It was a drum Mamita brought back from a trip to New York, a magnificent drum, its sides bright red, criss-crossed by gold wire held down by gold button heads, its top and bottom white. It had a broad blue strap with a pad for putting around your neck, the flat top facing up, for it was a drumroller’s drum. Mamita presented me with it, slipping the strap over my head, lifting the top up. “Ah,” I sighed, for in the hollow at the center, two drumsticks were stored. She took them out, tapped the top down, and handed me the drum-sticks. Though her palm had given the first tap, she would not rob me of the thunder of the first wicked drumstick drumroll.
Barra-bam, barra-bam, barra-barra-barra BAM!
“Ah”—my grandmother rolled her eyes—“another Beethoven!”
“What do you say to your grandmother?” Mami asked proudly.
“Barrabarrabarrabarrabarrabarra BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!”
“Yoyo!” my mother cried out, and I stopped drumming abruptly so that she yelled out into the suddenly silent room, “THAT’S QUITE ENOUGH!”
“Laura!” my grandmother said, scowling at her daughter. “Why are you yelling at the child?”
“Mamita,” I said nicely, “thank you.”
“Thank you is bare, put butter on my bread,” my mother snapped.
“Thank you very much,” I buttered. And then, I brought down an apocalyptic, apoplectic, joy-to-the-great-world drum-roll that made Mamita throw her head back and laugh her loud, girlish laugh. My mother plugged a finger in each ear like Hans at the dike, a great flood of scolding about to come out of her mouth, which I held back by drumroll until she snatched the sticks out of my hands and said she would keep them until I was responsible enough to play my drum like an adult. I forgot all the promises I had made—before being given the drum—to improve my character and wailed. I wanted them back. I wanted them back. Mamita intervened, and the sticks were put back into the hollow of the drum, and another promise extracted from me that I would not play the drum inside the house but only out in the yard.
My grandmother pulled me towards her. She had once been, so Mami said, the most beautiful woman in the country. We called her Mamita, “little mother,” because she was smaller than Mami, with the delicate face of a girl, brown doe eyes and white wavy hair in a bun that sometimes fell down her back in a braid. She looked like a girl who had had a terrible fright that had turned her hair white.
“That drum is from a magic store” she said, consoling me.
“Oh?” my mother said casually, wanting to rejoin the conversation. “Where did you get it?”
“Schwarz,” Mamita said. “F.A.O. Schwarz.” And she promised that one day soon, very soon, if I behaved myself and didn’t drive my mother insane with my drum and drank my milk down to the bottom of the glass and brushed up and down instead of across and didn’t get into things like lipsticks and perfumes and then pretended as I walked through the house reeking of Paris with a je-ne-sais-pas look on my face that I did not know what could have happened to the little bottle with a bow tie, she, my favorite grandmother, would take me from the Island to the United States on an airplane to see Schwarz and the snow. And at this, I could not help myself, but having tipped the lid up and kidnapped the drumsticks, I gave a modest, tippy-tap, well-behaved drumroll that made Mamita wink and Mami smile and both agree that in the last five minutes I had indeed grown up to responsible drumming.
Ba-bam, ba-bam, I tapped about the yard all day. That was just like my mother to let me have a drum and then forbid me to drum it, ba-bam, ba-bam, in any significantly inspired way. And how could I judge significance in a drum unless at least one grownup clapped her hands over her ears? And how could I judge inspiration unless there was noise in it, drumming from my ten flexed toes, from my skinny legs that would someday improve themselves, drumming from the hips I swayed when I was womanish, and up, up the rib cage, where the heart sat like a crimson drum itself among ivory drumsticks, and then the drumming rose like wings, making my shoulders shrug, my arms lift, my wrists flick, and down came the drumsticks, BOOM, BOOM, Barra-ba, BOOM!
“Yolanda Altagracia, you forget yourself,” came my mother’s curtsy-when-you-say-hello voice, her puree-of-peas voice. “We have a fine yard that lots of other children would give their right arms to play in.”
