I was almost certain Sophie had spent the night at the botánica, given her ability to get into locked places and her pardonable disinclination to share her father’s suite.
So as I approached the botánica from the alley, I put my powerful ears forward to see if I could detect her talking in there—or more likely, sleeping. She’d had an exciting night.
I heard voices. Not only was she up, but she had company. I touched my head to the back door.
“This is the veve for Ezilie. Practice it until you get it right.” It was the voice of Mme Vulcaine.
“Oh, I know!” Sophie’s voice. “I can do that one.”
I froze. That witch was teaching my Sophie vodou ways!
“Where did you learn this?” I heard the mambo say.
There was a pause. Sophie mumbled. Then she said, “Excuse me, I was saying the prayer to go with it. Jake taught me.”
“Jacob Pierre taught you?” Mme Vulcaine sounded shocked.
I felt weirdly betrayed to learn that Sophie had so much history with my old friend that I knew nothing about.
Mme Vulcaine snapped, “What else did he teach you?”
“I don’t understand your attitude,” Sophie complained. “You want me to learn this, and then you don’t like it that Jake taught me. You want Veek to become a lwa, but you are angry that he is becoming a lwa. Make up your mind!”
What! She wants me to be a lwa? I thought, and then, I should let Sophie argue for me with this woman all the time.
Mme Vulcaine answered slowly. “I have no say in what becomes of your friend.”
“But you disapprove of him.”
“He ran away from his training. We had invested much in him.”
“Invested? Quoi?”
“When it is done properly,” and I heard the severity in the mambo’s voice even through the door, “the whole community participates. It costs us all time, concentration, affection even, and also money. You are young. Your time means nothing to you. Also you are riche. You swim in a sea of money. My people are poor. You can’t understand.”
“Oh, I understand. My father throws it in my face, how much the family puts into making me a worthy descendante of Montmorency,” Sophie said darkly. “Jake thought me worthy to teach.”
Mme Vulcaine grunted. “Jacob was no houngan.”
“But did I do it right?”
The woman grunted. “Not bad. But this line is wobbly. Do it again. And let me hear the prayer aloud.”
Sophie pronounced the words in the old language, very creditably to my ear.
Get back to the part about not wanting Veek to be a lwa, I thought.
Sophie said, “But why should you mind if Veek is a lwa? How can that be, anyway?” Her mind worked too much like mine.
There was a long pause. “Most times, a lwa forms out of need. When many people need help, their desire calls up one who can help. They give it a name, a purpose. This is a reliable way of making a lwa. The other way is when a normal person is made great.”
“That way is not reliable?” Sophie interrupted. “Pourquoi? And what makes one great?”
I tingled down to my palms and feet.
Mme Vulcaine said in a sarcastic tone, “What makes him great? His own desire? Or a thump on the head from another lwa? Without direction or purpose, his power moves him the way a tail wags a dog.”
“Surely Samedi knows what Veek’s purpose is,” Sophie said, as if that settled everything. “Madame Vulcaine, why did Jake teach me these things, and why do you teach me if you don’t like it that he taught me?”
“You ask hard questions, child. Maybe that’s why.”
“And you evade hard questions.”
I heard the mambo grunt again. “Maybe he saw something in you. He gave you power over that boy, didn’t he?”
The navel string! How did she know about that?
“What do you mean?” Sophie suddenly sounded guarded.
“It was obvious when I saw you together. You are bound somehow. He would suffer less if you could release him.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Because it takes years of training before you can guide a lwa as he is being born, child. Such a thing is dangerous even for me.” She grunted again, and then muttered, “Yet Jacob began training you.”
“So you want to control Veek?”
Mme Vulcaine ignored that question. “I wonder what Jacob saw. Come here child. Look into my eyes.”
I couldn’t let this go on. I opened the back door with my key and walked in.
They stood over Jake’s card table. Mme Vulcaine had Sophie by the hand.
Sophie looked past her and squealed, “Veek!”
I walked up to her and took her hand out of the mambo’s and turned her toward me. She threw her free arm around my neck.
