They say Rose was born in invisible space. And because of this, Rose could bend anything to her will.
Nowadays, if you were to come upon the thick blockades of unbothered bush that surround Here, our neighbourhood that was formed by the momentary rage of a volcano no one remembers, you would have a burden of a time convincing anyone of Rose’s storied animalities. Here is made up of one field with its threadbare picket fence on the boundary still drawing apart sunlight and moonlight like matchsticks in the dirt. The sinewy edge of Here was once the British Empire’s communications headquarters and its stronghold of slave catchers, and held its camp of army whores during the Second World War. All the bays on the Atlantic side of Here are deep, and just wide enough to keep ships unseen by enemy vessels. There has always been more Here here, of course. Rose knew this. But what nobody knows is that Rose made this invisible space of hers, with all its merciless things—and that Rose had turned a fugitive from There, which was a helloid by nearly any standard—into a Rose simply because she could.
Part of Rose’s magic was in how she ran. Rose’s mama would tap a metal spoon on the tar drum outside her kitchen when she needed Rose to do something, like chase down a chicken for dinner. Rose heard this tapping from miles beyond and would beat her feet along the roadside, getting home quicker each time. She ran often, faster than she could, churning the dirt up and down like wings. Before you could adjust your vision, there was a dragonfly nebula all around her. Watching her run made me regret leaving that job at the butterfly conservatory There. In Rose’s presence, all of pre-life leapt from its latency. She could bend time and man in the same way. In a more just world, her unmarked grave would read: Here lies Haggard Rose, her life was the best and strangest alchemy.
But I want to tell you something particular about Rose and a stranger, a fella who seemed to be connected with a spoon in a way nobody out There could confirm. I won’t tell you how I know Rose and this story; we have no time for that now. But you’ve got to believe me because I own these words.
This field Here was a big place, even to a kid like Rose, but she treated it like her own yard. Everything Here was miles between trees and something somebody threw away. One day I watched as Rose chased a rooster for two hours while that bird got smart and learned all her moves. Then the fella I told you about earlier called out to Rose, said his name was Baron and that Rose should leave that chicken alone and let it “fo-get-about-you for a minute.” Something was familiar about that fella: his leathery face and the notebook he carried in a custom-made leather strap diagonal on his chest. His arms seemed attached a few inches too low from his shoulder blades. Then he pulled out a spoon from his back pocket and stuck it above his ear like a pencil. He was standing next to a big wooden tray with a small radio on it, and he had a pair of tap shoes strung over his bony shoulders.
“You’re not from here,” Rose said to the fella.
“Well, if I’m Here, must be something here,” he answered her, but looking at me.
“Must be what thing?” I cut in, knowing there was nothing Rose ever came upon that did not suggest something else. Once, when she’d fancied herself a musician, the pots and the pans, the potty with the broken lip, everything capable of making a hollow sound invited her to express her world-class musicianship. She even had a banana stand in for a violin and used her mama’s bread knife as a bow. Her body, always Cartesian, turned things inside out. She might not have had the benediction of the church as a performer of miracles, but this is what everybody knew about her.
I was interested in this stranger, in how he’d come to be Here. The Second World War was over, and I was hell-bent on mercy—or not mercy, really. I meant to remind the brokers of mercy that they were not to claim its power. I had stopped a crowd from stoning a woman they thought was the wrong kind of whore. That crowd ran me out of town. I don’t mind. I remember a time when Rose in her red robe, washing the feet of a stranger with oil and tears, would have been hanged and burned for the things she could do, but that bygone era was one she herself had willed out of existence. It has nothing to do with how many nails I have pulled out of my palms and feet.
So this fella, he had big criss-cross teeth and a bad spotty beard, like Miss Mona’s mangy dog. And when he smiled, he looked deep into you, and you knew things were about to go all green, that he’d seen things in you that you’re afraid of only because you didn’t know them yet. Things he himself was done making a horrible chronicle. Still, his little square moustache might have been the worst thing about him. That and how he looked to have leather skin, like it was grown in a lab to look dark and stay hard.
The fella had a dog with him. The dog had a crescent scar on its face, as if it had collided with a horse.
“Hey, kid,” the fella said to Rose, “never mind what I am. Just say a word. Anything that a-come to mind.”
Then Rose looked at him strange, as if he was stupid and Rose was smart. And the man said again, “Go on now.”
“Spoon,” Rose said, stepping back. I knew, but assume Rose didn’t know, what she was up to.
The man raised his arms slow and arched himself into the shape of a goddamn spoon.
“Go on, give me another. Like…a colour this time,” the fella hacked through a laugh.
“Red,” Rose said, wanting the man to melt.
The fella opened his arms like they were wings and brought his head down to his crotch. Then he twisted and turned himself until his head was sticking out from the middle of his body, now curved like a helix. He looked like a rose. It was disgusting, no doubt.
Rose smiled.
The fella looked horrified. “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9…I’m coming!” he yelled then, seemingly out of his own sense. The fella’s voice was bubbly and jazzy in a kind of rusty way.
At first, I thought he was talking to me, but soon he jumped, skipped a high skip over to the side, and shuffled his feet and tapped and swirled his hand around his chest and his head, smiling. The dog jumped up on the table and pressed his little paw on the Play button of the fella’s radio, and on came some jazz. Coltrane. It must have been “Venus,” except fifteen years too soon.
The fella did his counting and dancing for a time and then he asked Rose to join him.
Well, Rose looked as though she didn’t want anyone seeing her doing anything with this lunatic. But she broke off two sticks from a hibiscus plant and started whipping the air. Her air drums were all the loud noises you hadn’t heard anybody describe or believe.
I remembered that night in 1938 when Rose’s mama had found her reputation as a Seeyer: she was one of those women who’d warned the world about the end of the war. Rose’s mama was prone to happiness, and unrepentant about it. “Take your shadow out and bury it if you won’t let me do my work,” she had told the local priest. Yet now everyone criticized Rose for roaming Here like she owned Here, making of her years some kind of failed psalmody, forgetting her mother’s diatribe against the priest. But remember that Rose was born in invisible space.
“Hey, mister!” Rose hollered through the commotion she had no doubt created. The man didn’t break from all his ticking about to look back at the girl. A flash of sun off three brass teeth in the front of his mouth made me look away quickly. In that brief time, I gleaned his hand. Its three and a half fingers. Rose’s mama had warned about the men who would come with the three and a half fingers and the notebooks filled with formulas for poisons and bombs and all manner of hell on Earth. She had told us, too, of the submarines nestled in the Caribbean Sea and their torpedoes.
Rose hollered again, “Hey, mister!”
The fella turned back this time—and I saw he was as weary as any man who knew he’d been eclipsed into exile.