And so it was that for a whole day, I marched in front of the hibiscus and saluted the bougainvillea and drummed until the mockingbirds were ready to fly off to the United States of America in the middle of December. All that week and the next and the next and the next, I drummed up and down, up and down, up and down the yard. Then, with the terrible luck of such toys, I lost one drumstick. And then, our crazy aunt, Tia Isa, who was unhappily married to an American and always on the point of divorcing and who, therefore, never looked where she was going, plopped herself down on my second drumstick and snapped it in two and glued it with glue that would, she promised, hold a house together. But I never believed glue could hold drumsticks together, however good it was on china cups and porcelain shepherdesses and all such grownup truck that was always finding its shattering way to the floor in my presence. And so it was that in less than a month’s time, I had a drum but no drumsticks. Mamita and Mami and Tia Isa, not understanding that drumsticks are the only kind of drum-sticks that will do on a drum, suggested pencils or the handles of wooden spoons used for making cake batter. I tried them all, but the sound was not the same, and the joy went out of drumming. I took to wearing the strap across my chest, the drum riding my hips like a desperado’s revolver.
In those days we had a fine yard that lots of other children would have given their right arms to play in. Beyond the laundry room at the back of the house, the lawns rolled away, so smooth and closely mown, the ground itself seemed green rather than planted with grass. At the back of the property was a shed where the coal bins were kept for the laundry fires for boiling the white clothes, a shed known to be haunted. In those days it was an adventure to go into the coal shed and stare down the big barrels of coal bricks and breathe in coal dust; to then pluck up your courage and turn an empty barrel over, spilling the Devil out; to race all the way to the back of the house; to scramble up the back steps to the laundry room where one-eyed Pila would cock her head and say, “What? Is the Devil after you, child?”
That old laundry maid, Pila, was the strangest maid we had ever had, for it seemed everything that could go wrong with her had gone wrong. She had lost an eye, her left, let’s see, or was it her right? You never knew. The two eyes took turns staring fixedly at the sky. But what’s an eye? A little bit of jelly with a duplicate beside it. Who’d notice a missing eye in the face of her incredible skin. She had splashes of pinkish white all up and down her dark brown arms and legs. The face itself had been spared: it was uniformly brown, the brown skin so smooth that it looked as if it’d been ironed with a hot iron. Only around the eyes where the tip of the iron couldn’t get to were there wrinkles—from smiles. She was Haitian, though obviously, only half. The light-skinned Dominican maids feared her, for Haiti was synonymous with voodoo. She was a curiosity and I, a curious child, I, with the promise of snow in my heart and the wonder of the world seizing me with such fury at times that I had to touch forbidden china cups or throttle a little cousin or pet a dog’s head so strenously that he looked as if he were coming out of the birth canal, I wanted nothing more then to get a temporary injunction from politeness and have a good long stare at her speckled arms.
As I was saying, the coal shed was haunted. And it was Pila’s doing. There was a time—before Pila—when the coal shed was just a coal shed. But then Pila came, and in addition to five paper sacks of her things, she brought her story devils and story ghosts and her trances and her being mounted by spirits and her “I see a nimbus about your head, beware of water today!” All these spirits, she claimed, lived in the coal shed. And so it was that by the time of my drum, the coal shed was haunted. By the time of the drum, I should also add, Pila was gone. She had lasted a couple of months at the compound before disappearing one Sunday. The house was thrown into mathematical turmoil. The linens were counted. The clothes inventoried. The other maids and Mami put two and two together, and the sum was that now for almost two months we had been living with a thief!
“Pity for her,” my mother said, “she won’t get far with that skin.”
Sure enough, the next day she was picked up by the police. By then, having consulted her American education, my mother decided it would be cruel to press charges. The poor woman didn’t know any better. Let her and her ten shopping bags go. And she was gone, leaving behind a whole coal shed of devils and goblins, so that by the time of my missing drumsticks, to dare enter the coal shed was quite literally to be a daredevil.
The day I wandered into the coal shed looking for trouble I had the drum on my hip and two little dowels for drumsticks. Pila had been gone several weeks. In I went, pushing the door back so the hinges cried out, devils, their thumbs crushed, their pointed noses tweezed. I stood a moment in the doorway, blinded by the shaft of light that struck like a knife blade into the darkness. Slowly, I made out the barrels, eight or nine standing, a couple tipped over. I crunched coal bricks under-foot. I dared further. I stood at the end of the shaft of light, and then one toe braved the darkness. My heart was pounding. I leaned over the first upright barrel and peered in, half expecting to look down a long well into the Devil’s eye. Nothing but coal bricks at the half mark. In the next barrel, coal bricks at the quarter mark, then dregs of coal bricks. The new laundry maid, Nivea, was using them up inefficiently, without a system.
