The Healing (25 page)

Granada was so touched by the thought of Little Lord wanting to watch over her that without thinking, she reached out and patted his arm. She quickly caught herself and drew her hand back like she had touched fire. Aunt Sylvie would have slapped her face.

But Little Lord didn’t seem to notice. “Granada, please,” he begged, boylike again. “If we can get to Momma, you don’t never have to come back here. We can stay with her until we grow up and then you can be my slave and we can live wherever we want to.”

Granada knew there were a lot of things out there his momma’s little gun couldn’t protect her from. She hadn’t even mentioned the gators and whirlpools and quicksand and bears and panthers and buffalo gnats. But she decided against arguing. She didn’t want to scare Little Lord out of going.

Besides, she thought, as long as he was taking her, it wasn’t like she was running away. She was doing her master’s son’s bidding. She really had no choice.

“You got to promise me, Little Lord. If we get caught, you got to swear you made me go.”

“I promise, Granada,” he said, crossing his heart and then laughing. “I’ll tell them I was going to whip you good if you didn’t.”

Granada felt around on the floor for her brogans and slipped the freshly laundered calico dress over her shift. She listened for a moment to the light, steady snores across the room and then crawled out the window.

T
hey soon found themselves paddling easily down the creek on a beautiful May morning, savoring the stolen sweetness of their escape. Every once in a while a nesting crane rose from the banks and took flight. Turtles basked in the sun, lined up on fallen limbs that reached out into the creek. As the canoe neared, a line of four or five plunked themselves into the water one after the other like ticks of a clock.

Granada had never been on the water before and she marveled at how the creek was a living thing with a will of its own, like an untamed horse challenging her to ride upon its back. At first she was unsure and jumpy and nearly made them spill, but Little Lord had proved a good teacher. Barnabas had constructed the craft out of a hollow log and made it small and light, easier for a child to handle, and the oars were made to fit Little Lord’s boy-size strokes. Within an hour, he had Granada paddling like a fur trapper.

At times the creek narrowed so that branches from the locusts and sycamores arched over the entire width of the creek, and when that happened, Granada dropped her paddle to the bottom of the canoe and wrapped her arms over her head, certain that moccasins were about to rain from the limbs and bed down in her hair.

Otherwise things couldn’t be better.

Granada looked back over her shoulder to check on Little Lord. His fair skin was already beginning to pink up in the intense morning sun. His pale blue eyes were bright. The boy grinned at her.

“You studying hard to be a witch like Polly?” he asked. “My book says witches use graveyard dirt and bat wings and salamander eyeballs and such to cast spells and turn princes into frogs. You know how to do any of that yet?”

It was true. Granada had read the book before he had. “Never seen her do nothing like that,” she admitted. “I figure it’s the way she looks at folks. Like she can open them up with her eyes and count their bones.”

“The evil eye!” he exclaimed. Granada could tell he had been listening to Aunt Sylvie as well as reading books.

“And the way she touches folks all over their bodies with them hot hands of hers,” she said. “And she whispers things in their ear.”

“Incantations,” he said.

“I reckon,” she said noncommittally. She thought of the night in the forest when Polly dug the hole. And the time outside the hospital when Polly sang the song and her body seemed to become young again. She remembered the warming in her own chest when Polly touched her. Was that magic? Was that the hoodoo Aunt Sylvie talked about?

“What else she do?”

“She crazy,” Granada said. “She say varmints, jaybirds, and such talk to her. She say they always telling her what to do.”

Little Lord laughed with delight, encouraging Granada to say more.

“And, Little Lord!” she exclaimed, forgetting her paddling and swiveling her body to look him in the face. “She goes around naming things! Up and down creation, she puts a new name on everything she sees. Things I never knew had no name. She showed me something she calls a headache tree. And toothache bark. Rattlesnake weed. A fever bush. Polly say folks don’t really see something until somebody
names it. But soon as it got a name on it, they say, ‘Sure, I know what that is! I seen it all my life!’ She says to name something is to remember it down deep, where the roots go.”

She turned back around, shifted her paddle to the other side of the canoe, and dug deep into the water. “Yep,” she sighed, feeling old and wise, “she says a long time ago, her people used to be the namers of the world. I reckon she figures Adam who named all them critters was the first of her people. She says for the people to be free, they need to lay a claim to naming things again. And a person ought to start with his own self.”

Granada surprised herself at how effortlessly Polly’s words were flowing out of her mouth, almost like she believed them herself. She couldn’t help but continue. “And she says that God ain’t the one give the white man everything he got a hold of.”

“Where it come from then?”

“She says it comes from the slave woman’s bagina.”

“Bagina? What’s that?”

Granada shrugged. “I don’t know. Every time I ask she hoots and hollers at me and pops up her skirts real high. Laughs her fool head off. I told you she was crazy.”

Little Lord giggled again. It made Granada giddy to tell him everything. He was the only one who acted like he didn’t much mind what it was she came out with, whether he understood it or not. He just liked listening to her.

She had no sooner had these thoughts than Little Lord asked, “So how will you make my momma well?”

Granada had clean forgotten! There was something that Little Lord was listening for after all. She said the only thing she could think of that for sure wouldn’t do any harm. “I reckon I’ll feed her some mutton and port wine and whisper in her ear.”

“You reckon that works on a white person?”

“Course it does!” she snapped. Granada pulled hard on her paddle. Did he think their insides were so different?

The sun had begun its afternoon descent when the creek opened
up into an immense bayou where the water stood dark and still and bottomless. Giant cypress and tupelo gum rose imposingly out of the depths, dropping curtains of moss from their branches. The children paddled without speaking into this gloomy maze of trees and water.

