Samedi looked at Sophie.
My heart leaped into my throat.
She chirped, “You are the one who spoke to us through Jake, when Jake was dying. I held your hand.”
Le bon Dieu protect her.
Samedi nodded. “Who is this horse I am riding?”
“It is my papa. He wanted to summon you so he could take your power. Me, I don’t think you will allow that,” she said, swaggering a little closer to him with her head on one side.
I was dizzy with fear for her. Would he kill her? Or squeeze her and pull her out, like a concertina?
The lwa smiled.
I realized suddenly that Samedi was enjoying Sophie.
She was just his sort.
And by now I knew him too. After all, I’d spent eighty years sharing a boxcar and a bottle with him.
I put one hand over Sophie’s mouth, the other arm about her waist, and moved her bodily behind me. “What do you want me to do, lord?” I said loudly.
His eyebrows went up. He drew on his cigar and blew a smoke ring. “Now you ask.”
“Now I ask. I’ve given up everything, as you bade me. Now what do you want me to do?”
“What do you want to do, little spirit?”
Behind me, Sophie clung to the back of my shirt. Was I failing the test? I remembered how I had got here, by recognizing how much was invested in me. Now I realized how many people believed in me. Yet here, in the crisis, I was once again asking someone else to command me.
I spoke strongly. “I want to guard and protect my own.”
“But can you serve? Did you learn how to serve?”
I looked him in the eye. “With discretion, yes.”
He laughed at that. I didn’t laugh with him. “Si bon. Let us see how well you protect.”
Every nerve in my body turned to ice.
But he strode away across the circle to the nearest limestone slab and picked it up one-handed, as easily as I might pick up half a brick in the road. He turned the slab, moving his cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other, examining the stone from all sides, and then set it down.
He did this with every other slab in the circle, though each one was five feet long and weighed at least half a ton. Then he returned to us under the lights. “Si gro bon,” he said. “You do know how to consecrate and protect your place.”
Was that what I had done? My skin prickled. I’d done it the way a dog guards the perimeter of his property. And what did you just do, lord? I took a deep breath and let it out.
“I want also to ask you a question,” I began. Here goes.
“You would challenge me? Well, you are strong in your worshippers. You have a right.”
“What do you mean? You—you made me,” I stammered. “I have no worshippers.”
The Baron only smiled a puzzled, quizzical smile. “Ask your question.”
Anger strengthened me. “Why have you parted me from my home for so many years, if I was meant to guard and protect it?”
Samedi clapped his hands together, applauding with a sound like rolling thunder, spraying cigar sparks into the air.
“That is the right question!” He pointed at me. “Attend. A jam bois has roots in one place, little spirit. He guards and protects his own. Who are your own? You think they are a pack of rich whites across the ocean. But what about your other family?”
“But—but we—Jake and I traveled everywhere. I protected him always.”
“And everywhere you went, you stayed a little while. Just long enough to put down roots.”
At that phrase, I shivered. I could feel my desire to stay somewhere like a throb at the base of my spine. I’d been torn up by the roots many, many times.
Samedi’s voice sounded deeper in Henri’s chest. “Here, there, a few weeks, a few months, in places where vagabons dwell. The meek, the many, the poor, the silent. They are mine.” In that voice I heard the power of Samedi’s possession, his love for his own. “Through your travels, they have become yours.” The lwa’s voice dropped again. “Now here is what you will do.”
Samedi took one puff on his cigar, bent, put his hands on his knees, and looked down at me. He seemed twelve feet tall.
Sophie tightened her grip on the back of my shirt.
“You will make pilgrimage to all those places. You will consecrate them as you consecrated this place tonight. You will promise your protection to the people there. When they call upon you, you will come. This is your obligation. Promise it.”
Fire poured through my blood. “I promise it.”
Sophie thrust herself between us. “And I will protect him.”
Samedi nodded. “Yes, you should always defend your bois. The spirit should defend it, but the people who live there are obligated to defend it as well.” He put one big hand on Sophie’s shoulder and one on mine. I smelled the hot glowing tip of his cigar charring a hole in my linen shirt.
He laughed and clonked our heads together, mine and Sophie’s.
He looked out into the darkness under the trees. “Li se konplé.”
And then he was gone.