The last barrel was tucked behind the others. I looked down at a full barrel. Suddenly, there was a little stirring, a whimper, a little pink mouth opened in a yawn; so pink and moist was that mouth it seemed impossible in a coal barrel. The mouth closed, another one opened, a cry came out of it, “Meow.” Two or three mouths wailed in chorus, “Meow, meow.” Immediately, I singled out one who had four little white paws and a white spot between its ears, fully dressed, so it looked, as op-posed to the others who were careless and had lost their shoes and their caps. This one, a curiosity, was the one I intended for me.
But I did not touch her or pet her or touch or pet any of the brothers and sisters. At that time, my natural lore was comprised of a few rules, all of which I confused so that when the situation presented itself, I knew there was something to be done, but I did not quite know what exactly. If it was lightning, I was either to stand under a tree or in an open field so the tree wouldn’t fall on me. If I found a nest of nightingale eggs or chicks, I was not to disturb it or the mother would abandon her roost and the chicks would die. But was it chickens or kittens? I wasn’t sure. Vaguely, too, I remembered a horror story about a mother cat being vicious and scratching out the eyes of someone who had threatened her babies. I did not want to find out the hard way the dos and don’ts of kittens. I needed, therefore, to question an adult who might know everything, and between lightning and chickens, I could slip in a question on kittens. But whom could I ask who would know about kittens? And whom could I ask who would be sure to know about kittens but would not suspect my secret? Mami in the house was bad on both counts; Mamita wouldn’t know anything about the out-doors, which she was allergic to, she claimed, which was why she had to go on shopping trips to New York, where, she said, the outdoors wasn’t really out doors, a riddle I promised myself someday to solve; Tia Isa was no good to ask either: she’d laugh her whooping laugh and scurry around and peep and meow, pretending to be a chicken and nightingale and kitten, all in one, until the whole extended family would guess what I was up to; and Pila, who knew about everything on this earth and out of it, Pila was, of course, gone.
Unsure of what to do but knowing if I stayed there debating my options, the mother cat might well come and blind me, I left the coal shack and lingered about the yard. In my exasperation, I lifted the lid of my drum and was about to take my dowels out and drum a racket louder than I had ever drummed, when I saw a man I had never seen, crossing our yard towards the orchard of wild orange trees that stretched beyond our fence. A dog accompanied him, or rather, the dog ran ahead, slowed, sniffed the ground, gave a bark, chased a butterfly, and in a dozen other ways, made the world safe for the man. The man was a dashing, handsome, storybook kind of man, dressed in jodhpurs and riding boots. He had a goatee and a mustache, which made me wonder if he weren’t the Devil, and a way of addressing the dog with affection and humor, which convinced me he wasn’t. He had not seen me and was passing not more than ten yards away when the dog twisted about, raised his nose, and curled one paw up. The man stopped and looked up at the sky. It was then I noticed he was carrying a gun on a shoulder strap, the barrel pointed up. The dog began to bark.
“There, there,” the man said, addressing the dog. “Where are your manners?” Then he turned to me. The ends of his mustache lifted in a smile. “Good day, little miss. I hope Kashtanka did not frighten you?”
I eyed the man, his gun, the dog now poking his nose where dogs always poke their noses on a person. With a child’s instinct, I knew the man was safe, for occasionally, strangers my grandfather had met on his travels came for a visit and wandered over to our property. But I was uneasy that a dog was loose and there were kittens, seven mouthfuls, nearby in the shed.
The dog sniffed my drum. “I say,” the man said, “what have you got there?”
“It’s a drum,” I said, bringing it round from my hip to in front of me, “but I’ve lost the drumsticks.” And I lifted the top and tilted the drum so he could look in at the two dowels. “I’ve got to use those, and the sound is not the same.”
“It never is,” the man agreed, to his great credit. He crouched down beside his dog. His riding boots creaked.