The long hush was broken when a sudden and terrible roar rose up. Granada’s heart seized in her chest. The sound had been as fierce as the bellowing of a bull.

“That was a gator,” Little Lord said in a dry whisper. “A big one.”

What frightened Granada the most was that Little Lord felt the need to whisper. Was it that close?

“Smell that?” he asked.

A slight breeze wafted through the swamp and she caught a sweet and sickly scent.

“Gator wallow,” Little Lord said before Granada could answer. “Barnabas says it’s the only thing smells like that.”

“What if he chunks us in the creek?” Granada gasped. “Nobody learned me how to swim.”

“Just hold on to the canoe,” he said. “Hey! Maybe we get a gator that got no more teeth than Silas.” He made an attempt at laughing, but it sounded more like a strangled cough.

At last they found an outlet from the bayou, a small stream flowing between two overgrown banks. For a while the channel coiled snakelike but then it started to unravel, branching off into a confusion of choices. They wound around so much that the sun was never in the same place. In their faces, behind them, first to their left and then to their right.

“Little Lord, you reckon you know where we are?”

Little Lord didn’t answer.

There was no current at all now and the water stood shallow and stagnant. They had to work their oars mightily. At times the creek was so narrowed by grass and cane and overhung with trees, it looked to Granada like they were moving atop solid land. Sometimes the channel gave out completely and they had to backtrack.

The late-afternoon sun was blazing hot, and Granada shook sweat
off her face like she had stepped from a rain shower. The salt stung her eyes and blurred her vision. While she was lifting her shoulder to wipe her face, she thought she saw some creature scamper beyond the reeds along the shore, but by the time she looked, it had disappeared into the overgrowth.

It was while she strained to detect any movement at all that she heard the shriek. Both Little Lord and Granada recognized the sound.

“Daniel Webster!” the children shouted simultaneously.

Sure enough he emerged from a patch of mutton cane and began leaping up and down near the water, chittering wildly.

Little Lord nosed the boat toward the bank, guiding them under a dense overreach of branches. As they neared the shore where Daniel Webster waited, Little Lord reached up to sweep aside a screen of moss. What appeared to be a broken limb fell to the bottom of the canoe.

Little Lord screamed when he saw the moccasin slithering toward Granada. The panicked girl threw one leg over the side and then another, upsetting the canoe and throwing the two of them, along with the snake, into the murky creek.

Granada splashed furiously, sure that she would drown. Then her feet touched the muddy bottom. The creek was only knee deep.

She wiped the water from her eyes and saw the canoe floating empty down the channel. Little Lord was a few feet upstream wading through the cane toward Daniel Webster. And then she saw the snake swimming toward Little Lord.

Before she could scream, Daniel Webster leaped into the water, brandishing some kind of cudgel in his paw. Granada couldn’t believe her eyes. He was charging the snake with a heavy stick. After he landed two blows, the snake glided away.

Granada joined with Little Lord in cheering the monkey, laughing with relief. She had totally misjudged Daniel Webster and now wanted to hug his neck.

She started toward the shore only to have the deep mud of the
creek suck a shoe right off her foot. As she felt around for the lost brogan, she heard the pitiful whine of a child. Granada looked up to see that now it was Little Lord who held Daniel Webster’s stick, furiously pounding the ground around his feet. And then the scream again. Little Lord dropped the stick and the wailing monkey jumped into his arms.

“Hurry up, Granada!” he shouted, red-faced, cradling the monkey in his arms. “Daniel Webster’s been bit. You got to save him.”

His words seemed to turn the water into molasses and the mud to quicksand. How could she tell Little Lord she didn’t know the first thing about snakebites? That she had never healed anybody of anything?

Granada slogged up on the shore, her dress heavy and clinging to her legs. She began to tremble, not sure if it was from the chill breeze off the water or the expression of frightened expectation on Little Lord’s face. In his eyes was such a look of awful wanting Granada decided that if she didn’t know what to do, she would have to make it up. She began like she had seen Polly begin, by taking charge.

“Let’s find a place to lay him down,” she said, trying to control the quiver in her voice.

Granada led Little Lord to an open place under a locust tree. She knelt and raked up a soft mound of leaf mold. “Now put his head down here like it was a pillow and I’ll take a good look at him.”

As Little Lord began to lower Daniel Webster to the ground, Granada tried to think of what Polly would do. She decided to begin by looking into his eyes and then whispering into his ear.

But the monkey never made it to his bed. Shaking violently, he lurched from Little Lord’s embrace onto the ground, where he staggered drunkenly on all fours.

Daniel Webster’s left leg was impossibly swollen. Halfway down from his knee was the double-fang mark, red and raw.

“Do something, Granada!” the boy cried.

Granada could no longer look at him. “Polly ain’t learned me nothing,
Little Lord,” she confessed, her voice small. She threw a hand to her face, not wanting Little Lord to see. “Ain’t nothing I know to do.”

Daniel Webster was stumbling erratically, veering from side to side for a short distance. Then he would stop, weave a few moments on his feet, and begin again.

Granada knew what the monkey was doing. He was trying to make his way into the deepest woods, like animals do when they are ready to die. She had never thought of Daniel Webster as an animal before. He had always been so humanlike. Unlike her, he even had a last name and ate at the master’s table. He was allowed to touch the mistress anytime he wanted. But now he was dragging himself off to die like the poor beast he was.

Granada turned to Little Lord, wondering how badly he hated her now. Though his face was wet with tears, his fists were clenched and his jaw locked. She had the sense he was readying himself to do something required of a man.