Odessa knew this wouldn’t work, but, as a last possible resort, she had to try it. A room’s darkness pulsed by low-lit candles inside glass cylinders, a Virgin Mary plastered on the casing with her hands out, as if asking for a life that wasn’t rightly given. But she, too, had to try with all her might, if nothing else.
Odessa’s eldest daughter, Maya, had given her the address and the lady’s name, which wasn’t a name but a gender. She told Odessa about Lele’s boy, who they thought had the flu, but it had been bone cancer, and the woman known as HER had healed him. Foolishness, Odessa said, a day before going to the address.
HER parted the hanging purple beads that gleamed in the candlelight like suspended raindrops. HER wore her hair wrapped in a green scarf, her dark green gown cascading onto the floorboards as she floated across the warm room. HER searched Odessa, sitting at the tall table, hunched over in a black puffy coat. Hate had been Odessa’s fuel, what drove her here to HER. Honey, fern water, and the hint of sea wafted like waves, and Odessa licked her dry lips wet out of habit before answering any questions.
Back when Odessa had a closet for a home, one window open without a screen for Kentucky’s dirt road to dust the cabinets, she had envisioned a full family. In those days, things happened to people, and more so often bad things happen to Black people who were in the wrong place. How she had found a house in the backwoods with Rodney, when she was seven months pregnant with Maya, intended for safety. Rodney had told Ms. Pearl, Odessa’s mother, he had a good paying job in the city, that the shack would give them some comfort from rain or wild animals running rampant, at least until they had enough money to move into something better. Odessa’s mother had told her that ailments were a man’s nature—if he ought to, he sought to do it. Rodney sought his in a bottle after being laid off from that good-paying job in the city and whispered changes by morning, but nothing came except another bottle and a gambling debt. Then Rodney took his own life one evening. Years later, after Jazel and Dresden were born, their father, Donald, fell into robbery. The beautiful house Donald purchased in the city had been seized by the authorities, something about embezzlement. Even when Odessa got what she wanted, it had been stripped from her.
Safety for her family had been Odessa’s primary tool, passed down from her mother, and the children had to be cared for no matter what happened to the men. They did good, without fights or a drunken stumble, when Odessa and her mother and the kids stayed together, though she missed Rodney, her first child’s father. Her mother passed after Dresden’s second birthday, and now she searched for the source of her mother’s strength as she sat down with this woman glowing in luminescent green.
Cautiously, Odessa kept her hands on the table and her glare on HER. She didn’t know what to say to the lady with crow’s feet around her eyes, what to do while quietly sitting in the room. Odessa hauled her hauntings to this place, hoping to avoid the death of her son.
“No crystal ball, no tarot cards, no magic. Only ancestor, land unfurrowing deep into the marrow,” HER said. She drew out a small bag from inside her left sleeve before sitting.” Your child is dying.”
Odessa let out a half-choked sob but quickly restrained herself. “Yes, he . . . he is dying.”
HER dumped the small bag on the high table, dispensing mini gray bones that may have belonged to a rodent, perhaps a rat, opossum, or a squirrel. Odessa removed her hands from the table, clutched her purse strap as if the bones were scurrying across the table to gnaw her stubby fingers and knuckles. She looked away, closed her eyes to stop the turning of her stomach, but saw the bones arising in her thoughts.
“You are to become the healer, mother of birth. The grave—”
“Okay,” she broke, hands shivering. “I’m fine without this darkness—I don’t need it. Here.” Odessa unraveled forty dollars from her chest, money Maya had lent her for a week’s bus fare. “Thank you, but I can’t do this.” She got up so fast that she became dizzy. Smells flooded her senses: thick honey, the crisp of burned chicken Jazel had forgotten in Crisco grease the day Dresden came back in the neighbor’s arms.
“If you want the boy to live, pour this around the bed. Use what’s in the pouch and chant the words on the paper.” HER leaned forward “Take a lover afterwards, his essence, and mark the room with it—mark the room, girl, mark it!”
HER stretched out her arm, a branch, passing Odessa a small brown pouch containing some sandy substance. In a hurry to be free from the woman’s conjure, Odessa stuffed the pouch into her purse, parted the hanging raindrops that ran over her like a river over rock. Outside, fresh air seeped into her lungs. She sucked in as much of it as she could, still feeling the beads knotting over her heavy shoulders, the sting in her dry throat. That ain’t right, that soulless woman pulling ungodly items out of her sleeve. It ain’t right.
Miracles were for those extravagant movies or churches to keep faith alive for Sunday testimony. Dresden wasn’t doing better. The hospital thought Odessa would never give up Dresden’s life support, a costly endeavor they knew would bankrupt her.