“How did you get in last night?” I demanded.
“Jake gave me a key.”
“No, he didn’t.”
“All right, he didn’t,” she said calmly. “Veek, did you know that you have a purpose? And you must ask Samedi what it is. To learn why you are becoming a lwa.”
I couldn’t help glancing at the mambo. “Sophie tells me everything.”
“So I perceive.”
I glanced at the pattern drawn in cornmeal on the card table. “Get rid of that, or I will.” I put Sophie from me.
“I want to learn the vodou ways,” Sophie said, setting her small jaw.
“Why?”
“So I can help you become a lwa.”
I put my head back and closed my eyes. If I hadn’t shaved my head, I thought, I could be tearing out my hair now. I looked at the mambo. “Very well. You may tell me more.”
“May I?” Mme Vulcaine’s eyes danced. “Sure, you talking very rwayalman. What it is my lord wantin’ to know?”
I snapped, “Speak English. Sophie doesn’t know Kreyol.”
“You want her to hear this?”
“You heard her.” I sighed heavily. “She’s going to help me.”
The mambo nodded. She took the folding chair in one hand and swung it around, then sat.
Sophie promptly imitated her.
There were only two chairs.
I hunted up a third from behind some boxes and sat, giving Mme Vulcaine a defiant look. “I suppose you want another story about Jake.”
She bowed, seated in her chair. “That is why we are here.” But I knew it wasn’t. She had some agenda. It hung over me like lightning waiting to strike.
“All right. But then you will tell me things,” I promised.
I thought a moment. What story would Jake have wanted told? Something that would make his departed spirit strut with glee and self-importance. Ah. I cleared my throat.
“One summer Jake and I shoveled elephant shit for a traveling circus. Jake wanted to tend the big cats, but the lion tamer wouldn’t allow it. He could tell Jake wanted to let them escape. The elephants didn’t want to escape. In the circus, this little, little orphan girl performed with the elephants. She told us she was lost, and her brother was lost out there somewhere, too. Her brother was her twin, a fact Jake made much of. He told me we were now obliged to reunite these lost twins.
“Jake made me visit her dreams and take an impression of her scent—this is not a real scent but a kind of soul scent. I cannot well describe how it works. But I could copy the scent. We found a moment when we could get off the circus train, near a river. I chose an out-of-the-way spot, and I made sure no one would come near by accident, and I put the little girl’s scent into the river and the mud and the green growing things, while the sun beat down and made the insects buzz. I think I was remembering the Marais Poitevin as I did this. It made me homesick, with kingfishers swooping and calling, and frogs humping down among the cattail roots. I wondered, What would it be like to lose one’s twin, one’s other half? I hooked all that together, the homesick yearning and the beauties of that place, so that the little girl’s scent was as strong as the scent of sunshine on mud.
“She was delighted with the mud. She played in it, while Jake and I drank rum and smoked weed. Late in the afternoon, a little boy who looked just like her walked out of the woods. The two children rejoiced in one another. We offered to take them home, wherever that might be, but they said they were home now—in the mud! The little girl solemnly touched my head all over, like a woman feeling a goat’s udder. Before we got back on the train, Jake gave them all our candy. I had strange dreams for weeks,” I added as an afterthought.
Jake had attributed those dreams to our encounter with the children, and he drove me to work miracles that frightened the piss out of me, until I learned to do them well.
I didn’t tell the mambo this. Somehow, speaking of my powers to her made them more real. Destiny was closing its jaws about my leg like a steel wolf trap.
“Your turn,” I said, lifting my chin to her. “This lwa business. Tell it.”
Mme Vulcaine shrugged long and slow. “When you came to us, you were examined to determine your met-tet, your personal spirit guardian, but the results were inconclusive, as they often are.” Her face turned sour. “It was seen then that you would be expensive. Nevertheless we would have to pay, because Samedi wanted it.”
Hairs prickled up the back of my neck. I swallowed. “Go on.”