“About drumsticks,” I said. And then, because I was sure I had found my man, I hurried my questions: “Can you play with a brand-new kitten or will the mother abandon it or blind you if she catches you and by when can you take a kitten from its mother to keep as a pet?”
“Well!” the man said, looking at me closely but with friendliness in his eyes. “About drumsticks, eh? Well, just as your drumsticks belong inside your drum, and dowels will not do, so a kitten belongs with its mother, and no one else will do.”
“But pets,” I protested, glancing at Kashtanka.
The man’s hand fell fondly on his dog’s head. “Pets are a different matter, to be sure. But the little creature must be old enough to survive without its mother,” he concluded, rising.
Just as he was rising, Kashtanka made a dash forward. The man snatched his collar and pulled the dog back so his front paws were still treading the air. “Drumsticks, eh?” The man laughed at something over my shoulder. I turned around and saw a large black mother cat, her teats pink and sagging, slinking into the coal shed. Kashtanka barked excitedly. The cat scurried in.
“Your manners, Kashtanka!” the man said, giving the collar a jerk. The dog heeled, whining quietly to show that his feelings were hurt. “About drumsticks,” the man said, winking one eye so long I wondered if, like Pila’s, his wasn’t real either. “While a kitten is still a suckling, it cannot, now can it, be taken from its mother to be a pet?”
I had to agree.
“To take it away would be …” The man considered his words. “To take it away would be a violation of its natural right to live.” The man saw I did not understand him. “It would die,” he said plainly. “So you must wait,” he added, petting my hair so that Kashtanka gave me a jealous look, “you must wait until that kitten can make it on its own. Don’t you agree?”
I looked over my shoulder at the coal shed.
The man went on. “I would say in a week, and that’s one, two, three is Sunday, seven is Thursday, by Thursday I should think a kitten, even if born this very day, a kitten might be ready to belong to a fine young lady with a drum.”
I drummed my fingers on my drum, one, three, five, seven is Thursday.
“That’s a fine drum,” the man observed, “and a good, sturdy strap.”
Just then, a flock of birds flew overhead. The dog looked up and let out an excited yelp. “We’re off,” the man announced. And off they were, before I could count to seven, down the lawn to a creaky wicker gate, through which they entered the orchard and disappeared among the trees.
One, two, ba-bam, three is Sunday. The mother cat had gone into the coal shed to feed her kittens. Ba-bam. Mine was the best dressed one. I would name her Schwarz. Seven is less than the fingers of two hands, but seven was seven more than now, and as if to confirm my addition, I heard the thunderous report of the man’s gun in the distance. There was a clatter from the coal shed and, moments later, the mother cat dashed across the yard, flushed out by the noise of the gun.
While the coast was clear, I decided to re-enter the coal shed and tell Schwarz of our plan for next Thursday. I walked in, looked over the brim of the coal barrel. Schwarz was meowing in terror. “There, there,” I comforted her. But there, there would not do. I picked her up and whispered in the sweet little seashell ears, “There, there.” I brought her down to my shoulder and burped her and put her in the crook of my arm and tickled her belly and poked my fingers under her arms, and she meowed that that was fun, that I should do it again. And there, there, I did.
It was Friday and it would not be Thursday for another seven days. I had every intention of putting her back. But then, call it coincidence, call it plot, the man’s gun went off again in the distance, and I realized he was in the orange grove hunting. Hunting! Some of the birds he was aiming at this very moment were mothers with worms for their babies. I did not know at the time the word for saying one thing and doing another, but I did know plenty of practicing adults, and I was not going to be gypped of a well-dressed kitten by a moral imperative given to me by an exception to the rule!
Out of the shed I strode with Schwarz clapped on my shoulder. She meowed out goodbyes to her brothers and sisters as we crossed the yard. Suddenly, I stopped. Up ahead sat the fat black mother cat enjoying the warm sun on her fat black back, licking a paw as if there were cake batter on it. She had not seen me, but I knew it was a matter of moments before Schwarz’s meowing reached her. In that instant the vague memory sharpened. I saw a cat slinking forward. I saw it crouch to spring. I saw it leap and land on a woman’s face. I saw its claws rip out an eye. I saw that jelly spill—and I remembered suddenly with shocking clarity Pila recounting how she had lost her eye!