Sanai Hospital turned into Odessa’s second home. The turquoise chair her bed, her arms holding herself, she rocked alongside her son. He was a five-year-old boy. He was alive when alive. He would sing and dance and be happy at home with the littlest gesture. He was a boy loved. He used to help his sister Jazel with flouring chicken, when she was on flour duty and not yet ready to fry. He told her many times in a low voice that she would be the greatest cook in the world, but under his breath for Odessa not to hear him. Jazel shook the brown bag with raw chicken and watched Momma dip them each in hot grease, studying her craft.
Dresden was Odessa’s one and only boy. He had friends, and they weren’t good friends the day they encountered their first bully at Lumpkin Park. The bully shoved Dresden off the swing, punched him a few times in the face. His friends were too scared to help. Odessa warned him of anger when she patched up his scrapes, not to be quick to it, that it indeed was contagious and a worthless feeling to let evolve. It made too much claim to a heart, would blacken it with much bitterness. He listened as if she told Jazel which side of the chicken would be done first, when to flip it, to test it. A few days later he befriended his own bully with kindness and an excitement for his company, as if all a bully needed was the opportunity to be a friend.
After spending two days at the hospital, Odessa went home and straightened the small jeans belonging to Dresden before neatly folding them into the laundry basket. She rubbed her neck, thought of the woman she’d seen three days ago, then rubbed out the wrinkles in each pant leg. Odessa pressed down on those pants for hours. Maya demanded she go back to work, find something to churn her mind instead of wallowing and waiting for the inevitable. The juice that HER asked for was important, the reason Maya kept pressing Odessa to get out the house.
“Plus you need the juice that HER asked for,” Maya said. “You’ll never figure it out staying home.”
“How do you know about that?” Odessa asked
“Nevermind how I know,” Maya said, eyes pleading. “But someone needs to find it.”
What was she waiting for? Was it the courage to use that magic knowing its darkness could affect the entire family through some curse? Or was it the possibility of the magic working, turning her religion on its head?
“How many times you gon’ wash his clothes?”
“Don’t start with me,” Odessa said.
“You need to stop. What about Jazel? Your life?”
Jazel was seven years old, Maya nineteen when Jazel moved in with her sister, leaving Odessa alone to the crying fits and tantrums they knew she threw from all the broken dishes and tables upturned in the kitchen the following mornings. Odessa needed room to thrash, to throw her soul out of body, to break things. Maya explained to Jazel that it had been a tormented spirit who destroyed the kitchen and that Momma needed to confront it alone, the same spirit Odessa said Maya’s dad, Rodney, dealt with. Maya didn’t know too much of her father and didn’t care. Her sibling’s father, Donald, was the face she knew, and she listened to him when he told her to read every book at her local library. Maya read about history, her heritage, and where her ancestors came from and how they lived in their homeland. This knowledge filled her with an imagination so uncapped that she started practicing different African dances and songs and cuisines and clothes.
In the old house, Grandma Pearl gave her old stories from back yonder, the rivers that carried voices and the winds that concealed them for safekeeping—the tales of the old, root of us all. Even then, Ms. Pearl saw creation in her as a child and gave her a soft touch of recognition that she would bear more understanding than most, and Maya never let that go.
Her ambition came from those story-filled embers; her independence grew from watching other people struggle with themselves but never from seeing her mother in such turmoil. Odessa never showed an offbeat behavior when carrying the world on her shoulders until the days after Dresden’s little body sprawled across the kitchen floor.
“Why is it dark in here? What is that smell? Why are you still in bed?” Maya would ask every day, picking up around the house, sniffing out the soiled stench. Some days, Odessa would leave her knocking at the door for minutes, hoping Maya might think she had been somewhere else instead of lying there in cold sweat, in menacing tears, in suicidal thoughts. “You can save him,” Maya said, and she kept saying that she’d help, hoping Odessa could muster up the strength and courage to seek out HER.
Dresden’s pants were fading. Odessa’s hands were dry from folding and folding his fading pants. But she could still hear him in the house: the kitchen, the living room, jumping from couch to couch, all around as she laid under her damp sheets. If she moved, twitched, stretched, he’d disappear. So she laid still for days, listening to him play.
Jazel had butterfly barrettes in her pigtails the day of the accident, Odessa teaching her how to tell if the chicken was ready to be flipped.
“Poke holes in it for a thorough-through cook. See there, make sure it’s good and brown and crispy.”
“Like this one, Momma?” Jazel pointed at a chicken wing.
“That ain’t done yet, but it’s getting there.”