“Not only to Jacob did he say it. There were divinations, as I have told you.” She threw up a palm. “The Baron said that we must humor you in anything. You would live long and travel far and find your home, and you would serve as the lwas serve. You would bring honor to our house. My aryè-granmè, your auntie, who became the house mambo when—” Her lips pressed together, not-mentioning my mother. “She thought you seemed like such a good boy. She couldn’t imagine what trouble you could give,” she added bitterly.
“She never told me this.”
“You were a child. Younger than this child.” Mme Vulcaine indicated Sophie.
My stomach tightened. “And then Jake and I ran away together.”
“You ran away. He asked permission. His mambo was reluctant to let him go, because Jacob was strong in his met-tet, an asset to the house.”
“No!” My skin prickled, and I stirred, distressed. This was not what Jake had told me. “You’re joking. Jake? He was a renegade like me.”
She cut her eye at me. “Jacob was a black sheep, but he was no renegade. He was a valued member of our family. Yet we gave him up to care for you.”
I gasped. “No!” I choked, “No! I don’t believe it!” I sprang to my feet.
Mme Vulcaine reached into her pocket and slapped a little recorder on the table. “I tell you a story of Jacob Pierre,” she said, her voice deepening.
My bones turned to water. I clutched the table. The little red eye of the recorder winked at me. Wink wink wink.
“One day Jacob Pierre came to my aryè-granmè and said, ‘The young French kouzen, he is transforming as Samedi commanded, and he is becoming afraid. Soon he will run away.’ Jacob said that Samedi had told him to go with the French kouzen to see that he came to no harm, to teach him to value the things we value, and to guide his transformation.”
I was speechless.
“His mambo said, ‘Report to us often. Tell us if he is becoming a benefactor or a monster.’ This Jacob did. We are rich with his stories.”
I whispered, “No.”
“First the stories came by post, many pages. Then later sometimes by telephone. The whole house sat by, silent as worms, to hear his voice booming through the phone, telling the doings of the two friends.” She laughed. “Jacob was a good storyteller. Later, of course—”
Sophie interrupted. “It all fits together, doesn’t it? The spirits and the people are connected together by—by life. Each lwa speaks through someone, many someones, and you need the full set to balance everything.”
The mambo turned to her with a look of someone seeing a miracle. In this case, maybe, the miracle of a bubble-headed monkey-girl talking sense.
I brushed aside Sophie’s interruption. “You said Jake reported back to you as we traveled.” My mouth tasted of bile and betrayal. “Why?”
Mme Vulcaine’s eyes narrowed. “So that we might know what sort of—man—you were becoming.” She chuckled suddenly. “And to take his place in history.”
I sat back on Jake’s cheap folding chair, feeling boneless. My fellow runaway had only obeyed Samedi’s command to nursemaid me. He had spied on me for those from whom I fled.
I had never been comfortable with Samedi, though he’d strolled in and out of Jake’s head as if Jake were just another room in his house. Samedi had been like a brother all those years—the kind of brother who turns up in the middle of the night, drunk, full of wild ideas, irresistible.
But even when I knew, I’d pretended hard that it was Jake. Only Jake.
At the beginning I hadn’t known that they were different persons, Jake and his met-tet. Jake often forgot his most extravagant drunks, his wildest nights. At first, I’d thought it was simply drunken blackout.
At length, that was how I came to know when Samedi had moved him.
Samedi had kept us both moving.
How I had come to hate the road! Kept you moving, Jake had said on his deathbed. Kept you from putting down roots before you could take over your place. That had been by Samedi’s will.
What else had Samedi commanded?
My skin crawled, realizing that the lwa had struck my life from me, cursed me with inscrutable powers, and then herded me from one end of America to the other for some secret purpose.
Sophie broke the silence first. “He’s very quiet.”
Mme Vulcaine said wryly, “Beware if you smell smoke. A little oil in each ear will keep him running.” She got up and picked up her bag. “Practice those veves, girl. We’ll resume tomorrow.”
She left by the back door.
Sophie bounced up out of her chair and locked it. “Bon. Now we can search for the navel string. It must either be here or at my hotel room.”