary at first. To be sure, Nayima wiped away dust on her window pane with her shirt, although the spots outside still clouded it. The gleam seemed to vanish, but then it was back, this time with bright cobalt blue lights that looked out of place against the browns and grays of the road. Two sets of blue lights danced in regimented patterns, back and forth.

Nayima’s breath fogged her window as she leaned closer, so she wiped it again.

Hoverbikes!

Two large hoverbikes were speeding toward her house, one on each side of the road at a matching pace, blue lights snaking across their underbellies. At least it wasn’t an army, unless more were coming. Marshals’ hoverbikes were only big enough for two, at most.

“You damn fool, Raul,” she whispered again, but she already had forgiven him too.

Nayima was too exhausted to pick up her shotgun. She had failed the test with her cat thief, so what made her think she could fight marshals? Let them take what they wanted. As long as she had Tango and Buster, she could start again. She always did.

As the hoverbikes flew past her gate, Nayima counted one front rider on each bike in the marshals’ uniform: black jackets with orange armbands. The second rider on the lead bike was only Raul — his face was hidden behind the black helmet, but she knew his red hickory shirt. His father had worn one just like it, Raul had told her until she wanted to scream.

“Nayima!” Raul called. He flung his helmet to the ground.

The hoverbike Raul was riding hadn’t quite slowed to a stop, floating six inches above the ground, so Raul stumbled when he leaped off in a hurry. The marshal grabbed his arm to help hold him steady while the bike bobbed obediently in place.

“Querida, it’s me,” Raul said. “Don’t worry about the marshals. Please open the door.”

Nayima stared as both marshals took off their helmets, almost in unison, and rested them in the crooks of their arms. One was a young man, one a woman, neither older than twenty-five. The man was fair-haired and ruddy. The woman’s skin was nearly as dark as her own, her hair also trimmed to fuzz. Had she seen this man during an earlier classroom visit? He looked familiar, and he was smiling. They both were. She had never seen a marshal smile.

The marshals wore no protective suits. No masks. They did not hide their faces or draw weapons. Even ten yards away, through a dirty window, Nayima saw their eyes.

Nayima jumped when Raul banged on her door. “Nayima, ella está aqui!”

“I don’t see her.” Nayima tried to shout, but her throat nearly strangled her breath.

Raul motioned to the woman marshal, and she dismounted her hoverbike. For the first time, Nayima saw her bike’s passenger — not standing, but in a backward facing seat. A child stirred as the woman unstrapped her.

It couldn’t be.
Couldn’t
be. Nayima closed her eyes. Had they drugged her meat? Was it a hallucination?

“Do you see, Nayima?” Raul said. “Ven afuera conmigo. Please come.”

Raul left her porch to run back to the hoverbike. Freed from her straps, a child reached out for a hand for Raul’s help from the seat. Raul made a game of it, lifting the child up high. Curly spirals of dark hair nestled her shoulders. For an instant, the child was silhouetted in the sunlight, larger than life in Raul’s sturdy upward grasp.

The girl giggled loudly enough for Nayima to hear her through the window pane. Raul was a good father. Nayima could see it already.

“Now you’re going to meet your mamí,” Raul said.

Nayima hid behind her faded draperies as Raul took the girl’s hand and walked to the porch with her. When she heard the twin footsteps on her wooden planks, Nayima’s world swayed. She ventured a peek and saw the girl’s inquisitive face turned toward the window — dear Jesus, this angel had Gram’s nose and plump, cheerful cheeks. Raul’s lips. Buried treasure was etched in her delicate features.

Jesus. Jesus.
Thank you, Dear Lord.

Nayima opened her door.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tananarive Due
is the Cosby Chair in the Humanities at Spelman College. She also teaches in the creative writing MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles. The American Book Award winner and NAACP Image Award recipient has authored and/or co-authored twelve novels and a civil rights memoir. In 2013, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. In 2010, she was inducted into the Medill School of Journalism’s Hall of Achievement at Northwestern University. She has also taught at the Geneva Writers Conference, the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and Voices of Our Nations Art Foundation (VONA). Due’s supernatural thriller
The Living Blood
won a 2002 American Book Award. Her novella “Ghost Summer,” published in the 2008 anthology
The Ancestors,
received the 2008 Kindred Award from the Carl Brandon Society, and her short fiction has appeared in best-of-the-year anthologies of science fiction and fantasy. Due is a leading voice in black speculative fiction.

“So it was, and so it is written:

And fire rained from the sky, and Abraham died, and all his brethren, and all that generation of the world were burned away.”

Isaac had really thought writing the bible would be easier.

“And Isaac saved the children of Abraham and led them to the promised land.

And Isaac took Julia and Ellen for his wives and begat Joseph and Thomas.

And Joseph begat Simon who begat Noah and Reuben and Thomas begat Paul and Israel and Luke. And the children of Abraham were fruitful, and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and the land was bountiful, and the LORD was pleased and gave them his favor, and the children of Abraham filled the land.”

The scribe falls silent, waiting; Isaac keeps his eyes closed, lets the words echo. Steeples his gnarled hands, draws a rasping breath, hocks up the phlegm.

Life is phlegm, now. Most likely death will be, too, a slow drowning in his own bed, gurgling and frothing. A death unfit for a patriarch. A voice, now, unfit for a patriarch, this phlegmy croak, but the scribe is of no use either, his thin warble that of a boy still proud of the peach fuzz on his balls, trying to prove himself to the sovereign Father. Failing.

“Again,” Isaac snaps, and the boy, with his stuttering rhythm, reads back the morning’s work.

And Isaac saved the children of Abraham.

And the children of Abraham filled the land.

Isaac likes the sound of these words, the roll and crest of them. He likes the tense of them, the tide sweeping the children’s struggles into the past, smoothing its edges, blurring its sharp, painful lines. Between each verse, the fine-grained memories: brighter, for Isaac, than the details of his breakfast meal or his great-grandchildren’s names. The burn of frostbitten fingertips in an ashen winter, the paperwhite crinkle of skin preserved too long from the sun. No room, in this new bible, for the names of the traitors who chose death over the Lord’s command, the whores who stole away with their soft curves and gentle voices, the plump breasts and fertile wombs meant to belong to Isaac, leaving him to women like Julia and Ellen and Shirley and Kate, too fat or too old or too angry. Abandoning him to Kate’s womb, all dried up, and Shirley’s tongue so sharp no one could blame her hands for tying the noose, silencing it for good. Julia’s inability, for so many years and so many daughters, to finally give Isaac a deserved son.

Isaac took Julia and begat Joseph.
He appreciates the tidiness of it. The act of taking, his spindly thirteen-year-old limbs crushed against Julia’s bulk, her meaty fingers on his spurting organ as he finally became a man — third try’s the charm, her tears and his, their murmurs overlapping,
God’s will
God’s will God’s will,
let it be done, please God let it be done, and eventually, fifteen seconds later, seven years later, three daughters later, it was.

Isaac still thought, then, that the woman he’d loved would return from the wilderness, to save him as he had once saved her. He assumed the Lord would return her to the fold, because Isaac desired it.

It never happened. Isaac never found anyone worthy of replacing her, and the voice he’d once heard so clearly never spoke to him again. In body and spirit, Isaac was left alone.

Here is another bible he could write, testament of Isaac, son of Abraham.

And then the father abandoned the son, charged him to be a man before his time and lead his people through the dark times.