Jazel smiled wildly, Odessa moving along the kitchen like oil in a pan, rich with motherhood and full of love but never sticking to one spot. Jazel kept flour on her hands like her momma, moved to the swish of her hems breezing along the tiled floor. They the same, momma and daughter.
Outside, Dresden took the sidewalk in big dashes, hurdle jumps, faster and faster, until the wind whistled in his ears. The sun gazed upon its own heat and Dresden blasted through it.
Summertime at the park disguised a maze of adventure for Dresden. His new friend, Juju, had been a bit tall for his age and outgrew most of his clothes. With his mother’s loving permission, Dresden gave Juju some of his dad’s old shirts and pants. Though Dresden never saw his father in person and mostly talked to him a few times over the phone, he knew Juju would probably be like Dresden’s father. Maya often spoke about the robbings he’d done. And Dresden thought that since the shirts fit Juju the same, he’d do similar bad things.
A man drinking Mad Dog 20/20, his blue Suburban doing thirty on a residential street, swerved onto a curb, a ball of body hurling in the air before catching a small person on its windshield. Hate was all Odessa had for that drunken bastard, hate that she allowed to evolve over any other emotion she had inside her. Hate that dripped slowly as Dresden’s saline dripped in his IV cord. Hate so sweet that she wished things, bad things, to conquer this man’s mind as he waited for ten years in prison.
Jazel and Dresden played their made-up games in the house. One of the games they called, “hide the remote from Momma.” Odessa liked them getting along. They weren’t like other siblings in families she’d seen in her life, not like Kadijah and her second cousins on her daddy’s side.
“C’mon nah, y’all get out the way.” Odessa said. Family Feud, Steve Harvey in tailored suits, was Odessa’s TV game show. She yelled out answers, and as soon as her voice billowed, the ash from her Newport cigarette fell to a rolling revolt in her lap.
“Momma, look at me. Look at me!” Dresden zoomed around the couch, Jazel lagging behind him like some tugboat bobbing over wave.
“You going too fast, Dresden!” she’d proclaim.
“I’m breaking time,” he’d hoot. And what did he know about breaking time or the actual meaning of travelling through dimensional timeline? Had he seen a future without himself, a timeline he hadn’t finished to its very end? Baby, go, she thought now. Go so you can come back to me.
She found the pouch and poured out the black sand around the hospital bed. She didn’t light any candles. The windows letting in the city lights were bright enough on her son’s glossy face. She did it but didn’t know why or how or if she truly believed in HER’s doing.
Odessa stood outside of that circle, chanting God knows what was on that paper. But she kept the succession of words, a soothing flow of pronunciations, the hard Rs rolling in deep baritone. With machines beeping, hissing, and air pumping, she heard something in that dimmed room groan that pleased her weakened heart. She kept going, reciting, chanting. She improvised, lifted her hands to the heavens, powered them down with quivering fingers and wrists.
“Oligewa donde es o—” Honey. She smelled sweet honey, like at the house where she had gotten the pouch full of black sand, those hanging beads chattering. Her son unconscious on that hospital bed began to cough.
“Baby . . . Dresden, this Momma. Can you hear me?”
His greasy eyelids flickered, maybe finding the right side up before opening, but that was all that night. Her palms were covered in the black grains. Juice. But what did it mean? Did she have to take a man, or make love to one, use his juices? Juices could mean anything: his tears, his sweat, his saliva, his blood, his—
Donald was a strung out, half-ass, prison man. And Rodney was dead. She couldn’t go back to none of them fools for it.
Odessa hid from any mirror staring her down. Dresden called her his pretty momma, flicked the mole mounted on her nose or the one on her shoulder. Naked, she thought she looked like a chocolate chip cookie, and not the delicious kind where the crumbs hung on a desired lip.
She always suggested the lights be off when men tasted her, but not Maya’s father. Rodney laid every piece of her body against his lips and made Odessa feel something she couldn’t ever find again. She pulled her hair back admiring her cheekbones, beautiful in certain light, and hoped that to someone she might be of interest.
The next week, she went back to work at the Ford plant. Willie bumped into her by the vending area. He apologized over and over. Odessa laughed to lighten the mood.
“It’s just a butt. Nothing sexual, right?”
Willie was forty-four, did jail time for child support, and had board shoulders. Odessa thought about what she could rest on them: the glass bowls she only brought out on holidays, shelves of her spices. His bumping became more frequent after the first time, and Odessa couldn’t tell if it was a mistake because the vending area was tight. But, after learning he couldn’t take care of his own kids, she never gave him a chance, at least up until today.