Slowly, my left hand patting Schwarz to encourage a hiatus in her meowing, I worked the top off my drum with my right hand. Schwarz’s mother put down one paw, lifted another, and began to lick it. I picked Schwarz up, and in one deft movement, plunked her down into the hollow of my drum, grabbing up my drumsticks in exchange, slapping the lid down, shifting the drum in front of me, and then as the mother cat jerked around and caught sight of me and then of my drum, which was meowing furiously, I brought down a loud, distracting drum-roll:
BARRA BARRA BARRA BOOM BOOM? (Meow!)
BARRA BOOM! (Meow! Meow!) BOOM
BOOM
BOOM
(Meow!)
I marched straight towards the house, lifting my knees high like a majorette. The baffled mother cat looked at me uncertainly and followed at a cautious distance, meowing. The drum meowed back. I drummed madly. My heart was drumming. And then, as the cat gained on me, I broke into a mad run, scrambled up the back steps, slammed shut the back door that led through the laundry room to the house. A deep sink full of soaking whites told that the new washerwoman had stepped out only for a moment. Backed against the wall, I spied out the window. The mother cat prowled in front of the door. She stopped, smelled the ground.
“Schwarz!” she meowed.
Schwarz meowed feverishly from inside the drum. The mother glanced all about her, at the door, at the sky, but she could not find where the sound was coming from.
“Schwarz! Where are you?” she meowed.
“THUNDER, THUNDER!” The gun thundered. The mother cat bolted away.
I picked the meowing kitten out of my drum. Its little human face winced with meows. I detested the accusing sound of meow. I wanted to dunk it into the sink and make its meowing stop. Instead, I lifted the screen and threw the meowing ball out the window. I heard it land with a thud, saw it moments later, wobbling out from under the shadow of the house, meowing and stumbling forward. There was no sign of the mother cat.
I must have gone to that window about a dozen times that morning and watched the wounded kitten make a broken progress across the lawn. I was tempted to go and deposit it at the door of the coal shed, but there was no leaving the house, my mother’s orders. Some crazy fellow was shooting illegally in the orange grove. The police had been called. Sometime before lunch the shooting stopped. I looked out the window of the laundry room. The kitten was gone.
That night I woke with a start in the claws of a bad dream I could not remember. In those days we slept with mosquito nets strung from four poles at each corner of the bed. Everything in the dark assumed a spectral appearance through white netting: a ghostly bureau, a ghostly toybox, ghostly curtains. That night, sitting at the foot of my bed, poking her face in so that the gauzy net was molded to her features like an awful death mask, was the black mother cat. I froze with terror. She glared at me with fluorescent eyes. She let out soft, moaning meows. I closed my eyes and opened them again. She sat there, wailing until dawn. Then I saw her rise, leap, and land with a thud on the floor and trot down the hall and down the stairs. The next morning in tears I told my mother of the cat that haunted my bedside all night. “Impossible,” she said and to prove it, we went through the house, inspecting latches and windows. “Possible,” Mami said when we found a window left opened in the laundry room. That new washerwoman, Nivea, was almost as bad as the old one, Mami complained.
Impossibly the next night—for the windows were locked and the house secure as an arsenal—the cat appeared again at my bedside. And night after night after that. Sometimes she meowed. Sometimes she just stared. Sometimes I cried out and woke the house up. “A phase,” Mami said, worried. “A perfectly normal nightmare phase.” The phase lasted. I gave the drum away to a little cousin, throwing the ghost cat into the bargain. But the cat came back, on and off, for years.
Then we moved to the United States. The cat disappeared altogether. I saw snow. I solved the riddle of an outdoors made mostly of concrete in New York. My grandmother grew so old she could not remember who she was. I went away to school. I read books. You understand I am collapsing all time now so that it fits in what’s left in the hollow of my story? I began to write, the story of Pila, the story of my grandmother. I never saw Schwarz again. The man with the goatee and Kashtanka vanished from the face of creation. I grew up, a curious woman, a woman of story ghosts and story devils, a woman prone to bad dreams and bad insomnia. There are still times I wake up at three o’clock in the morning and peer into the darkness. At that hour and in that loneliness, I hear her, a black furred thing lurking in the corners of my life, her magenta mouth opening, wailing over some violation that lies at the center of my art.