They met at Joe’s Coney. The booth she picked stuck out of the wall by the door. She had no intention of eating or staying for too long. The sweating hotdogs smelled sweet, like honey-glazed ham and onions. She noticed the chili had a familiar spice, something she used to cook with her chicken. She couldn’t think of the name, but she kept sniffing.
“Hey. How’s Dresden?” Willie asked. Outside, the night sleeked over the roofs of cars, a gas station across the street packed.
“He’s trying.”
Willie sat.” You know how people are at work, the rumors.”
“What rumors?” she questioned
He assessed her state to take the truth.
“Go on now. Don’t start gossip unless you part of it.”
“You’d gon’ crazy is all. Talks of you killing yourself or doing something ungodly,” Willie said.
“They don’t know what it’s like to almost lose your only son. Do I care what they think?! You’ll do any and everything for your child’s safety. And that’s that.”
“I get it. I understand.” He wiped his mouth with his hand.
“I’m fine. I’ll push through,” she said, giving him her strength, what she had for that moment. “Let’s get out of here.”
She tried to remember the seductive eyes she gave men she was ready to be alone with, though she didn’t care too much to be alone with Willie. Sadness had been in those eyes for far too long. She gave him a look that was supposed to display desire, but a tear sprung from under her eyelid, caught on its edge before falling down her face.
“Okay—it’s okay. Let’s go. I’ll take you home.” Willie held her close when she got up. They walked side by side to his truck. He felt warm, his body against hers, soft. She’d realized she’d do whatever was needed for Dresden’s health; she’d do anything to keep him alive.
They parked in front of her house, the empty street cracked from years of travel.
“When was the last time you’ve been with a woman, Willie?” Softly, she bit her lip.
“It’s been a while.”
“Don’t you like me?”
“Of course, but you’re going through a pain right now, Odessa, and I can’t take advantage of you . . . not like this. Nah, it’s not right.” But he laid back to caress her.
“What you know is right for me, I just. . . .” She tugged at what could extract those juices, like milk from a teat.
“Woman, you crazy! The Lord has left you, Odessa.” His hand stopped hers, his body shaking as if he never knew her face, a face of something undone. “I gotta go.”
She got out the truck empty handed. He sped down the street, taillights flaring down the block. Odessa inhaled deeply, held in the entire world, wondering how long she could hold it before passing out on the lawn. With a soft whine, she exhaled.
She didn’t have the juice HER had told Odessa to spread in her son’s room, and as she thought of it now, it sounded foolish. The juice could have been a conversation of love, the energy, the spirit of love between a man and a woman. She would have to explain to Willie that her silly daughter gave her the notion that Africans had some kind of untapped power, that what they say to do you did because they come from the earth. Silly, of course. So silly. She laughed to herself as she entered the room. Jazel and Maya stood bunched by the window. Whatever was out there was more important than what was lying in bed. Odessa turned to Dresden.
“His eyelids fluttering!” Odessa blurted. “How long dis been going on—did you . . .” Maya kept her glance on the parking lot.
“Don’t worry. I did it for you, Ma,” Maya said wearily. “That’s when his eyelids . . . and the bed. . . .” Odessa saw the red splotches on Maya’s K-Swiss, dark red caked under her nails, her sunken shoulders.
Jazel squeaked like a bat before covering up her mouth.
“Momma, look!” she called between her fingers.
Odessa gasped, slowly taking one step, then another, to the body sitting upright in the bed, his spine reported to be a mesh of bone, now fixed. Her child, her son, looking as if it was his first time seeing life.
“Oh, Jesus.” She shook her hands, nervously touching Dresden’s face. “Can you walk?”
He nodded, wiggled his toes under the thick cover.
Maya held Jazel by the window.
“Baby it’s gon’ be okay. May, Jazzy, what y’all doing back there? Come hug your brother! He here! He here y’all!” After kissing him, she licked her dry lips, tasting cinnamon and cider, smelling the honey and what seemed to be sea water.
“Dresden, say something, baby. How do you feel . . . you need something?”
Maya held Jazel so tightly that Odessa wondered at their stillness. She looked closer at the red splotches, the blood on Maya’s shirt and shoes.
“Girl, what did you do!” Odessa said, holding Dresden.
“I saved him, Momma. I—” Maya covered Jazel’s ears. “I got what we needed so you wouldn’t have to. Don’t you see the blood smeared around the bed?”
Police sirens were growing outside of the building, and Odessa hoped they signaled another patient for treatment instead of the Law as she stared at Maya with a new admiration, with fear.
***
Rumpus Original art by Nina Semczuk
